Smyrna waterfront: drawing and photograph, 1910s

15 Jan

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The Acropolis, 1820

15 Jan

Hate to be a bummer to all those art historians who would have liked to preserve the plurality and palimpsest of this kind of look.

(source unknown)

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Photo: Sarajevo 1938

15 Jan

Hhmmm… Dunno, does it look as much older to anybody elseas it does to me? My only source is Bosnian History @BosnianHistory and WorldPress site: Bosnian History. So maybe she can help us out.

The largest single collection of her photos are here: “…beautiful old photos of Bosnia

Sarajevo 1938

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Ussama Makdisi: not a dude I’m often that kind to, comes up with a slightly chewed-edged but legit position

15 Jan

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Tito: whatever fun you had this new year, Tito had more.

15 Jan

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Doors of Toulouse

15 Jan

See Toulouse: “Who ever lov’d who lov’d not at first sight?”, and Per Tolosa totjourn mai…” A fellow lover of Toulouse and reader writes:, andOccitan and “endangered languages

25 Jan

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Image

Our view of Bahçeli

13 Jan

Μαλάκα, Greeks were always really funny… Here is Aristophanes, complaining to a friend for his totally inappropriate behavior towards his son:

13 Jan
Aristophanes 386 – 436 BC — comic genius, though only eight of his complete plays survive

Wonder which play the above line is from…

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Frequency of Italian family names Greco and Spagnuolo by region — And Greeks and Albanians in Italy

13 Jan

“Greco” in all the obvious places, maybe some distant Magna Graecia leftovers, but followed by the much, much more recent and numerous waves of refugees fleeing Ottoman conquest in the 15th and 16th centuries from the western Balkans and Greece and the religious persecution that followed in those same areas (Because, apparently, there actually is compulsion in religion?). The prevalence of the name around Milan and Turin and scattered throughout Liga Norte regions in the north probably is just proof of the huge post-wave migration of poor Italians from the south to the industrial areas of the north.

Whereas here there’s reasons to believe that western Lombardy and Milan and Turin had the name Spagnuolo because those corners of the north were Aragonese and Imperial/Hapsburg for significant amounts of time.

Given the heavily mixed populations of the regions on the Balkan coasts of the Ionian and Adriatic seas, and that many of them probably were of mixed Albanian-Greek stock, it’s hard to calculate the separate number of each group “ethnically”.

But today, while in the handful of still Greek-speaking villages of Pugliese Salento, the language is fast dying out: there are classes that are trying to teach children both the regional “Griko” dialect and making them proficient in Modern Greek, a thankless job; in the Albanian-speaking towns of Calabria and especially Sicily, the culture and language are flourishing, is taught in primary schools and there are very strong personal and institutional bonds with Albania, educational exchanges at levels of both younger school children and higher academic programs and tourist activities. Cool!

One just has to assume that after a few Sicilian Albanians take a group trip to Albania, they must mumble to themselves: “welll…shshshsh…but good thing our ancestors left”

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My friend Pelagia in Belgrade: some great serbo-funny tweets in the great tradition of that people’s black and acerbic humor.

13 Jan

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Сновым Годом!!!!

The great Rakia Bar, with all its houemade varieties, Dobračina 5, Beograd 11000, Cрбjа

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