Hi Niko, – Predictably enough, when I first discovered your blog (a happy accident — I was googling “Sveti Jovan Bigorski” and spent an unusual amount of time leafing through search results) one of the first things I did was look under the ‘Serbia’ tag. I’ve already seen all four of the posts you’ve referenced. All four are terrific, but I’m especially enamored of your take on Belgrade — you really understand the place and its people and its historical-geographical specifics. I haven’t seen any other English-language writer pull these elements together into such a compelling portrait of the city. It’s obvious that you care about the place, which means a lot.
Just that I’m particularly proud of that review… :)
And if asked you’d say you’re in favor of a “Greece for Greek Christians” wouldn’t you? But your shameless use of the Cross is proof you know and understand nothing of what those words mean. And you sign off with IC/XP/NI/KA , next to “Turks, you’re gonna die.” Why don’t you come forward publicly and take responsibility for your artwork?
…what ensued was the massacre, expulsion and complete annihilationof the Muslim and Jewish communities of south and central Greece. (This is what Greeks like to call “genocide” as long as the victims are Greek: like in the “Pontic Genocide” or the “Anatolian Genocide” or the “Smyrna Genocide”). Below are some selections from an old post of mine that’ll give you more details of the whole, gruesome process, and then a very interesting video interview with historian Mark Mazower, which touches upon the problematic nature of using “Greek” or “Hellenic” or “Christian” or “nation” or “independence” in this particular context, or how it’s a tricky process to refer to the chaotic rebellion of a motley crew of Greek and Albanian, Pashtun-like warlords and feudal landlords by the lofty term of “National War of Independence”. Definitely watch the interview; it covers a million different, interesting facts and nuances.
A super-intelligent and erudite but nationalistly straight-jacketed close relative of mine, who readers have met before under an older alias but who now goes as the “Right-Wing Old Fart” (Δεξιός κωλόγερος) — not an insult, just a personal joke based on his once telling me that he’s relishing the process of growing into a Right-Wing Old Fart — says that I write things like this post because I’m ridden with certain “complexes” and I’m aiding and abetting the enemies of our Fatherland… Yes, that was the word he used, though I’ll be fair and say that it doesn’t have the same ominous Germanic tone in Greek.
No I don’t. I don’t care about the fatherland or its devious, ever-scheming enemies. I care about the polity where the vast majority of my people now live, for better or worse, and for its satellites like where I live, and because I want that polity to contain a society that’s just and equal and fair and tolerant and cosmopolitan and historically enlightened. Maybe I used to just write things like this to annoy people. And maybe now I mostly do it just to annoy people, because the people who are annoyed by these things are so easily annoyed that it gives me a kind of perverse pleasure.
But the real reason I do it is in order to lift the official silence about the past, in this case the Ottoman past, and to get at least some people to wrap their heads around the magnitude of the slaughter, dislocation, persecution, suffering and destruction that was necessary to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states out of the crumbling empire. The RWOF is not bothered by all those things; yes, it was grievous and painful, he’ll say (οδυνηρό) but it had to happen, because a state can only function with one, clear identity. He’s obsessed with what he calls “monoculturalism” and is even irritated by the notion that someone (like me) can have two passports. And while we’re on the topic of “complex-ridden”, I have often suggested that his mania for “one-ness” is something that needs to be approached psychoanalytically and not ideologically, but to no avail.
I’m addressing the people who don’t know about the past but who maybe, when educated, will start to reconsider the ideological and race (and racist) foundation of the modern nation-state, instead of considering it natural or inevitable. The rest will hopefully grow from there.
That’s all I have to say right now. Read on for more from the past or from other writers. Thanks!
“A month later, in September [1821], a combined force led by Kolokotrones and Petrobey Mavromihalis captured Tripolitsa [the Ottoman administrative center of the Peloponnese]. Historian W Alison Philips tells a horrific tale of mutilation and slaughter “For three days the miserable inhabitants were given over to lust and cruelty of a mob of savages. Neither sex nor age was spared. Women and children were tortured before being put to death. So great was the slaughter that Kolokotronis himself says that, from the gate of the citadel his horse’s hoofs never touched the ground. His path of triumph was carpeted with corpses. At the end of two days, the wretched remnant of the Mussulmans were deliberately collected, to the number of some two thousand souls, of every age and sex, but principally women and children, were led out to a ravine in the neighboring mountains and there butchered like cattle.”
“A Prussian officer described the incidents that took place after the capture of Tripolitsa by the rebels, as follows:
“A young Turkish girl, as beautiful as Helen, the queen of Troy, was shot and killed by the male cousin of Kolokotronis; a Turkish boy, with a noose around his neck, was paraded in the streets; was thrown into a ditch; was stoned, stabbed and then, while he was still alive, was tied to a wooden plank and burnt on fire; three Turkish children were slowly roasted on fire in front of the very eyes of their parents. While all these nasty incidents were taking place, the leader of the rebellion Ypsilantis remained as a spectator and tried to justify the actions of the rebels as,’we are at war; anything can happen’.” Based on the accounts of one hundred European officers who were present at the scene, and did nothing to intervene, William St. Clair wrote: “Upwards of ten thousand Turks were put to death. Prisoners who were suspected of having concealed their money were tortured. Their arms and legs were cut off and they were slowly roasted over fires. Pregnant women were cut open, their heads cut off, and dogs’ heads stuck between their legs. From Friday to Sunday the air was filled with the sound of screams… One Greek boasted that he personally killed ninety people. The Jewish colony was systematically tortured… For weeks afterwards starving Turkish children running helplessly about the ruins were being cut down and shot at by exultant Greeks… The wells were poisoned by the bodies that had been thrown in…”Although the total estimates of the casualties vary, the Turkish, Muslim Albanian and Jewish population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community after the early massacres. Some estimates of the Turkish and Muslim Albanian civilian deaths by the rebels range from 15,000 out of 40,000 Muslim residents to 30,000 only in Tripolitsa. According to historians W Alison Phillips, George Finlay, William St. Clair and Barbara Jelavich, massacres of Turkish civilians started simultaneously with the outbreak of the revolt, while Harris J. Booras considers that the massacres followed the brutal hanging of Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople. Finlay has claimed that the extermination of the Muslims in the rural districts was the result of a premeditated design and it proceeded more from the suggestions of men of letters, than from the revengeful feelings of the people. St. Clair wrote that: “The orgy of genocide exhausted itself in the Peloponnese only when there were no more Turks to kill.” There were also calculated massacres towards the Muslim inhabitants of the islands in the Aegean. This is because one of the aims of the Greek revolutionaries was to embroil as many Greek communities as possible in their struggle. By engineering some atrocity against the local Turkish population, diverse Greek communities would have to ally themselves with the revolutionaries fearing retaliation from the Ottomans. In one case, in March 1821, Greeks from Samos landed on Chios and attacked the Muslim population living in that island. Among the Samian belligerents was an ancestor of mine, Dimitrios Kalymnios.When the Samians withdrew to the safety of their island, the Ottomans descended upon defenceless Chios and carried out an atrocity that horrified the rest of the world: the massacre of Chios. – [my, N.B., emphases throughout this last paragraph — just so that nobody is allowed to take something like the the Massacre of Chios out of historic context again…] –
“The final word, if there is one, goes to Theodore Kolokotronis, who in his account of the fall of Tripolitsa, was unrepentant to the last: “When I entered Tripolitsa, they showed me a plane tree in the market-place where the Greeks had always been hung. “Alas!” I said, “how many of my own clan — of my own race — have been hung there!” And I ordered it to be cut down. I felt some consolation then from the slaughter of the Turks. …”
DEAN KALIMNIOU kalymnios@hotmail.com First published in NKEE on Saturday 6 April 2013. – READ HIS WHOLE POST: “Diatribe” ; it’s very intelligent.
And one sad little detail I discovered somewhere else, though I can’t find the source for it: “European officers, including Colonel Thomas Gordon, who happened to be at Tripolitsa during the massacre, witnessed the hair-raising incidents there, and some of them later recalled these events in all their ugliness. Colonel Gordon became so disgusted with the Greek barbarities that he resigned from the service of the Greeks. A young German philhellene doctor, Wilhelm Boldemann, who could not bear to witness these scenes, committed suicide by taking poison. Some of the other European philhellenes who were extremely disillusioned, followed suit.”
The poor, idealistic, Werther-like German Romantic, come to fight and liberate the sons of Pericles and Leonidas, kills himself out of disappointment…it just seemed to encapsulate the whole patheticness of a certain kind of European Helleno-latry.
And here (below) is the man himself, Kolokotronis, proud of his corpse-strewn victory lap in Tripolica and one of the fathers of our country, projected onto the White Tower (Beyaz Kule) of Salonica for this year’s bicentennial celebrations.
An excellent book, and probably only monograph, to deal with the step by step expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims through the nineteenth and and early twentieth centuries, but tracing roots of the process back to even the century before is Justin McCarthy’s Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922. Not polemic, not propagandistic, just the facts and figures that speak for themselves. It should be required reading for every Christian in the former Ottoman sphere.
The Annunciation of the Virgin mosaic from Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore (click)
Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to a terrified, barely post-adolescent Jewish girl in a village in Galilee and told her that she was going to become God’s mother. And in one of the greatest acts of moral bravery in history, this — what? fourteen-year-old? — Jewish girl said: “Yeah…ok.”
This is a “yes” which we should all pray to be given the opportunity to offer up to some one or to some greater thing, in even the tiniest of manners, at some one point in our lives. It, oddly enough or not, always puts me in mind of the name “Reza,” which I’ve always loved on Persian men, since as far as I understand it, it means “willingness, acceptance, consent…” a saying-yes to Life or to the Divine Will. (The other is “Peyman,” with its comparable sense of promise and commitment.) Except in Mary’s case it’s a “saying-yes” that’s particularly female in its bravery, since she barely understands what’s being asked of her and she consents out of pure love, and most men find such consent difficult without first knowing what glory there is in it for them. Instead Mary does the glorifying:
48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
49 For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.
50 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
51 He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
52 He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
53 He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
54 He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
55 As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.
That’s March 25th: the Annunciation of the Virgin. The rest — by which we mostly mean Greek Independence Day — is bullshit. Nothing that led to the establishment of the first independent Kingdom of Greece happened on March 25th. There were sporadic outbreaks of rebellion, some semi-coordinated, among Ottoman Greeks throughout the Empire in the early spring of 1821, but there was no raising of any standards, or launching of any campaigns or declarations of any kind made on March 25, 1821 as far as we know. Except for sporadic massacring nothing much occurred at all that year until the fall, when, only with foreign help, the Greek rebels were able to finally take Tripolitsa in the Peloponnese and butcher the majority of its Muslim and Jewish — meaning practically its entire — population. And eventually all that happened is that the Greek statelet slapped its observation of Independence Day onto the Annunciation in a conscious-or-not appropriation of the holiday’s already inherent meanings of conception, inception and beginning (I think that, the Julian Calendar still in operation at the time, March 25th was also Easter Sunday that year so, with the theme of Resurrection added, the temptation was irresistible) and so Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus smothered one of the loveliest holidays of the Church with flags and parades and tanks and national anthem sap and all the other cheezy trappings of N/S patriotism.
But by the same token, the Annunciation itself was slapped by the Church onto the pre-existing observation of the Vernal Equinox (by a few days), the Persian Zoroastrian New Year, Nowruz, the first day of spring, the first day of the month of Aries — with its already inherent meanings of conception, inception and beginning. And fast forward nine months, exactly (she was nothing if not on-time our Pantanassa*) and we have Christ born on (or near) another Zoroastrian holiday, Yalda, which marks the Winter Solstice and the beginning of the lengthened days and the Sun’s return to our lives. The Winter Solstice, in more ancient Iranian religion, was the birth date of the deity Mithra, often associated with the Sun, and who — guess what? — was often said to be born in a cave, of a virgin mother, and who saved the world through the sacrifice of a bull along with a whole other complex of shifting tales and myths that I’m not an expert on.
But though Mithra seemed to fade into a secondary deity in classical Sassanian Zoroastrianism, he was accepted with great fervor and enthusiasm into the highly eclectic polytheism of the late Roman world, where he was especially popular in the Roman army. Many of the latter emperors were devout followers and there are historians that believe — seems like a bit of an exaggeration to me — that the West came close to being a Mithraic civilization instead of a Christian one. But the Church slapped Christ’s December 25th birthday onto Mithra’s (I’m simplifying some) and that was the end of Mithraism. Which is a bummer, because by the Second Century A.D., Mithraism had evolved, in Roman hands, into a super-butch, male virility bull-cult for an initiated military elite, all wrapped-up in the full panoply of Hermetic-Alexandrian-Astrological wisdom, where Roman officers and soldiers gathered in caves and commemorated the sacrificed bull and honored its blood (we don’t really know what occurred because it was only for the initiated but a sacrifice and subsequent shared meal of some kind was probably involved) and Christianity is kinda — well — is kind of lacking in those kinds of thrills. One of my best beloved Roman ancestors, Julian the Apostate (the subject of four Cavafy poems), a fascinating figure, who was both a devotee of Mithra and an initiate into the Eleusinian mysteries, tried to reverse his uncle Constantine’s establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion and give support to the traditional pagan cults, their rites, rituals and sacrifices, but it was already too late. People just wanted their blood as metaphor by then, a shift in consciousness that has always been considered psychic or intellectual progress of some kind though — like the shift to monotheism itself — I could never quite understand why. Those of us who still like reality better still have and have always had Spain though; that’s unless the European Union and PETA and the Catalans take their sanitary Handy-Wipes to the corrida too and that’ll be the real end.
Ah, but even then we’ll still have Mexico…
Mithra and the Bull, from the Vatican Museum (no other info) (click: it’s a huge and beautiful file)
What conclusions can we draw from all this? One, is that humanity is not particularly imaginative and just kinda copies itself over and over ad infinitum. Second, is the idea that often comes up when looking at our zone, thinking about “our parts,” more closely — and that’s the simple conclusion that everything is Persian. Not just our food, our music or dance, our dress, our color palette, our poetic sensibility and ideas about love, but our common penchant for narrative cycles of martyrdom and rebirth (see: “Ashura 1435: a poem from Agha Shahid Ali”) and the deeper structures of our spiritual psyches. It’s tempting; instead of the inane arguments about what’s Greek and what’s Arab and what’s Indian and what’s Turkish — everything is Persian, and be done with it. Alexander seemed to have gotten it; shouldn’t be too hard for the rest of us. But probably the truth lies and always will lie with Jung: and that is that all of the imaginary activity of the human unconscious operates on one, unified, symbolic grid of archetypes.
Chronia Polla to those whose namedays are today. And signing off this post with R&B singer Lauryn Hill’s beautiful “To Zion” where the subtitle of this post comes from. This was a song that came from her real-life experience of having to choose between having an unexpected baby and sticking with her career. “One day…you gonna understand…” Lyrics are below:
“To Zion”
Unsure of what the balance held I touched my belly overwhelmed By what I had been chosen to perform But then an angel came one day Told me to kneel down and pray For unto me a man child would be born Woe this crazy circumstance I knew his life deserved a chance But everybody told me to be smart Look at your career they said, “Lauryn, baby use your head” But instead I chose to use my heart
Now the joy of my world is in Zion Now the joy of my world is in Zion
How beautiful if nothing more Than to wait at Zion’s door I’ve never been in love like this before Now let me pray to keep you from The perils that will surely come See life for you my prince has just begun And I thank you for choosing me To come through unto life to be A beautiful reflection of His grace See I know that a gift so great Is only one God could create And I’m reminded every time I see your face
That the joy of my world is in Zion Now the joy of my world is in Zion Now the joy of my world is in Zion Now the joy of my world is in Zion
Marching, marching, marching to Zion Marching, marching Marching, marching, marching to Zion Beautiful, beautiful Zion [repeat to end of song]
*”παντάνασσα,” pantanassa, is one of my favorite epithets for the Virgin, but whether it means “all-breathing, giver-of-breath, breath-granting” I can’t tell, nor can anybody else I know.
**Latest addendum note: Beloved dinosaur cousin — who is the always the one one should go to for these question, since he’s a monster of erudition in most fields, but especially Greek language, informs us that Pantanassa has nothing to do with breath or breathing, as many of us must assume, but: Η άνασσα είναι το θηλυκό του άνακτος (ονομαστική: άναξ), του βασιλέως (εξ ου και ανάκτορα). “Anassa” is the feminine form of “Anax,” meaning king, same root as “Anaktora,” or palace. So it simply means “Queen of Queens,” which is kind of disappointingly Catholic-sounding. Speaks to a whole history of Greek and Latin vocabulary mixing itself up, replacing, re-replacing, disappearing and then appearing again, especially in titles of government or military due to initial composite character of Byzantine state structure. I’m assuming, i.e., άνασσα was already an archaically Greek word at the time, for example, the Chairetismoi were written.
And a personal sensory note: According to the guidelines of Orthodox fasting, which if observed carefully constitute the most elegantly designed spiritual economy of partaking and abstaining one can imagine (probably only Hinduism could produce a more intelligent schema) — again, the guidelines, not the rules, meaning it doesn’t affect your G.P.A. at the end of term if you slip up, like if you’re Catholic — fish is considered meat, and is not eaten during Lent. But there are festive days, essentially the Annunciation and Palm Sunday, which even in the sorrow of Lent, should be marked as Feasts, and then the eating of fish is practically obligatory. Today in the streets of Greek neighborhoods, therefore, here in Athens or in Astoria, in apartment house corridors and restaurants, the smell of fried bacalao is all-pervasive. One of my strongest sensory memories of Holy Week as a child is being taken to the matins for Holy Monday on Palm Sunday evening, the first of the so-called “Nymphios” or “Bridegroom” services (the reference being to Christ coming to Jerusalem for Passover and to meet his fate) and all the old women in church smelling like fish fritanga.
And a really interesting article from Wiki about “Tauroctony” or “Bull-slaying” if you’re interested in the phenomenon religio-anthropologically. Again, the best book, that’s both an anthropology of Mediterranean bull cults and the best sociological history of Spanish bullfighting there is, is Timothy Mitchell’s “Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting.”
Ussama Makdisi, not a man I’m usually very nice to, brings us a most opportune quote from a great thinker, as if riding on the heels of my anti-nation-state diatribes.
“I DEMAND EITHER CITY-STATES OR A UNIVERSAL IMPERIUM OF HUMANITY”
-- Murtaza Muhammad Hussein (quoted above) is a journalist I respect immensely whose work focuses on national security, foreign policy, and human rights. His work has previously been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera English.
(See more of M.M. Hussein @theintercept)
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FROM BOSNIA TO BENGAL -- The purpose of this blog
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.
"What I hope this blog accomplishes is to create even the tiniest amount of common consciousness among readers from the parts of the world in question."
Please contact me with comments, questions, complaints or -- please -- corrections at: nikobakos@gmail.com
