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.
Check out this cute video from sehr-cute Jewish boy, Nathaniel Drew (kind of goyische-sounding last name? Yeah, I thought so too) who talks to his polyglot grandma about the languages she speaks and how she acquired them.
Money moment at 3:25:
Nate: “We could say you’re a sponge for languages?
Grandma: “Yes” (chuckles)
Nate: “Do you know why you have this ability?”
Grandma: “I love languages. I love learning. I love to know.”
Translation: “I come from a very ancient tradition of Mediterranean and MENA urbanism and cosmopolitanism which was destroyed by the modern ethnic nation-state and its ridiculous ideas about cultural uniformity”
Or…
Translation: “I’m Jewish.”
Readers who want to remember the pre-Nasser Alexandria this woman was born in might want to revisit “The Other Homeland” documentary by Yorgos Augeropoulos for Al Jazeera.
Ibn Khaldun, the great medieval historian, noted with surprise that the Gospels consisted largely of sermons and stories, “and have an almost complete lack of laws”. It was this lack, in the opinion of medieval Muslim jurists, that served to condemn Christianity as an inadequate and superceded revelation. Unlike the Jews, who at least had a written law from God, Christians were forever changing their minds, devising new law codes, revising the ones they already had. How were such people possibly to be taken seriously? […]
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Islamist radicals, when they look at the history of France, should see in it a sinister continuum. In 2015, when the Islamic State issued a statement claiming responsibility for the murderous attacks on the Bataclan and a range of other atrocities, it readily conflated the era of Louis IX with the vices of a more recent and godless materialism. Paris was condemned both as “the carrier of the Banner of the Cross in Europe”, and as “the capital of prostitution and obscenity”. […]
The Islamic State, when they identified France as the capital of everything that it most hated, were not so far wrong. Eldest Daughter of the Church and the home of revolution, the land of saints and philosophes, Catholic and laique, it is her fate — and perhaps her privilege — to serve, more than any other country, as the very embodiment of the West.
Tom Holland is a writer, popular historian and cricketer. He is not an actor. His most recent book is Dominion
November 2, 2020
In 1798, Napoleon embarked on the first French invasion of Egypt since the era of the Crusades. He prepared for it with his customary attention to detail. Conscious that he was travelling to a predominantly Muslim land, he sought to make a careful study of Islam. Top of his reading list was, of course, the Qur’an. Raised as he had been to view the Bible as the archetype of scripture, he found it a surprising text. The character of Muhammad’s revelations, he realised, was radically different from that of the New Testament.
The Qur’an did not content itself with what Napoleon had been brought up to think of as “religion”. Its scope was much broader than that. From fiscal policy to sumptuary laws, it offered prescriptions for entire dimensions of what, in Europe, had long since come to be defined as “secular”. Napoleon, sorting out the library in his cabin, duly catalogued it, not under “Religion”, but under “Politics”.
A testament to the funky cosmopolitanism of the Mediterranean “Cities We Lost“ (see Facebook page) and to the strength of Italian regional language cultures — a great juxtaposition of wordliness and provincialism, or the provincial in the cosmopolitan — the Alhambra Theater in Alexandria, one of the city’s first, hosts a travelling theater troupe staging productions in Sicilian dialect:
C.P. Cavafy @CCavafy “His poetry… immortalizes the moment at which the predestined disaster or corruption happened. Of all poets he is the one who most makes success look like grandiose failure and failure look like fatal success.”
Την εργασία μου την προσέχω και την αγαπώ. Μα της συνθέσεως μ’ αποθαρρύνει σήμερα η βραδύτης. Η μέρα μ’ επηρέασε. Η μορφή της όλο και σκοτεινιάζει. Όλο φυσά και βρέχει. Πιότερο επιθυμώ να δω παρά να πω. Στη ζωγραφιάν αυτή κυττάζω τώρα ένα ωραίο αγόρι που σιμά στη βρύσι επλάγιασεν, αφού θ’ απέκαμε να τρέχει. Τι ωραίο παιδί· τι θείο μεσημέρι το έχει παρμένο πια για να το αποκοιμίσει. — Κάθομαι και κυττάζω έτσι πολλήν ώρα. Και μες στην τέχνη πάλι, ξεκουράζομαι απ’ την δούλεψή της.
(translation comment: it’s a “spring” — βρύσι — not a “fountain”. Fountain sounds built and marble and urban, as in Trevi… Spring better suits the pastoral, Arcadian setting that I think Cavafy’s mind has wandered into in this poem.)
Patricia Storace‘s Dinner withPersephone (along with Patrick Leigh Fermor‘s Roumeli:Travels in Northern Greece) is one excellent book that I recommend to all friends who are planning on visitting Greece and want to know what to read.
At one point Storace writes:
“Greek is not a voluptuous language, or a lilting one, but stony and earthy, a language full of mud, volcanic rock, and glittering precious stones…”
Listen to Lambete beautiful recitation of Cavafy’s “The City” and you’ll know what she means:
Η Πόλις
Είπες· «Θα πάγω σ’ άλλη γη, θα πάγω σ’ άλλη θάλασσα. Μια πόλις άλλη θα βρεθεί καλλίτερη από αυτή. Κάθε προσπάθεια μου μια καταδίκη είναι γραφτή· κ’ είν’ η καρδιά μου — σαν νεκρός — θαμένη. Ο νους μου ως πότε μες στον μαρασμόν αυτόν θα μένει. Όπου το μάτι μου γυρίσω, όπου κι αν δω ερείπια μαύρα της ζωής μου βλέπω εδώ, που τόσα χρόνια πέρασα και ρήμαξα και χάλασα.»
Καινούριους τόπους δεν θα βρεις, δεν θάβρεις άλλες θάλασσες. Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. Στους δρόμους θα γυρνάς τους ίδιους. Και στες γειτονιές τες ίδιες θα γερνάς· και μες στα ίδια σπίτια αυτά θ’ ασπρίζεις. Πάντα στην πόλι αυτή θα φθάνεις. Για τα αλλού — μη ελπίζεις— δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό. Έτσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ’ όλην την γη την χάλασες.
The City
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You will walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, will turn gray in these same houses. You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
And if you can see the documentary posted: Egypt: The Other Homeland by Giorgos Augeropoulos and Al Jazeera about the story of Alexandrian Greeks. It’s really beautiful; I remember I first posted it onErev Pesach in 2012 and introduced the post with: “Another people’s exodus from Egypt”. Plus, it’s good to remember the positive aspects of our long historical relationship with Egypt at times like this. I think it’s particularly noteworthy that one of the doc’s subjects talks about how Greeks slowly and steadily starting leaving Egypt because they felt there wouldn’t be any room for them in the nationalist and statist revolutionary Egypt of Nasser, but it was striking that “…we never felt fear” in Egypt.” Contrast that with the chronic low-level fear — punctuated with moments of real terror — Greeks in Istanbul lived with throughout the twentieth century…
Dear Niko, yesterday I found Jadde-ye-kabir and your email, and here I am. I was so happy to read what you think of Hellenism!!!!! It’s exactly what I think. In my latest book I quoted Ion Dragumis when he wrote that Hellenism is a far larger place than Greece.
I studied ancient Greek at school ages ago, and I’ve been going to Greece as often as I can. It’s the mother-country of my choice! I have also studied modern Greek which I can read and write, which doesn’t make a tourist of me, but a traveller. I wrote a book about the (Losanna) population exchange, which implied travelling in the North of Greece and in Anatolia: a wonderful journey. But I’ve found Greece, or better Hellenism, in Alexandria (looking for Penelope Delta among other things), and in Crimea, and I’m looking forward to going to Pakistan in the footsteps of Alexander. I’m in a hurry now, but I’d like to talk with you longer. Where do you live?
I do like what you write and I completely agree with you! Let’s keep in touch! Have a nice day, Claudia from Verona (I’m going to Bari in a few days to present my book on Greece and I’ll use some ideas in your blog. Thanks!!). Ciao, as we say
Thanks Claudì! Keep reading! And yes, stay in touch.
Time Out has come out with the fifty coolest neighborhoods in the world, and two — arguably three — of them are Greek; one in Athens, Kypsele, and another in the capital of the Greek diaspora, New York: Astoria. (Yeah, Melbourne…ok…chill). Now there are only what, 14 or 15 million of us in the whole world, and we corner 8th and 16th outta 50. Not just not bad, but figures that make it clear there’s a connection between Greek-ness and urbanity — even Greek villages are really just tiny Greek cities — the polis and everything political life implies, that runs deep.
Astoria
Kypsele
What if you have no Greeks (or worse, no Jews). Well, brother Turk, take a walk, or a nerve-wracking tourist shove, down what you’ve turned your “İstiklâl” into: its new garish, overlit, Gap-outlet, Gulfie, Saudi hideousness… And weep. That we left.
Oh, and what’s arguably the “third” Greek neighborhood… Ok, I scrolled down the list, nervously expecting to find Pera (Beyoğlu) there, the formerly, largely Greek mahalla — the formerly Greek, Jewish and Armenian heart of the City actually — because Turkey’s American public relations firms deserve every dollar they get from the Turkey accounts and they manage to shove a fictitious Turkish tolerant multiculturalism in our face whenever they get the chance, and Pera has, for about the past 15 years, taken pride of place in this masquerade of Istanbul hipness and Turkish cosmopolitanism — quite an accomplishment since the Midnight Express days. (Too bad Turkey itself reverts back to Midnight a little bit more every day.) And Pera wasn’t there, not on the list!
“All – I thought a lot about whether I should use “almost all” in this sentence and decided against it –because all the hippest, funkiest, most attractive, gentrified neighborhoods in the historic parts of İstanbul are neighborhoods that were significantly, if not largely, minority-inhabited until well into the twentieth century: not just Pera and Galata, but Cihangir and Tarlabaşı, and Kurtuluş — of course — and up and down the western shores of the Bosphorus and much of its eastern towns too, and central Kadiköy and Moda and the Islands. (And if serious gentrifying ever begins in the old city it’ll be in Samatya and Kumkapı and Fener and Balat; I wouldn’t put any big money into Çarşamba just yet.)”
And so, happily, I didn’t find Pera being prostituted again by Turkey as a symbol of a multiculturalism that the Turkish Republic eradicated, exterminated, expelled and that no longer exists. But I scrolled a bit further down…and there was Kadiköy and Moda, #42, also, until well into the 60s, heavily Greek and Armenian. More sweet justification!
(I’ll take Egyptians on for the empty, dingy Alexandria they got stuck with after our good-bye party in another post.)
Kadiköy
Finally, came the sweetest of all, my beloved Dorćol in my beloved Belgrade. 50th on the list of 50. You have to be pretty attuned to the Serbian soul to know what coming in 50th out of 50 means. It doesn’t mean being last. It means: “You think we’re cool? Who asked you?”
The Rakia Bar in Dorćol
Plus, Belgrade comes in in way first place over all of these cities in one important way: the guys. No joke.
Some restaurant notes:
Don’t go to Çiya in Kadiköy. Unfortunately, the food is spectacular, and I’m a sadist for posting this picture:
But the unfortunate part is that Çiya is owned by a sociological type: the newly comfortable, if not rich, provincial, pious middle-class; that’s the AKP’s and Erdoğan‘s political power base. What that means on the ground is that your great food is prepared by puritans who won’t serve you alcohol, so you can’t have a leisurely rakı or beer dinner, but have to scarf it all down and leave, paying with dough that might indirectly end up in the AK’s coffers or ballot boxes. The same goes with the otherwise excellent Hayvore in Pera. Amazing Black Sea dishes but no booze. Go ahead if you want. You can go to Sauditoo if you want. I refuse to. Even if I didn’t want to drink: just on principle. And they — Hayvore — make one of my absolute favorite dishes which I can’t find anywhere else: an anchovy pilav. But I’ll live without. Or make it myself.
.
And then, a little less geopolitically charged, there’s the completely baffling phenomenon of Cyclades in Astoria. I can’t argue with the fish. And if fish is their mission statement then fine, because it’s always fresh and expertly cooked — even if the owners are Albanian and hadn’t seen the sea till they were sixteen. But you do want to eat something along with the fish and everything else is awful. The cacık and eggplant salad is made inedible by that crazed Greek overuse of raw garlic, so that all you have is the bitterness of the bulb and not even the taste or aroma. The zucchini and eggplant are fried in old oil. The raw oil served for greens or salad is horrible — cheap, and I’m not even sure it’s 100% olive. And in a Greek fish meal, where almost everything is dressed with raw oil, it really needs to be the best quality or everything else is shot. The bread — and one thing we do well, γαμώτομου, is bread — is nasty and old. This place reminds me of food in tourist traps in the old days before the foodie revolution in Greece in the 00s.
And they commit one incomprehensible abomination. They serve oven-baked potatoes — with lemon, fine… But. With. The. Fish. These are potatoes, that according to the taxonomy and order of Greek food, if such a primitive cuisine can be said to have such order, are baked in the oven with meat in a composite dish or casserole. It’s a sin of commission to serve them with fish, with which they haven’t even been cooked, unless you’re going for plaki which means tomatoes and a whole different palate. And they taste as if they’ve been soaked overnight in lemon. And I dunno, but the yellow color is so suspiciously bright that it looks like yellow dye #2. Investigate them; I’m sure I’m right. And, of course, everything comes garnished with piles of more lemon wedges, to satisfy that deep Greek urge to obliterate the taste of everything else on the table.
And people — Manhattan people — come out to Queens and wait, for over an hour, malaka, to get a table at this Soviet cafeteria (the lighting is awful; the music is deafening). They’ll often go cross the street to wait to be called, to get a drink at Michael Psilakis‘ MP Taverna, where the food is phenomenal. It’s only slightly reinterpreted Greek — it’s deeply faithful to the roots but Psilakis — I dunno — freshens things, and combines traditional ingredients in ways that make you wonder why no one else had ever tried this. It’s generally full and has a great and friendly bar that looks out on the bustle of Ditmars Boulevard. But it should be a destination spot and it’s not. And Cyclades is. It makes me think that white people will eat bad food if they think it gives them woke and authenticity street cred. And convince themselves it’s good.
“You may have already heard plenty about Call Me By Your Name, the upcoming Luca Guadagnino film. There’s original music by Sufjan Stevens, Oscar buzz, and even some (misplaced) controversy. But you may have missed that this film is not only a queer coming-of-age romance— it’s a Jewish one.
“Call Me By Your Name is based on a 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman about Elio, a teenager in Italy in the 1980s who falls for Oliver, a young academic who comes to stay with his family over the summer. Both the family and guest are Jews, a minority in a very Catholic country.
“This shared bond is one of the things that brings Elio and Oliver together; Elio is enchanted by how Oliver wears his Jewishness on his sleeve (or literally, on his chest, in the form of a Magen David), and he tries to emulate him, despite the fact that his family describes themselves as “Jews of discretion.” Elio even wears his own Star of David (“My Star of David, his Star of David, our two necks like one, two cut Jewish men joined together from time immemorial,” writes Aciman in the original novel). In the novel, at least, this has a mixed effect for Elio:
Judaism never troubled [Oliver] the way it troubled me, nor was it the subject of an abiding, metaphysical discomfort with himself and the world. It did not even harbor the mystical, unspoken promise of redemptive brotherhood. And perhaps this was why he wasn’t ill at ease with being Jewish and didn’t constantly have to pick at it, the way children pick at scabs they wish would go away. He was okay with being Jewish.
“In the novel, despite his secularity, Elio understands his own sexuality through the lens of Jewishness:
I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Clean Jewish, Oliver Jewish— we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away from such intimacy is galut, the Hebrew word for exile and dispersal. [my emphasis]
“How Aciman writes Jewish characters is reminiscent of his personal essays about Jewishness; he treats the subjects with ambivalence and great poignancy. Aciman was born to a Jewish Egyptian family, living as a tiny minority until the family was forced to leave when the writer was a teenager.
“As far as the film is concerned, much of the cast is Jewish as well. Armie Hammer, of Jewish descent, plays Oliver, and Jewish-American newcomer Timothée Chalamet plays Elio. Elio’s father is played by Michael Stuhlbarg of A Serious Man.
“It’s exciting that an Oscar film for this season is also a Jewish queer one. The movie doesn’t come out in wide release till November, but you can enjoy the decadently Sufjan Stevens-laden trailer in the meantime (see if you can spot the Jewish star necklace)…”
If you haven’t, homework for Jadde readers is Aciman’s first novel, Out of Egypt. It’s one of the best — and earliest — English-language novels of the ‘Destruction-of-eastern-Mediterranean-cosmopolitanism’ genre.
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.
Astoria
Kypsele
Kadiköy
The Rakia Bar in Dorćol
But the unfortunate part is that Çiya is owned by a sociological type: the newly comfortable, if not rich, provincial, pious middle-class; that’s the AKP’s and 
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 