Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and other Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, occasional forays into southern Italy, Spain or eastern Europe, minorities, the nation-state and nationalism — and whatever other quirks or obsessions lurk inside my head.
Great Kings of Antiquity: Cyrus, Porus, Darius and Alexandros. Fresco in Saint Achilios church in Pentalofos*, Kozani, 1744. Source: http://ellinikihistoria.com
How weird. An eighteenth-century church fresco painter in far western Macedonia knew his Achaemenid history. But I guess between the classical historians (Plutarch, etc.) and dramatists (Aeschylus) things Iranian (well, Porus was king of what we call Punjab today…) were transmitted on a popular level too, mostly through the Alexander “saga”.
* Pentalofos (above) is a pretty village that lies in the northernmost mountain pass between Epiros and Greek Macedonia, between the prefectures of Ioannina and Kozani. Given its location, it’s kind of surprising that it’s not a Vlach village, though it might have been in the past, given how many regions on the eastern side of the Pindos mountains were Vlach-speaking in the past but that that has been forgotten. I’m also pretty sure that, despite its sound, “Pentalofos” is actually its real name and is not a made-up replacement for a traditional Slavic one.
Here she is singing soleares and siguiriyas, generally considered the two oldest and “heaviest” of flamenco genres: the most “jondos” of “cante jondo”.* Usually no dancing, none of the guitar or caja percussion of other flamenco, minimal if any clapping or ole-s, heavy melisma and chromaticism — what probably makes them the most definitively eastern-Med-sounding of flamenco genres.
Its deep, expressive style is among the most important in flamenco. The siguiriyas are normally played in the key of A Phrygian with each measure (or compás) consisting of 12 counts with emphasis on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th and 11th beats as shown here: [1] 2 [3] 4 [5] 6 7 [8] 9 10 [11] 12
This rhythm can be contrasted to the rhythmic pattern of the soleares, which also has 12 beats, but the accents fall differently. Taking the unusual accenting into account, it can technically be seen as a measure of 3/4 (counted in eighth notes) starting on “2”, then a measure of 6/8 followed by the “1 and” of the 3/4. Every note is evenly spaced apart. For example: [2] and [3] and [1] 2 3 [4] 5 6 [1] and
However, this presents difficulties in counting and is counted more simply in 5 beats, with three “short” and two “long” beats: [1] and [2] and [3] and uh [4] and uh [5] and
In this case, the 1, 2, and 5 are the short beats and the 3 and 4 are long beats.
It sucks to really be into a certain kind of music and have absolutely NO clue what someone — like above — is talking about. I’ll give my first-born to anyone who can adequately explain it to me.
Anyway, Estrella; she’s friggin’ magnificent:
Like in ghazal, the verses of flamenco have only the freest of free associations between them. I love this particular soleá because at 2:30 she sings:
“No te compro más camisas, Y porque no he visto altares, pa que otros digan misa”
“I’m not buying you any more shirts, because I haven’t seen any altars, for others to cry ‘mass’.“
Like, what does that mean? Like with any truly captivating poetry, you don’t really know what it means, but you kinda do.**
* “Cante” in Spanish doesn’t mean song, but chant. And “jondo” is deep, with the archaic Andalusian/Gypsy pronunciation of the “h” in “hondo”
** “Missa est” — it is mass, literally — is how the Catholic Tridentine Latin mass ends. It’s the participle of the Latin verb “mettere”, to put, to place — like “mise-en-place” in French culinary language, put in place — or “no te metas” in Spanish, don’t get involved. So in the Latin mass it means, “It’s done – it’s in place” – “you’re dis-missa-ed”.
So what is the soleá verse saying? We’re done, you and me? You ain’t all that? I don’t see any altars from where “Missa Est” is cried when I look at you? Y’ain’t so holy that I should keep you in shirts?
Her tweet for today, à propos of nothing except that yesterday was September 11th:
“I don’t think I can ever really be that close to people who didn’t experience the aughts the same way I did. muslims who did, im automatically close to you.”
(She just pops that one out of the oven, but otherwise, she doesn’t want “to talk politics anymore”. Check her Twitter account.)
My response:
“That’s great guys. Hunker down with only your kind. And then expect things to get better. Who am I, though, to question how delicious victimhood is? I experience some slight tension when I first get close to, say, Latin Americans, who never lived through the Stalinist nightmares my family did in eastern Europe and have never even heard about them even. But we talk, they get it, etc. And I try to understand that they’ve mostly experienced oppression and violence from the US and from the Right, so they may not have had any reason to know too much about the communist world. I’ve never said or thought “Oh, I can never be close to them.”
“This is the kind of monopoly on suffering and rejection and discrimination that too many Muslims think they have and it alienates a lot of fucking people…
“Surprised and disappointed at some of the people who “liked” your exclusion.
“And what were you all? Pleeeeease… Like four years old at the time? And from a generation that keeps talking woke shit about inclusion… Especially unfortunate because it alienates people who would otherwise be on your side — LIKE ME.”
But then I decided editing Ayesha’s tweet for my purposes would put things more clearly:
“I don’t think I can ever really be that close to people who didn’t experience …. [communist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships, the taking away of grandfathers to labor camps where they disappeared and were never heard from again, and ended up in mass graves in some unknown place, the mass massacring of families, the mass confiscation or burning or destruction of property, land, home in brutal collectivization, or those whose lives in the Soviet Union were nearly ruined because they dared to be friends with me when I was studying there; and I don’t think I can be close to anybody who’s not descended from communities who experienced centuries of Islamizing pressure and violence and held on to their faith through it all, like Christians in my part of the Balkans did, or who isn’t an Istanbullu Greek, who lived through decades of slow-motion but brutal ethnic cleansing by the Turkish Republic, or with anybody whose people weren’t wiped off the map by the Croatian Ustaše and their vigorous Bosnian Muslim collaborators during WWII, and I don’t think I can be close to people whose silence about the existential threat that an Islamist Turkey poses to my country is deafening, or to people who “like” my posts when they’re about saving the wooden mosques of Georgia, but whose silence when Erdogan deprives the rest of humanity of two equivalents of the Sistine Chapel in Istanbul ’cause it satisfies his own Muslim Brotherhood and most of his people’s — who have voted for him repeatedly — monotheist hard-on about images, is equally deafening] ….the same way I did.
[….But you racist, drunk Russian thugs who beat up Tajiks in Moscow, asshole Serbs, who have a lot of reason to feel aggrieved, but take it out on Albanians or LGBTQ folk in Belgrade, or assholes like the leaders of Hungary or Poland, who think they’re defending the boundaries of Christian Europe, or just any Orthodox Christian, no matter how reactionary or fascist an idiot you are, or ridiculous clergy who not only won’t allow new mosques to be built for a sizeable Muslim community in Athens, but want the four, beautiful old Ottoman ones torn down….] who did, [experience what I or mine did] im automatically close to you.”
You don’t know how good you have it, Ayesha-jaan…
And — oh shit — I forgot the link she’s got to a site that sells hammer-and-sickle t-shirts. No clue that that’s the equivalent of a swastika to hundreds of millions of people.
But “ok, gen-x-millenial border person”. Don’t wanna spoil your fun.
Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and rest of ME, Iran, South Asia
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.
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 