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.
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.
Bad translation. “Pодные”…”rodnye” means intimate, familiar, related; by extension born-beloved, dear one, cared for, same root in Russian as parents, birth, homeland, Christmas…wouldn’t be surprised if it has the same Indo-European roots as “root”.
Vitaly Mansky‘s documentary is being screened this coming weekend and the next at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. (See schedule. It’s two train stops into Queens, guys. Then you can have a nice dinner for half of what you pay in Manhttan at a good friend and koumbaro‘s place: Mar’s.)
“In this follow-up to his award-winning documentary Under the Sun, filmmaker Vitaly Mansky examines Ukrainian society amidst the 2014 national election, a period rife with political chaos and growing uncertainty over national identity and integration. As both a Russian citizen and native Ukrainian, Mansky deftly underscores personal and political complexities as he visits with relatives living in Lvov, Odessa, the Crimean peninsula, and the Donbass region, and in the process discovers a wide and disorienting spectrum of outlooks and affiliations, including his own sense of ongoing exile and unease. Close Relations is at once an intimate family portrait and a graceful journalistic endeavor, a movie of the intense present that illuminates a place caught between a troubled past and an anxious future.”
Watch the trailer below.
Lots of moving, “disorienting” footage. Also, lots of humor, which reminds us that so much of a certain ironic, sardonic take on the world — a viewpoint “from a certain angle”, as E.M. Forster said of Cavafy — that we in the United States think is particularly Jewish, is really just a trait common to all eastern Europe, even Greece, or perhaps just a trait common to the powerless everywhere:
“Crimea was a pity, but the Donbass…they can have it.” *
But I think the most important moment in terms of geopolitics comes at 1:15:
“So Ukraine decided to join NATO. Isn’t that its own business?”
“Nyyyyyet!”
…comes the reply without a moment’s hesitation.
“Nyet” with its palatized “n” and final “t” is one of humanity’s great no-words. Like “yok” in Turkish, it literally means “there isn’t” or “Il n’y a pas”. But while “yok” has a kind of know-nothing passivity about it, “nyet” is an active “Halt! No way you’re going further down this road. There’s no access.” **
That moment in Mansky’s doc is why, despite widespread support for a Putin I find repulsive, I can’t get as angry at Russians as I get at Trump Americans and Türk-doğans; because Russians aren’t stupid. They’re not as smart as they used to be in the old days, при коммунизме, when everybody knew not to believe any-thing. They now believe all kinds of nonsense. And they went and got religion on me too, which is one of my life’s greatest watch-what-you-wish-fors. But they’re still pretty intelligent about the world.
I can’t get inside Putin’s head, like Ben Judah convincingly does in what’s still the best book on the Путинщина, the “Putin-ness” or the “Putin thang.” Judah’s thesis is that Putin is really just a nebech apparatchik who others put in his place and who now — having trampled over so many people on his way up — is terrified of stepping down and that the macho persona he so tiringly projects masks mega insecurity. It almost makes you feel sorry for him.
But this relative of Mansky’s and her coldly realpolitik “nyet” tell you why he has so many Russians’ support. Because it means: nyet, you can’t tell me that the U.S. and NATO suddenly developed a major crush on Estonia and Georgia; nyet, you can’t suddenly tell me you’re interested in Ukraine too, because this was already starting to feel like a corporate raid on all the old girlfriends who dumped me, but Ukraine, especially, is like hitting on my sister; nyet, you can’t moan and groan about how we’re violating a basic credo of the European Union by changing borders, when neither Russia or Ukraine are part of the European Union and you wouldn’t even have considered Ukraine — with its resources, access to the Black Sea and huge Russian population — a candidate if it weren’t a way to totally encircle Russia; and, nyet, you can’t tell us that you’re not still treating us with a Cold War mentality that you inherited from an Anglo tradition of Great Game power struggle that doesn’t apply anymore and is now completely counter-productive.
At least talk some truth and maybe we can get somewhere. And then I’ll reconsider breaking up with Putin.
In the meantime, we can try to think of everyone as “close relations.”
************************************************************************************* * The Donbass, the river Don basin is part of southeast Russia and the Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine where the current conflict is centered. From “The first two of my cents on Ukraine and Russia“:
“Also, thence, a crucial point: that Ukraine wasn’t so much conquered, but settled by Russia…
“The independent “frontiersmen” mentality of the Russians of these areas, a sort of Russian Texas — among its ethnic Cossack peoples especially — should not be underestimated and should not be disregarded as a possible element in the current conflict. (See: And Quiet Flows the Don at Amazon and at Wiki.)”
“Новая Россия,” (Novaya Rossiya), New Russia, is not a Putinism. It’s a name for these lands that goes back to Catherine the Great and the first serious subduing of Cossack rebelliousness and settling of Russians in the region in the 18th century. It was part of the Russian empire’s most fertile grain-producing regions and then the scene of crazy industrialization under the Bolsheviks; maybe it was once a sort of “Russian Texas” but now it’s more like a sort of Russian Rust-Belt. Hence, the “they can have it” comment. The Soviet Army, decapitated by Stalin’s purges of its most talented and experienced, and ill-prepared and ill-equipped, only made the Nazi sweep through Ukraine grind to a halt once the Germans had made it this far east and after hundreds of thousands of Russian men had already been sent to a meaningless death and the Nazis had swept the old lands of the Pale clean of Jews through massive massacring and mass executions which were an integral part of the military strategy of the eastern front; many military historians believe that if the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union hadn’t been slowed by German troops stopping every other community to round up and shoot its Jews (a method/process that killed more Jews than the gas chambers did), they might have been successful in beating the coming of winter and more successful in their campaign long-term. The region then became the scene of brutal attrition warfare, culminating in the siege of Stalingrad (now reverted back to its original name, Волгоград / Volgograd on map below). This left the region seriously trashed and so huge numbers of Russian workers were settled there post-WWII, Russianizing the Ukrainian far east even further and setting the stage for today’s conflict.
Map of the Don Basin. The grey line shows the border between Russia (РОССИЯ) and Ukraine (УКРАИНА) and the broken grey lines in Ukrainian east indicate the Lugansk (Луганск) and Donetsk (Донетск)
** “У меня денег нет” (“U menya deneg nyet”) in Russian is the same structure as the Turkish “Benim param yok” — “I don’t have any money.” Though Russian has a verb for “to have” like other Slavic languages, these structures both mean, literally: “By me there’s no money” or “My money isn’t there/isn’t by me.” Wondering whether it’s a construction Russian acquired through contact with Tatar. There is apparently a phenomenon where languages effect each other and transmit certain properties between them, though there’s no large bilingual population to bring them together and though they’re not genetically related, at least not closely. The absence of an infinitive, for example, in modern Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian/Vlach, though each are from different Indo-European families and more closely related languages have an infinitive, is one good example. Also, Yiddish “by mir” (as in “By mir bist du shayn”) which is like the Russian по-моему (“according to me”) — for me, in my opinion. Though German uses “bei mir” also to mean same thing.
In March 2014, Russia marched into Crimea and illegally annexed the peninsula, which had previously been part of Ukraine. Since then, the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group native to the peninsula, have been subject to intimidation, arrests, and expulsions. Such persecution is a symptom of a new wave of Russian nationalism that, if unchecked, could threaten other minorities.
It is estimated that 3,000 Tatars have already left Crimea this year, out of fear. It’s not the first time that the population, which first settled in Crimea during the fifteenth century, has had to endure such pressure. In May 1944, Stalin deported some 190,000 Tatars to Central Asia, allegedly for their collaboration with the Nazis. Soon after Stalin’s death in 1953, a Crimean Tatar movement was established with the aim of returning Tatars to their homeland.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, tens of thousands of Tatars did return to Crimea. According to Ukraine’s 2001 national census, Crimea was home to 243,000 Tatars out of a population of around 2 million.
“On May 18, 1944, Joseph Stalin deported 218,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia.
Using personal testimonies, this film tells the story of the Tatars’ expulsion from their homeland and their long struggle to return.
It was only in 1989, with the opening up of the Soviet Union, that they were able to come back in large numbers. Most, finding Russians living in their former homes, built shacks in which to live.
Today, 300,000 Tatars live in Crimea – 5,000 of them still in shacks.
Even those with houses suffer because they only have minority status.
Despite this, 150,000 more are still hoping to return home.”
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 