On any given day, American children are more likely to eat dessert than plants. Makers of baby food face a conundrum: If it sells, it’s probably not best for babies. If it’s best for babies, it probably won’t sell. Photo illustration by Horacio Salinas for The New Yorker
Yeah, and anything else for that fact. Just make them eat what’s on the table with no options. Watch how they’ll start to love their broccoli once that’s all there is. We’re the first civilization in history which has made such a fuss about what children like or don’t like, and have created a civilization full of adults who still eat like 10yr olds.
And in the process we’re destroying centuries of ancient culinary traditions.See one of my first ever posts from this blog: “Chitterlings…and mageiritsa”
Archaic torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell:
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
–
Archaïscher Torso Apollos
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigen Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle
und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.
That last line: “Du musst dein Leben ändern”, “You must change your life”, is always like a kick-box punch to the gut.
“It is decisive for the lot of a people and of humanity that culture should begin in the right place – not in the “soul” (as was the fateful superstition of the priests and half-priests): the right place is the body, the gesture, the diet, physiology; the rest follows from that. Therefore the Greeks remain the first cultural event in history: they knew, they did, what was needed; and Christianity, which despised the body, has been the greatest misfortune of humanity so far.”
I mean Greek Greek — not us Greeks/Romioi — I mean THOSE Greeks.
It’s not because the man in the photograph is Greek. He’s actually Montenegrin judoka Zvezdan Djukić. It’s not because he has such a beautiful body or such perfect Praxitelian proportions — wonderful how photo catches his back in the mirror. It’s not because such dense muscles like his usually belong to shorter, stockier, endomorph types, and because such thick muscle bellies on such long limbs are relatively rare, except — maddeningly — in the western Balkans: Northern Albania, Montenegro, Kosovo, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia and yes…ok…Croatia.
It’s because Greek humanism would have been first in seeing the beauty in this fleeting moment: a young exhausted athlete taking a break from his exertions. It’s why Nietzsche called the Greeks “the first cultural event in history.”
I had thought that maybe I would permanently keep the photographs that I first posted on the blog’s homepage when I started it (Turkish refugees from Rumeli in turn of the century Istanbul and adorable kids in Samarina in 1983), as sort of a trademark, or what obnoxious “Ok, millenials” call a “meme” — which is just a mystified/jargonized term for what used to simply be called an “image”. But when you don’t have any new ideas, you make up fake new words to cover for the fact.
Then I saw footage from a Paradzhanov film that I love, and remembered that he’s among my two or three favorite directors. It’s strange that I hadn’t thought of him before, because he was essentially obsessed — possessed would not be an exaggeration — with the visual beauty of our parts, of the Jadde world. He was almost an “our parts“ pornographer, in the most beautiful sense of the word, fixated on the image of our cultures’ physical (and I mean that sexually) and material beauty, more interested in the fetishized gaze and tableaux than in editing or the syntax of cinema. In our world today, where cinematic and video language has been so perverted and debased that the average viewing time between editing cuts is less than three seconds — we’re kept watching by the fact that we’re not allowed to actually lookat anything — Paradzhanov granted us the delicious luxury of lingering over every beautiful detail his cinematic mind generated.
So, I decided that every month I’m going to change the homepage pic with one from his various films. This one is from his 1969The Color of Pomegranates, widely considered his masterpiece, though it’s not my favorite. That would be his 1965Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, though Pomegranates is without a doubt a beauty.
Hope you enjoy them as much as I like to watch them and post the stills. Unfortunately, the crappy Soviet color film stock they were shot in and the abysmal curatorial conditions these films were kept under for so many decades means that some of the stills will be soft or just not of optimal quality. But I hope you enjoy them anyway and look out for opportunities to see them, and hopefully on a real screen and not your Mac…
Look, I’m as annoyed as the next Christian by Islam’s puritan beef with booze and pig meat*, but this is sheer inanity and sociopathic intent to insult and hurt others. It’s what the Spanish Inquisition used to do. It embarrasses me as a Greek. Malakes…eh malakes.
* I do have to say though, that I’m super-irritated at the hypocrisy of Muslim friends I know who are more than border-line alcoholics who get trashed on a regular basis, but will freak out if there’s pork or even any non-halal meat put in front of them. It’s like you can live without pork; and that’s your loss of course: I’m sorry you’ll die without ever trying pata negra jamón or a cocido madrileño, or ever eating a roast suckling lechón in Segovia, or Dominican chicharrón or Doña Cecilia’s pigfeet seco with chickpeas or a Shanghai braised pork shoulder or really good chorizo or morcilla. I respect your fortitude.
But really… Ok, pig is haram; but if we’re talking about an addictive substance that’s harder to abstain from like alcohol, then you can get a halal-pass?
A stain on the Greek conscience, an obscene manipulation of Orthodox identity and brotherhood, an affront to the suicidal bravery of Greek and Serbian resistance against the Nazis during WWII (in is German, Hungarian and especially its Croatian variants), and a gross mockery on what for me is still the moving idea of a long, historical Greco-Serbian bromance.
Here’s another dude who doesn’t like the premise of this blog. I love when people like this write to tell you that you’re wrong, ridiculous, and that 99% of the world will ignore you because that’s what you deserve — and feel obligated to take the time and energy to write a 762-word email in order to tell you that. (Full email of Kristos posted below)
It’s like Carly Simon’s “You’re so vain”. I bet you think this post is about you, don’t you?! Don’t you?!?!
“My name is Chris, I am from Greece and accidentally fell in your blog today, as I was reading news and things about the latest situation in Kurdistan. I noticed your title “FROM BOSNIA TO BENGAL”, then “I’m Greek” and finally “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.”.
“I was sure what the blog is about before even open “Jadde — Starting off — the Mission”, as you are not the first person (of Greek roots) who supports such views. For example Dr Kitsikis would probably mastrubate to “It’s about that zone, from Bosnia to Bengal that, whatever its cultural complexity and variety, constitutes an undeniable unit for me”.we partied well together”
“I am not going to start with arguing wether your statements are or not right, let me ask you some things first: Do you realize the difference between “natural choice” and “enforcment” which (the second one) in many cases ended in 1821? Or the difference between 1819 and 2019 and how many changes have occured during these two centuries? Like you said, the area that your father called “our places” was Pogoni, a valley close to Greek-Albanian borders, which remained under ottomans till late 1912. Can you realize how different your father’s experiences are from a next-door Corfiot or an Athenian whose ancestors were expriencing Bavarian rule since as early as 1830s? Can you understand how many Greeks in the new world, are attracted by South Italians, Irish, or others by Eastern Europeans (like Russians or Ukrainians) depending upon person and for different reasons, the exactly same way that you are attracted by the ethnicities you mentioned above? By “attracted” i obviously do not mean physically attracted, but even in that case, how many marriages have been done between Greeks and Italians in the US and how many between Greeks and Bosnians, Arabs or Indians? From all of my relatives there, nearly half of Greek Americans married to a “foreigner” are married to an Italian person (funny fact is that even for Greeks of Smyrna it was much more possible to get married to a Person from French or Italian communities of the city than a turkish or Arabic person). Yes, you are a person from pogoni (where if i am not mistaken Greek was even not spoken till recently, instead of it Aromanian and Aravnitic were spoken), your ancestors have interacted much more with all these people you mention and until very recently. Can you understand that I and many other Greeks come from places where social and cultural norms were very, very different?
“You call yourself a Roman, I guess considering yourself as a successor of Byzantines. In what way were the Christian Romans of Byzantium closer to Arab muslims than to Christian Romans of Western Europe?
“You will certainly find some (because 99% of “neo-athenians will probably not even pay attention to your work) “offended Athenians” but did you ever consider the possibility that Athens, being a multicultural city today, has ALL of the ethnicities mentioned above, with neither of these ethnicities attracting Greeks in the way you describe?
“You have the right to associate yourself with whoever you want, and feel confortable as well. Just let us know, why do you put a whole nationality, with different experiences from class to class and from region to region into the same basket, when the majority of our 10 million people have different experiences from yours? You mention enlightenment and the way nation state is perceived by it in a part of your text. As long as Greeks have chosen since 2 centuries ago to live this way (as an independent nation state and fully part of Europe-we had even revolted 150 times to gain independence from the ottomans before 1821) why don’t you at least respect that and seperate yourself and people with similar views to yours from us? No, we are not part of such a “zone” from Bengal to Bosnia, we have never been even if most of our ancestors were FORCED to interact with these people until 1821.
“Do not take my message as offensive, but as an invitation to open your mind and do not put whole groups or nationalities into basket which they don’t feel part of, because they are not part of them (and don’t take yourself as the “chosen one” to know the absolute truth among millions of “delusional” Greeks who “want” to be European)”
“This is…really something. Like, “and it’s no coincidence that 9 our of 10 examples here on how Greeks are supposed to belong to a supposed zone from Balkans to south Asia, are examples of Greeks who either lived in Northern regions near Balkans and Turkey and wasted time under ottomans until late 1913 and from early 15th century or Anatolian Greeks or even Romani Greek people. The majority of Greeks, who come from regions with deep and long contacts with Southwest and sometimes central Europe, like Southern Greeks or Greek islanders are almost ignored.”
“What?! What Greeks are these, exactly, who experienced most of the 400 years before 1913 outside of the Ottoman Empire and in close contact with southwest and central Europe? And why don’t the Anatolian or Balkan Greeks count? (I mean, I know why they don’t count, his racist argument only works if you exclude people who don’t fit the narrative).
“It’s really astonishing how ultimately defensive and afraid this kind of nonsense is. They’re so terrified by the idea that, gasp, cultures and peoples mix over time, they have to construct these completely a-historical versions of the past to comfort themselves.” [my emphases]
“As the villagers fled to Diyarbakir from the surrounding areas, it became a Kurdish city. In time, the Diyarbakir Kurds began to recognize that their role in the genocide was a kind of original sin in their modern political history. “I remember this one Armenian priest,” Demirbaş told me. “A Kurd was insulting him, and this priest told him, ‘We were the breakfast for them, you will be the lunch. Don’t forget.’ And that was important for me.'”” [My emphasis]
While we’re on Armenians, at a time when Syria plunges more deeply into hell than we had ever thought possible, when the West abandons the Kurds to Erdoğan and Assad, proving again that the U.S. is Turkey’s hamali, or that Turkey’s tail wags the dog, if you prefer, a historical reality check might be called for.
The American and almost every other media might be too superficial or too impatient to dig so deep historically because they’d lose their audience, but there is one, and one big thing that disproves Donald Trump’s assertion that Turks and Kurds have been fighting each other for centuries and are “natural enemies“ (see video below). And that is the fact that perhaps the greater portion of the massacres of Armenians and other Christians in eastern Anatolia during the last decades of the 19th c. and first two and a half decades of the 20th c. were conducted by Kurds.* Not by the Ottoman military, but by Kurdish para/irregular forces or just Kurdish tribal chieftains craving more land and authority and wealth, and conducting/justifying their campaigns of mass murder with the rippling green banner of Islam, under which Turks and Kurds were just brothers in defense of the faith. Only when the forces of modern nationalism started displacing the older bonds of religion and empire, did Kurds arguably start to feel themselves a separate entity from Turkish Muslims, and did the power of clan loyalties shift from semi-feudal to Kurdish nationalist ones; it’s even arguable that Republican Turkey’s anti-ağa, anti-religious and Turkification campaigns stoked the fires of the new Kurdish nationalism more than anything else. (Somewhat of a similar process occurs between the Ottomans and Muslim Albanians in the early 20th c., and Orthodox Greeks and Orthodox non-Greeks: Bulgarians, Macedonians, Vlachs, Albanian Christians — as the latter groups discovered/invented new identities to replace the old religious-institutional bonds.)
An Armenian woman and her children who were refugees of the massacres and sought help from missionaries by walking far distances. Photo unknown provenance.
So I’m sorry that couldn’t counter Trump’s claims ofeternal Turkish-Kurdish enmity with something pretty about how — on the contrary — eternally well they have gotten along but rather by implicating both parties in coordinated mass murder. And forgive me the occasional snicker at Greek pro-Kurdish poses and the general sanctification of Kurds that we’ve witnessed in the past couple of decades.
Armenian victims of the massacres being buried in a mass grave at Erzerum cemetery. Photo unknown provenance.
* From Wiki:
(“In 1890-91, at a time when the empire was either too weak and disorganized or reluctant to halt them, Sultan Abdul Hamid gave semi-official status to the Kurdish bandits. Made up mainly of Kurdish tribes, but also of Turks, Yöruk, Arabs, Turkmens and Circassians, and armed by the state, they came to be called the Hamidiye Alaylari (“HamidianRegiments“).[16] The Hamidiye and Kurdish brigands were given free rein to attack Armenians, confiscating stores of grain, foodstuffs, and driving off livestock, and confident of escaping punishment as they were subjects of military courts only.) [my emphasis]
And not just eastern Anatolia. Istanbul’s Kurdish population played a major role in the 1896 Hamidian Armenian massacres in the City, where hundreds were killed right there in Pera, in ab-fab Beyoğlu, in the middle of the elegant, Beaux Arts, now garish and overlit Istiklâl. Referred to this before and to how brilliantly these events are handled in the “Duck with Okra” chapter in Maria Iordanidou’sLoxandra.
Only fair, however, that I include a reference to this 2015 article from The New Yorker, “A Century of Silence: A family survives the Armenian genocide and its long aftermath.“ by Raffi Khatchadourian, in which the then mayors of Diyarbakır and the separate municipality of the Old City, Osman Baydemir and Abdullah Demirbaş respectively, apologize for the Kurdish role in the Armenian massacres and rebuild and restore the city’s main Armenian church, Sourp Giragos (Hagios Kyriakos in Greek) and allow it to function (see photo above) for the handful of Armenians left in the city. Khatchadourian‘s article has some beautiful photos too by Pari Dukovic.
“We Kurds, in the name of our ancestors, apologize for the massacres and deportations of the Armenians and Assyrians in 1915. We will continue our struggle to secure atonement and compensation for them.”
“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
I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but like five people today understand what I'm talking about when I say that, 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
On any given day, American children are more likely to eat dessert than plants. Makers of baby food face a conundrum: If it sells, it’s probably not best for babies. If it’s best for babies, it probably won’t sell. Photo illustration by Horacio Salinas for The New Yorker
An Armenian woman and her children who were refugees of the massacres and sought help from missionaries by walking far distances. Photo unknown provenance.
Armenian victims of the massacres being buried in a mass grave at Erzerum cemetery. Photo unknown provenance.
