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I bought it a thousand years ago in Toulouse — you have to believe me. It survived the drips and crumbs of countless French dinners, successfully cammoed wine stains for years, held up to Russian washing machines, the Attic sun and the hard water of Athens. And I really like it. And now I can’t wear it because of the fucking Proud Boys fachos.
I also loved it because black and yellow are, by complete coincidence, the colors of my favorite Greek soccer team AEK. That doesn’t mean I know anything about Greek soccer or care. But when asked or when I get thumbs-upped on the street when I wear it, it’s for AEK, because the acronym stands for the Athletic Union of Constantinople, which was founded in Athens in 1924 by Greeks from Istanbul, and is the institutional descendant of the Tatavla (a.k.a. Kurtuluş) Sports Club:
Kurtuluş S.K. was founded in 1896 under the name Hercules (Greek: Ηρακλής, Turkish: İraklis Jimnastik Kulübü) by local Greeks in 1896. It was the first club in Istanbul exclusively dedicated to sports activities. Later in 1934 it was forced to change its name to Turkish, Kurtuluş.
It was one of the major Greek sports clubs in Istanbul, while from 1910 to 1922 it was one of the clubs that undertook the organization of the Pan-Constantinopolitan games (Games organized among the Greek clubs of the city).
In 1906 two athletes of the club, the brothers Georgios and Nikolaos Alimbrandis won gold medals in the Intercalated Olympic Games in Athens, in horizontal bar and rope climbing respectively.
During the 1930s, the club intensified the efforts in the field of sports with the foundation of basketball, volleyball, cycling, athletics and other sports departments. Competent athletes from these departments were distinguished in local and international sports events. The club played in the Turkish Basketball League between 1966 and 1968.
The Tatavla Sports Club was the first athletic club in Turkey and was obviously created by non-Muslims because baring your knees is haram, I guess, and the Ottoman ulema had a particular problem with the soccer British troops in the City were making popular in Allied-occupied İstanbul because it was too evocative of the victors playing with Huseyn‘s head after his death at Karbala.
And it’s not like I can keep wearing it as long as I’m still in Greece, because even if Greeks didn’t know about the Proud Boys and their sartorial choices before, after last week they do. And they’re very unforgiving when they know they have one on you — malicious Romeic glee is boundless and an undying spring — and haydi explain yourself. I don’t know what the universe is trying to prove to me, but I’m vexed!
Thank God Carhartt is cool in Greece and has no American far-right nut-job associations yet, ’cause otherwise my dungarees would have to go next…
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Next time a Turk or Turkey/Islam apologist tells you that progressive, tolerant, cosmopolitan Turkey gave refuge to Jewish intellectuals and scientists persecuted by the Nazis during the 1930s, remind them that a few years later the Turkish Republic imposed an over 100% estate tax — the Varlık Vergisi, also imposed on Greeks and Armenians — on its own Jews, which ruined most and saw many sent to lethal work camps in Anatolia as punishment, where many died.
One voice of protest:
Context: from the massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Lausanne Population Exchange, the various rulings and legal restrictions placed on non-Turkish speakers and non-Muslims following the founding of the Republic, the 1934 Thrace Pogrom against Jews, the estate tax (above), the anti-Greek Pogrom of 1955, the Deportations of Greeks in 1964-65 and the general climate of fear and violence and harassment non-Muslims still live under in contemporary Turkey — the Varlık Vergisi represents just one episode in a process of a massive transfer of capital from non-Muslim to Muslim hands in the 20th century – a transfer which laid the groundwork for late 20th and early 21st century Turkey’s booming (or now not-so-booming) economy.
But history does provide us with some delicious ironies: currently, when Turks need a visa to travel anywhere in Europe or North America — given they could even afford such travel with their steadily plunging Erdo-lira — Turkish Jews can just go and fill out some paperwork at the Spanish consulate and be granted the Spanish citizenship with which they can start a new life in any country in Europe tomorrow! Snag…
And follow Avlaremoz (“Hablaremos” in Ladino, of course) on Twitter; it’s a fascinating, informative account.
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Here, for more worryingly banal truisms from a US and NATO forces commander in Afghanistan.
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There’s something Village People-ish about it, at best; Commodus, Roman-decadent at worst…
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Pompeo is apparently — finally! — going to Turkey after visiting several neighboring countries, including Greece, so far this autumn and blowing Turkey off. But the US administration says that during his visit Pompeo will only meet with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in the Phanar and not with any member of the Turkish government. And to discuss religious freedom in Turkey and around the world at that!
A major χυλόπιττα (wet “noodle” in Greek, meaning major dis or slap upside the head) for Erdoğan and Erdoğan’s Turkey generally.
Yes, too bad it’s Pompeo and the Trump administration. But the Talmud says that even the actions of the worst-intentioned individual can have positive consequences.
Apparently Pompeo’s wife Susan is Orthodox, and “…impressed everyone with her knowledge about the Divine Liturgy…” during their visit to Greece last year.
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It shows the extreme lengths that the Yugoslav government went to throughout the 1920s and 1930s to hold the country together, under Crown Prince and then King Aleksandar — also known as Aleksandar the Unifier. At some point during his reign, I think after it became clear that Croatian separatism was determined to obstruct the functioning of the Skupština and the Yugoslav government in any way possible, Aleksandar redrew the constituent regions of Yugoslavia which corresponded to various ethnic groups, and introduced new administrative banovine which were given the ethnically neutral names of the main rivers that ran through each region.
And yet even despite those reforms Serbs still tried to placate Croatian separatists by allowing them — and only them — to retain an ethnic name for its historical region: what’s shown as the “Hrvatska Banovina” on your stamp.
There is, I think, in much of Serbian pride, or even in Serbian arrogance, a certain sense of what in Greek we call φιλότιμο, “love of honor” crudely put; perhaps a better term would be “noblesse oblige”. Since Serbs and Serbian blood pretty much created Yugoslavia singlehandedly, by fighting off the Austrians and defeating the Ottomans (along with guaranteeing us possession of Salonica ’cause they kept the Bulgarians busy while Greek Crown Prince Constantine strolled into the city like the conquering hero), you might have expected that they would work to keep a Serbian kingdom ,under the Карађорђевић (Karađorđević) dynasty, where all other ethnic groups — who did nothing to fight for south Slav independence, except tangentially the Macedonians — would simply be subject peoples to the Serbian crown. Instead, they made a sincere and honest attempt to make the noble experiment of south Slav unity actually work, democratically and harmoniously. There was even an ideological current running through Serbian intellectual circles of a plan for unification with Bulgaria and even Greece into one greater Balkan state, which would have made it harder for the West to push us around and fuck us up like they did and do; maybe even made us more valuable to the West than Turkey, the tail which wags the Western/US/NATO dog.
And I think King Aleksandar, for all his theoretical faults, was a genuine personification of that sense of Serbian noblesse oblige and ἀρχοντιὰ.
And for his efforts he was assassinated in Marseille in 1934 by a Macedonian separatist in cahoots with the nasty-piece-of-work, Vatican-supported, Croatian Über-Nazi Ustaše.
And that’s what your cool stamp is all about, Charlie Brown.
King Aleksandar I
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They certainly looked Greek.
And my — and probably everyone’s — favorite song: Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. Is it distressing or heroic and valiant that such a peppy song was popular at such a dark time? They toured extensively wherever there was American military during WWII and entertained men who were almost certain to face horrendous violence and brutal, mass death. The soldiers, sailors and marines adored them. And I don’t think the men in the video are actors, but real draftees.
Sometimes I miss America. I don’t mean New York; I always miss New York. But sometimes I miss for-real America, like the real thing.
I’ve become obsessed with this video partly because I can’t forgive myself for being as musically illiterate as I am and I’m desperately trying to understand what “eight to the bar” means. Until recently I was obsessed with trying to understand what syncopation means — after finally understanding what chromaticism and melisma are, because they’re so crucial to the music of our parts. But otherwise…I have a very musically literate best friend who explains it all to me and it just goes way over my head. I rarely feel so stupid.
Lyrics below for those who haven’t heard the song twenty million times and didn’t wear out the vinyl in a month like I did when I first bought it :)
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America is turning its back on the European project. Time to wake up, the French president tells The Economist
During the hour-long interview, conducted in his gilt-decorated office at the Elysée Palace in Paris on October 21st, the president argues that it is high time for Europe to “wake up”. He was asked whether he believed in the effectiveness of Article Five, the idea that if one NATO member is attacked all would come to its aid, which many analysts think underpins the alliance’s deterrent effect. “I don’t know,” he replies, “but what will Article Five mean tomorrow?”
NATO, Mr Macron says, “only works if the guarantor of last resort functions as such. I’d argue that we should reassess the reality of what NATO is in the light of the commitment of the United States.” And America, in his view, shows signs of “turning its back on us,” as it demonstrated starkly with its unexpected troop withdrawal from north-eastern Syria last month, forsaking its Kurdish allies.
In President Donald Trump, Europe is now dealing for the first time with an American president who “doesn’t share our idea of the European project”, Mr Macron says. This is happening when Europe is confronted by the rise of China and the authoritarian turn of regimes in Russia and Turkey. Moreover, Europe is being weakened from within by Brexit and political instability.
This toxic mix was “unthinkable five years ago,” Mr Macron argues. “If we don’t wake up […] there’s a considerable risk that in the long run we will disappear geopolitically, or at least that we will no longer be in control of our destiny. I believe that very deeply.”
Mr Macron’s energetic recent diplomatic activity has drawn a great deal of interest abroad, and almost as much criticism. He has been accused of acting unilaterally (by blocking EU enlargement in the Western Balkans), and over-reaching (by trying to engineer direct talks between America and Iran). During the interview, however, the president is in a defiant but relaxed mood, sitting in shirt sleeves on the black leather sofa he has installed in the ornate salon doré, where Charles de Gaulle used to work.
The French president pushes back against his critics, for instance arguing that it is “absurd” to open up the EU to new members before reforming accession procedures, although he adds that he is ready to reconsider if such conditions are met.
Mr Macron’s underlying message is that Europe needs to start thinking and acting not only as an economic grouping, whose chief project is market expansion, but as a strategic power. That should start with regaining “military sovereignty”, and re-opening a dialogue with Russia despite suspicion from Poland and other countries that were once under Soviet domination. Failing to do so, Mr Macron says, would be a “huge mistake”.
Dig Deeper
Cover leader (November 7th): “A continent in peril”
Briefing (November 7th): A president on a mission
Transcript: Emmanuel Macron in his own words
The Intelligence podcast: “He talked about Europe in almost apocalyptic terms”— Macron’s interview
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 