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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.
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Write us: with comments or observations, or to be put on our mailing list or to be taken off our mailing list, contact us at nikobakos@gmail.com.
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:
The stills above are taken from Giorgos Augeropoulos‘ beautiful documentary, Egypt: The Other Homeland | Al Jazeera World, a piece about the Greeks of Alexandria in the 19th and 20th centuries. This documentary was the subject of one of our first Jadde posts: “Another people’s exodus from Egypt“, posted right around Passover that year.
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Provenance and location unkown. Thought it might be the Certosa di San Martino in Vomero, but that’s not a functioning monastery. Who knows? Naples is a strangely middle-eastern city in some ways; there are always secret interiors that there are no exterior clues to. On the other hand, the claustrophobia of the tightly packed and built city often leads to a great deal of domestic life taking place in the street.
Corfu is such a depressing rebuke to the ugliness of most other Greek οικίσμοι, urban or rural. Who would look at this photograph and not think Italy or southern France first? Or, who doesn’t go to Corfu and at some point ask himself: “Hmmm… What if all Greek lands had been Venetian colonies for four hundred years instead of Ottoman?”
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Byzantine Ambassador, in another informative piece, talks to us about the Spanish cult of Santiago.
Outside Rome the West lacked the relics of important apostles. This was rectified in Venice by the theft of St Mark the Evangelist from Muslim Alexandria in AD 828. Not to be outdone by the Adriatic pirates, however, the Spanish promptly discovered St James the Greater’s tomb at the Galician fishing town of Padron at some point between 818-42.
The interior and exterior (below) of the cathedral of Santiago in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain.
Just to add… Bari rectified a lack of relics by stealing the remains of St. Nicholas of Bari from the city where he had served as bishop, Myra in Asia Minor/Anatolia.
The Cathedral of St. Nicholas of Bari below; I love the combo-contrast between the austere Romanesque of Norman churches in southern Italy and later Baroque additions, like the ceiling here.
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 