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.
Lifted by me without permission — hope she forgives me:
“Les Bosniaques en marche”, 1890A couple from Kreševo, date unknownAt the fountain in Sarajevo, early 20th c.Mostar 1898Bihać, 1908Bosnian Christian left, Bosnian Muslim right, date unkownBosnia: coffee and mangal, date unknownBosnian costumes, date unknown (the beauty, variety and opulence of Balkan female dress always blows me away, especially as the West has traditionally thought of the Balkans as a poor part of the world.)Bosnia, dance, no further information (I love the movement of the colored salvar — the women’s long baggy pants.)House and family in Herzegovina, date and location unknown (along with ethnic/religious affiliation of those pictured; but the women aren’t wearing salvar — see previous photo — which traditionally identified a woman as Muslim in the Balkans; I’m assuming they’re Croats or Serbs)Mostar (date unknown): among other things, an illustration of the ridiculously phallic competition to make church towers higher than minarets — and it’s only gotten worse today.Sarajevo, 1890, guessing, from left to right, Croatian, Serbian and Muslim women.Sarajevo, 1892 (the gorgeous lattice work of the round cumba on house on left.)Serbian woman from Herzegovina, date unkown, one of @BosnianHistory ‘s loveliest photos. Travnik, 1900, love the low divan, coffee and cigarette (staples of civilized Ottoman life) and the partial smirk on the second from left woman that’s the only thing that comes close to a smile. In Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace, the best travel book on Greece since the earlier work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, which I give to all friends who are going to Greece for the first time, Storace writes: “The initial glance here is inquisitive, investigative. There are no easy smiles given away in Greece. It hasn’t yet been ascertained that your existence deserves a smile.” The huge, pearl-white teeth smile is, I think, an entirely American invention: the relentless positivity of the American psyche (Like, why are you smiling?) until the crazy smile descends into total psychosis.Tuzla 1902Bosnia urban couple, no further info, but an illustration that urban dress throughout the Balkans was basically a variety of Ottoman urban dress; the wildly imaginative costumes belonged more to the rural population.Bosnia, no further info, but another image of Ottoman coffee “tea ceremony”. People swear, till today, that coffee made in the ashes of a mangal, like in the photo, tastes far superior to coffee made by any other contraption.Bosnian Croats (no further info), hence, I guess, the resemblance to Catholic nuns’ headress.Jajce, 1941Bosnian bride and father-of in more contemporary image. Again, it’s obvious that these costumes cost a fortune for families. Luckily most of the gold is inherited. And I love the male vanity of dad. Montenegrin men (the butchest of Balkan butch) dress in similarly extravagant stuff, and if I’m not wrong every male in Montenegro still has a traditional outfit made for him for ceremonial occasions.The Male in nature?Kolo in Busovača, 1926Busovača, 1926Sarajevo, girl at fountain, 1920sMostar, 1950s (relatively late, but Greek rural women wore traditional clothing until the 50s – 60s as well.)Mostar, 1912Mother and child in Sarajevo, 1947. This may be my absolute favorite: stylish 40s fashion and traditional niqab-like item.Sarajevo, Logavina, 1904Sarajevo, 1938Sarajevo bakery, Eid/Bayram, 1910. Sorry man, but the niqab must be a real pain-in-the-*ss.Latinluk, Sarajevo, 1933, Sephardic women on a stroll (Does anyone know what “Latinluk” means? In Turkish it literally means the “Latin-ness”Sephardic women (or as caption says “Spanish women”) in Sarajevo, early 20th c.Urban garb, Sarajevo, early 20th century. And an image of the much-commented-on height of Bosnians.Tuzla, 1911Woman in traditional dress, Mrkonjić Grad, Bosnia.Muslim women in Sarajevo, 1925Young men smoke nargilé (hookah) and play music, Sarajevo, 1898
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”.
Forgotten Bonds: Albanian armed guards protected medieval Serbian churches & monasteries in Kosovo during the last centuries of Ottoman rule. The commanders were hereditaryVojvodas, the guards permanently lived on the church grounds & were most likelyLaramans(Crypto-Orthodox).
Purpura begins his tweet with the words: “Forgotten Bonds”. I think it’s safe to assume that his intentions are to show how, in some indeterminate past, Albanian Muslims and Orthodox Serbs lived in harmony together in Kosovo and in such multicultural peace that it was Albanians who guarded the extensive and dazzling ecclesiastic art heritage of Kosovo Serbian Orthodoxy (instead of vandalizing it like they do now). But he concludes by saying that most of these guards were secretly Christian. And that of course belies the whole myth of “bonds” and tolerance and happiness and how “there is no compulsion in religion.”
Read about the Laramanson Wiki. It’s a fascinating page because it puts together a whole package of phenomena that all, to some extent, grew out of Ottoman defeat in the Great Austro-Turkish War at the end of the 17th century: the retaliatory violence against the still-Christian Albanian and Serbian population that lived in the western Balkans on the corridor where much of the fighting of the prolonged conflict had occurred; the flight of Serbs to the north; the Islamization of Albanian Catholic Ghegs who then settled in a depopulated Kosovo and the parts of southern Serbia that the Serbs had fled from*; the spread ofBektashism throughout the Albanian Balkans and how that form of Sufismmay have grown out of the crypto-Christianity of much of the population and even fromJanissaries(with whom the Bektashi order was widely associated) of Albanian extraction; and the spread of violent Islamization campaigns to the Orthodox, mixed Albanian-Greek population, of southern Albania later in the 18th and early 19th century.
A testament to this last phenomenon — the Islamization of southern Albania — is the obstinate Christianity of the region my father was from, the valley of Dropoli(shown above). There are several songs in the region’s folk repertoire that deal with the conversion pressures of the past, but one song that is heard at every festival or wedding and could be called the “national anthem” of the region, is “Deropolitissa” — “Woman of Dropoli.” Below are two versions; the first a capella in the weird, haunting polyphonic singing of the Albanian south (see here and here and here and especially here)**; and another with full musical accompaniment, so readers who are interested can get a sense of the region’s dance tradition as well (though in the second video the dress is not that of Dropoli for some reason). If you’re interested in Epirotiko music, listen for the “γύριζμα” or “the turn” — the improv’ elaborate clarinet playing — toward the end of the second video, 4:02; the clarinet is a Shiva-lingam, sacred fetish object of mad reverence in Epiros and southern Albania.
The lyrics are [“The singers are urging their fellow Christian, a girl from Dropull, not to imitate their example but keep her faith and pray for them in church.”]:
σύ (ντ)α πας στην εκκλησιά, με λαμπάδες με κεριά, και με μοσκοθυμιατά, για προσκύνα για τ’ εμάς, τι μας πλάκωσε η Τουρκιά, κι όλη η Αρβανιτιά, και μας σέρνουν στα Τζαμιά, και μας σφάζουν σαν τ’ αρνιά, σαν τ’ αρνιά την Πασχαλιά. σαν κατσίκια τ’ Αγιωργιού.
…and go to church with lamps and candles and with sweet-smelling incense pray for us too because Turkey has seized us, so has all of Arvanitia (Albania), to take us to the mosques, and slaughter us like lambs, like lambs at Easter, like goats on Saint George’s day.
Until the first part of nineteenth century women in Dropoli used to wear a tattooed cross on their forehead, the way many Egyptian Copts, both men and women, still wear on their wrists; there are photographs of Dropolitiko women with the tattoo but I haven’t been able to find them. Here’s a beautiful photo, though — looks like some time pre-WWII — of Dropolitisses in regional dress.
* Good to know something about the traumas of Serbian history before we rail against them and villainize them in a knee-jerk fashion. I think my best summary came from this post last year, Prečani-Serbs:
Prečani-Serbs: It’s doubtful that any Balkan peoples suffered more from the see-saw wars between the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs than the Serbs did. It’s easy to see why; Serbian lands are pretty much the highway for getting from the south Balkans to Vienna.It’s the easiest proof there is that war always had “collateral damage” and civilian casualties. The Ottomans launched rapid campaigns up through to Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Both times they failed to take the city and retreated. Thank the gods, because the idea of Turkish armies at the walls of Vienna is even more terrifying than the idea of Arab armies in the Loire valley at Tours just 70 kilometers from Paris in 732. But in 1683 they not only failed to conquer Vienna, the Hapsburgs chased the retreating Ottomans across the Danube and as far south as Kosovo. That could have meant Serbian liberation from the Ottomans 200 years before it actually happened.
But then the Austrians made the fateful decision to retreat. I don’t know why. Perhaps they felt overextended or thought they were getting too deep into imperial overreach. And of course this meant horrific retaliatory violence on the part of Turks and local Muslims against the southern Serbs who had welcomed the Austrians as liberators. And an epic exodus of the Serbs northwards, in what are called the Great Migrations of the Serbs, began. This resulted in a massive shift to the north of the Serbian nation’s center of gravity and, perhaps most fatefully, marks the beginning of the de-Serbianization of Kosovo, which was the spiritual heartland of the Serbs. And an influx of increasingly aggressive highland Albanians, now Islamicized and emboldened in their impunity as such, only accelerated the departure of Kosovo Serbs to the north.
Conditions in northern but still Ottoman Serbia were better than in the south. But for many Serbs this was not enough. A great many crossed the Danube and settled in what is now the autonomous region of Vojvodina and the parts of Croatia called Slavonia and Krajina. Ironically, just as the Ottomans made Serbia prime recruiting countryfor their system of enslaving young boys to turn them into the most powerful unit in the Ottoman army, the Janissaries, the Austrians themselves also recognized that Serbs were, as always, good soldier material, and they invited Serbian fighters and their families into Austria’s border regions to protect the boundaries of the Hapsburg empire from possible Ottoman aggression.
So Prečani-Serbs, refers, very broadly, to those Serbs who went and settled in the borderlands of the Austrian empire; the term comes from “preko” or “over there” or “the other side”, across the Danube, Sava and Drina rivers, in other words, that were the borders between the Ottomans and Hapsburgs for centuries.
I don’t know whether Krajina Serbs from around Knin — shown in green in map below — are considered prečani or not, those from that part of Croatia that was largely Serbian until 1995, when it’s Serbian inhabitants were expelled with American help in what was the largest single act of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars, with some 200,000 Serbs expelled from their homes. Serbs are soldiers and poets, as I’ve quoted Rebecca West saying so many times; Croatians are lawyers; but with the detestable Milošević having abandoned Krajina Serbs (Venizelos-style), and with Americans arming, training them and watching their backs, Croats proved themselves to be formidable warriors indeed.
So, if one can put one’s biases aside, the poignant tragedy of this whole set of some 600-years of pain and trauma becomes clear. Bullied out of Kosovo over the centuries, Serbs move north, even so far north as to settle in Austria itself. Then, with no one’s help, they gather Serbs from Kosovo to the trans-Danube-Sava lands where they had settled over the centuries into one state. And less than 100 years later, they lose and are almost entirely expelled from both the Kosovo they had fled from and from the Krajina and Prečani lands they had fled to.
Good to know the whole stories sometimes.
** I’m pissed and disappointed at my χωριανοί, “landsmen”, who have totally abandoned this beautiful and UNESCO-protected form of singing. When I first went to Albania to see my father’s village for the first time in 1992, after the fall of its heinous Stalinist regime, and to meet relatives we only knew through the spotty correspondence that made it through the Albanian Communist καθίκια‘s censorship, a group of aunts and uncles of mine recorded two hours of traditional singing for me to take back to my father (my father put off visitting until much later, when he was very sick because I imagine he was afraid that it would be traumatic; of course, going back when he did in 2002, knowing it would be his one and last time was just as painful.)
Now, thirty years later, no one except a few very old men still sing; they’ve totally left the playing field of the region’s song to neighboring Albanian villages; just like only a few young girls still wear traditional dress as brides, just like they’ve built horrible concrete polykatoikies without even a nominal nod to the traditional architectural idiom… Dance and dance music they’ve maintained, though they’ve sped up the tempo a little (compared to the second video above for instance) and that would have irritated my dad, since the aesthetic ideal of dance in the region is slow, almost motion-less, restraint — reminds you of Japanese Nōh drama. I carry the torch for him and get “grouchy”, as my friend E. says, when things get a little too uppity-happy on the dance floor.
It’s actually hard to say which came first: whether Maria Iordanidou’s Loxandrawas the first literary manifestation of the archetype of a Greek woman of Istanbul, or whether life imitated art and Politisses started unconsciously behaving like Loxandra. Joyful, funny, hovering and caring around all her loved ones but even strangers – even Turks – worldly for her degree of education and fundamentally cosmopolitan if even unawares, obsessed with good food, and always finding happiness and beauty and pleasure in the world, despite her people’s precarious position in their wider environment.
Iordanidou’s novel captures more perfectly than any other literary representation what Patricia Storace has called the “voluptuous domesticity” that Greeks associate with life in Anatolia and Constantinople. But what’s always moved me and struck me as so intelligent about the novel — each of the some ten or more times I’ve read it — is that it’s not all fun-and-games and yalancı dolma and Apokries in Tatavla and Politika nazia. Right along side the pleasure and humor rides a brutally honest portrayal of the “tolerant” and “diverse” Ottoman society that is a favorite fantasy of certain progressives, on both Greek and Turkish sides of the coin. Iordanidou doesn’t fall into that trap, just as she doesn’t fall into the alternate trap of portraying all Turks as murderous animals, along the lines of Dido Soteriou’s Matomena Homata(Bloodied Lands) or Veneze’s Aeolike Ge(Aeolian Earth). She simply goes for the starkest realism: Ottoman Turks/Muslims and their subject peoples didn’t live together in harmony but rather lived in parallel universes that rarely intersected; the novel takes place at a time when – as Petros Markares points out in his essay in the book’s latest edition – “life was heaven for the minorities and hell for Muslims.” But even in that paradise, when the two parallel universes collided, the result was hellish for everyone.
I’ve translated the chapter that takes place during the Hamidian massacresof Armenians in 1896, particularly the shockingly urban episode that occurred in Istanbul. In August of that year, the Dashnaks, Armenian freedom-fighters-cum-terrorists took hostages at the Ottoman Bank in Karaköy and the operation turned into a mini-civil-battle with groups of Armenians and Turks taking up position on either side of the Galata Bridge.
Retribution against the ordinary Armenian populace in Constantinople was swift and brutal. Ottomans loyal to the government began to massacre the Armenians in Constantinople itself. Two days into the takeover, the Ottoman softas and bashibazouks, armed by the Sultan, went on a rampage and slaughtered thousands of Armenians living in the city.[11] According to the foreign diplomats in Constantinople, Ottoman central authorities instructed the mob “to start killing Armenians, irrespective of age and gender, for the duration of 48 hours.”[12] The killings only stopped when the mob was ordered to desist from such activity by Sultan Hamid.[12] They murdered around 6,000[1] – 7,000 Armenians. Within 48 hours of the bank seizure, estimates had the dead numbering between 3,000 and 4,000, as authorities made no effort to contain the killings of Armenians and the looting of their homes and businesses.
Loxandra and her family live through the massacring of their Armenian neighbors in Pera in terror, hiding inside their shuttered house for a week, till they finally run out of water and have to start interacting with the neighborhood vendors. Iordanidou does take a swipe at Turkish passivity and fatalism though in the closing part of the chapter as Loxandra hears repeatedly from the Turkish merchants she has to deal with, in reference to the killing: “Yağnış oldu.” “That was a mistake.” This “Yağnış oldu” chimes like a bell or rather a kick in the gut on the chapter’s last page: “Thousands dead, families annihilated, their homes looted, their churches destroyed… Yağnış oldu”
Shit happens, in other words.
Loxandra soon starts to forget, or at least pretends to. In the end, the chapter is a disturbing look at the compromises we make in order to go on living with the Other, despite the evil he may have done you, or you him. Otherwise life would be intolerable. For “…too much sorrow doth to madness turn…” Loxandra concludes in the final sentence.
Loxandra: Chapter 5
Glory be to God, because “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…A time to be born, and a time to die…a time to break down, and a time to build up…”
Loxandra just figured that for her to suddenly find herself living in the Crossroad*(1) that meant that the time had come and that this had to be her world from now on. She accepted her new life the way that she accepted Demetro’s death. What can you do? That’s how that is.
The Crossroad was nothing like Makrochori [Bakırköy], and the beautiful old life she had there – it was like a scissor had come and snipped it off — slowly became a sweet receding dream. Cleio started to yearn for twilight in Makrochori, the sky, the sea, their garden and the shade of their plane tree. She had even lost her father’s library, because during the move to Pera, Thodoro had pilfered most of it and now all she was left with were Kassiane, Pikouilo Ali Ağa and Witnesses at a Wedding. She started to avoid the cosmopolitan life of Pera, which she at first had thought heavenly, and she lamented her lost paradise. Exactly opposite to her mother.
Because Loxandra never wept for lost heavens. Nor did she ever go in search of joy. It was joy that went in search of Loxandra. And it would usually pop up in the most unexpected moments. The angel would suddenly descend and stir the waters in the fount of the Virgin of Baloukli and for Loxandra it was like she had been baptized anew.
Glory be to God. And great be the grace of the Virgin.
The fat little ducklings of August and the okra make good eating. It’s a sin to let August pass without eating ducklings with the okra.
So on the eve of the Virgin’s Loxandra bought ducklings to cook them with the okra, and despite her exhaustion, she went down into the kitchen to start preparing the birds. She was especially tired because the day before she had stocked up fuel for the winter. She filled the cellar with charcoal, and then she’d call the Kurds to come hack up the lumber she would use for the stoves.
In the City at that time, just as your milkman was Bulgarian, your fishmonger Armenian, your baker from Epiros, so your lumber supplier was a Kurd. So Loxandra called the “Kiurtides” to come chop up her winter stock of lumber. Early in early morn’ — όρθρου βαθέος — they would dump a good thirty “chekia” of tree trunks and thick boughs and then the Kurds would come, brawny giants from deep in Anatolia in salwar and black kerchiefs wound around their fezzes and with their shiny, well-sharpened cleavers to chop up the wood. The Kurds were meraklides [connoisseures] when it came to their blades. Even all the way in his village in the depths of Kurdistan, the Kurd could never be separated from his cleaver, and when the time came for him to emigrate his mother would present his cleaver to her son, the way a Spartan woman gave her son his shield. And when a young Kurd got to an age of fourteen or fifteen and started feeling the first longings of his youth, he never took flowers in hand. Instead he’d take his knife and go about the mahalades crying out: “Dertim var, dertim”… “I’m in pain, in longing” and would look around to see if any of the shutters or windows all about would open. The young girl that would first answer his call would open her window and cry: “Dertine kurban olurum”, meaning “I’ll sacrifice myself to your longings”. And the young man would exclaim: “Bende baltaim burada vururum”, meaning “And so I nail my knife here.” Then he went home and sent his mother to retrieve his knife and at the same time, get to know her future daughter-in-law.
That’s how important the cleaver was for a Kurd. And you’d be better off cursing out his Prophet rather than saying anything offensive about his cleaver.
Loxandra was afraid of Kurds, just the way she was afraid of Turks. But when it came to important things like her yearly supply of firewood, well…there was no holding her back nor kid gloves to wear in treating them:
“Does this fit, you son-of-a-dog?” she’d yell, suddenly fearless and waving a big, bulky knot of wood above the Kurd’s head. “Does this fit, bre, in my stove?”
She would get so angry that she even might have said something about his cleaver.
But oddly enough the Kurds never got angry and never felt insulted by her, and would do any favor she wanted. They would stack the chopped up lumber in her cellar and their departure was always warm and accompanied by the usual güle güle and reciprocal good wishes and a light winter, may-it-be, and here…take this for your little boy and here take this for your wife, and all the rest.
That night, Loxandra was exhausted and all night long she saw bizarre dreams of sharp meat cleavers and a big butcher’s block piled with chopped meat. She just attributed the dreams to her experiences that day with the Kurds. “Oh”, she thought upon waking: “Ιησούς Χριστός Νικά” “Jesus Christ Victor”…and she went down into the kitchen to brown the ducklings.
How could she know what the future had in store for them? How could she know that the treaty that was signed eighteen years before in San Stefano had been revised and revised again so that Bulgaria could be an autonomous state, Romania and Montenegro were now independent, Russia took Kars and Ardahan and Batumi, Britain took Cyprus, Greece got Thessaly and a part of Epiros, but the Armenians got nothing out of all that had been promised to them, and they started an uprising, so that Sultan Hamid roused up his people, and he brought Kurds with their cleavers and they had organized a massacre of Armenians…right there…in the middle of the streets of the City…on the eve of a feast day like this…the Assumption of the Virgin… How could she possibly know all of that?
So, blissful and clueless, she went down to prepare the ducklings, and she was in a happy mood, but in just such a good mood that morning. The day before they had received a letter from Giorgaki asking for Cleio’s hand in marriage. The letter was a bit nutty, but what was important is that he wanted to marry Cleio. It started like this:
“In these difficult moments my mind races to you and only you, my refuge and haven, my peaceful port…”
And riding on that inspiration – and drunk – Giorgaki wrote that he missed his boat and that he had gotten stuck in Genoa with Epaminonda, alone and abandoned and penniless, because, being human, they had had a bit to drink to forget their dertia and night had fallen on them in the alleyways of Genoa, and in the dark Epaminonda had started bugging a Catholic priest: …psss…psss…thinking he was a woman, and the neighbors had gotten all riled up and Epaminonda had gotten arrested, but the Greek consul in the city was a countryman of Giorgaki’s and he got the authorities to release Epaminonda from the holding pen, and in a few days the consul would put them on a ship to Constantinople to celebrate the engagement — that is, if Loxandra accepted him as a son-in-law. And before closing, he added: “My lips will never again touch even a single drop of alcohol.”
How could she not be happy?! She set the pan on the fire and as soon as the birds started to soften up, she tasted the sauce to check the salt. Suddenly she heard the stomp of running feet in the street.
“Bre, Tarnana, get up and go out and see what’s going on”, she said to him.
But Tarnana was too tired to go see because to see he had to climb up onto the sink because the kitchen was in the basement. So all he could see the was the sight of running feet. But Loxandra grabbed a chair for herself and climbed on top of it to get a better view. And what does she see? A Kurd with his cleaver in hand was trying to break down the door of Monsieur Artin.(**2)
HA! The bloody dog, may-a-wretched-year-befall-him!
She got down off the chair and grabbed the large soup ladle.
“Just wait and see what I’ll do to him!”
She gathered up her skirts and ran up the stairs. But she came crashing into Cleio.
“It’s a massacre, mother, a massacre!” cried Cleio in a semi-faint.
Loxandra paid her no mind.
“What massacre shmassacre you talking about, bre? Some Kurd is looking to break down Monsieur Artin’s door. Get outta my way!”
Sultana came down too and along with Cleio and Tarnana they stuffed up her mouth so that her cries couldn’t be heard on the street. They closed the shutters and they all hid in the charcoal cellar.
But even in the cellar you could hear the blows from the street, the running feet, and the dying cries of the wounded. There would be a short few moments of quiet and then it would start again. Any time there was a bit of silence, Loxandra would grab her ladle.
“It’s just the Kurds for heaven’s sake, may-the-Devil-take-them-and-carry-them-off! Let me go see what’s happening!”
When the frenzy finally stopped an employee from Thodoros’ office came to bring them some groceries and to see how they were. He said there had been a mass slaughter of Armenians but that no Greeks had been hurt unless they were harboring Armenians in their house, and Thodoro sent the message that God forbid anyone find out you’ve got Tarnana in the house. In the Crossroad things had calmed down, but the killing was continuing in the suburbs.
That was enough to finally scare Loxandra and she hid Tarnana under her bed. She was afraid to get near the window or even open the shutters. The street vendors started to come by as usual. The salepçi (***3) came by. The offal-vendor came by, and as soon as they smelled him the cats started growling. She locked them up in the charcoal cellar. “Shut up, bre, they’ll come and cut your throats too.” The milkman came and knocked. No one inside made a sound. We’ll do without milk. Drink tea. But on the seventh day the water supplier came by and she had to open up because they were running out. Hüseyn came in limping and emptied two goatskins into the clay amphora they stored water in.
Hüseyn says good bye sweetly and soon the egg-seller comes knocking on her window.
“Kokona (****4), Aren’t you going to buy any eggs?”
Loxandra cracked open the window, took a look at him, and thought: “Could my egg-vendor Mustafa be a Hagarene Dog (*****5) too?”
The next morning the street watchman came by to say hello, expecting his usual cup of coffee.
“Haydi, Tarnana, make him some coffee.”
She opened up the front door and sat on the steps, thinking again: “Is he or isn’t he?” Finally she couldn’t contain herself:
“Bre, Mehmet, I want you to tell me the truth, but, I mean, I want the truth, ok? Were you out on the street the other day with the killings? But tell me the truth.”
“Valah! Billah! Mehmet wasn’t involved.”
“Oooff… And I was going to say…” And she began to sob. “Why such madness? What did poor Monsieur Artin do to them and they slaughtered him like that? No, Tell me! What did he do?”
“Vah, vah, vah”, Mehmet said.
“Vah, vah, vah”, said the liver vendor a bit later.
“Vah, vah, vah”, said the chickpea vendor too. “Yağnış oldu.” “That was a mistake.”
Some ten, some twenty thousand people were murdered. Their homes were looted. Their churches destroyed. Whole families were wiped out…“yağnış oldu.”
The dogs licked the blood off the sidewalks and life started again as if nothing had happened.
Tarnana came out from under the bed too, Elegaki came over too and they all got together in the kitchen to prepare the sweets for Cleio’s engagement. Loxandra wiped her tears and made sweet out of sorrow, because that’s how that is. And let me tell you something, too much sorrow, well…too much sorrow doth to madness turn. I mean, there are limits!
*(1) The Crossroad, Το Σταυροδρόμι, (above) is what Greeks called the spot in central Pera where the now Istiklâl Caddesi (the Isio Dromo or the Grande Rue) intersects with the steep uphill Yeni Çarşı Caddesi (never understood what the New Market, which is what Yeni Çarşı means, refers to) coming up from Karaköy, and the Meşrutiyet Caddesi which then takes a curve at the British consulate and ends up — now — in one of the most dismal urban plazas in Istanbul and a run-down convention center, that were built over a pleasant little park that was built in turn over an old Catholic cemetery. Mercifully, one side of the street is still architecturally intact and you still get one of the most splendid views of the Horn and the western part of the Old City from there. By the Gates of Galatasaray Lycée, that’s still the starting place for demonstrations and protests — whatever are allowed, anyway… By the Cité de Pera arcade and the central fish market (never understood why the fish market is up at the top of one of Istanbul’s hills and not on the seafront somewhere) that is full of both trashy, touristy restaurants and really good meyhane finds as well, once almost all owned by Greeks and Armenians.
If Pera is the center of Istanbul, the Crossroad is the center of Pera. And in Greek usage it meant the whole surrounding neighborhood as well.
The old Meşrutiyet CaddesiThe Gates of Galatasaray
(**2) Artin immediately registers to a Greek-speaker as an Armenian name.
(***3) Salep (Salepçi is a salep vendor) is a hot drink made from ground dried orchid tubers, milk I think, and cinnamon on top. It’s supposedly fortifying — in what way common decency prevents me from saying — but aside from the fact that “orchid” comes from the Indo-European root for “testicle” (as in “αρχίδια,” or as in “στα αρχίδια μου”) the finished drink has a slightly creepy, slippery texture and translucent color that definitely reminds one of semen. I happen to really like it, but I don’t know if that’s just because of its status as a historical remnant or oddity. You can find it in Athens too, like on Ermou, still. But it’s a hot drink, meant for wintery consumption, so it’s weird for Iordanidou to have a salepçi coming around on the street in the middle of August.
(4****) “Kokona” is a term used in historical literature to address not just Christian women, but Greek women, Ρωμιές “Roman” women, specifically. It’s never used to address Armenian or Jewish women, for example. It appears in literature and various accounts dating from even early Ottoman times. In the Byzantine Museum here in Athens (the name of which, at some point recently, was changed to the Byzantine and Christian Museum — in case we forget that Byzantium was a Christian culture 🙄) there are several pieces of ecclesiastic embroidery: priests’ stoles, Epitaphio shrouds — that date from the 16th and 17th century, and are attributed to specific women: Kokona Angela, Kokona Marigo, so it was more than just a slang term of address. No one I know can tell me the root of the word, nor can anyone say why it was used just for Greek women and not other gâvur/kaffr women.
(5*****) “Hagarene Dogs” – Αγαρηνά Σκυλιά – is an obviously unpleasant term used as far back as mid-Byzantine times to refer to Arabs/Muslims. The rub is that it was the first peninsular Arabs and Muslims who themselves identified with the term. Hagar, as we know, was the slave wife of Abraham, who bore him a child, Ishmael, because his own wife, Sarah, was already 80 years old plus and unable to have a child. Then the angels came to visit and told Abraham that Sarah would bear him a child; Sarah heard from the kitchen and laughed with good Jewish irony. But indeed, she did bear him a son, Isaac. And Abraham promptly tossed Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert, but they were saved by an angel that descended and struck the ground out of which a fresh spring of water gushed:
Hājar or Haajar (Arabic: هاجر), is the Arabic name used to identify the wife of Ibrāhīm (Abraham) and the mother of Ismā’īl (Ishmael). Although not mentioned by name in the Qur’an, she is referenced and alluded to via the story of her husband. She is a revered woman in the Islamic faith.
According to Muslim belief, she was the Egyptian handmaiden of Ibrāhīm’s first wife Sara (Sarah). She eventually settled in the Desert of Paran with her son Ismā’īl. Hājar is honoured as an especially important matriarch of monotheism, as it was through Ismā’īl that Muhammad would come. [my emphasis]
Neither Sara nor Hājar are mentioned by name in the Qur’an, but the story is traditionally understood to be referred to in a line from Ibrāhīm’s prayer in Sura Ibrahim (14:37): “I have settled some of my family in a barren valley near your Sacred House.”[20] While Hājar is not named, the reader lives Hājar’s predicament indirectly through the eyes of Ibrāhīm.[21] She is also frequently mentioned in the books of hadiths.
I have no idea why early Arabs chose — not that it was a conscious process, but being unconscious makes its function even more powerful — out of all of Jewish scripture, to consider themselves and Muhammad descended from a scorned slave woman and her unwanted son, the first-born of Abraham cast into the desert, especially given how Ishmael is described in Genesis:
Genesis 16:12 “He shall be a wild man; His hand shall be against every man, And every man’s hand against him.”
Unless “a wild man” suited their needs. Almost to an archetypal degree, conquest narratives justify themselves as retribution for a historical wrong, or as a necessary process by which the morally and ethically superior impose themselves on the inferior: from the Israelites and Canaan, to the Romans taking revenge for their defeated Trojan ancestors, to the Turkic Conquest of Rum and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, to the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, to American Manifest Destiny, to Nazi lebensraum to the current Islamist and Turanian rantings of Mister Erdoğan and the bitchy historical insults he’s constantly hurling our way.
And wouldn’t you know, just today, Mr. Erdoğan gives us a Friday sermon that pretty much says it all and in language far less wordy than mine:
Loxandra, of course, doesn’t know any of this. She’s just heard the legends of the “Hagarene Dogs” growling at the walls of the City before the conquest, and imagines them to be real barking dogs who can take human shape and turn into her milkman or egg vendor.
Betty Valasi as Loxandra in the 1980 Greek TV serialization of the novel
And now I need some good salsa, ’cause the legacy of“our parts” — τα μέρη μας — can weigh on you like a glob of hardened lead.
“I would love to see these people try and live somewhere like Pendik or Küçükçekmece, and commute to work for 4 hours total/per day in crowded public transport for 3,000 TL/month… like most of Istanbul… and then see what they have to say.
“At least these people aren’t as terrible as the (appallingly numerous) Westerners who think Dubai is a lovely holiday destination.”
Dubai? Who needs Dubai when Erdoğan builds hideous and hubristically six-minaretted mosque monstrosities like this:
For 2,676 years, the Megaran Greeks who founded the city, the Romans, meaning the the Italian ones and us, and the Ottomans only built things that added to the beauty of Istanbul. Only Erdoğan had the arrogance to build something so hideous on a site so conspicuous that it mars the entire sea-landscape, horizon and view of the City.
…are so blissfully ignorant of how much ugliness and violence went into creating the questionably “beautiful” city you see today. Your type probably wept in the 90s (if you’re even that old), along with Susan Sontag and Angelina Jolie, for the violent segregation and ethnic cleansing that evil Serbs inflicted on poor Sarajevo. But there’s apparently a statute of limitations on such crimes where Istanbul is concerned. And if, like most ex-pats, your existence is pretty much limited to the axis between Karaköy to Bebek — maybe some 0.5% of the territory of the city — with an occasional foray to the islands or to Kadıköy to go eat at AKP Çiya, and you’ve ingested enough Turkish tourist propaganda, then you’ll believe anything.
You know nothing about Istanbul. You know nothing of the violence, massacre, pogroms, property destruction and confiscation, discriminatory taxation and imprisonment, expulsions and deportations that created the wonderful East-West playground you love so much. You know nothing of the genuine Mediterranean worldliness that’s been displaced by rural Anatolian puritanism. You know nothing of the last muhallebici in Pera that’s been replaced by another kitschy restaurant with women in salwar and headscarves kneading flatbreads in the window. You know nothing of the subtlety and sophistication of the City’s cuisine that’s been totally replaced by the monotony of kebab/köfte joints that you think are authentic and cool.
Yes, it still has a modicum of its old charms. And it’s hard to beat its stunning physical location, though the Padishah’s monster kitschario-mosque has managed to mar even that. But mostly, Istanbul today is a Baudrillardian simulacrum of the city that it was for centuries. And you buy it up. It’s a massive — and aside from the axis mentioned above — hideous monstropolis of 15 million, 99.9% of whom are Turkish or Kurdish Muslims, and yet still manages to sell itself as multicultural.
Look at what a tiny bit of the actual city you really have any relation to:
And how ignorant you are of even the neighborhoods that you do move about in. How clueless you are about who used to live there. (see below)* About who was displaced to house you and your Turkish yuppy friends. The zoning corruption that’s destroyed neighborhood after neighborhood and the woodlands and wetlands of the City’s environs and replaced them with massive high-rise developments that make the Queensbridge Houses in New York look like the Place des Vosges. The megalomaniacal mega-mosques disfiguring Taksim or Çamlica, that are more Riyadh or Dubai than Istanbul. The cheezy, glitzy Gulfie shopping malls…
Plus, how glibly non-concerned you seem to be about political developments…Islamist dictatorship…more imprisoned journalists than any other country in the world…whatever.. It’s exhausting to even talk to you.
This “DAMN” city is right.
Enjoy your Turkish Life.
Oh, that’s the Sülemaniye on the right, isn’t it? and the Yeni Camii in the distant left?
“All – I thought a lot about whether I should use “almost all” in this sentence and decided against it –becauseall 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 even 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.) If young Turks are fighting to preserve the cosmopolitan character of areas made cosmopolitan by a Greek presence, among others, is it a recognition of that presence, however vestigial, that I want? Yes. Is it because some recognition might assuage some of the bitterness of the displacement? Perhaps. Is the feeling proprietary then? Does the particular “cool” quality of these neighborhoods that protesters have been fighting to protect register for me as a form of appropriated “coolness?” I’m afraid that yes, sometimes it does. In darker moments this spring and summer, these Occupy Gezi kids annoyed me: “What’s wrong mes p’tits? The Big Daddy State threatening to break up your funky Beyoğlu party? Do you know the Big Daddy State made life so intolerable for the dudes who made Beyoğlu funky that they not only had to break the party up, but shut down shop altogether and set up elsewhere? That your own daddies and granddaddies probably stood by and watched, approved even? Do you know that now? Do you care?”
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?
Few things are more irritating (“might make you grouchy” my friend E. says) than traditional dietary practices of depth, subtle abstraction, intelligent symbolism and transcendence being given new, healthy, “life-style” meaning. Being retroactively rationalized, in short, into meaningless utilitarianism.
That Jews and Muslims don’t eat pig meat because “pigs are dirty” is probably the most ancient one. Because they’re not. Pigs actually have high self-hygeine practices compared to other domestic mammals and that’s generally attributed to their relatively high intelligence compared to other mammals. (I’m always tempted to think it’s just that pig meat tastes so good — like shellfish and wine — and banning its voluptuousness was just one of those random rules that monotheism needs to build its puritan edifice and get its rocks off*). The chicken whose steroid-bloated, skinless, grilled pec you’re eating lives in far filthier conditions and even in free range eats worms and its own feaces. Then there are the vegans who think that their diet and a Hindu’s vegetarianism come from the same impulse and have the same objective. If that were the case Indian vegetarian wouldn’t be so wildly delicious and vegan food so unswallowable. Or the male soy-dieter, wreaking havoc on his endocrinal system and flooding his body with estrogen, because Zen must have something to teach us about health. It does, just not that.
And then are those occasions when it’s spring and you explain to someone the guidelines for Orthodox, Lenten fasting (Because they’re guidelines, suggestions, not rules like in Catholicism.) “Oh,” inevitably comes the response, “that must have started as a wise way to cleanse your system for spring — and you must lose so much weight.” No. You don’t. You end up eating a ton of cheap carbs and sugars on the halva and lagana diet and on Easter you’re ten pounds fatter than you were at Carnival when you were gorging on fat and animal protein.
So “Jai Ganesh Deva”! Eat Navratri foods if you want and offer the right prasad. Pray that Sri Ganesh, in his wisdom, prevents any anti-Muslim violence — something a little more important than your anti-oxidant consumption — and skip the diet part.
* Don’t wear wool and cotton blends. “Thou shalt not round the corners of thy head.” “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.”
Huh? Not just the randomness of the injunction, but the obscurity of the language… What are these rules even dictating exactly? What are the corners of my head? Last time I looked my head was round already. Is it just the mother’s milk? Then why is all milk prohibited? And on that one weird line we construct a whole dietary culture and an entire constitution of domestic order that must be an insane expense of energy to maintain…
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.
It’s the easiest proof there is that war always had “collateral damage” and civilian casualties. The Ottomans launched rapid campaigns up through to Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Both times they failed to take the city and retreated. Thank the gods, because the idea of Turkish armies at the walls of Vienna is even more terrifying than the idea of Arab armies in the Loire valley at Tours just 70 kilometers from Paris in 732. But in 1683 they not only failed to conquer Vienna, the Hapsburgs chased the retreating Ottomans across the Danube and as far south as Kosovo. That could have meant Serbian liberation from the Ottomans 200 years before it actually happened.
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 