tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45658459845128080772024-03-13T19:20:20.546+01:00Poemas del río WangStudiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.comBlogger2088125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-74844236233774887822024-03-13T14:25:00.004+01:002024-03-13T14:28:25.538+01:00Luck<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/berlin/glueck/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/berlin/glueck/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/03/szerencse.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a>
At dusk I am standing in front of the Staatsbibliothek with two large bags of loan books on my shoulders. I’m looking on my mobile which bus comes first. I hear a shy voice behind me: “Would you like an apple?” I turn around and see the speaker matching the voice, a small, shy, thin-faced homeless person who offers me a beautiful red-yellow apple. I don’t want to deprive him of this beauty. “No, thanks.” “And do you have an euro for me?” he asks in elegant German. I dig in my pockets. I hate coins, I usually try to get rid of them as soon as possible, but luckily now I find a two-euro piece. While I’m searching, he tells me that he really likes apples, but the other day he almost choked on one, it got stuck in his throat and he could barely cough it out. As he talks, I can see that he only has one tooth like in the cartoons. It is difficult to safely eat apples like this. He thanks me for the coin, and offers me the apple once more. I turn it down once more, although later I recall that maybe I should have done better to him by accepting it. “Then let me give you something else”, he says. He begins to search his infinite number of pockets. He cannot find it. He searches through them again. I know this, I have exactly the same number of pockets. After a while, I say: “It’s okay. Next time”, I almost add <i>inshallah,</i> since this year I have guided mainly in Muslim countries this far. I start to go towards the subway. After some two hundred meters, I hear his muffled voice behind me: <i>“Hallo, guter Mensch!”</i> I turn around, he reaches me. He reaches out his clenched fist. “This is it. I have found it. I don’t know whether it is made of gold or not. Maybe it brings luck, maybe not.” He pours it into my hand. I say thanks, <i>einen schönen Abend noch.</i> I only look at it in the light of the lamp.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/berlin/glueck/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/berlin/glueck/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/03/szerencse.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-20903019721463908802024-03-08T22:21:00.003+01:002024-03-09T19:21:01.599+01:00Hagia Sophia through the back door<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/03/hatso-ajton-at-hagia-sophiaba.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a> <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:960" target="_blank"><img style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> In July 2020, Turkish President Erdoğan restored by decree the mosque status of the Hagia Sophia Cathedral, which was transformed into a mosque in 1453, after the capture of Constantinople, and then into a museum in 1934 by Atatürk’s decision. This decision, by which Erdoğan sought to favor his conservative voter base and illustrate his own authoritarian power, sparked protest around the world. The public nature of the museum made it a kind of bridge between cultures and religions, and its non-denominational accessibility symbolized that it was not only part of Islam, but of the world’s heritage, a common cultural treasure of humanity. Sharia, of course, does not recognize such categories. But what will happen to the beautiful Byzantine mosaics rediscovered after 1934 and made publicly visible, which are obviously incompatible with an active mosque, since this is why they were whitewashed in 1453? And how can hundreds of thousands of tourist visit a cult place that serves prayer? Erdoğan dismissed these problems: “Like all our mosques, the doors of Hagia Sophia will be wide open to locals and foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims”, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53366307">he said.</a> That promise has since been proven to be a lie.<br /></p><p>At the time of the decision, these questions were not relevant, because the country was still closed to tourists due to Covid. When it was possible to travel again in 2021, I visited the cathedral with curiosity. The change was big. You could enter the building without a ticket, but only to the lower level. The gallery with most of the mosaics was closed to visitors. Many people were praying in the mosque. The prominent mosaics visible from here – the image of the Mother of God with the child Jesus on the vault of the apse, above the current mihrab, and the archangel Gabriel on her left – were covered by stretched canvases.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The apse mosaic of Hagia Sophia in 2019 (above) and 2021 (below)</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Before our current trip to Istanbul, news spread that the gallery had been opened. We visited the cathedral again with curiosity. The result, to put it kindly, is half-baked. The lower level can be entered only by Turkish citizens – so much for Erdoğan’s promise. The entrance to the gallery is on the back side of the church, from the side towards Topkapı Sarayı. It is a makeshift tunnel with electronic access gates. The ticket office is opposite the tunnel, with a long line in front of it for the €25 ticket (which is more expensive than the most expensive Western ticket I know, the one for the Vatican Museum). Tickets can supposedly be bought online, but according to the local guards, it is not recommended, because the electronic entry gate often does not recognize the electronic ticket code. In such cases, the ticket is reset, and a new one must be purchased by waiting for your turn in the line.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Later, I experience that online ticket buying is virtual in the strict sense of the word. In some of the overlappingmandatory sections of the poorly designed <a href="https://book.hagia-sophia-tickets.com/book/11982/checkout/?date=2024-03-09&pax.adult=1&pax.child=0&time=09%3A30%3A00&tourId=22979&variantId=22881">website</a> it is simply impossible to enter data. Thus, the queue is the only way to go.<br /></span></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>When you are finally inside, a spiral staircase takes you directly to the gallery. It has a gently sloping, knurled surface. It was obviously used for bringing up construction material fifteen hundred years ago.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>You can walk around the gallery and see everything: the mosaics depicting the emperors and their spouses, the beautiful Deesis mosaic, the pictures of the three church fathers on the wall of the northern gallery facing the interior, the Viking runes scratched into the marble of the southern gallery by the bored bodyguards.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Christ Pantokrator, with Empress Zoe and her third husband, Constantine IX Monomachus on either side. Made between 1028 and 1042. The mosaic originally depicted her first husband, Romanos Argyros. Only the head was replaced in 1042 for that of her third husband.<br /></span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The Mother of God, with Emperor John Komnenos and his wife Eirene (the Hungarian Piroska, daughter of St. Ladislas, King of Hungary) on her both sides. To the right, on the turning wall, the heir to the throne, Alexios, who died early. Made between 1118 and 1143</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Deesis, i.e. the plea of the Mother of God and Saint John the Baptist to Christ the Pantokrator. It was made in 1261, after the reconquest of Constantinople from the Crusaders. John’s title “ὁ πρόδρομος”, <i>the forerunner</i> is translated as “pioneer” by the informative inscription<br /></span></p></div>
<p>You can also look down on the lower level, and you can see how Turkish citizens – most of them tourists just like you, no one is praying, so the segregation is more discriminatory than religious – are walking around in the mosque. However, you cannot go down.<br /></p>
<div class="mosaic">
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</map>
<img border="0" height="552" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/1/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#hagiasophia1" width="550" /></p></div>
<p>And some pictures from 2021, when foreigners could admire the church also from the lower level:<br /></p>
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</map>
<img border="0" height="273" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/2/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#hagiasophia2" width="550" /></p></div>
<p>This is a particularly big loss for us Hungarians. After all, on either side of the mihrab stand the two large bronze candlesticks that King Matthias had made in Buda in Italian Renaissance style, and which Sultan Suleyman took from the Church of Our Lady in Buda Castle after the sacking of the city in 1526, along with the library, weapon collection, bronze statues and the library of Matthias’s palace as well as with the treasures of the churches of Buda and Pest. Until now, you could admire them up close, and even a sign proved their coming from Buda. Now, viewed from the gallery, they are almost indistinguishable in the covering of cult objects. As if we had been robbed a second time. Along with all of humanity.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The candlesticks on either side of the mihrab back in 2021<br /></span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>At the same time as the Hagia Sophia, the greatest treasure of Byzantine art, the Chora church, was also reclassified from a museum to a mosue, even though its mosaics had only recently been restored with many years of work. It was also closed immediately, and since then noises of work can be heard from it. It is rumored that it will also be opened within a mont or two. But there, all the mosaics are in the cult space of the mosque. I wonder what the combination of violence, stupidity and hypocrisy experienced in Hagia Sophia will result there?<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/turkey/istanbul/hagiasophia/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/03/hatso-ajton-at-hagia-sophiaba.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-31524749439846882162024-03-01T19:39:00.011+01:002024-03-03T08:47:37.830+01:00Motherland from below. Photos by Dmitry Markov<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/003k.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 10px 10pt;" /></a><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-haza-alulrol-dmitrij-markov-fotoi.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a> “They say I photograph «Russia without embellishment». But I find that quite superficial. I feel it more accurate that I photograph «the average Russia», because this is what Russia looks like beyond the great cities.”</span></p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;"><i>“Comparing your Instagram page <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dcim.ru/">https://www.instagram.com/dcim.ru</a> with other, colorful, bright pages, one has the feeling to see two different countries. Are the heroes of your photos the real Russia?”</i></span></p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“Look, my grandmother just died. She worked as a seamstress in a factory all her life. Under the bed where she spent her last two weeks, we found a bag of potatoes. She has been sewing such bags all her life. This is how my gradmother’s life passed. I don’t think that today’s young people dream of such a future, of working in a factory all their lives and dying with a bag of potatoes under their mattress.</span></p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">But as I take pictures like these of these aunts, of my grandmother’s potato sack, I want to see meaning and beauty in it. These pictures show people’s lives, this is how people live. And not one or two or three persons, but the majority in Russia. This is what I want to show. The newsstands show pictures of stars. I want to show ordinary people, the beauty in ordinary, everyday life."</span></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Dmitry Markov’s <a href="https://www.sibreal.org/a/29072749.html">interview of 2018</a> emphasizes beauty in these images. We are primarily struck by the misery, wretchedness and hopelessness in them, with which this beauty and humanity tries to maintain a balance. The inhumanity into which this regime pushed this people and which it uses to push other peoples into it. The source of the darkness that has flooded the world more palpably than ever before in the last two years.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Родина-Мать</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In addition to beauty and love, another important feature of these images is that they shed light on stories and identities that differ from the narrative of power. They are fallible and fragile, but they are real. They are alive, full of humor and absurdity. You can identify with them. Their contrast with the symbols of power often make the latter comic. Markov calls this “alternative or protest patriotism”.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>“He was a «Russian Cartier-Bresson»”, said Kirill Serebrennikov, a leading Russian theatre director who collaborated with Markov. “He was able to capture the soul of the people, their DNA. If you want to understand Russians, you should look at Dima Markov’s photos.”</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Markov lived in Pskov, photographed all over Russia, and had exhibitions in Moscow, Paris, Rome and New York. He was an advertising face of iPhone 7 – he also took most of his photos with an iPhone. This was a conscious choice: this is how he was able to take such close-up pictures of people and situations. His Instagram page has more than eight hundred thousand followers.</p><p>He did not just photograph this absurd and miserable world with love, but he also wanted to improve it. Since 2007, he has worked as a volunteer in a psycho-neurological institute near Pskov, preparing orphaned children for integration into society. “We managed to save all the more or less intelligent ones”, he says in an interview. And after he was arrested at a pro-Navalny demonstration in 2021, he took his most successful photo of a masked riot police officer under Putin’s photo at the police station. He put the picture up for auction, and transferred the two million rubles he received for it to human rights organizations that help the illegally detained.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Dmitry Markov, one of the greatest contemporary Russian photographers, <a href="https://meduza.io/feature/2024/02/18/umer-fotograf-dmitriy-markov-on-pokazyval-nam-nastoyaschuyu-rossiyu-i-pomogal-polyubit-ee">died on February 16, at the age of 41, in Pskov.</a></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“Rest in peace, Brother”, writes one of his followers under his last Instagram photo. “I don't even know how to write this. You and Lekha were my beacon in this hopeless hell…”</span></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/markov/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QDHYQ9Nd-GU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></iframe>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Yury Dug’s interview with Dmitry Markov, 2019</span></p></div>
</div>
<br>
<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-haza-alulrol-dmitrij-markov-fotoi.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-64994460148908091092024-02-23T20:33:00.008+01:002024-03-08T04:43:41.326+01:00The Koubba<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-marrakesi-koubba.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
The history of Morocco is a succession of capitals. The successive dynasties, having overthrown the previous one, always create a new capital in their own tribal territory, spectacularly humiliating the city of their defeated opponent, looting and destroying it, and tearing down and carrying away the marble covering and decoration of their royal buildings and mosques to decorate the ones of the new capital.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/006k.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 10px 10pt;" /></a>Marrakesh was founded in 1070 against the northern Fez by the Berber Almoravids coming from the nearby Atlas valleys. Organized by fanatical Muslim preachers, this dynasty quickly took control of the trade routes south of the Atlas, along which gold flowed from the Ghana empire to Morocco. Then, with this military and economic background, they easily occupied Andalucia, where the golden age of the Cordoban caliphs ended around this time. Marrakesh became the center of a rich world empire spanning two continents, and the first Almoravid caliph ruling from here, Ali ben Youssef (1106-1143), tried to make the city worthy of this rank. This ruler, born of an Andalusian Christian mother and raised in a cultured Andalusian environment in Ceuta, saw Córdoba as his role model. He tried to build the first mosque of Marrakesh on the model of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, bringing architects and even building elements – capitals and marble carvings – from there, including from <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-elephants-well.html">Medinat al-Zahra, the Cordoban caliphate city</a> looted and destroyed by the Almoravids.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:923" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>The Ben Youssef Mosque still stands to the north of the bazaar. However, this is no longer the one built by Ali ben Youssef. The Almoravid mosque, along with the entire city, was destroyed by the next fanatical Berber dynasty, the Almohads, after the capture of Marrakesh in 1147. Then the mosque built on its place and destroyed again, was rebuilt again by the Saadi dynasty in the 1550-70s, and then by the Alawi dynasty in the early 19th century.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Postcard of the mosque based on Marcelin Flandrin’s photo, 1930s</span></p></div>
<p>However, just as there are survivors of every destruction, who survive by hiding in basements, locking themselves in warehouses, pretending to be dead, so there are three survivors of Marrakesh’s first heyday.</p><p>One is the Almoravid <i>mimbar</i> – pulpit –, one of the masterpieces of Islamic art, which Ali ben Youssef ordered in Córdoba in 1137, and which the Almohads took to the Kutubiyya mosque built by them, which is why it is usually referred to as the Kutubiyya <i>mimbar.</i></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Detail of the mimbar</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:925" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>The other, also imported from Córdoba, is a marble water tank richly carved with vegetal patterns and animal figures, once used for ritual ablution. According to its inscription, it was ordered by Abd el-Malik ben El Mansour, courtier of the Cordoban Umayyad caliph Hisham II, between 991 and 1008. It was probably brought from there by Ali’s father Youssef ben Tashvin, after the sack of the city. Today it is in the Ben Youssef <i>madrasa</i> or theological school, next to the above mosque, which I will write about soon.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The Umayyad water tank in the courtyard of the Ben Youssef madrasa in the 1930s</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:924" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>And the third is the Koubba. This word, meaning “dome”, traditionally denotes a tomb. This small architecture, however, was not built as a tomb, but as a pavilion for ritual ablution, a <i>midaʿa</i>, in front of the Ben Youssef Mosque. At the bottom it had a basin for washing, and it was surrounded by latrines and basins for giving water to animals. In this way, it was not only a religious, but also a public service institution for the bazaar that extended south of the mosque. This is probably why it was saved. The bazaar gradually grew around it and covered it, while the ground level that rose at a height of 7-8 meters due to the destruction, covered its entire lower part. It was only in the first half of the 20th century that they began to excavate and free it form the stalls built on top of it. It was restored in recent decades and has been open to visitors since last February.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">In the aerial photo from 1930-31, the Ben Youssef Mosque is in the middle, with the newly excavated Koubba in front of it</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The lower part of the building opens onto the pool with two horseshoe-arched gates on the longer sides, and one multi-leaf gate on the shorter sides. The internal arches of the latter are decorated with a beautiful geometric pattern. On its inner cornice, a Kufi inscription dating back to 1125 runs around, gloryfing Allah andd the builder Ali ben Youssef.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/023.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/023k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/024.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/024k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/025.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/025k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/026.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/026k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/030.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/030k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/031.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/031k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/028.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/028k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>On the longer side of the upper part, there are five alternately multi-leaf and horseshoe-arched windows, while on the narrower side two multi-leaf ones. The dome rises above the upper, fringed cornice, whose complicated brick architecture, as we will see, is purely decorative and does not reflect its real architecutre visible from the inside.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The windows illuminate the lower part of the dome. This dome is the most special element of the koubba. It is supported by intersecting multi-leaf arches starting from the third points of the cornice. The arches transform the square into an octagon, and then into the beehive-like dome. The undecorated white surfaces of the arches, the octagon and beehive emphasize the structure, while the infill surfaces between them are covered with colored stucco, acanthus and palm leaves, with an accented central shell on each of the eight eaves. This structure is obviously a development of the <i>mihrab,</i> prayer niche of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, but it is even more special as far as it solves the basic problem of all domes, the squaring of the circle without the intervention of a tambour, the intermediate element usual in Western domes that transforms the square into a circle.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/029.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/029k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The dome and multi-leaf entrances of the mihrab of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, built around 960</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The entire architecture cannot be well photographed. From the street, you can only see the upper part, while up close is difficult to capture in a picture. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:926" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Its prominent point of view is the roof terrace of the Les Almoravides café to the west of the mosque, from where it is clearly visible how it is located at the entrance of the bazaar, surrounded by the market, but keeping a small distance from it, and lowered, as a witness to a former city on a different level not only in space, but also in time.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/koubba/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
</div>
<br />
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/02/a-marrakesi-koubba.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-3928605414712488942024-01-11T00:52:00.002+01:002024-01-12T12:21:17.161+01:00The last serf village in Europe<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/az-utolso-jobbagyfalu.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a> As you drive from Málaga airport through the Málaga mountains into the interior of Andalusia, just before the Antequera junction where the roads branch off to Seville, Córdoba and Granada, <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:904" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> a compact cluster of houses looks down from a hilltop along the way. Traditional Andalusian white houses, standing shoulder to shoulder, coming together as a single closed settlement, as if they were preserving an old story. I give in to my gut feeling and pull off the highway to listen to that story.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Approaching the village on the access road, the compactness of the settlement is even more striking. Behind the fields and olive groves shining in the warm January sunlight, the white façades arranged in a straight line seem to be the first protective wall of a fortified settlement, and to the right, the large block of buildings behind the white church tower looks like a fortified monastery or a castle.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>And it is indeed. As I park the car on the left side of the village and walk down Granada street between closed rows of white houses leading to the church – the other two streets are named after Seville and Málaga, as if giving a hint as to where you can go from here –, the many-windowed façade of a large, thick-walled block of buildings gradually unfolds behind the white church tower. This large peasant castle, assembled over the centuries, is none other than the Moorish castle of Cabeche or Qawŷ.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The castle of Cabeche was first mentioned by the 10th-century Córdoban historian Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Razi in his <i>History of the Rulers of Andalusia,</i> which became known in Spanish as The Chronicle of the Moorish Rasis. According to this, the castle was built in the early period or golden age of Andalusia, sometime during the Umayyad emirate.</p><p>The castle of Qawŷ was mentioned in the chronicle <i>Yannat al-Rida</i> of the 15th-century Muhammad Abu Yahya ibn ʿĀsim from Granada among the castles that the Christians captured in 1410 on the western border of the Sultanate of Granada, but in 1447 the Muslims recaptured from them for a while. Ibn ʿĀsim describes the location of the castle quite precisely, and it roughly coincides with the castle of Cauche. It is not known whether this is identical with the castle of Cabeche mentioned by al-Razi, because he does not localize it exactly, but it is not excluded.</p><p>What is certain is that the castle, as a Moorish fortress, oversaw the main road from Málaga to Medina Antequera for centuries.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>However, the settlement has a much older history. A little south of the former Moorish fortress, the foundation walls of the Roman-era town of Aratispi are still visible, which the locals also call Cauche el Viejo, as if the original population of today’s Villanova de Cauche came from there. The mill of the village, which today stands in ruins on the banks of the Cauche river, was also built from its carved stones. And this is also where three beautiful carved stones with Roman inscriptions from the 2nd century come from, built into the tower of the village church in 1731, so placed as to indicate not simply the use of free stone material, but antiquarian interest.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The stone on the SE corner commemorates the death of Emperor Trajan (53-117), who was born in this province, Hispania Baetica. It ends: <i>Res publica Aratispitanorum decrevit et dedicavit</i> – ordered and established by the community of Aratispi</span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">A tombstone on the S wall with the initials <i>M. Fulvio Senecioni Aratispitano</i> – erected to Marcus Fulvius Senecio of Aratispi by his friends</span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The stone on the E wall of the tower was erected in honor of Emperor Hadrian (76-138), who was also born in Hispania Baetica: <i>Res.P. Aratispitana D.D.</i> – ordered and installed by the Aratispi community</span></p></div>
<p>After King Ferdinand II in 1487 captured Málaga, the southernmost stronghold of the Sultanate of Granada, the castle of Qawŷ, which depended on it, also fell, and the king had it destroyed along with several other small Moorish fortresses. The depopulated area of the castle was resettled in 1509 by the nearby town of Antequera with Christian residents. This is why the name of the village was expanded with “Villanueva”, new settlement, so characteristic of Andalusia that was undergoing a change of population. Their descendants are the 65 inhabitants of today’s Villanueva de Cauche. The land was given to the Arreses noble family, whose eighth descendant, Pedro de Arreses y Aspillaga was raised to the rank of Marquis in 1679. They built today’s manor house on the ruins of the Moorish fortress, to the wall of which the three streets of the village run.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The inhabitants of the thirty-five houses of the three streets were thus the serfs of the <a href="http://investigacionesprovincialesmalaguenas.blogspot.com/2019/02/villanueva-de-cauche-11-el-marquesado.html">Marquis of Cauche</a> for several centuries. They cultivated their lands, partly in the form of compulsory free work, partly for their own benefit, but in return for a tithe. Even at the turn of the millennium, the residents of Cauche regularly delivered chickens and crops to the manor house. Although they had lived in their houses for generations, they had no title deeds, only a document signed by the Marquis, which allowed them to live there. In this way, the houses could neither be sold nor rebuilt.</p><p>After 2005, the new heir reorganized the noble estate into a modern farm and gave the residents of Cauche the opportunity to buy the land they cultivated at a price of 90 euros/m². This was realized, but the new owners only received a private contract without an entry into the land registry, because the Antequera land registry was not able to transform the records of the Marquis’s estates according to the new parcels. Finally, in 2015 it was possible to solve the reorganization and register the ownership of the lands and houses. In 2015, the Middle Ages ended also in the last serf village in Europe.</p><p>All this did not change in the view of the village. Its most significant building is still the Marquis’s manor house with the church. Apart from this, there is only one community institution in the village, the “Antigua Peña”, Old Club, that is, the pub. It was closed when I was there now, but according the local papers reporting on the end of feudalism, <a href="https://www.diariosur.es/interior/201504/20/tiempo-vuelve-ponerse-marcha-20150420131709.html">there is a lot going on here.</a> There is no store: a grocery truck comes twice a day with bread, meat, fish and other basic foods, and on Saturdays the mobile supermarket. “In which other village do they deliver the goods to your door?” the residents say proudly. The built heritage of the village is subject to strict regulations of monument protection. Even if the Middle Ages are over, the traditional Andalusion white houses – preserved by the constraints of serfdom – must be maintained without any changes.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Villanueva de Cauche photographed from a plane this afternoon</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/spanish/cauche/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
</div>
<p><span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/az-utolso-jobbagyfalu.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span></p>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-21459313280281511822024-01-06T20:46:00.004+01:002024-01-08T10:25:34.007+01:00The glass trumpet of the Magi<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-haromkiralyok-uvegtrombitaja.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
Every year now, the thre Magi <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/search/label/Magi">pay their respects on their holiday here on the blog.</a> This time, they are signing in from Mallorca, where they arrived last night on their fancy caravel, and then with their richly loaded camels and their luxurious entourage, they marched around the old town of Palma, distributing blessings and gifts, exactly along the route that <a href="https://riowang.blogspot.com/2014/01/winter-ends-spring-begins.html">the demons will march with their fiery chariots in two weeks.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>These days, the procession of the Magi is accompanied by a brass band that fills the streets with rumor commensurate with the importance of the procession. In the nineteenth century, however, the chaotic musical background was provided by the population itself, and its typical instruments were the conch horn and the glass trumpet. The Mallorcan ethnomusicologist Amadeu Corbera Jaume recently devoted <a href="https://sonograma.org/2022/04/una-historia-de-violencia/">a special study</a> to the latter. In this, he pointed out that the glass instruments were prepared by the glass factory workers in the Santa Catalina district of Palma for fun, inbetween real jobs.</p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“Our joy reached its height when the shouts and screams of the crowd, mingling with the shrill sound of the apocalyptic glass trumpets and the deep bleat of the conch horns, filled the street, announcing that the Magi were here.<br />«The Holy Magi!» we shouted. And we run out onto the balcony, watching the chaos, the children and lads waving burning torches, among them a figure with blackened face, dressed in dirty and ragged clothes, with a turban made of two different colors on his head, on top of a two-pronged ladder, which was carried by half a dozen street children on their shoulders, in the midst of a huge noise.” (Miquel Binimelis, <i>La Tradición</i> 1897)</span></p><p>The glass trumpets were mostly blown by unruly youngsters, into the faces of the passers-by, also engaging them in other ways. The procession of the Magi in Palma was also a more or less tolerated ritual occasion for street violence, like today’s fans’ parades before and after soccer matches.</p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“It is with the greatest indignation that we take up our pen to-day to condemn certain acts committed the night before yesterday by bands of boys who, without any consideration, provided with glass trumpets, conch horns and other various dissonant instruments, went about the streets of the city, brandishing torches in their hands, and throwing sparks to right and left, thereby causing considerable harm to the poor passers-by, whose bodies and clothing were in constant danger of damage.” (<i>Diario de Palma</i> Jan. 7, 1863)</span></p><p>However, the traditional objects of violence were not random passers-by, but certain well-established target groups. The Moors disappeared a long time ago, but the Jews were still there. It is true that the Mallorcan Jews, the <i>Xueta</i>s <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2012/07/call.html">already converted to Christianity in 1391, as I wrote.</a> But once a Jew, forever a Jew.</p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“I still remember that during the feast of the Magi, the suburban urchins marched up and down the city blowing their glass trumpets. And I also remember the rampage they had every year on Silversmiths’ Street [the main street of the <i>Xueta</i> neighborhood], breaking shop windows and damaging furniture. Fortunately, this came to an end during the time of Mayor Rubert, thanks to the measures of the silversmiths’ committee, whose president, Senyor Felicindo, as tall and fat as St. Paul, I even knew myself.” (From the memoirs of poet Miquel Forteza (1888-1968))</span></p><p>It is no wonder that in Palma the “old Christian” and the Xueta families did not intermarry, no matter how devoutly Catholic the latter were. So much so that even today the Israeli rabbinate recognizes the Xuetas as pure-blooded Jews, who only need to return to the Jewish faith in order to be readmitted to the People. And in the vestibule of the church of St. Eulàlia on Silversmiths Street, one of the three known medieval synagogues, there is still a marble plaque with the names of the Xueta families “who come here to Mass,” since traditionally no other local Catholic ever set foot there.</p>
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<img border="0" height="552" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/2/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#trumpet2" width="550" /></p></div>
<p>But times change, and with them the means of noise making. The glass trumpet as an instrument of the poor has disappeared from Mallorca, just as I think that not one of the New Year’s Eve paper trumpets of my childhood can be still found anywhere. It was such a common and cheap item that none were ever kept around. Where it survived, writes Amadeu Corbera Jaume, is in the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels. The museum, located in the Art Nouveau style building of the former Old England department store in the museum district of Brussels, was developed by its first curator, Victor-Charles Mahillon, into one of the largest musical instrument collections in the world at the end of the 19th century. He corresponded with folk music collectors worldwide, including Antoni Noguera i Balaguer (1869-1904) from Mallorca, who sent him three glass trumpets among several other Mallorcan folk instruments. They are still in the museum’s collection and are listed as number 1316 in the Mahillon catalogue.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>When I got this far in reading the article, I got up and walked to the Museum of Musical Instruments, not far from my place, to see with my own eyes and capture with my own lens the famous noisemakers. But I had no luck. Only a fraction of the nearly four thousand musical instruments collected by Mahillon are exhibited, and they do not include the glass trumpets.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>However, it is not pointless to visit the three floors of the Museum of Musical Instruments. You can see wonderful pieces from all over the world. And like the desert of the Little Prince, the collection is also beautiful because it includes three Mallorcan glass trumpets in one of its storerooms. Three items whose story is almost more interesting and important than the items themselves.</p>
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<img border="0" height="552" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/trumpet/1/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#trumpet1" width="550" /></p></div>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-haromkiralyok-uvegtrombitaja.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-87401409350681311392024-01-04T14:06:00.005+01:002024-01-04T14:47:32.833+01:00There was a city<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/volt-egy-varos.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Plo-PLxVg4" target="new"><i>Assa</i> (1987),</a> directed by Sergei Soloviev, was as much a cult film of the Soviet change of regime as <i>Hair</i> was of an earlier change in the West. The theme songs of the movie – just like <i>Aquarius</i> in <i>Hair</i> – all became “anthems” of the change, but mainly the two that <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2009/11/there-is-city.html">I presented some fifteen years ago here on the blog with the title <i>There is a city:</i></a> <i>Перемен!</i> – “Change!” and <i>Город золотой</i> – “The Golden City”<br /></p><p>To the west of the Soviet Union, <i>Assa</i> remained largely unknown, and along with, its theme songs, too. But they are still popular in the Russian language area. This is attested by the fact that the Udmurt women’s choir <i>Buranovskie Babushki</i> won third place in the Russian pre-selection of Eurovision 2010 with the Udmurt version of <i>The Golden City,</i> along with the Udmurt version of <i>Yesterday</i> by Beatles, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2010/07/city.html">as I reported at that time.</a> And that this is still the case, I found new evidence in the past few days.<br /></p><p>An American spy story is running on Netflix under the title <i>In From the Cold.</i> In this, Russian spies trained in the 90s by KGB successor organizations, but inactive for twenty years, are reactivated – in Madrid. The two spies, who now work for opposite sides – Americans vs. Spanish far-right and ultimately Russians – had had a romantic relationship at the time. In one of the film’s key scenes, before the final showdown, this is recalled at a dinner, with none other than <i>The Golden City</i> as background music.<i><br /></i></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/899683956?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p></div>
<p>In fact, this music is not so background. It emerges as an independent actor. The figures reflect on it, telling that it was the song of an era that was beautiful but irretrievably gone.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/infromthecold.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/russian/infromthecold-550.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The Russian references of the film are by the way just as stereotypical as in most other American movies. They present the image that the average American viewer thinks to know and wants to see to confirm their knowledge: the puppet figures of the vampire-like Russian KGB officer, the typically bisexual Russian woman who promotes her career with her body, the unscrupulous Russian mobster, the Russian scientist wanted for death back home because of his wonderful invention. This audience did not see <i>Assa,</i> and does not know what <i>The Golden City</i> means. Who is, then, this song for? Perhaps the movie’s Russian expert – because there had to be one, at least to recall the material world of Moscow in the 1990s – speaks out here with this song of his youth, like a message in a bottle thrown into the emptiness, without any hope of understanding, rather only to himself?<br /></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/volt-egy-varos.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-482014889698755252024-01-01T08:35:00.004+01:002024-01-02T20:49:51.224+01:00New Year’s bread<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/000.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/000k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/ujevi-kenyer.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
Yuval Harari writes in <i>Sapiens,</i> that the last truly great invention of mankind was agriculture, which completely transformed human society. Eight thousand years ago, during the process called the Neolithic Revolution, humanity was transformed from a loose network of free hunters into a complex production machine, whose calorie-producing efficiency was much higher, but its operation tied up all of mankind’s energy.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The top product and emblem of this machinery is bread, which, in addition to its primary energy-carrying and nourishing function, has also become the most comprehensive symbol and one of the main means of communication, the most important human activity according to anthropology. Donating and offering bread accompanies the most significant moments of human and divine communication. And from the Neolithic onwards, we find thousands of stamps that reinforce the communicative role of bread with various patterns.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In most European cultures, breads and cakes with such stamps and figures have largely disappeared. But in Sardinia, where the Neolithic is still present in everyday life in the form of thousands of imposing stone buildings, the offering and donation of decorated breads – <i>su coccoi pintau</i> – is still an important part of the holidays. And their patterns often resemble Neolithic motifs.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:903" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The pictures of the breads and archival photos come from the exhibition of the Museo Etnografico in Nuoro</span></p></div>
<p>The festive breads are usually consecrated in the church before giving them as gifts. In such cases, the priest and the poor also receive from the loaves.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>One of the most important festive occasions is a wedding. In the three days before, the bride and her female relatives – <i>sas manus bellas,</i> “the beautiful hands” – gather at the bride’s house to prepare the wedding bread together. The work is often accompanied by music and dance, so it can also be regarded as a kind of bachelorette party. Guests recieve the beautiful loaves distributed at the home of a wedding, and usually keep them as souvenirs, put on the wall or in display cases. I visited an old Sardinian woman whose wall was covered with such breads, and she was able to tell her life story by reviving the memories related to them.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/1/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#pane1" width="550" /></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/023.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/023k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Bread in the shape of a child is often given as a christening gift.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Eggs are sometimes baked with the Easter bread as a symbol of the desired fertility and wealth.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>On the Day of the Dead and on other occasions of visiting the cemetery, the deceased also receive festive bread as a symbol of family togetherness. The nutritional value of this bread is of course unimportant, but its decorative value is all the more significant, since it remains on the grave for a long time, exposed to the critical gaze of other cemetery visitors.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/024.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/024k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Is this the bread of someone who died of covid? No, it’s a wedding loaf</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>One of the most important occasions for festive bread is St. Mark’s Day, April 25, when the flocks are driven out to the mountain pastures. On this day, the shepherds, their family members, and the owners of the flocks meet for a farewell mass at the solitary shepherd churches near the villages. The festive loaves are placed on plates around the altar, and each shepherd takes some of the blessed bread up into the mountains with him.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/025.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/025k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">San Mauro shepherd church near Sorgono</span></p></div>
<p>Finally, the decoration of the bread given for the New Year represents the desired wealth and prosperity, symbolized by domestic animals, chickens, sheep, goats. Or, in fact, by bread itself, in the form of the small loaves, ears of corn and seeds placed on the decorated bread, as the main symbol of abundance.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sardegna/pane/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V9RQ8z4lH9A" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" width="560"></iframe> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The “beautiful bread” in Sardinia</span></p></div>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2024/01/ujevi-kenyer.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-7878439748522376292023-10-09T17:54:00.007+02:002023-10-09T19:01:33.758+02:00Watching the fish in Sichuan<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/000.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/000k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/10/halat-nezni-szecsuanban.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
China, especially the western part, is full of small historic towns and villages. You will, however, look for them in vain in any Western-language guidebook. I don’t know what came first, the chicken or the egg: whether they aren’t in them because Western tourists don’t come to these hidden parts of China anyway, being satisfied with the Great Wall and the Xian Clay Army for those two weeks, or they don’t come because the guidebooks don’t talk about these parts.</p>
<p>If you are curious about these small towns, you must read special Chinese guidebooks whose titles end in 古镇 <i>gŭzhèn,</i> “old town”. There are many such publications in China, because Chinese travelers with sophisticated tastes love and seek out these time capsules. When I wrote to the Chinese bus company the list of small towns I wanted to visit with my group in the mountains around Chengdu, they gave me the exact routes and times without blinking, just indicating that sometimes the bus will cover the thirty kilometers between two towns in an hour.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Such is the road, too, which leads to Wangyu, some two hundred kilometers south-west of Chengdu. From Ya’an, the starting point of the Sichuan branch of the tea and horse road, a steep and narrow two-lane road winds its way up into the mountains. A single oversized truck is able to block the road, turning with amazing maneuvers at every hairpin bend. The cars which otherwise rarely drive here, including our minibus, slowly gather into a long line behind it. Morning clouds are sitting on the mountains, the river is roaring in the depths. At longer stops, we get out to take photos. We cover the forty kilometers from Ya’an to Wangyu in two hours.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Next to us, it can already be seen that the patience of the province has run out, and they are building a four-lane road through the mountains. And Chinese road construction is a very spectacular undertaking. Concrete mixing facilities, valley bridges, tunnels and concrete road sections are everywhere. The construction is nearing completion. If it ends, the romance of the <i>gŭzhèn</i>s of the highlands will probably end. My friend Shi Tan, a collector of Chinese folk music, said that you can only collect folk music in a Chinese village as long as no concrete road leads to it. We are doing this tour in the last hour.</p>
<p>Wangyu was built on the plateau of a high rock on the banks of Zhougong River. Not much before this, only a steep staircase of one hundred and fifty steps led up here from the river, but now, in connection with the road construction, a winding asphalt road has also been built, which reaches the village at the upper end. From there, slippery stairs lead down, then the path continues between barns and through vegetable gardens. However, at the upper end of the stairs, a modern road sign and a tourist reception center under construction indicate that the village will soon be integrated into the tourism industry.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>From the path, you can see the roofs of the wooden houses and the courtyards along the main street. The village rests between the green mountains covered with clouds like in a cradle.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>From the main street, you can see the river and the more modern houses built on the other bank. This is where the old town got its name: 望鱼 <i>wàng yú</i> means “watching the fish”. Local folklore holds the rock itself to be a curled-up cat watching the fish playing in the water before her nose.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>But watching the fish is also a form or metaphor of meditation in the Chinese tradition.</p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">According to a classic Taoist story, Chuangzi, while walking by a river, said to Hunzi: “See how the fish are playing and darting around as they please. That’s what fish really enjoy.” Huizi countered: “You are no fish. How do you know what the fish enjoy?” Chuangzi blurted out: “You are not me. How do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">This epistemological debate is continued by the famous Song-era painter Zhou Dongqing in his six-meter-long <a href="https://ltfc.net/img/5df666bc1b3a543d93bbb1ef">scroll painting</a> <i>The Joy of Fish </i>(1291, Metropolitan Museum of Art) on which he wrote the following poem next to the long row of playing fish:</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">
</span></p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="align: center; display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: justify; width: 560px;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-size: 85%;" valign="top" width="240px">非鱼岂知乐,<br />寓意写成图。<br />成探中庸奥,<br />分明有象无。</td><td style="font-size: 85%;" valign="top" width="20px"> <br /></td><td style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;" valign="top" width="300px">Being no fish, how can we know their joy?<br />But we can express our own feeling in the picture.<br />If we want to explore the depth of the ordinary,<br />we must describe the indescribable.</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">
</span><p></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/fish1.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/fish1k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/fish2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/fish2k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/fish3.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/fish3k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The path descends with steep steps to the main street, covered with stone slabs and lined with elegant wooden houses with columns and porches. The stone bases of the columns have 18th-century carvings. It can be seen that the village was rich sometime in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was the main market for bamboo trade in the area. The wealth then passed, but the wooden houses, with their carved consoles and lintels, beautifully constructed windows and imposing internal structures have fortunately survived to this day. In 2013, Wangyu was awarded the title of “Sichuan’s most beautiful old village”.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>One or two elderly people sit on the porches, offering tea or street food, and in one place, a group of people play cards. Today, the village has only sixteen permanent residents, but life is bubbling in the new village built at the foot of the cliff, many people come up from there, too.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In a gap between the houses, you can see mossy Taoist statues. In the small square between farm buildings are the remains of the village’s former sanctuary. Next to the two central statues – probably the ancestors who founded the village –, statues of gods sit on either side. Stepping behind them, the layers of time are revealed: a Buddhist statue of Guanyin, the Buddha of Mercy, next to it a small statue of Confucius, on the wall behind them a Communist pioneer scene in tiles, and behind that one, a modern construction sign on the recently built concrete retaining wall.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>Continuing along the main street, a newly designed café <i>cum</i> bookshop displays a very nice example of the preservation and modern use of the old houses. The wooden façade and the internal column-and-beam structure with the roof structure have been preserved, but the internal spaces were opened up and connected with an accented wooden staircase. The emblem of the new building, a wooden frame standing on the head of a fish, refers to the name of the village and the essence of the building. The café sells the best Italian espresso and cappuccino, as well as Tibetan tea. The hipster furnishings and offering suggest that the village is frequented by an audience with refined tastes, and this will be even more so after the road is built.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/4/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#wangyu4" width="550" /></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/025.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/025k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p><p>The same audience is targeted, a little further away, by two houses opposite each other, run by a boy and a girl, maybe a couple, maybe brothers. They don’t look like locals, they may be university students who are here only for the shop. One of the houses, which are consciously kept in a rustic style, is a rustic café, and an excellent handmade clothing store is operated in the other. On the table in the clothing store is Hermann Hesse’s <i>Glass Bead Game,</i> in Chinese. The girl says she really likes this book, whose “spirituality” is very similar to Chinese spirituality. I felt the same when I read it thirty years ago.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A few houses after the double shop, the street ends with a lookout pavilion. The long staircase which until recently was the only way up to the village, leads down from here to the new town. Below the pavilion, you can see the roofs of this latter, as well as the concrete pillars of the new road under construction on the other bank of the river.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<p>On the way back on the main street, we stop at a construction site, which shows how the café we just left has inspired the modern transformation of the old houses. The dividing walls and ceiling of the interior space have been removed, only the supporting columns and carved beams remain in place, and obviously some new wooden structure will be put up between them.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>We continue towards the end of the main street, which must have been a less prestigious, more peasant, economical part of the village.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>Two or three small local eating houses are open here, at least a hundred years old, as the well-worn Mao portrait and party slogans attest. Now the construction workers are having their lunch here.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/024.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/024k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The guidebook 四川古镇, <i>Sichuan’s old small towns,</i> which I bought thirty years ago in Beijing as a kind of pledge for the barely hoped-for opportunity to one day get to see these places, switches to a particularly lyrical tone when talking about Wangyu:</p>
<p></p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="align: center; display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: justify; width: 560px;"><tbody><tr><td style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;" valign="top" width="210px">川北古镇中,望鱼是一个另类。想感受民风民俗,可以去元通;想欣赏特色建筑,可以去平乐;想了解历史人文,可以去街子。可是,想寻觅桃源,想慰藉心灵,想神游八荒,望鱼,就是赤子的彼岸。它地处半山腰,藏在深闺人未识,所以,它的破败也让人感动。它太小了,你有足够的时间来发现它细节的美;它太悠闲了,亲近它,谁都会乐不思返。</td><td style="font-size: 85%;" valign="top" width="20px"> <br /></td><td style="font-size: 85%;" valign="top" width="330px">Among the old small towns of northern Sichuan, Wangyu is a special case. If you are interested in folk customs, go to Yuantong. If in specific architecture, go to Pingle. If you want a deeper understanding of history and culture, to Jiezi. But if you want to find paradise, to find your peace of mind, if you just want to wander about and watch the fish, then this is the place of innocence. Hidden among the mountains, in a secret chamber, unknown to everyone, it is striking even in its weariness. It is so small that you will have enough time to discover the beauty of its details, and so peaceful that once you immerse yourself in it, you will never want to leave it again.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p>I wish it would stay that way.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/023.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/chinese/wangyu/023k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/10/halat-nezni-szecsuanban.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-72165553941956110152023-08-10T18:57:00.029+02:002023-09-08T08:56:52.647+02:00Ashura, minute by minute<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/000.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/000k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/ashura-percrol-percre.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
Ashura is Iran’s most spectacular feast day. On this day, the Shiites commemorate the bloody battle of Kerbala where, in 680 AD the usurping caliph Yazid massacred the rightful leader of Islam, Muhammad’s grandson, Hossein, along with seventy of his companions. It was then that Islam split into two branches, the Sunnis who continued the caliphate, and the dispossessed Shiites, and that was when the Ummah’s governance took a definitive turn in the wrong direction, according to the latter.</p><p>But for the predominantly Shiite Iranians this commemoration, at least in practice, is not so much about mourning as it is about strengthening the community’s bonds by preparing and experiencing the rites of the feast together, by the gathering of relatives and co-workers, by cooking together in the mosque kitchen for thousands of people and sharing the meal. At this time, communities also open up to the stranger – on this day no one can remain lonely –, they invite you in, ask questions, feed you, and display their fundamental kindness in an obvious way. That’s why it is a particularly good experience to come to Iran during Ashura, as the guests who have come with me for this holiday in recent years have raved about it.</p><p></p>But since Ashura comes two weeks earlier each year, and thus has already slipped into the excruciatingly hot summer months, I will not organize a travel group for this feast until it moves into the mild spring months. I, however, miss the feast. That’s why Wang Wei and I have arranged this year to come at this time, only us two.<p></p>
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<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The first significant object we see from the plane leaving Brussels is NATO headquarters. After that, we don’t really see anything else, because Europe is largely covered by clouds, which only occasionally open up, mainly showing meandering rivers: Do you recognize any of them? By the time we are over Iran, only the urban road networks sparkle out of the darkness like the constellations of an unknown galaxy.</span></p></div>
<p id="colorkarkas"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:808" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We pick up the car at Tehran Airport at dawn, and set off for Kashan, two hundred kilometers away. The sunrise, just like last November, reaches us at the foot of the Vulture Mountains.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>At 8 am, the streets of Kashan are still almost deserted. However, they are already covered in festive decorations: red and black flags reminiscent of blood and mourning, as well as pious sayings and posters with the symbols of the martyrs of Kerbala and the image of the Great Mosque of Kerbala, which often include portraits of local people who havee died in recent years. <i>Dates</i> lie in front of the mosques, that is, Hossein’s symbolic coffins, which will be carried around in tomorrow’s grand procession. On the main square, some early risers are fixing the inscriptions of the festive podium.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/2/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#ashura2" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="sacrifice"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:888" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> When we start walking around in the old town late in the morning after a few hours of sleep, we witness one of the most important preparatory rites of the holiday: the slaughter of the dinner animal, in front of the nearby mosque. Three thousand servings of <i>pilav,</i> rice with vegetables and meat are made from such a cow, in which there will be hardly any meat, only the taste of its juice. The beautiful animal is slaughtered at the casual slaughterhouse in the <i>halal</i> way, that is, with its blood drained out, and it is cut up in a matter of seconds by experienced hands. The operation is directed by the chef of the mosque, who has a broken leg, sitting on a chair, and giving commands with few movements, like a godfather. The audience watches spellbound.</p>
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<p id="kashanbazaar">The holiday oozes out from the corners of the bazaar and gathers into one big pulsation in the bazaar’s large spaces, and then the next day on the main streets of the city. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:202" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Kashan bazaar is a corridor covered by a row of domes running along the entire width of the old town, to which many other smaller corridors, caravanserais, shops and courtyards are connected. Members of a trade or guild gather in one of these larger shops or courtyards, and then step out onto the section of corridor in front of them and begin their own ceremony. The lead singer – you could say, the cantor – sings into the loudspeaker the simple-texted, long-repeating songs about Kerbala, the heroism of Hossein and his companions, our reverence for them, and the grief of his mother and all of us with her. And the others sing with him and beat their chests to the rhythm of the song. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:811" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Then the procession starts towards the magnificent Timche-ye Amin od-Dowle caravanserai or rather plaza at the west end of the bazaar, where each group has a set time to perform. This is the most appropriate term for a ceremony where lead singers ‘rap’ on stage and their followers swing their arms to the rhythm of the song: they raise their arms above their heads, beat their chests, then lower them again and again.</p>
<p>When clips of the Ashura ceremony are sometimes shown on Western TV, they mostly try to convey the impression of fanatical crowds. In my personal experience, there is nothing fanatical about these ceremonies. Any football crowd is more fanatical. It’s more like dancing at a festival concert. After the singing and dancing the participants spread out to drink tea, smiling contentedly and talking cheerfully. They happily allow themselves to be photographed, and they even invite you to take photos, and at the end they even thank you for it.</p>
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<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/852942018?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p></div>
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<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/852939078?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p></div>
<p>A novelty is that the portrait of General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Corps responsible for military operations outside Iran, who was killed by a targeted American drone attack in Iraq in January 2020, is hanging in the most important place of the stage, in the middle between the two great ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. As the leader of Iran’s fight against the Islamic State, Soleimani was extremely popular in Iran, and his assassionation was condemned not only by the regime, but also by the majority of the population. On this year’s Ashura, surely on higher orders, he takes the center stage, as if assuming the role of Hossein as a martyr, thereby automatically casting the US into the role of the evil caliph Yazid.</p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/027.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/027k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Women are conspicuously absent from these recordings. The celebrations are done by men. But women are also present, they gather in the shops and workshops. Now we are just two men, so it was not appropriate for us to go inside, that’s why they are missing from the photos. But if there are women with us, the whole group is always called in, fed, and we can entertain the children.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">A dissenter at the Ashura ceremony. As I ask for permission to take the photo by raising the camera and nodding, he smiles, it seems that he knows why I am taking the photo.</span></p></div>
<p>In the corridors of the bazaar, on the streets, in the courtyards of the mosques and around them, everywhere they offer something: tea, soft drinks, cakes, chocolate, melons. Mosques set up their own snack stalls at the entrance and on nearby street corners. An integral part of the holiday is that people meet at these stalls, they take a tea or a soft drink, exchange politeness formulas for a long time until they drink it, and then move on. A fundamental element of Persian public communication is that when people meet each other, they address a series of warm, respectful gestures to each other. By the time you reach the end of the street, you have received so many such gestures that you necessarily feel good and in your place in the world. This rite and feeling greatly contributes to the maintenance of social health in a world threatened from as many sides as the life of the Iranian people. And you, an outsider, are also included in this. At every stand, they invite us, offer food and drink, ask questions, try to find common ground. This is not difficult with Wang Wei, since everyone knows Catalonia, Barcelona and Messi. The few objecting Real Madrid fans are booed together.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<img border="0" height="273" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/5/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#ashura5" width="550" /> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Cooking sweet saffron rice in the courtyard of a private house next to a mosque. It is just as wonderful a men’s pastime as cooking goulash at a garden party. You are in a good mood even without alcohol.</span></p></div>
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<p>The top of the offering is the midday and evening meal. In the morning, animals were slaughtered at each mosque, from which thousands of portions of rice with vegetables and meat are cooked at noon and in the evening, which are distributed in styrofoam containers to the community of the mosque and anyone passing by. People either eat it on the spot, chatting with each other, or take it home. Anyone can get as much as they want – some people take seven or eight containers –, and no one says anything about it. They probably know how big their families are. This gesture of charity is so unlimited that whenever I bring a group for Ashura, fifteen or twenty of us usually stand in front of a mosque’s kitchen, and they happily feed us. If only because all restaurants are closed on these two days. When we came for the first time, twenty Europeans in front of a mosque kitchen, it caused such a stir that Kashan TV came out to interview us.</p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The point of Ashura and other Shia feasts is pretty much like that of the Jewish ones: “They tried to kill us, but they did not manage to, so let’s eat!” During one of our Ashura visits, after dinner, the local mullah invited our group to the mosque, among the believers keeping night vigil, and asked the question: “Agha Tumas, you have been to Ashura several times. What did you learn from the behavior of Imam Hossein and his companions?” To which I replied: “I have yet to delve deeper into the behavior of Hossein and his companions. But I learned the following from the behavior of the Persians. Most countries in the world celebrate a glorious event as their national holiday: the day of independence, victory over the enemy, a revolution. Iran’s national holiday is a great defeat. A defeat that has been teaching the Persians for fifteen hundred years that you can get back up from every defeat.” My less religious Persian friends, who were also present, later thanked me for making the feast meaningful to them.</span></p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">And another story: I am sitting in Yazd in a vaulted alley. Before me are passing, from the nearby mosque, after the lengthy post-Ashura ceremony, women, men and children dressed in black, carrying in a plastic bowl the festive free meal distributed in the mosque, some kind of pea pottage. I am watching them. A short, young, yet already broken man with a very young woman – maybe his wife, maybe his daughter –, and with a little child behind him, approaches, with two plastic bowls in his hands. I’m just thinking about how much he might need this free meal, when he passes before me, smiles at me, and offers to me one of the two bowls: <i>“Befarmâid”,</i> please. I smile back, and bow a little bit, with my hand on my chest, as a sign of polite rejection: <i>“Motshakkeram”,</i> thank you so much. He nods, they go on.</span></p>
<p>In the pictures below, the chef of my friend Mehdi’s mosque proudly shows the kitchen where five thousand meals are cooked in each of the two days of the feast.</p>
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<p>The absolute winners of the feast are the children. If they come with their parents, they are at the center of the company, but mostly even the very little ones become independent, hang out with each other, visit the stalls, and organize their own small parades. They also communicate bravely and openly with strangers.</p>
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<p>The first, preparatory day of the feast, Tasuʿa (“the ninth”, because it is the ninth day of the Islamic month of Moharram) ends slowly. In most mosques, it does not even end, because the believers imitate Hossein and his companions, who kept vigil and prayed all night before the next day’s battle. This is what they do in the mosques and in many private houses as well: They take turns singing and listening to the storytellers who go from house to house, narrating in colorful and vivid details the battle and the martyrdom of the heroes.</p>
<p>Early next morning, we set out to go up to the Vulture Mountains, to the historic town of Abyaneh, where we want to participate in the great festival of Ashura (Ashura = “the tenth”). Making our way to the car from the labyrinth of the old town of Kashan, we become involved in the morning ritual of a mosque. They invite us for an iced soft drink. If yesterday’s procession was for men, the morning ceremony is surely for women, who flock to the mosque from all directions around 8 am. In the courtyard, they touch and kiss Hossein’s symbolic coffin, then enter the mosque, where the songs sung by men yesterday are heard, now performed by women.</p>
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<p>When we reach the main road, we witness a wonderful flashmob. In the still deserted street, a truckload of men dressed in black suddenly pulls up, then another and another. They jump down, line up and begin the mourning ceremony for Hossein. Five minutes later, they jump onto the truckbeds, and as if they had never been there, the street is empty again.</p>
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<p>The second day of the Ashura feast, the actual feast day, is for the remembrance of the martyrdom of Hossein and his companions in Kerbala. The most important symbol is the <i>nakhl,</i> the “date”, Hossein’s symbolic coffin, a date-shaped large structure of wood, covered with mourning shrouds, which is carried around by handles extending from the front, back and sides. While on the previous, preparatory day, the commemoration took place in small groups, in closed places, the bazaar, mosques and back home, today the whole community pours out into the streets and goes around the center of the city in a huge joint procession. The Ashura procession has its own specific tradition in each city. We had been to Kashan several times. Now we are going to participate in Abyaneh.</p>
<p id="abyaneh"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:190" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> I have written several times about Abyaneh, the Red Village hidden in the heart of the Vulture Mountains: once <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/08/abyaneh-red-village.html">a summary,</a> then <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2022/11/iran-minute-by-minute.html#abyaneh">a brief report</a> about our visit to the complex of the local mosque and Zoroastrian temple closed to foreigners, and once specifically <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/08/ashura-in-abyaneh.html">about the Ashura celebrations of the town,</a> with the photos of Iranian photographers. Now we finally want to see this colorful celebration with our own eyes.</p>
<p>Abyaneh has been closed to foreigners for years on this day. Only the residents of the village and those descending from the place can enter the village and participate in the ceremony, thus protecting the intimacy of the feast. But anyone can book a room in the two local hotels for this day. We did so well in time, and we flag our booking to the policemen standing at the occasional roadblock of the mountain road winding up from the Natanz road towards Abyaneh.</p>
<p id="hanjan"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:189" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>
Winding up into the valley, an imposing fortress faces us from the mountainside. This is Hanjan Fortress, which was built by the Sassanid governors to protect the valley. A veritable <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Desert_of_the_Tartars">Desert of the Tartars</a> fort – by the way, Zurlini <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK6oKZ7Vi4I">shot the Desert of the Tartars movie in a similar Iranian fort</a> –: it has steadfastly protected the valley from the enemy for fifteen hundred years, but the enemy just didn’t want to come. The Arabs who conquered Persia did not think that there could be anything interesting inside the barren mouontain rising in the middle of the desert, so they did not penetrate the valley for a thousand years. The fortress was kept in good order by the locals for centuries, it was used to store their crops and valuables, but it began to fall into disrepair after the Islamic Revolution. Unfortunately, this is a common phenomenon in Iran. Many thousands of similar castles still stand throughout the country, but they were declared a symbol of the fallen regime and are not cared for. Since they are made of clay, a few decades are enough for the heritage of two thousand years to crumble to dust. It seems that the locals are just now starting to restore the ruins of Hanjan fortress: with bricks and concrete instead of the traditional technique, but at least it will not perish. In the main square of the nearby Hanjan village, the rustic monument and the Islamic poster encouraging the wearing of the headscarf indicate the current cultural standard.</p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="tareh"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:889" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We met a procession already before Abyaneh. At the access road of the previous village, Tareh, a fighter-bomber is standing from the time of the Iraq-Iran war. On the socle, there are photos and names of local men who lost their lives mainly in the air force. The monument is officially called the “Memorial Museum of the Martyrs of Tareh”. The Ashura procession of the village starts from here, connecting the memory of the ancient martyrs with that of the 1980s, just like everywhere else in Iran. It would be nice to photograph them standing next to the plane, but by the time we manage to stop and get out, the procession has already started down the road to the village.</p>
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<p>In Abyaneh, the tea stall was set up on the main street. The people of the town sit around it and chat. Although the village has only four hundred permanent residents, nevertheless those living in Isfahan, Tehran, and even abroad come home for this holiday. We talk to people whose parents weren’t even born here, but since childhood they come back every year for every major holiday, and they maintain the image of the virtual population and the real house – that’s why the built heritage of the town is not significantly decaying, despite the residents, who are few and aging. At such times, they usually also wear the local folk costume, the men loose black silk trousers, the women floral skirts and a white shawl sprinkled with roses, a remnant of the former Zoroastrian dress. In addition to tea, they go around again and again offering soft drinks, chocolates and melons.</p>
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<p>Abyaneh has not one, but two processions. Adult men carry a large <i>date,</i> Hossein’s coffin, and it is followed by a small <i>date</i> carried by the children. In the morning, it seems, they carry them back and forth along a narrow street of the old town only for the sake of warm-up and spectacle, accompanied by groups singing Ashura songs. In the afternoon, however, they are also joined by “Hossein’s army”, a heavy metal decoration, whose individual feathers symbolize soldiers. This is carried by men in turn, followed by a procession of self-flagellants. Until the 19th century, this was a rather bloody cult, but today even the most ardent beliver cannot do much harm with the little, symbolic whip. The <i>dates</i> and the <i>army</i> start at about 1 pm to go around in and outside the old town. It’s a strange sight how the date sways forward in the narrow streets, like an elephant with its caretaker in the sadddle. In the meantime, the members of every family distribute the usual delicacies to everyone present.</p>
<p>The “army” and the walls of the ouses are decorated with portraits of those who died the previous year. The “cantor” also evokes the deceased at each stop. This kind of identification with the martyrs makes the commemoration personal for the participants and gives them the opportunity to express their individual grief by mourning for Hossein.</p>
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<p>At dusk, the whole town gathers again in the center. Dinner is now being served in the mosque kitchen. Here, every local eats his or her container sitting and talking to the others, since they so rarely see each other. They quickly notice the helpless stranger, and they escort us in a chain of five men all the way to the kitchen, where we also get two portions. And we also get conversation partners. Two twenty-year-old boys want to practice their fairly good English skills. They are architects, but they are interested in history, that’s what we are talking about. It is deplorable how much the Islamic state closes off all sources of information from them. Whatever they know from world history, they get from the game <i>Assassin’s Creed,</i> and it is surprisingly correct. But they are completely at a loss when it comes to very basic issues, and so they are prone to simplifications, short-circuits and conspiracy theories. They are also not helped by the limited book publishing and the miserable internet in Iran. Later, in some museums, young guides give a sample of their knowledge, and this is also dominated by the lack of solid information and quickly drawn large metaphysical connections. This might give an incentive to art, film, photography, visual arts, in which Iran is now a leader, but it will take its toll anyway.</p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“Do you know why the Iranian government cooperates with the Russian?” asks one of the boys concerning the current Russian-Ukrainian war, about which the regime is silent and the Iranians have little idea. “Because they are both unbelievers.” It is perhaps understandable that the news about the atheist Soviet leadership having switched to the Christian-Fascist Russian one has not yet reached Iran. But in order to call the first theocratic government of the 20th century one of unbelievers, you need the daily experience of the hypocrisy of the Iranian <i>system of national cooperation.</i> And that this fact finds in the two system a common denominator, you need the connection-making power of an imagination unshackled by solid information.</span></p>
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<p id="abyanehtemple">Early next morning, the streets of the village are still deserted, but completely clean. The huge amount of waste is gone, the bins are empty, only the Ashura decorations are still out on the walls. But the little whips are already neatly collected in the back of a van. An old woman opens the door to the sound of our footsteps on the main street. She tries to sell us a kilo of apricots for a little money, with success.</p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Unlike the rest of Iran, where local languages are not supported, everything in Abyaneh is written alongside Persian, and even above in it, in the local vernacular, which is close to the Sassanid Middle Persian of the first centuries AD, and is locally called “zabân-e Zartosht”, the Zoroastrian language. The gate is <i>darvâze</i> in modern Persian, and <i>bardarvâzâ</i> in the thousand-year-old language.<i></i></span></p></div>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:890" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We want to visit the Zoroastrian sanctuary outside the village, between the mountains. I have known for a long time that it existed (although it is not marked on the maps), but in my previous visits to Abyaneh, I have never had two free hours to walk there and back. This morning I finally have it.</p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Abyaneh, hidden in the middle of the barren Vulture Mountains that rise in the middle of the desert, was never discovered by the Arab conquerors, and the inhabitants of the village were careful enough not to give any news of themselves for centuries. This is how they preserved their archaic language, clothing and Zoroastrian religion. The first – already Persian – Muslim preachers reached them only in the 1500s, and their Zoroastrian sanctuaries were still functioning in the 19th century.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/farvahar.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 3pt 0px 10px 15pt;" />The Zoroastrian religion was named after its founder, the Eastern Iranian Zarathushtra (Zoroaster in Greek). He lived sometime between the 12th and 6th centuries BC and transformed the local version of the ancient Indo-European religion of twelve chief gods under one supreme god into the first monotheism. In his teaching, the chief gods are actually only archangels – the twelve Persian months still bear their names –, and there is only one god, Ahura Mazda (meaning the greatest and the wisest), who created them as well. Ahura Mazda created the world to be good, but not perfect: from the beginning it contains the evil in the form of decay (entropy), which was later personified in the form of the evil Ahriman. Man’s main purpose is to work against entropy as a kind of maintenance staff, to restore the decaying world, to bring joy and happiness into it. For this, he can expect no reward, and no punishment for negligent maintenance. People do good for its own sake, because it is the only right and meaningful action. Zoroastrianism has neither heaven, nor hell. At the end of the maintenance work – that is, death – man’s work clothes, that is, his body is cleaned up by vultures, and his soul – everyone’s soul – returns to Ahura Mazda.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Just as the central concept of Christianity is <i>love,</i> so that of Zoroastrianism is <i>truth.</i> Lying increases entropy in the world, so it is a meaningless and harmful action, contrary to one’s goals. According to Herodotus – who offers a detailed anthropology of the Persians and their religion in his <i>Histories</i> (1.136) – the young Persian only had to learn three things before the age of twenty: to ride well, to shoot arrows, and to tell the truth.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Although Islam recognized Zoroastrianism as one of the religions of the book, they were forcibly converted to Islam after the Arab conquest. Today there may be some 100 to 200 thousand Zoroastrian believers, above all in central Iran, in and around Yazd, and in Western India, where many of them fled from the violent conversion campaigns.</span></p>
<p>The village is surrounded by orchards. The gardens are irrigated by a network of canals, and the trees are even now sagging under the crop of apples, plums and walnuts. It is still early in the morning, but several people are already coming back with the morning harvest. Looking back from the first barren hills beyond the gardens, you can see the red village creeping up the mountainside.</p>
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<p>The shrine stands alone among the barren red mountains at a point where a strong-flowing stream breaks through a dramatic rock face.</p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Herodotus writes that the Persians do not build their temples in cities, but in nature, on mountaintops, next to springs and similar places, where the forces of nature, or in general the essence of reality manifests itself. Károly Kerényi calls such manifestations <i>epiphanies,</i> and considers their cult to be the essence of ancient religions. Zoroastrianism was also an epiphanic religion, although it did not personify the forces manifested in this way, unlike the Greeks, but traced them back to Ahura Mazda. In the Sassanid era (AD 2-7th c.), when Zoroastrianism had to compete with increasingly urban religions – Christianity, Judaism, Manichaeism –, they began to build sanctuaries in the cities as well. In Abyaneh, such is <a href="https://riowang.blogspot.com/2022/11/iran-minute-by-minute.html#abyanehjamemosque">the small shrine on which the local mosque was built,</a> as well as the former fire temple, the construction of which was attributed to Harpak, chief minister of the great shah Khosrow II (590-628), who is said to have come from Abyaneh. These have not been used since the 18th century, but the sanctuary outside the city – which was renovated in 1881 according to its inscription, but which is probably the oldest of all – was visited even as late as the 20th century.</span></p>
<p>From the outside, the present-day sanctuary is a featureless cube at the base of the rock wall, next to the stream. Upon entering, you are greeted by a pillared courtyard, with 19th-century Qajar-style stucco on the opposite side: two angels supporting a building inscription, flanked by a deer and a ram. A huge plane tree (Old World sycamore, <i>Platanus orientalis</i>) with many trunks grows in the yard. It is quite old, but probably consists of lateral shoots of an even older tree.</p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The sycamore was the sacred tree of the Zoroastrians. Old sycamores stand in front of most of the ancient Zoroastrian shrines converted into mosques, as well as in <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2016/08/chak-chak.html">the Zoroastrian shrine of Chak Chak,</a> which is still in use today. Herodotus mentions that Xerxes, marching with his army to Greece, on his way</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“…saw a delightfully beautiful sycamore tree. He embellished it with golden ornaments, and entrusted one of his immortals with its guarding.” (<i>Historiae,</i> 7.31)</span></p>
<p>However, the courtyard is only the front porch of the actual shrine, to which a door decorated with stucco and mirror inlays opens to the left. This shrine is actually a cave in the rock, which has a fireplace for the eternally burning fire, and probably a narrow branch of the stream, which has since been diverted, was also introduced here so that the four sacred elements – fire, water, earth, air – were all present. This was certainly the original sanctuary, built many centuries BC, and the forecourt, renovated in 1881 was later added to it.</p>
<p>The church is abandoned, but still in relatively good condition. They might have stopped visiting it only after the Islamic revolution. They scribbled graffiti on its walls, but otherwise they keep it clean, they don’t destroy it. The plastic poster stretched on the back wall of the courtyard also calls for its protection. It is a great experience to stand here, on such an island of the living past. How long will it stay this way?</p>
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<p id="abyanehfortress"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:891" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> On the way back, we take a small detour, passing the Sassanid-era clay fortress opposite the town. The fortress is actually just four round towers with clay walls between them. “It was not used to station any army”, explained one of the local men the night before, “but so that the people and the animals could seek refuge here for a few days in the event of an attack.” “Who would have attacked the town here among the mountains, where the enemy never entered?” I ask him. “Well, we ourselves produced the enemy. The robbers, the outlaws.”</p>
<p>At the base of the fortress are clay buildings of former farms, with cracked roofs and crumbling walls. For the owners living in big cities, it is enough to maintain the ancient house in the old town of Abyaneh, they have no energy for the farm buildings. From here, you can see the whole town at the base of the big red rocks and the even bigger gray rocks towering behind them.</p>
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<p id="komjan"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:203" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>
On the way back from Abyaneh to the Natanz-Isfahan road, we stop two villages away, at the archaic cemetery of Komjan. Above each grave there are two triangular flat stones, at head and at foot, with an inscription and some schematic figures. These figures represent the sun and the moon, cypresses, the trees of the cemetery, but most interestingly, some of the headstones have schematic human faces. I don’t know this from any other Iranian cemetery, this must be the valley’s own tradition.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>We reach down to the foot of the Vulture Mountains. If <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/08/ashura-minute-by-minute.html#hanjan">I just compared the fortress of Hanjan to that of the Desert of the Tartars:</a> well, then this is the Desert of the Tartars itself, the exemplary desolate plain at the foot of the menacingly jagged barren mouontains, on the edge of which the enemy’s fur-capped, spear-shaking horsemen can appear at any time, but they never will, because they too consider such theatricality a useless effort. Only small whirlwinds sweep from time to time among the dried-up succulent bushes, which store life in their roots for the one or two short rains a year. If I turned back now – which I won’t do –, I would see the above-ground buildings of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant behind me, surrounded by the guns of the dug-in tanks facing the four winds.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="natanzhosseinie"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:892" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The old main street of Natanz is covered with a mass of red and black flags. Even before reaching the great mosque, the sight of a magnificently decorated <i>hosseiniye</i> prompts us to stop. <i>Hosseiniye</i>s are spacious courtyards or squares surrounded by arcades, which are used for Shiite ceremonies involving many people – mainly for Ashura, Hossein’s funeral feast, as their name suggests. In their midst, there is usually a <i>date</i> as a memorial, Hossein’s symbolic coffin, which is moved and carried around only in this day. It is richly decorated for the vigil before Ashura, and the sacred theater of <i>taʿziye,</i> presenting the lives of the twelve imams, are performed here in the ten evenings following the holiday. Every mosque must have a <i>hosseiniye,</i> if nothing else, a public square appropriated for the holiday. The people of each mosque compete with each other in decorating their <i>hosseiniyes.</i><br /></p>
<p>The current form of the Ashura decoration largely developed in the Qajar era (1794-1925), and has inherited the pictorial formulas of that period. Such is the lion carrying a sword on the canvas roof of this <i>hosseiniye,</i> called <i>shir-e-khorsid,</i> which was the coat of arms of the shahs for many centuries. It was also in the middle of the national flag until the islamic revolution banished it from there. Considering this, it is astonishing that it could stay, without any religious antecedents, in the decoration of the holiest holiday. And the figures of the Qajar period are placed on the most important element of the decoration, the metal <i>alamat,</i> which is carried around during the Ashura procession, but then it stands in the center of the <i>hosseiniye</i> until the decorations are taken down. <i>Alam</i> originally means flag, in this context Hossein’s flag, which usually have the inscription <span style="font-family: tahoma; font-size: 100%;">يا حسين</span> „ya Hossein”, <i>oh Hossein!</i> (or rather <i>Hossein, help us!</i>), accompanied by Quranic quotations or the pictures of the main martyrs of Kerbala. The Arabic plural form <i>alamat</i> is a complex metal construction, which, in addition to the copper, peacock and ostrich feathers symbolizing Hossein and his warriors, also have the animal symbols of the visual world of the Qajar folklore: birds, lions, deer, gazelles, dragons, and the most unusual, the bird-bodied <i>shirin</i> with a human face.<br /></p>
<p>The Ashura procession is often accompanied by live pictures reenacting the battle and its characters. An example of this is the symbolic installation of Hossein’s camp next to this <i>hosseiniye,</i> parading the most important symbols of the feast: Hossein’s green tent, the hose with which Abolfazl, Hossein’s half-brother and the other great hero of Ashura, went down to the Euphrates on the morning of the battle to bring water to the thirsty children and women, the bloody white horse that came back alone after the slaughter of Abolfazl, and the flag with Abolfazl’s severed hand on top of its staff, which replaces the usual crescent in most Shiite mosques. Next to the installation, there are traces on the ground demonstration the complexity of yesterday’s ceremony: scattered candles, tops of soda cans snapped off and cigarette butts.<br /></p>
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<img border="0" height="459" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/19/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#ashura19" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="natanzatashgah"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:893" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Walking futher towards the mosque, we see the same wax stains on the steps of the <i>atashgah,</i> the so-called Zoroastrian fire temple. There are two possible explanations for this. One is that the ardent Muslim believers in Natanz want to include the infidel monuments in the Islamic cult as has happened so many times in the past with sanctuaries converted into mosques. The other is that neo-Zoroastrians held a counter-ceremony here. A superficial cult of Zoroastrianism as the ancient pre-islamic Persian religion is popular mainly among young people who reject the Islamic regime. However, there is something strange about this fire temple. The unusual four-gate structure and its masonry technique both refer to 20th-century construction. It was probably built under the Pahlavi shahs, who were great supporters of the cult of ancient Persia and its religion. After all, the original Zoroastrian temple certainly stood on the site of the 11th-century mosque. It was converted into the mosque, as it was the Muslim custom throughout Western Iran. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:895" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> A proof of this is the wonderful sycamore tree grove that stands in front of the mosque today, but whose old trees are the shoots of the ancient one that stood in front of the former Zoroastrian shrine. Their age is estimated at two thousand years.<br /></p>
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<p id="natanzmosque"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:894" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> This mosque represents the prototype of Iranian mosques, the four large arches (<i>eivan</i>s) around a square courtyard. The area around its mihrab is particularly nicely decorated with Seljuk-era stucco and Safavid-era calligraphy. The wall of the <i>eivan</i> opposite, next to the entrance, is decorated with folk graffiti close to Ashura in spirit: Ali’s double-edged sword, the Zulfikar, and a bunch of hands laid on the plaslter and drawn around, thus expressing the believer’s identification with Abolfazl, whose hand carrying the hose was cut down by the enemy. Such and other sacred graffiti are held in high esteem, they are not destroyed, but as you can see, they are preserved even in the course of a restoration.<br /></p>
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<p>The most spectacular part of the mosque complex, however, is the mausoleum built by Zayd al-Din al-Mastari, the grand vizier of Öljeitü, the Mongol Great Khan of Persia, for his Shiite Sufi master Sheikh Abd-ul-Samad Esfahani, in the early 14th century, at the same time when he also decorated the Öljeitü prayer hall in the Grand Mosque of Isfahan. The pointed roof of the octagonal mausoleum, decorated with green glazed tiles, rises as proudly above the mosque complex as its entrance <i>eivan,</i> also decorated with glazed tiles, steals the show from the mosque’s own entrance.<br /></p>
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<img border="0" height="273" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/22/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#ashura22" width="550" /></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:897" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The decorations are already being dismantled in the Grand Mosque’s own <i>hosseiniye,</i> but it is obvious that it was inaugurated for the feast with a lot of work. In the middle of the decoration is a black flag with the three main figures of the feast. In the middle Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, the virtuous knight of Islam, holding the double-pointed Zulfikar sword in hand, and with a lion, his attribute, at his feet (Ali as the lion of faith). To the right, his son and successor, Hossein, with the green flag of the faith, and to the left, Abolfazl wading in the Euphrates with the hose. I will soon write a separate post about this iconographic culture.<br /></p>
<p>The metal <i>alamat</i> is even richer and more detailed than the previous one. Behind it, under the cover of two rolled up carpets, a man with a short white beard is sitting, browsing his phone. He greets us politely, we start talking, he shows us the photos of yesterday’s parade. It turns out that he is the master of ceremonies. He also organizes the <i>taziʿye,</i> the sacred theater, held for ten evenings beginning today. Then he invites to see his museum, located next to the mosque, on the old bazaar row. We go over with him.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="natanztavasolyan"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:896" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>
<i>Mehdi Tavasoliyan’s exhibition of old Natanz</i> is above the entrance. Mehdi fumbles with the lock, the door opens. Under the centuries-old arch, in a circle, the city comes to life, as it was in Mehdi’s childhood. Dollhouses, palace and apartment interiors, shops and workshops, faithfully furnished down to every small detail. Mehdi selects a tool, turns the miniature grinder, clicks the scissors: everything works. It’s just that the shopkeepers don’t loudly advertise their wares and the assistant doesn’t steal a handful of pistachios the size of an ant’s egg.</p><p id="natanztavasolyan">I wonder what it takes for a person to put so much energy into creating such a world. Above all, time, a lot of time, and they have it here. Then the joy of babbling. And last but not least, a great, nostalgic devotion to the world that has completely disappeared here in Natanz, as in the whole of Iran, with shocking speed. In Mehdi’s life, this world that had been stable for centuries, changed more than in the life of any of his ancestors.<br /></p>
<p>The last workshop of the evoked bazaar belongs to the photographer, with a large tripod Hasselblad in the door, and Qajar-era photographs on the walls. I know these pictures well, I recently wrote about them for a Spanish journal of art history. I am thinking that if Mehdi had also made the camera work, it would now be possible to lift from it the images of Pahlavi-era Natanz on small glass negatives. And then Mehdi, as if reading my thoughts, steps to the door, puts on the clothes of an ancient picture-shower at a fair, and twists the control arm of a machine that I have never seen before. It is an early 20th-century Persian portable cinema. The spectators knelt in front of the stovepipes protruding from the machinery, in which thick lenses magnified the brown archival photos slowly circulating in front of them. Photos of a world that belonged to the past even in Mehdi’s childhood, but when viewed from here, the other side of the great changes, the two merge into one another.<br /></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="isfahansquare"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:898" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The multi-day holiday of Ashura is also a time of great travel for most Iranian families. The main square of Isfahan is colored by rarely seen eastern and southern Iranian folk costumes. They came to see their country’s former capital and still its most beautiful city. They take photos with the wonderful arcades, domes and fountains, fly kites, slide around the square in hansoms during the day, and at dusk they have a picnic on the lawn of the main square and at the edges of the pools, many young women without scarves or fear.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="hajjimirza"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:820" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>
We have dinner again at Hajji Mirza’s restaurant, just like last year: <i>chelo kubdari,</i> i.e. minced meat kebab with saffron rice, and <i>beryân,</i> ground lamb meat seasoned in two ways and spread on a pita. And again, I take pictures of the decoration reminiscent of a good antique shop. It’s not like I left out something last year, but because it is so good. And to draw your attention that most of the copper animals on the shelves used to be ornaments of old <i>alamat</i>s, so this day is actually their holiday as well.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/023.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/023k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/024.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/024k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="isfahanezahmad">The Ashura decorations have already been taken down in Isfahan’s two large mosques which also serve tourism and, being large mosques, do not have their own community: the Shah Mosque on the main square and the Friday Mosque in the old town. But it is still up in the smaller mosques, as the series of commemorations continues for another ten days. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:899" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> So in the Imamzadeh Ahmad mosque, not far from the main square, in the artisans’ bazaar. The large posters we have already seen: the women mourning the fallen <i>imamzadeh</i>s, Abolfazl’s hand with Hossein’s bloody feather, and a large panel of Imam Hossein fighting heroically on his white horse against the black shadows.</p>
<p>About Imamzadeh Ahmad, who rests here, it is not possible to exactly know how he is related to the twelve imams (<i>imamzadeh</i> means an imam’s son or descendant). But he is not alone in this. Iranian popular religiosity respects the graves of many <i>imamzadeh</i>s while it is not certain who the person is, and sometimes it is certain that he is not the one who is honored there. In fact, it is not for him that we made a pilgrimage here, but because the great contemporary artist and art historian Parviz Tanavoli writes in his album <i>Lions of Iran</i> that the oldest surviving lion-shaped tombstone stands in the courtyard of this mosque. Such tombstones were erected by the nomadic tribes of the Zagros Mountains, primarily by the Bakhtiaris, for their chiefs, outstanding warriors, or, as they told me there, the <i>bozorgân,</i> the great ones, which provides a surprising etymology for the Hungarian word <i>boszorkány</i> (witch, wizard).</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/025.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/025k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>We can find the stone, it is kept under glass. As to its age, it is significant that the lion already carries carved firearms on its side. He holds a human head in his mouth, as if to show the fate of whoever attacks the grave.</p>
But at least as interesting is the large stone slab that I am searching for here on the basis of Jabar Ansari’s <i>History of Isfahan and Rey</i>. He writes about this:<br />
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“Mahmud Ghaznavi brought a stone from Somnath in India. It is said that the stone belonged to the most important idol in that country. The stone went to Isfahan and was cut in two a hundred year later. One half has become a lintel in Vazir Tahmasb’s madrasa, while the other half was dragged on the ground [out of contempt for the idol], and then taken to Emamzadeh Ahmad’s mausoleum.”<br /></span></p>
<p>Mahmud (998-1030) was the founder of the Ghaznavid Seljuk Sultanate ruling over Iran, while Somnath one of the main shrines of Siva in Gujarat, India. It was built in the first centuries AD, and became one of the most important Indian pilgrimage sites. The Muslim attacks that started around 1000 destroyed it several times. The very first one of these was led by Mahmud Ghaznavi.<br /></p>
<p>So much as it was easy to discover the <i>bozorgân</i>-lion in the middle of the courtyard, that much was it difficult to find the Somnath stone in the mosque. We are about to give up when a young master comes in from the bazaar to fill his demijohn with fresh water from the mosque’s well. I tell him what we are looking for. He smiles at me: “Well, it is not here, but outside.” He takes us out into the street and points at the ledge of the wooden window of the mausoleum. This stone covers the Imamzadeh’s grave, with only its carved edge sticking out into the street. It is not clear what is written on it and in what language, but it is likely that the inscription in Arabic letters was created after it was moved here.<br /></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/026.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/026k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="hajjmahmud"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:900" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We have to visit one more place in Isfahan, Hajj Mahmud’s <i>beryâni.</i> A <i>beryâni</i> is a place where you can eat <i>beryân,</i> the typical lunch of Isfahan, and nothing else. And what is <i>beryân?</i> Mutton soaked in onion-salt water, then ground and mixed with little cinnamon and dried mint, sometimes with a little liver, fried in a copper pan, spread on fresh flat bread, sprinkled with walnuts or almonds, and served with fresh vegetables and onions. Already the great French travelers of the 17th century, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Jean Chardin wrote about it in their Persian travelogues, and the latter also published two recipes for it. And the West’s interest in it has not waned since then. Anthony Bourdain dedicated a special episode to Hajj Mahmud’s <i>beryâni</i> in his series on the special cuisines of the world. This is where we are heading now. Their <i>beryân</i> is really not bad, but that of the aforementioned Hajji Mirza outshines it. Bourdain cannot know everything either.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/028.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/028k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="golbahar">Hajj Mahmud’s <i>beryâni</i> is in the bazaar, at the end of the bazaar’s long main corridor towards the Friday Mosque. But you don’t have to walk the one-and-a-half kilometer long section from the main entrance to it (although it is worth it), but if you are hungry, you can also enter the bazaar from the side. And then you will be richer for the experience.<br /></p>
<p>Isfahan’s old town, especially the area around the bazaar, was full of old merchant houses, caravanserai courtyards, small alleys and other exciting historical places still twenty years ago, when I was here for the first time. Since then, there has been unprecedented land speculation in the old town. These places are being demolished one by one and soulless modern buildings are being built in their place. As most of the old buildings are to some extent protected as monuments, they cannot just go at them with a bulldozer: they have to wait until they reach such a state that there is no other remedy for them. I have seen and still see several beautiful, townscape-wise and historically valuable objects, being destroyed in this way. Now I see the same thing on <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:901" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Haroneyeh Street, leading to the Friday Mosque from the south. Here there have been, at least since the Qajar period, but perhaps even earlier, large multi-storey merchant houses with spacious inner courtyards, which served as caravansarais, warehouses and wholesale trade centers. By now the houses become empty, the courtyards destroyed, and only the façades still defy the challenge of time. This street was already in contact with the Jewish quarter, and many of the trading houses’ owners were Jews. The map still marks the Golbahar synagogue here, next to them, but no trace of it can be found on the site, and the neighboring shopkeepers also don’t know about it.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/029.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/029k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>We are still eating Hajj Mahmud’s <i>beryân,</i> when the Ashura songs, which we first heard in the Kashan bazaar, blare from a loudspeaker right next to us, in the corridor of the bazaar. We will witness the same ceremony. As on the day before Ashura, the merchants of the bazaar also march up for the ten following days, ritually mourning Hossein and his companions. Here, at the eastern end of the Isfahan bazaar, there is no magnificent <i>hosseiniye</i> like the Timche-ye Amin od-Dowle in Kashan, so the square in front of the thousand-year-old Friday Mosque is declared an occasional <i>hosseiniye,</i> this is the goal of the groups marching under the <i>alam</i>s. The women and children have already gathered here. They are settling down on carpets and chatting. Young boys serve them soft drinks and sweet saffron rice in small glasses. A small child, perhaps with his mother’s encouragement, perhaps on his own initiative, takes two more glasses of rice and brings them over to the two strangers standing by the pillar with cameras.<br /></p>
<p>Isfahan’s Friday Mosque, which was probably founded in the 8th century on a former Zoroastrian shrine, is the only mosque in Iran, and perhaps in the entire Muslim world, that does not stand isolated from the surrounding buildings and shows up its façade significantly, but is integrated into the fabric of the surrounding city. The bazaar’s arches and shops flow around it, they are clinging to its walls. During the course of history, it had twelve gates, of which only two are open today. The Ashura ceremony takes place right in front of the main gate, kept closed for the occasion. While the believers gather, we go around the mosque to take photos of the twelve gates. We manage to find perhaps four, the rest being swallowed up by the bazaar. They could only be approached from shops and workshops, but these are also closed due to the holiday.<br /></p>
<p>Meanwhile, the processions have already started towards the main gate. By the time we get back, they have already lined up in two rows on both sides of the corridor in front of the main gate, and the mourning ceremony begins with singing and rhythmic chest beating. We watch for a while and take pictures, then we set off with Wang Wei to tour the small medieval synagogues of the nearby Jewish quarter. I know eight of them, but there are supposedly more. I will write about them in a separate post. By the time we get back to the mosque, the ceremony is already over. The crowd is dispersing, many leave, but many stay to chat and drink tea. We are also invited. We accept it with thanks, we answer who we are, where we came from, we praise Iran and Isfahan. The children are particularly interested in us, and invite us to play. We take turns photographing them with Wang Wei. We ask one of the young mothers for her WhatsApp number, we will send her the photos in the evening.<br /></p>
<p>This is the end of this year’s Ashura for us. From Isfahan, we set off on new discoveries: up to the Zagros Mountains, to the end-of-the-world Bakhtiari village of Sar Agha Seyyed, then down south to Sarvestan, the ancient seat of the Sassanid kings, and finally up to Tehran. I will write about these in separate posts. We started Ashura in the bazaar, and we end it in the bazaar as well. It was a great experience, as always, a little personalized presentation of the beauty of Persia and the kindness of the Iranians. We’ll be back for more.<br /></p><p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/030.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/ashura/030k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
í</div>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/ashura-percrol-percre.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-12153583924212714842023-07-27T07:53:00.005+02:002023-07-27T13:12:01.578+02:00Greek Saint Martin in the Pyrenees<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/gorogszentmarton-pireneusokban.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
We are tracing the memory of the Cathars in the French Pyrenees, south of Albi and Carcassonne. Castles ruled by the nobles who supported them, which were occupied from 1209 onwards by the crusaders sent by the French king under the leadership of Simon of Montfort. Small towns whose population was put to the sword or sent to the stake by the crusaders, in part or to the last man: “The Lord will know those that are his own.” Monasteries, mainly Cistercian ones, founded by local bishops in the second half of the 12th century, during the still bloodless phase of the conflict, to convert the heretics.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The Aude River that runs from the Pyrenees to the south of Carcassonne is flanked by a string of such monasteries: St-Hilaire, St-Polycarpe, Rieunette, Alet-les-Bains. Among them I discover on the map the name of Monastère de Cantauque, which is not mentioned in the historiography of the Cathars. I mark it for a visit.<br /></p><p>From the road winding along the Aude between the hills of the Limoux wine region, a smaller road turns off into the valley of the tributary Baris, and then an even smaller one, a mere strip, into the valley of the stream Lauzy. Finally, at the beginning of a white gravel road branching off from this, you see a sign for <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:887" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> the Orthodox monastery of Cantauque.<br /></p><p>An Orthodox monastery in the French Pyrenees? As the building is slowly revealed from behind the trees, the distinctly Orthodox forms become more and more visible: the Ruthenian-style triple belfry with the Non-human-hand-made Icon of Christ, the Greek columned and domed porticus, the dominant brick-red color of the walls, the arched windows. All iconic historical forms. As if the designer wanted to create a building that is definitely modern, but at the same time suggesting that its elements have been pieced together over many centuries.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The inner wall of the porticus is covered by a <i>Deesis</i> fresco, a half-length Pantocrator Christ with the Virgin Mary on his right, and, surprisingly, with St. Martin of Tours on his left, in the usual place of St. John the Baptist. St. Martin has been the patron saint of his native Hungary as well as of his missionary land, France, for a thousand years. Below, an inscription: The monastery of the Mother of God and of St. Martin. Through the gate you can see into the courtyard, whose walls are decorated with large, colorful Orthodox frescoes.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>When we ring the doorbell, a tall smiling monk comes out. He does not tell us his name and does not ask ours, only where we come from. “Hungary? We also had a Hungarian monk, Tamás, who recently went home.” “But you have another left”, I point to St. Martin above the gate. “Yes, yes. Although he was born in <i>Szombathely</i>” – he prounces the difficult name correctly – “but he is also the patron saint of Gaul. And since he lived before the schism, he is venerated as a saint by Catholics and Orthodox alike. That’s why we chose him as the patron saint of our monastery, because we wanted to create a community here that is completely French, completely Orthodox and completely international.”<br /></p><p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>He guides us to their chapel, the main entrance of which is separate from the monastery, at the back of the building, since it is used not only by the monks, but also by Orthodox believers from the wider region, Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Georgians, Greeks. “They come here from about a hundred kilometers distance, about two hundred persons, or three hundred on big holidays. At those times they stand outside the chapel. We have liturgy four times a day, at six in the morning, at noon, at six pm, and late in the evening. There are always some believers, if no one else, there are those who live in our ten guest rooms: now a few Ukrainian families, two Romanians, four French and one Georgian.”<br /></p><p>“And you, how did you find us?” “We were visiting the monasteries here, we saw this one on the map, we thought we should not miss it. Only at the crossroads did we see that it was Orthodox.” “If you knew it beforehand, would you have avoided it?” “No, we would have come here first.” We all laugh.<br /></p><p>On the wall above the entrance to the church, the life of St. Martin is painted in Orthodox icon style. I have never seen anything like it. In the centre, Martin himself as Bishop of Tours among the geese who betrayed him by gaggling when he hid in the goose-pen to escape his election as bishop. They still get their punishment for it every November 11. Above right, Martin’s baptism, above left, his sharing his mantle with the beggar, below left, his ordination as a monk, below right, his funeral. Some scenes from his standard Western iconography (e.g. <a href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappella_di_San_Martino_(Assisi)">Simone Martini’s St. Martin cycle in Assisi</a>) are missing, because they are not really meaningful in an Orthodox context: his knighthood, the renunciation of arms, and his miraculous mass.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">In 2016, in preparation for the 1800th anniversary of Saint Martin’s birth, I was asked by Europa Publisher to write a book on the European cult of him. In the course of a year, I visited his most important pilgrimage sites, and wrote the starting chapter about <a href="http://riowang.com/2015/11/saint-martins-day.html">the inauguration of St. Martin’s footprint in Pannonhalma Abbey</a>. Life, however, fell on me and I never finished the book. Recently I have been thinking of publishing the collected material here on the blog. An unexpected contribution to this is now this visit to the Orthodox monastery of St. Martin.<br /></span></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The chapel was decorated by a local monk-painter in a good style, with vivid colors and an original interpretation of the traditional Orthodox iconography. The painting was finished just a week ago, perhaps we are its first visitors. In the apse is the Virgin Mary, with Christ to come in her womb, below her St. John Chrysostom, St. Athanasius, and two Cappadocian church fathers, St. Basil and St. Gregory. And on the walls of the sanctuary are four church fathers who are a surprising choice in an Orthodox context: St. Martin, St. Hilarius of Poitiers and St. John Cassianus, who are usually associated with the Latin church (although, living before the schism, they are of course also Orthodox), and St. Isaac of Nineveh, who belonged to the Syriac Nestorian church in Persia in the 7th century, that is, after the separation of the Nestorian and Orthodox churches. Their presence indicates the desire of the monastery’s founders for ecumenism, for the linking of the Western Catholic and Eastern Syriac churches with the Orthodox mainstream.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A centuries-old Lebanese cedar stands in front of the church’s entrance. It was obviously not planted by the current monks. “Indeed not. The site of the present monastery was a nobleman’s manor. Before the French revolution, to plant a Lebanese cedar, or indeed to obtain cedar seedlings, required royal permission, and good connections with Versailles, where the seedlings came from. The local landowner seems to have had them. This cedar was planted sometime in the 1600s. It’s now coming into its own.”<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>We return to the courtyard of the monastery, which was once a sheepfold. In the centre is a pretty little well. The walls, now I clearly see, are decorated with scenes of the Creation, according to Orthodox and Venetian iconography. By Venetian iconography I mean that a current of Orthodox iconography – known to us from the 5th-century Cotton Genesis manuscript, used in designing the mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica – represented the six days of the Creation by interpreting the standard final phrases closing each single day – <i>and there was evening and there was morning, the second day,</i> etc. – so that one more day was also created. The Venetian Creation mosaics, therefore, add to each day one more angel, representing that day, so that God resting on the sevenths day is surrounded by the angels of the six previous days. The Cantaque Creation is unusual in that God and the angels of the seven days are together <i>before</i> the first day of the Creation, but probably only because there was a large and significant wall area to depict them together.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<p>The Egyptian monk-painter took particular delight in the detailing of the animals – fish, birds, quadrupeds – and in strong, striking colors. Around the edge of the second wall, the second Creation story starts with the planting of the Garden of Paradise. This was painted by a Romanian nun, in a more traditional but also more rigid and less creative style.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>After looking around in the courtyard, we are invited to the monastery kitchen for a coffee. The coffee is brewed for us by a French pilgrim, and the cake is served by another pilgrim. The first is with her husband, the second with her daughter. They talk at length with our monk about the various Orthodox pilgrimage sites from Russia to the Caucasus and the Holy Land to Egypt, which they have obviously visited. When it gradually turns out that I have also been to these places, and even speake their languages, I get more and more looks of recognition. I almost become a honorary Orthodox.<br /></p><p>And then I ask the question that has been on my mind for a long time: <i>“Permettez-moi la question.</i> You must have been born in a Catholic family. <i>Comment avez-vous embrassé l’orthodoxie?”</i> it is a nice phrase: how did you embrace Orthodoxy?<br /></p><p>And then an amazing life story begins. With a very traditional Catholic family, where the father’s mother is a protestant from Alsace, but the father rejects this branch. Nevertheless, he still has the openness to enroll his son in the local Quranic school while living in Morocco: “you don’t have to believe in it, but if you live here, you have to learn what they do”. The boy speaks Arabic since childhood, does not believe in the Quran, but memorizes it, and goes to the Jesuits for religious instruction. In high school, like everyone else, he goes through crises of faith, then after graduation he finds his faith again and goes to the Holy Land. He works in a kibbutz, learns Hebrew, then is called to a priestly vocation, enters a Catholic monastery in Jerusalem, studies theology in Paris. Returning to Jerusalem, he studies in Jewish, Christian and Arab biblical and religious institutions, learns Russian, travels in the Holy Land, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. He feels himself ever closer to the Orthodox world. In 2002, he and his fellow like-minded monks return to France, where they found an Orthodox monastery in Cantauque. “The Catholic bishops have offered us a number of empty old monasteries, but the catch (he uses the phrase “poisoned gift’) is that they have to be maintained, which for a listed building costs an incredible amount of money.”<br /></p><p>It is strange how much this region is intertwined with the Holy Land, from where the emblematic figures of the region came: the Cathars, the Templars, the Crusaders and now the Orthodox.<br /></p><p>In France there does not seem to be a sharp dividing line between Catholic and Orthodox, as is shown by the many icons in Catholic churches. He is also invited to teach church history at the theology faculty in Toulouse. “I taught it for years until I felt more and more that Catholic church history was tendentious. It is taught as if Western Europe had been Catholic from the beginning. Yet in the beginning there was only one church, which was both Catholic, <i>universal,</i> and Orthodox, <i>true to the faith.</i> And it was the church of Rome that departed from this direction with the Carolingian Renaissance, becoming a Rome-centered provincial church. Look at it, the Orthodox church is still doing the same liturgy, singing the same hymns as it did two thousand years ago. And the Catholic church is constantly innovating. Even the recently re-authorized liturgy of Trent is not the original, it was an innovation in its day. Even the Gregorian chants can only be reconstructed. The truly great era of the Western church was when it had not yet departed from the original common faith. When they ask me what is the <i>raison d’être</i> of the Orthodox church in Catholic France, I answer: we are only bringing back what the Catholic Church originally was.”<br /></p><p>We came to the Pyrenees to visit <i>the region of great heresy</i> – the title of Bruno Schulz’s biography –, and over coffee in the most lively monastery there, we discover that the heretics are in fact us.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/french/cathar/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/gorogszentmarton-pireneusokban.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-4239764116174993432023-07-05T14:27:00.001+02:002023-07-05T14:27:40.619+02:00Походження і порятунок священних образів<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-szent-kepek-eredete-es-megmentese.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
У Луврі відкрилася нова виставка. Міжнародна виставка з винятково цінними предметами, які ніколи не експонувалися за кордоном.</p><p>Це не є чимось незвичайним на виставці. Але все інше є. Справа в тому, що предмети були передані музею не в <i>борг,</i> а на <i>зберігання.</i> До Франції їх везли не зі звичайною страховкою, а під броньованим військовим прикриттям. Експозиція складається лише з п’яти предметів – хоча чотири з них належать найдавнішим і найціннішим представникам своєї тематики. У виставки немає каталогу, лише короткі інформаційні написи французькою, англійською та – <i>українською.</i> І через відсутність каталогу та стислість написів зовсім не зрозуміло, що виправдовує амбітну назву: <i>«Походження священних образів».</i></p><p>На перші питання можна відповісти з щоденних новин, а на останнє – лише з сучасної літератури про ікони, і це власне мета цього посту. Але давайте спершу розберемося з першими.</p><p>Ще в травні Лувр оголосив, що найцінніші артефакти Національного музею Києва під військовим прикриттям перевезуть через Польщу та Німеччину до Парижа, де вони знайдуть притулок від воєнних руйнувань і пограбувань. Справді, згідно зі звітом ЮНЕСКО за жовтень 2022 року, російські окупанти знищили або пограбували в Україні 468 культурних об’єктів та установ, у тому числі 35 музеїв. Тому українська держава намагається зберегти артефакти, що знаходяться під загрозою зникнення, в іноземних колекціях. Наприклад, Музей Ватикану взявся за збереження ікон Києво-Печерського монастиря під час війни. Цей монастир належав Українській Православній Церкві, номінально залежній від Москви, поки Українська держава не передала його в березні цього року іншій, київській, автокефальній Православній Церкві України, яка була затверджена Константинополем у 2018 році. Російська преса негайно почала поширювати новини про те, що українська держава хоче прикрити західні поставки зброї, відправивши на Захід мистецькі скарби «Російської Церкви», і що ці скарби ніколи більше не побачать в Україні.</p><p>Під час іншої війни, десятиліття тому, ми, угорці, були б дуже щасливі, якби в Європі була країна, де ми могли б зберегти наші скарби мистецтва від знищення та пограбування ворогом. Почекайте, які вороги? Ну, росіяни. Але не було, тому що угорська держава подбала, як тоді, так і тепер, щоб ми не мали друзів у Європі, тільки той, чию дупу ми цілували, поки її знищення не потягло нас із собою. Ось чому частина наших мистецьких скарбів досі – свідомо чи таємно – перебуває в Росії, де закон 1998 року проголосив їх репараційний характер, тобто ми ніколи більше не побачимо їх в Угорщині. Тепер маємо радіти, що українська держава, яка бореться за власну свободу та свободу всієї Європи, все ще має друзів у Європі, які допомагають, щоб ці скарби людства зберігалися та залишалися доступними для фахівців та відвідувачів. </p><p>Оскільки первісною метою було не експонування, а збереження, не дивно, що більшість артефактів, вивезених на Захід, зараз неможливо побачити, але вони консервуються та реставруються за допомогою пожертвувань громадських фондів. Тим не менш, Лувр домовився з Національним музеєм Києва, що, частково як жест прихильників цих громадських фундацій, п’ять особливо цінних ікон буде виставлено на загальний огляд з 14 червня по 6 листопада.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Зазначу лише в дужках, що окрім підтримки, прихильникам доводиться ще й боротися за те, щоб побачити об’єкти. Нинішня концепція масового музею Лувру спрямована на те, щоб якнайшвидше перевести відвідувачів від контролю квитків до Мони Лізи, а потім повернутися до виходу. Цей маршрут позначений тисячею стрілок, а всі інші – майже жодною. А обслуговування оперує інформацією з відомим французьким менталітетом: якщо Бог дав тобі роботу, то Він, очевидно, дав і розум. Тож вони з неперевершеною впевненістю спрямовують вас у нескінченні коридори, у кінці яких напевно немає виставки ікон. Одна з мадемуазель хоче неодмінно відправити нас назад до входу, мовляв, щоранку вона бачила там цей плакат виставки, який ми, власне, просто сфотографували там серед усіх інших плакатів. Отже, ми пройшли близько чотирьох кілометрів музеєм, а на першому поверсі, під сходами, в проході між класичною грецькою та ісламською виставками ми виявили п’ять ікон, розміщених у напівтемряві, але освітлених чудовими прожекторами.<br /></p><p>Перша ікона — мікромозаїка кінця XIII — початку XIV ст. Окрім прекрасної срібної філігранної рами – ймовірно, візантійської роботи – вона в основних рисах повторює новгородську іконографію святителя Миколая, як і новгородська її сучасниця, що зберігається в Третьяковській галереї.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>Справжній сюрприз приходить лише після цього. Чотири ікони з монастиря святої Катерини на Синаї, ймовірно, усі з 6 століття, часу найдавніших відомих християнських ікон. Від часу знищення ікон Візантією у VIII-IX століттях збереглося ледве десяток християнських панно, переважна більшість із них у монастирі Св. Катерини на Синаї, куди не дійшла рука візантійців-знищувачів образів. Ці чотири ікони привіз звідти <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9_%28%D0%A3%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9%29">Порфирій Успенський</a> (1804-1885), одеський архімандрит, сходознавець і археолог, який був призначений головою Російської православної місії в Єрусалимі в 1842 році, і в наступні чотири роки він багато подорожував християнським Східом від монастирів Афону через Святу Землю до Синаю. <a href="https://www.google.de/books/edition/%D0%92%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%88%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B0%D1%80/_c_WDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9+%D0%A3%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9&printsec=frontcover">Його подорожній опис, опублікований у двох томах у 1856 році,</a> не описує, як він придбав ікони та інші художні скарби на Синаї. Відвідуючи Синайський монастир, не намагайтеся наслідувати його!</p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Монастир Святої Катерини на Синаї</span></p></div>
<p>Подорожній опис із детальним описом відвіданих монастирів та їхніх мистецьких скарбів не привернув особливої уваги. Але коли історик мистецтва Никодим Кондаков (1844-1925) представив на Московському археологічному з’їзді в 1890 році чотири ікони, привезені отцем Успенським і залишені ним у скарбниці Київського архієпископа, вони викликали фурор і значною мірою сприяли пожвавленню інтересу в іконах. Австрійський історик мистецтва Йозеф Стшиговський, який особливо цікавився східною традицією, опублікував їх опис через рік у I томі <i>Byzantinische Denkmäler,</i> і відтоді вони були загальновизнаними витоками християнського іконопису, хоча кілька інших сучасників зберігаються в Синайському монастирі. У 1917 році, коли Архієпископську скарбницю було націоналізовано, ікони були передані до Київського національного музею, який був названий на честь і виріс із спадщини великих київських колекціонерів - подружжя Богдана та Варвари Ханенків. За століття, що минуло з моменту їх «відкриття», дуже небагато іноземних відвідувачів мали можливість побачити їх у реальності.</p><p>Техніка ікон є особливою з точки зору пізніших епох. Панно того періоду — не лише християнські ікони, а й язичницькі вотивні малюнки, єгипетські портрети мумій і навіть грецькі мармурові статуї — були розписані за допомогою техніки <i>енкаустики,</i> під час якої пігменти змішували з розплавленим бджолиним воском, а потім випалювали на поверхні за допомогою нагрітого залізного інструменту. Це надавало картинам характерний, глибокий, вогненний колір, схожий на олійний живопис тисячу років потому.</p><p>Порівняння із сучасними жанрами також є натяком на причини назви виставки: <i>«Походження сакральних образів».</i> Відповідно до давнішої християнської традиції, християнство від початку використовувало ікони. Вони в основному посилаються на євангеліста святого Луку, який, як кажуть, перший написав образ Діви Марії. Сьогодні <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-window.html">в різних місцях зберігається не менше чотирьох десятків копій</a> цієї святої ікони. Звичайно, всюди оригінал.</p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Празька пивоварня <i>U Černého vola,</i> «Чорний віл», також отримала свою назву від символічної тварини євангеліста Луки, яка малює свою святу картину над входом у паб.</span></p></div>
<p>Однак мистецтвознавча література останніх десятиліть бачить цю історію інакше. Християнство, яке виросло з єврейського середовища, спочатку було аніконічною релігією: воно не практикувало і не потребувало образів. Почало сприймати їх, коли до нього приєдналися грецькі, римські та єгипетські віруючі, чия попередня релігійна чи цивільна культура включала використання зображень, і вони були адаптовані до християнських тем. Ганс Белтінг у <i>«Bild und kult»</i> (1990) в основному досліджує християнські парафрази римських політичних образів, тоді як Томас Ф. Метьюз у <i>«The dawn of Christian art in panel paintings and icons»</i> (2016) вказує, що перші відомі християнські ікони насправді є адаптаціями грецьких ікон і єгипетських релігійних вотивних панно. Християни починають використовувати зображення, спочатку лише прості символи в катакомбах, у 2-3 століттях, і потрібно ще 2-3 століття, поки вони не переймуть і адаптують язичницький релігійний живопис, який був дуже поширений у той час. Отже, перші ікони датуються VI століттям не тому, що попередні не збереглися, а тому, що найперші були зроблені саме в той час. І вони майже такі ж, як ви бачите тут, у Луврі.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Перша ікона — портрет преподобних Сергія і Вакха. Ці двоє грецьких воїнів прийняли мученицьку смерть на початку IV століття під час гонінь на християн за імператора Галерія. Вони були поховані в сирійській Ресафі — відомому як Сергіополь у Візантії — де над їхньою гробницею була споруджена важлива святиня, а їхній культ поширився по всьому стародавньому світу. Малий собор Святої Софії в стамбульському районі Султанахмет, який був побудований у 6 столітті як своєрідний взірець, щоб його дизайнери показали, що їх інноваційна архітектурна споруда міцно стоятиме в новозбудованому соборі Святої Софії, також присвячений їм.</p><p>На цій іконі вони зображені наполовину, у військовій формі, як на надгробках римських патриціїв. А над ними в маленькому медальйоні зображено лик Христа. Це композиційне рішення також сходить до римських офіційних уявлень. Римські чиновники мали звичай зображувати себе з образом свого начальника, зазвичай імператора, у медальйоні над головою. У випадку святого це було замінено зображенням його настоятеля - Христа. На диптиху зі слонової кістки V століття консула Юстина з Музею Боде в Берліні зображено не один, а три медальйони над головою консула: Христос посередині та імператорська пара по обидва боки від нього.</p>
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<p>На наступній іконі також зображені мученики св. Платон і Глікерія у вигляді нагробного портрета. Перший жив у 4 столітті в Анкірі (сьогоднішня Анкара), другий у 2 столітті в Траянополі. На одній іконі їх об’єднує те, що їхнє свято було 24 жовтня. Ця картина написана більш невмілою рукою, ніж попередня, але біло-червоні відблиски обличчя та кольори вбрання показують, що він принаймні знав, що він мав малювати. Можливо, панель пережила кілька перефарбувань, що також не підвищило її якість. З правого боку замість енкаустики олійною фарбою додано смужку, яка різко відмежовується від оригінального живопису. Між двома святими - фрагменти позолоченого хреста, прикрашеного коштовним камінням, і залишки напису під верхнім краєм. Розшифровка останніх проливає світло на особи мучеників.</p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Третя ікона – дуже гарна Богородиця з Дитятком Ісусом. Ганс Белтінг особливо звертає увагу на те, наскільки ця ікона, зроблена з контрапунктом, є більш класичною, ніж не набагато пізніша ікона Богородиці в римському Пантеоні, яка вже представляє жорстку середньовічну позу «показу».</p>
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<p>Нарешті, четверта ікона, зображення св. Іоанна Хрестителя, демонструє структуру, подібну до ікони Сергія і Вакха. Тут також «настоятель» Іоанна, Христос, постає в медальйоні. На нього вказують слова з Євангелія (Ів. 1, 29-30) св. Іоанна Хрестителя: «Ось Агнець Божий!». Це можна було прочитати і на фрагментарному написі, який він ніс у руці. З іншого боку, у подібному медальйоні, з’являється образ Діви Марії, і таким чином три фігури утворюють особливу деисусну групу – центральну потрійну групу іконостасу, – в якій Богоматір та св. Ісус не з обох сторін, як зазвичай, щоб милосердно судити людство, але один з тієї ж небесної висоти, що й він, а інший на землі, відповідно до його земної форми.</p>
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<p>Таке рішення медальйонів використано і на іконі, яку отець Успенський залишив у Синайському монастирі, але яку Белтінг за стилістичними ознаками пов’язує з іконами, що прибули до Києва. На цій іконі, також із VI ст., зображено святого Петра з медальйонним зображенням Христа над головою, а також два інших медальйони поруч із цим останнім, у яких дослідники здебільшого бачать матір і сина, які замовили ікону й подарували її монастирю.</p>
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<p>Підводячи підсумки, це причина, чому ця виставка, зведена до чотирьох образів, може носити назву «Походження священних образів». Його докладне пояснення, звичайно, вимагало б докладного каталогу, який би розповідав вам малюнок за малюнком та проілюстрований кількома іншими образами, що говорять Белтінг і Метьюз у своїх роботах. Сподіваємося, що це також народиться, і ми зможемо прочитати його о шостій годині вечора після війни «в Чаші». А точніше у Чорного Вола.</p></div>
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-szent-kepek-eredete-es-megmentese.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>
<br />
<span class="post-footer">
<a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-origin-and-rescue-of-sacred-images.html">in English</a> •
<a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="https://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/07/proiskhozhdeniye-i-spaseniye-svyashchennykh-obrazov.html">по-русски</a> •
<a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-szent-kepek-eredete-es-megmentese.html">magyarul</a>
</span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-10970382375790224002023-07-03T20:26:00.001+02:002023-07-03T20:26:44.772+02:00Происхождение и спасение священных образов<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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В Лувре открылась новая выставка. Международная выставка с исключительно ценными предметами, которые никогда не выставлялись за границей.</p><p>На выставке это не редкость. Но все остальное есть. Дело в том, что предметы были переданы музею не <i>взаймы,</i> а на <i>хранение.</i> Их везли во Францию не с обычной страховкой, а под бронетанковым военным прикрытием. Выставка состоит всего из пяти предметов – хотя четыре из них принадлежат старейшим и ценнейшим представителям своей тематики. У выставки нет каталога, только краткие информационные этикетки на французском, английском и – <i>украинском</i> языках. И из-за отсутствия каталога и краткости этикеток вообще непонятно, чем оправдывается амбициозное название <i>«Происхождение священных образов».</i></p><p>На первые вопросы можно ответить из ежедневных новостей, а на последний только из современной иконописной литературы, что и является, собственно, целью данного поста. Но давайте сначала разберемся с первыми.</p><p>Еще в мае Лувр объявил, что наиболее ценные артефакты Киевского национального музея будут перевезены под военным прикрытием через Польшу и Германию в Париж, где они найдут убежище от разрушений и разграбления военного времени. Действительно, согласно докладу ЮНЕСКО за октябрь 2022 года, российские оккупанты уничтожили или разграбили на территории Украины 468 объектов и учреждений культуры, в том числе 35 музеев. Поэтому украинское государство пытается обезопасить находящиеся под угрозой исчезновения артефакты в зарубежных коллекциях. Например, музей Ватикана взял на себя сохранение икон Киево-Печерского монастыря во время войны. Этот монастырь принадлежал Украинской Православной Церкви, номинально зависимой от Москвы, пока украинское государство не передало его в марте этого года другой автокефальной Православной Церкви Украины, одобренной Константинополем в 2018 года и центр которой находится в Киеве. Поэтому российская пресса тут же начала распространять новости о том, что украинское государство хочет прикрыть западные поставки оружия, отправляя на Запад художественные сокровища «русской церкви», и что эти сокровища больше никогда не увидят в Украине.</p><p>Во время другой войны, несколько десятилетий назад, мы, венгры, были бы очень счастливы, если бы в Европе была страна, где мы могли бы сохранить наши художественные сокровища в безопасности от разрушения и разграбления врагом. Подождите, какой враг? Ну - русские. Но этого не было, потому что венгерское государство позаботилось, как тогда, так и сейчас, чтобы у нас не было друзей в Европе, а был только тот, чью задницу мы целовали, пока это разрушение не увлекло нас за собой. Вот почему часть наших художественных ценностей до сих пор находится – явно или тайно – в России, где законом 1998 года объявлен их репарационный характер, а это означает, что мы никогда больше не увидим их в Венгрии. Теперь мы должны радоваться тому, что у украинского государства, которое борется за свою свободу, а также за свободу всей Европы, все еще есть друзья в Европе, которые помогают сохранить эти сокровища человечества и оставаться доступными для профессионалов и посетителей.</p><p>Поскольку первоначальной целью была не выставка, а сохранение, неудивительно, что большинство артефактов, вывезенных на Запад, сейчас нельзя увидеть. Их консервируют и реставрируют за счет пожертвований гражданских фондов. Тем не менее, Лувр договорился с Киевским Национальным музеем, что частично, в качестве жеста поклонникам этих гражданских фондов, пять особо ценных икон будут выставлены на всеобщее обозрение в период с 14 июня по 6 ноября.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Отмечу лишь в скобках, что помимо поддержки, сторонникам приходится еще и бороться за то, чтобы увидеть объекты. Нынешняя концепция массового музея Лувра заключается в том, чтобы как можно быстрее доставить посетителей от билетной кассы к Моне Лизе, а затем обратно к выходу. Этот маршрут отмечен тысячей стрелок, а все остальные – почти ни одной. А обслуживающий персонал обрабатывает информацию с известным французским менталитетом: если Бог дал тебе должность, значит, Он дал тебе и мозги. Так они с превосходящей уверенностью направляют вас в бесконечные коридоры, в конце которых уж точно нет выставки икон. Одна из мадемуазели хочет непременно отправить нас обратно ко входу, говоря, что каждое утро она видела там эту афишу выставки, которую мы, собственно, только что там сфотографировали среди всех остальных афиш. Итак, мы проходим по музею около четырех километров, а на первом этаже, под лестницей, в проходе между классической греческой и исламской экспозициями, мы обнаружили пять икон, помещенных в полумрак, но освещенных прекрасными прожекторами.</p><p>Первая икона представляет собой микромозаику конца XIII или начала XIV века. Помимо прекрасной серебряной филигранной рамы, вероятно византийского произведения — она повторяет в своих основных чертах новгородскую иконографию св. Николая, как и ее современник из Новгорода, хранящийся в Третьяковской галерее.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>Настоящее удивление приходит только после этого. Четыре иконы из монастыря Святой Екатерины на Синае, вероятно, все из 6 века, времени самых ранних известных христианских икон. От византийского уничтожения икон в VIII и IX веках сохранилось едва ли дюжина христианских панно, большинство из них в монастыре св. Екатерины на Синае, куда не дошла рука византийцев-разрушителей образов. Эти четыре иконы были привезены оттуда <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9_%28%D0%A3%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9%29">Порфирием Успенским</a> (1804-1885), одесским архимандритом, востоковедом и археологом, который в 1842 году был назначен начальником Русской Православной Миссии в Иерусалиме и в последующие четыре года много путешествовал по христианскому Востоку от монастырей Афона через Святую Землю до Синая. <a href="https://www.google.de/books/edition/%D0%92%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%88%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B0%D1%80/_c_WDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9+%D0%A3%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9&printsec=frontcover">В его рассказе о путешествии, опубликованном в двух томах в 1856 г.,</a> нет подробностей о том, как он приобрел иконы и другие художественные сокровища на Синае. Посещая Синайский монастырь, не пытайтесь подражать ему!</p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Монастырь Святой Екатерины на Синае</span></p></div>
<p>Путеводитель с подробным описанием посещенных монастырей и их художественных сокровищ не привлек особого внимания. Но когда искусствовед Никодим Кондаков (1844-1925) представил на Московском археологическом съезде в 1890 году четыре иконы, привезенные отцом Успенским и оставленные им в Киевской архиерейской казне, они произвели фурор и во многом способствовали возрождению интереса к иконам. Австрийский историк искусства Йозеф Стржиговский, который особенно интересовался восточной традицией, опубликовал их описание годом позже в томе I <i>Byzantinische Denkmäler,</i> и с тех пор они были общепризнанными источниками христианской иконописи, хотя некоторые другие современники сохранились в Синайском монастыре. В 1917 году, когда Архиерейская казна была национализирована, иконы были переданы в Киевский национальный музей, который был назван в честь и вырос из наследия великой четы киевских коллекционеров – Богдана и Варвары Ханенко. За столетие, прошедшее с момента их «открытия», очень немногие иностранные посетители имели возможность увидеть их в реальности.</p><p>Техника икон особенная с точки зрения более поздних веков. Панно того периода это не только христианские иконы, но и языческие вотивные картины, портреты египетских мумий и даже греческие мраморные статуи — были написаны с использованием техники <i>энкаустики,</i> при которой пигменты смешивались с расплавленным пчелиным воском, а затем выжигались на поверхности с помощью нагретого железного инструмента. Это придавало картинам характерный, глубокий, огненный цвет, похожий на масляную живопись тысячу лет спустя.</p><p>Сравнение с современными жанрами также намекает на причины названия выставки: <i>«Происхождение сакральных образов».</i> Согласно старой христианской традиции, христианство использовало иконы с самого начала. В основном они относятся к евангелисту Луке, который, как говорят, первый написал образ Девы Марии. Сегодня <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-window.html">в разных местах хранится не менее четырех десятков списков этой святой иконы.</a> Конечно, везде оригинал.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Пражская пивоварня <i>U Černého vola,</i> «Черный Бык», также получила свое название от символического животного святого евангелиста Луки, рисующего священную картину над входом в паб.</span></p></div>
<p>Однако в искусствоведческой литературе последних десятилетий эта история видится иначе. Христианство, выросшее из еврейской среды, изначально было аниконической религией: оно не практиковалось и не нуждалось в изображениях и начало принимать их, когда к нему присоединились греческие, римские и египетские верующие, чья предыдущая религиозная или гражданская культура включала использование изображений, и они были адаптированы к христианским темам. Ганс Бельтинг в книге <i>«Bild und Kult»</i> (1990) в основном исследует христианские парафразы римских политических образов, в то время как Томас Ф. Мэтьюз в книге <i>«The dawn of Christian art in panel paintings and icons»</i> (2016) указывает, что первые известные христианские иконы на самом деле являются адаптациями греческих и египетских религиозных обетных панно. Христиане начинают использовать изображения, сначала только простые символы в катакомбах, во 2-м и 3-м веках, и спустя еще 2-3 века, пока они не перенимают и не адаптируют очень распространенную в то время языческую религиозную панельную живопись к их убеждениям. Таким образом, первые иконы относятся к VI веку не потому, что более ранние не сохранились, а потому, что самые первые были сделаны в то время. И они почти такие же, как здесь, в Лувре.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Первая икона представляет собой портрет преподобных Сергия и Вакха. На ней изображены два греческих солдата, которые были замучены в начале 4 века, во время гонений на христиан при императоре Галерии. Они были похоронены в сирийской Ресафе, известной как Сергиополис в Византии, где над их могилой была построена важная святыня, и их культ распространился по всему древнему миру. Им также посвящен собор Малой Святой Софии в стамбульском районе Султанахмет, который был построен в 6 веке как некая модель, чтобы его архитекторы могли показать, что их новаторское архитектурное сооружение прочно встанет во вновь построенном соборе Святой Софии.</p><p>На этой иконе они изображены в половину роста, в военной форме, как и надгробия римских патрициев. А над ними в небольшом медальоне появляется лик Христа. Это композиционное решение также восходит к римским официальным представлениям. Римские чиновники изображали себя с изображением своего начальника, обычно императора, в медальоне над головой. В случае святого, это было заменено изображением его начальника – Христа. На диптихе консула Юстина из слоновой кости V века из музея Боде в Берлине изображен не один, а три медальона над головой консула: Христос в середине и императорская чета по обе стороны от него.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>На следующей иконе также изображены мученики святые Платон и Гликерия в виде поясного гробового портрета. Первый жил в 4 веке в Анкире (сегодняшняя Анкара), второй во 2 веке в Траянополисе. Объединяет их на одной иконе то, что праздник их был 24 октября. Эта картина написана более неумелой рукой, чем предыдущая, но бело-красные блики лица и цвета платья показывают, что он, по крайней мере, знал, что он должен был нарисовать. Панель, возможно, прошла через несколько перекрасок, что также не повысило ее качества. С правой стороны вместо энкаустики добавлена полоса масляной краской, резко отделяющая от оригинальной живописи. Между двумя святыми есть фрагменты позолоченного креста, украшенного драгоценными камнями, и остатки надписи под верхним краем. Расшифровка последнего пролила свет на личность мучеников.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Третья икона – очень красивая Богородица с младенцем Иисусом. Ганс Бельтинг особенно обращает внимание на то, что она выполнена более классично, с расчетом на контрапункт, чем не намного более поздняя икона Богородицы в римском Пантеоне, уже представляющая жесткую средневековую «показывающую» позу.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Наконец, четвертая икона, изображение св. Иоанна Крестителя, показывает структуру, подобную иконе Сергия и Вакха. Здесь также «начальник» Иоанна, Христос, запечатлен в медальоне. На него указывает Иоанн как написано в Евангелии (Ин. 1, 29-30): «Се, Агнец Божий!» Это читалось и на отрывочной надписи, которую он держал в руке. С другой стороны, в таком же медальоне, появляется образ Богородицы, и, таким образом, три фигуры образуют особую деисусную группу (центральную тройную группу иконостаса), в которой Богородица и св. Иоанн Креститель не с обеих сторон, как обычно, чтобы милосердно судить человечество, а она с той же небесной высоты, что и он, а другой на земле, по земному образу его.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Такое решение медальонов использовано и на иконе, оставленной отцом Успенским в Синайском монастыре, но которую Бельтинг стилистически связывает с иконами, пришедшими в Киев. На этой иконе, также VI века, изображен святой Петр с медальонным изображением Христа над головой и двумя другими медальонами рядом с этим последним, в которых исследования в основном видят мать и сына, заказавших икону, которою подарили монастырю.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Вот, вкратце, причина, по которой эта выставка, сжатая в четыре образа, может носить название <i>«Происхождение священных образов».</i> Его подробное объяснение, конечно, потребовало бы подробного каталога, который рассказывал бы вам картинкой за картинкой и иллюстрировал бы несколькими другими иконами то, что говорят в своих работах Бельтинг и Мэтьюз. Надеемся, что и этот каталог будет рожден, и мы сможем прочесть его в шесть часов вечера после войны в « У чаши». Или скорее в Черном Быке.</p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-origin-and-rescue-of-sacred-images.html" style="color: #5588aa;">in English</a></span> • <span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-szent-kepek-eredete-es-megmentese.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-60435201345291243272023-07-02T02:48:00.005+02:002023-07-02T08:13:33.376+02:00The origin and rescue of sacred images<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-szent-kepek-eredete-es-megmentese.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a>
A new exhibition has opened in the Louvre. An international exhibition with exceptionally valuable objects that have never been exhibited abroad.</p><p>This is not unusual in the exhibition. But everything else is. The fact that the objects were given to the musem not on <i>loan,</i> but for <i>safekeeping.</i> That they were transported to France not with the usual insurance, but under armored military cover. That the exhibition consists of only five objects – although four of them belong to the oldest and most valuable representatives of their subject. That the exhibition has no catalog, only short information labels in French, English and – <i>Ukrainian.</i> And that, due to the lack of a catalog and the brevity of the labels, it is not clear at all what justifies the ambitious title: <i>The origin of sacred images.</i></p><p>The first questions can be answered from the daily news, while the last one only from the modern literature on icons, and this is the actual purpose of this post. But let’s get over the first ones first.</p><p>Back in May, the Louvre announced that the most valuable artefacts of the National Museum of Kyiv would be transported under military cover via Poland and Germany to Paris, where they would find refuge from wartime destruction and looting. Indeed, according to Unesco’s October 2022 report, the Russian invaders destroyed or looted in Ukraine 468 cultural objects and institutions, including 35 museums. The Ukrainian state is therefore trying to secure endangered artefacts in foreign collections. For example, the Vatican Museum undertook the preservation of the icons of the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves during the war. This monastery belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, nominally dependent on Moscow, until the Ukrainian state handed it over, in this March, to the other, Kyiv-centered, autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which had been approved by Constantinople in 2018. Therefore the Russian press immediately started to spread the news that the Ukrainian state wants to cover Western arm shipments by sending the art treasures of the “Russian Church” to the West, and that these treasures would never be seen in Ukraine again.</p><p>In another war, decades ago, we Hungarians would have been very happy if there was a country in Europe where we could keep our art treasures safe from the destruction and plundering of the enemy – wait, which enemy? well, the Russians. But there was none, because the Hungarian state made sure, then as now, that we had no friends in Europe, only the one whose ass we were kissing until its destruction dragged us down with it. This is why a part of our art treasures are still – admittedly or secretly – in Russia, where the 1998 law declared their reparation character, meaning that we will never see them in Hungary again. Now we should rejoice that the Ukrainian state, which is fighting for its own freedom as well as for the freedom of all Europe, still has friends in Europe, who help to ensure that these treasures of humanity are preserved and remain accessible to professionals and visitors.</p><p>As the original purpose was not exhibition, but preservation, it is no wonder that the majority of the artefacts transported to the West cannot now be viewed, but they are being preserved and restored with the help of donations from civil foundations. Nevertheless, the Louvre has agreed with the National Museum of Kyiv that, partly as a gesture to the supporters of these civil foundations, five particularly valuable icons will be on public display between June 14 and November 6.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>I only note in parentheses that in addition to support, the supporters also have to fight hard for seeing the objects. The current mass museum concept of the Louvre is about getting visitors from the ticket control to the Mona Lisa as quickly as possible, and then back to the exit. This route is marked by a thousand arrows, while all the rest by almost none. And the attendants handle information with the well-known French mentality: if God gave you an office, He has obviously also given you brains. So they, with superior confidence, direct you towards endless corridors, at the end of which there is surely no icon exhibition. One of the mademoiselles wants to definitely send us back to the entrance, saying that every morning she used to see there this poster of the exhibition, which we actually just photographed there among all the other posters. So we walk about four kilometers in the museum, while on the ground floor, under a staircase, in the passage between the classical Greek and Islamic exhibitions, we discover the five icons placed in semi-darkness, but illuminated by excellent spotlights.</p><p>The first icon is a late 13th or early 14th-century micro-mosaics. Apart from the beautiful silver filigree frame – probably a Byzantine work – it follows, in its main lines, the iconography of St. Nicholas that appeared in Novgorod, as does its contemporary from Novgorod preserved in the Tretyakov Gallery.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The real surprise comes only after that. Four icons from the Monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, probably all from the 6th century, the time of the earliest known Christian icons. From before the Byzantine destruction of icons in the 8th and 9th centuries, barely a dozen Christian panel paintings have survived, the vast majority of them in the St. Catherine Monastery in Sinai, where the hand of the image-destroying Byzantines did not reach. These four icons were brought from there by <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9_(%D0%A3%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9)">Porfiry Uspensky</a> (1804-1885), Arch-Abbot of Odessa, orientalist and archaeologist, who was appointed head of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem in 1842, and in the following four years he extensively traveled through the Christian East from the monasteries of Athos through the Holy Land to the Sinai. <a href="https://www.google.de/books/edition/%D0%92%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%88%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B0%D1%80/_c_WDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9+%D0%A3%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9&printsec=frontcover">His travelogue, published in two volumes in 1856,</a> does not detail how he acquired the icons and other art treasures in Sinai. When visiting the Sinai Monastery, don’t try to imitate him!</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai</span></p></div>
<p>The travelogue with the detailed description of the monasteries visited and their art treasures did not attract much attention. But when art historian Nikodim Kondakov (1844-1925) presented at the Moscow Archaeological Congress, in 1890, the four icons brought by Father Uspensky and left by him to the Kyiv Archbishop’s Treasurey, they caused a sensation and greatly contributed to the revival of interest in icons. The Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski, who was particularly interested in the Eastern tradition, published their description a year later in Volume I of the <i>Byzantinische Denkmäler,</i> and from then on they have been generally recognized as the origins of Christian icon painting, although several other contemporaries are preserved in the Sinai Monastery. In 1917, when the Archbishop’s Treasury was nationalized, the icons were transferred to the Kyiv National Museum, which was named after and grew out of the legacy of the great Kyiv art collector couple Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko. In the century since their “discovery”, very few foreign visitors had the opportunity to see them in the reality.</p><p>The technique of the icons is special from the point of view of later ages. The panel paintings of the period – not only Christian icons, but also pagan votive paintings, Egyptian mummy portraits, and even Greek marble statues – were painted using the <i>encaustic</i> technique, which mixed pigments with melted beeswax, and then burned it onto the surface with a heated iron tool. This gave the pictures a characteristic, deep, fiery color, similar to oil painting a thousand years later.</p><p>The comparison with contemporary genres is also a hint at the reasons of the title of the exhibition: <i>The origin of sacred images.</i> According to the older Christian tradition, Christianity used icons from the beginnings. They mainly refer to the Evangelist St. Luke, who is said to have painted the image of the Virgin Mary after life. Today, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-window.html">at least four dozen copies of this very holy icon are preserved in various places.</a> Of course, the original everywhere.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Prague’s <i>U Černého vola,</i> “The Black Ox” brewery also takes its name from the symbolic animal of St. Luke the Evangelist, doing his holy painting above the pub’s entrance.</span></p></div>
<p>However, the art historical literature of recent decades sees this story differently. Christianity, which grew out of a Jewish environment, was originally an aniconic religion: it neither practiced nor needed images. It began to embrace these when it was joined by Greek, Roman and Egyptian believers, whose previous religious or civil culture included the use of images, and they were adapted to Christian themes. Hans Belting in <i>Likeness and presence</i> (1990) mainly examines Christian paraphrases of Roman political images, while Thomas F. Mathews in <i>The dawn of Christian art in panel paintings and icons</i> (2016) points out that the first known Christian icons are actually adaptations of Greek and Egyptian religious votive panel paintings. Christians begin to use images, at first only simple symbols in the catacombs, in the 2th and 3rd century, and it takes another 2-3 centuries until they adopt and adapt the pagan religious panel painting, which was very widespread at the time, to their beliefs. The first icons are therefore from the 6th century not because the earlier ones did not survive, but because the very first ones were made at that time. And they are pretty much the same that you see here in the Louvre.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The first icon is a portrait of St. Sergius and Bacchus. These two Greek soldiers were martyred at the beginning of the 4th century, during the persecution of Christians under Emperor Galerius. They were buried in the Syrian Resafa – known as Sergiopolis in Byzantium –, where an important shrine was built over their tomb, and their cult spread throughout the ancient world. The Little Hagia Sophia in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district, which was built in the 6th century as a kind of model, in order for its designers to show that their innovative architectural construction will stand firmly in the newly built Hagia Sophia, is also dedicated to them.</p><p>This icon depicts them half-legth, in military uniform, like the tombstones of Roman patricians. And above them, in a small medaillon, the face of Christ appears. This compositional solution also goes back to Roman official representations. Roman officials used to depict themselves with the effigy of their superior, usually the emperor, in a medaillon above their heads. In the case of a saint, this was replaced by the effigy of his superior, Christ. The 5th-century ivory diptych of the consul Justinus from the Bode Museum in Berlin shows not one, but three medaillons above the consul’s head: Christ in the middle, and the imperial couple on either side of him.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The next icon also depicts the martyrs St. Plato and Glykeria in the form of a half-length tomb portrait. The former lived in the 4th century in Ancyra (today’s Ankara), the latter in the 2nd century in Traianopolis. What brings them together on one icon is that their feast was on October 24. This picture was painted with a more clumsy hand than the previous one, but the white and red highlights of the face and the colors of the dress show that he at least knew what he was supposed to paint. The panel may have gone through several repaintings, which also did not raise its quality. On the right side, a strip was added with oil paint instead of encaustic, which sharply separates from the original painting. Between the two saints are fragments of a gilded cross decorated with precious stones, and the remains of an inscription under the upper edge. Deciphering the latter shed light on the identity of the martyrs.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The third icon is a very beautiful Virgin with the child Jesus. Hans Belting especially draws attention to how much more classical this icon, made with counterpoint in mind, is, than the not much later icon of the Virgin in the Roman Pantheon, which already represents the rigid medieval “showing” pose.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Finally, the fourth icon, the representation of St. John the Baptist, shows a structure similar to the icon of Sergius and Bacchus. Here, too, John’s “superior”, Christ, appears in a medaillon. To him points, according to the plot of Jn 1:29-30, St. John the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God!” This was also read on the fragmentary inscription he carried in his hand. On the other side, in a similar medaillon, the image of the Virgin Mary appears, and thus the three figures form a special <i>deesis</i> group – the central triple group of the iconostasis – in which the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist plead with Jesus not from both sides, as usual, to judge mercifully humanity, but the one from the same heavenly height as him, and the other from here on earth, according to his earthly form.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>This solution of medaillons is also used by an icon that Father Uspensky left in the Sinai Monastery, but which Belting connect, on stylistic grounds, with the icons that came to Kyiv. This icon, also from the 6th century, depicts St. Peter, with a medaillon image of Christ above his head, and two other medaillons next to this latter, in which research mostly sees the mother and son who ordered the icon and donated it to the monastery.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/ukraine/kievicons/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>This is, in short, the reason why this exhibition, condensed into four images, can bear the title <i>The origin of sacred images.</i> Its detailed explanation would of course require a detailed catalog, which would tell you picture by picture and illustrated with several other icons what Belting and Mathews say in their works. We hope that this will also be born, and we can read it at six o’clock after the war in the Chalice. Or rather in the Black Ox.</p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-szent-kepek-eredete-es-megmentese.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-73945169533616660142023-06-04T22:50:00.004+02:002023-06-04T22:58:32.044+02:00Resurrection<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/187.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/187k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/06/feltamadas-mardin-surp-hovsep-ormeny-katolikus-templom.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
At ten in the morning I leave with the group to visit the Christian quarter of Mardin. I can already see from afar that a decorated horse is waiting with its Kurdish caretaker at the corner of the street of the <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:886" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Surp Hovsep (St. Joseph) Armenian Catholic church. And this indicates a big event, since the horses used to appear on such events, so that the little boy dressed for the occasion or the bride dressed for a wedding photo could pose with them or eventually on them for some money. But what event can be here at ten in the morning on a Sunday? In the side street going down there is no building but Surp Hovsep, and it has been closed for decades. It is true that in recent years there has been a major restoration here, and I wondered what the church would be transformed into. I look down the side street and see that there are men dressed for the occasion waiting around the gate of the church, and then families walking up from below walk through the gate. Is it perhaps open? I run down to check it.</p>
<p>The gate is really open, families are really walking in. I would also go with them, but the men in suits standing at the gate tell me it is closed. “And them?” I point to the people going in. “To them it’s open.” “And when will it be open to others?” “Another time.” “When exactly?” “In two weeks”, a hitherto silent man in a suit from the back row tries to dissuade me. I look there, and see a familiar face next to the person. “Edip!” I shout with joy. It is the custodian of the Syriac Orthodox church, with whom I talked a lot after the visits last year. “Thomas!” he shouts, too. We shake hands. “Let him in, he’s a good friend”, he says to the men in suits. “I am with a small group, eight people. Can they come in, too?” I ask. “Sure”, Edip says, and the men in suits obligingly let us in.</p>
<p>“What is happening here?” I ask Edip, now in the courtyard. “The Armenian church was restored. It is being consecrated today.” “Are there that many Armenians in Mardin?” I point to the almost full church, where people are still entering. “No. But all Christians came, it is a feast for all of us.” And indeed, familiar faces now enter the gate, the parish priest of the Syriac Orthodox church and the Syriac Orthodox metropolitan dressed in festive vestments. They are heading in, we go in after them.</p><p>The consecration ceremony is already taking place in the church. The Armenian bishop and the choir are already at the back of the church, under the gallery. The text of the ceremony and the songs are Armenian, but sometimes I hear Turkish mixed in as well.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/833105953?h=467661dfa4&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p></div>
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<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/833107242?h=53234999b8&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p></div>
<p>I go forward to the altar, where an Armenian priest is already preparing the celebration, and the Syriac priests are sitting on the benches to the side as guests. After a short wait, the consecration ends in the back, and the priests with the choir, led by the bishop, come forward. The liturgy begins, in Armenian, with Armenian songs.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/190.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/190k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/191.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/191k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/192.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/192k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/193.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/193k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/194.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/194k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/833108052?h=8c7da61f06&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/833108585?h=0da601cf3e&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="352" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/833108713?h=d99d6706f9&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p>My baggy Kurdish pants and black shirt with a calligraphic quote from Hafez attract the attention of one of the young doormen, who asks me: “Are you Christians?” “Yes”, I answer, “Hungarians, from Budapest”. He smiles at us reassuringly.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/195.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/195k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The Surp Hovsep church was built in 1894 by the Armenian Catholic community in Mardin. Most Armenians belong to the independent Armenian Apostolic Church, which is Monophysite, so it is separated not only from the Catholics, but even from the Orthodox. However, for various historical reasons, one branch of the church accepted the Pope as their leader, while retaining their own Armenian liturgy and church language. The seat of the Armenian Catholic Metropolite in Turkey and Syria is precisely Mardin. The <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-red-church.html">recently visited Red Church,</a> which is now <a href="https://www.europanostra.org/armenian-church-mardin-targeted-europa-nostra-eib-institute/">listed among the seven most endangered monuments in Europe,</a> was the cathedral of this branch. And their parish church is Surp Hovsep, too. After the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the church was used as a barracks and then as an orphanage. Later – according to one of my sources, in 1949 –, the Armenian community got it back, but then it was closed for decades due to the emigration of the surviving Armenians and lack of financial resources. This is why today’s reconsecration is such a big feast, since the first Armenian church after the Genocide was rebuilt in Turkey in 2015, and since then maybe only one or two.<br /></p>
<p>“How many Armenians are there in the city?” I ask the young doorman. “Maybe we are six or seven families”, he replies. I wish the rebirth of this church would also mean the survival of the community.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/188.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/188k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/06/feltamadas-mardin-surp-hovsep-ormeny-katolikus-templom.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-44951152197318566892023-05-29T20:58:00.007+02:002023-05-30T08:14:13.321+02:00Brother Sun, Sister Moon<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/171.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/171k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/164.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/164k.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 5pt 0px 10px 15pt;" /></a><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/05/nap-fiver-hold-nover.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
I did not want to go to Harran. It does not matter that Abraham lived there, that Eliezer asked for Rebekah’s hand at that well for his master Isaac, that Jacob served fourteen years there for Rachel, that it has the castle of the moon-worshiping Sabeans and the centuries-old beehive houses, if the measure of arrogance and ripping-off practiced by the locals – and euphemistically formulated by touristic sites like “the locals go to great lengths to take care of the visitors” – is almost unbearable. You have not even gotten out of the car or the bus, and a multitude of self-appointed tour guides are already clinging to you, offering, in poor English, their services which amount to guiding you to the cafe-cum-open-air-museum set up in the nearest beehive house, where they sell coffee at the price of gold among the scenery of copperware and kilims bought in he Urfa bazaar, and on the way out they heavily rip you off under the pretext of an entrance fee. I’ve been there three times, and not one bit of me wants more.</p>
<p>I present my aversion to the group, but I also report honestly about the sights. Finally, the decision is made to leave after all, once we are just forty kilometers away here in Urfa, and that everyone would vigorously defend themselves against the onslaught. In the evening, I am still browsing the internet and Sinclair’s <i>Eastern Turkey</i> for some more attractions to add to this tour, and there are indeed a few locations that promise to be interesting.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/156.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/156k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Harran is as I expected. As soon as we stop at the Byzantine castle, a tour guide arrives by car. In such cases, refusing him in English or Turkish is not an option, but neither is not talking to him: he just sticks to you like a fly. The solution, in a strange way, is to only speak to him in Hungarian, slowly, articulately, and persuasively. He loses thread, while the group laughs in a circle, and after a while he wears off on its own.</p>
<p id="harrancastle"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:479" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Byzantine castle in the center of today’s settlement may have originally been a palace. Perhaps it was fortified only after the Muslim conquest. It is first mentioned in 958 by the historian Al-Maqdisi, who claims it to be “comparable to Jerusalem in beauty”. And this is no small compliment, because Al-Maqdisi came from a family of architects in Jerusalem, and he was very proud of the architecture of his hometown. The current state of the castle dates from the time of the Ayyubid dynasty around 1200: beautifully carved stones, carefuly designed geometric shapes, strong walls.
</p><p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/155.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/155k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>The most characteristic buildings of the surrounding settlement are the beehive houses. These were erected by their inhabitants from bricks mined from the ruins of the ancient city, and bound together with clay. They provide excellent protection against the summer heat. A family center consists of dozens of such beehives, built closely together and opening into each other, like a multi-domed peasant palace. According to Turkish tourism mythology, this building type has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and they even show you one that belonged to Abraham himself. In reality, the current inhabitants of Harran were tent-dwelling nomadic Bedouins just a few centuries ago, so this type may be more of a vernacular version of the bazaar dome, created recently due to the abundant availability of raw materials. Since the turn of the millennium, the Atatürk Dam has transformed the surrounding steppe into well-watered, abundantly productive lands, and the sudden wealth has caused the locals to move into “regular houses”. The beehives are used as stables, and more recently many of them have been arranged as folkloristic tourist traps.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/154.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/154k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>That Harran, this dirty and poor settlement was one of the most important cities of the ancient East, is now only evidenced by the incredible dimensions of the Roman and Ayyubid city walls. Inside the walls, there is only barren land, and around the former city gate the ruins of the Great Mosque and of the Islamic Theological University.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/151.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/151k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="sin"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:878" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Great Mosque was, of course, built on the site of the former Moon Temple. And this moon cult is perhaps the most interesting thing in all of Harran’s history. As early as the 8th century BC, the Harranians are recorded as worshiping the stars (i.e. the planets, including the Sun and the Moon), and this cult of Babylonian origin gradually focused on the Moon. The Assyrian kings, who had Harran as their second largest city after Nineveh, rebuilt the local temple of Sin, the moon god, even twice. But Sin’s most ardent admirer was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabonidus">Nabunaid,</a> the last Babylonian king (556-539), who must have been as original and stubborn a religious innovator as Akhenaten. Not born into a Babylonian family, he came to power through a coup. His father was probably from among the Assyrians (defeated only fifty years earlier <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/04/northern-mesopotamia-minute-by-minute.html#charcemish">at Carchemish, recently visited by us)</a>, and his mother an Aramaic from Harran, even a priestess of Sin. Nabunaid wanted to replace the Babylonian cult of the sun god Marduk with the veneration of Sin, and he also rebuilt his lunar temple in Harran, but Marduk’s priests invited the Persian king Cyrus as their ruler, out of fear of losing their bread. Cyrus marched into Babylon without a blow of the sword, and as a wise ruler he first left Babylon in the cult of Marduk, secondly he appointed Nabunaid as governor of a distant province, and thirdly he released the captive Jews to Jerusalem, who out of gratitude portrayed him in their holy books as a good boy, and Nabunaid as a bad boy. True, the name of the Babylonian king appears as Nebuchadnezzar in the 4th book of Daniel, but on the one hand this is the name of a previous bad boy, the Assyrian king who destroyed Northern Israel, and on the other hand, as Géza Komoróczy points out in the introduction to his translation of the Dead Sea Scroll entitled <i>Nabunai’s Prayer,</i> Daniel’s story is actually about Nabunaid.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/153.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/153k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">King Nabunaid worships the Sun, the Venus and the Moon on the Harran Stele in the Urfa Museum (another version is in the British Museum). Its text (excerpt): “Sin, the lord of all the gods and goddesses residing in heaven, has come down from heaven to (me) Nabonidus, king of Babylon! For me, Nabonidus, the lonely one who has nobody, in whose heart was not thought of kingship, the gods and goddesses prayed (to Sin) and called me to kingship. At midnight, he (Sin) made me have a dream and said (in the dream) as follows: «Rebuild speedily Ehulhul, the temple of Sin in Harran, and I will hand over to you all the countries.»”<br /></span></p>
<p>And perhaps the most interesting thing about the Harran moon cult is how well it survived all religious changes. In the 2nd century AD it was even able to convert among the Arab tribes immigrating here, and when Christianity became the state religion in 395, the mostly moon-worshiping Harranians bribed the local governor so that they could continue to practice their religion. And after the Muslim conquest, they preserved their faith by making the Arabs believe that they were the Sabaeans from among “the religions of the book” – Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, Sabaean – mentioned by Muhammad. Since by that time the real Sabaeans – probably a sect venerating St. John the Baptist – had long since disappeared, but the locals did have books – mainly astrological books –, so the Arab governor accepted this. This is how the religion, now called “Sabian” (in Arabic <i>sabi</i>) survived until the 1200s, when the Mongols relocated them to Mardin, where they finally merged with the Muslims. But in the meantime, they gave shelter to the Neoplatonic philosophers exiled from the Christian Roman Empire, who created here the school of “esoteric Islam”. It is telling, that the greatest astronomer of the Arab world was al-Battani as-Sabi, “the Sabian Battani” (858-929), who never converted to Islam, and who, due to his upbringing in Harran, could rely on two thousand years of astronomical experience.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/152.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/152k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Al-Battani’s astronomical tables in a Latin edition, Nuremberg 1537</span></p></div>
<p id="hanelbarur"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:879" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> After Harran, our next stop is Han el-Barur, “the Caravanserai of the Well”, located thirty kilometers to the east. The caravanserai was built in 1229 by Husam ed-Din Ali, probably a local Ayyubid provincial chief. On its façade, to the right of the gate, there was a lion, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/04/northern-mesopotamia-minute-by-minute.html#diyarbakirmosques">the royal animal of Persian origin of the medieval Mesopotamian dynasties,</a> whose belly and legs are only visible now. The well has long since dried up, but today there is no more need for it, because the water comes from the swollen Euphrates through canals and pipes. The resulting increase of population is flocking to us from the surrounding farms within minutes. Among them, a teenage girl brings a key and opens the gate. The courtyard of the caravanserai is a spacious, empty square space. A vaulted corridor runs around it on four sides, where people and animals stayed once. The entire building has been over-restored according to Turkish custom, as is evident from the fact that two vault sections were left unpolished, and the original surface is full of graffiti accumulated over the centuries: horsemen, camel with her foal, men dancing in circles. It is painful to imagine how much history might have been removed from the other four dozen vault sections under the name of “restoration”.</p>
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<img border="0" height="552" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/23/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#brumi23" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="suayipsehri"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:880" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The late antique city of Şuayb is only ten kilometers after the caravanserai. The city was built on a hill. At the hilltop is the still-standing façade and straight back front of a church. And all around it, to the bottom of the hill, are cave dwellings that are half carved into the rock and half built of stone or wood. Remains of arches and buildings made of large ashlars are also visible.</p><p>Shuayb was a prophet mentioned in the Qurʿan who was sent to a city called Madyan, but the people there rejected him, for which they received their due punishment. As Maydan, located on the pilgrimage route to Mecca, was also a cave city, perhaps for this reason it was identified with this city, which was thus called Şuayb Şehir – Shuayb’s city – after the Arab conquest. The few miserable houses around the ancient city – through whose courtyard you have to pass to it – are still called Şuayıpşehri. A cemetery once belonged to it, but its stones were broken by the locals. Some of their remains can be seen in the museum in Urfa. According to their testimony, the city was inhabited by Christian Arabs and Syriacs even centuries after the Muslim conquest.</p>
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<p>Local children cling to us here as well and they loudly demand money, but I only communicate with them in Hungarian. They also draw attention to the prophet’s former visit here, and then ask us if we are Muslims. When the eldest decides that we are not, he stands on a rock and begins to prophesy loudly in Turkish that all non-Muslims (kafirs) will go to hell. When nobody answers, he starts cursing us personally. He is screaming in an amost hoarse voice, revealing to us the deepest layers of the vocabulary of the besiegers of our fortresses in the 16th century. It is an amazingly archaic experience. This boy will become a priest. Obviously, he did not produce this hatred by himself, but from adults, parents, relatives and Muslim teachers. It breaks my heart to think that the local Syriac and Armenian Christians had to and must live with such neighbors and die at their hands. When I am fed up with him, I stand in front of him and tell him loudly, articulately, in Hungarian: “Listen to me, you infidel heathen. According to the teachings of the Holy Catholic Mother Church, anyone who does not accept and follow the decisions of the Holy Counciil of Trent is anathema and goes to hell. Give the idea some thought, allright?” He may not understand the teaching in its purity, but he feels its weight in my voice, and falls silent.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/157.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/157k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The prophet and, as a counterpoint, two kind children</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/158.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/158k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/159.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/159k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="sumatar"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:881" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> However, the most amazing experience awaits us another ten kilometers away, in the village of Yağmurlu. Sinclair’s <i>Eastern Turkey</i> indicates here the ancient settlement of Sumatar. It was actually a well in one of the valleys of the Tektek Mountains – now a national park – around which the 1st to 3rd-century semi-nomadic Arab tribes gathered and established a common place of worship. The object of it was precisely the star and moon cult of Harran, which clearly indicates how natural the reverence of the moon was among the nomadic Semitic peoples, including the Jews and Arabs, whose religious calendar is still based on the cycles of the moon. From my previous readings I know that there will be a cultic cave and some kind of carvings.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/166.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/166k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="moseswell">Arriving in the village, we look at the surrounding barren limestone hills at a loss. On some of them there are natural caves as well as man-made cave dwellings, or remains of built structures. But which was the cult center? The local children are gathering around us, but here they are much more tactful than in the previous places. I ask one of the bigger boys if he knows where the statues are. “Yes”, he points firmly to the north. “They are there. They are twelve.” We’re off. Mehmet soon stops. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:882" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> “This is the well of Moses.” “Of the prophet?” “Yes, his.” He points at a deep square well carved in limestone, with a pump so old that even Moses could have used it. Apparently, this was the well around which the Bedouin tribes following the cult gathered at the time.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/160.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/160k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/161.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/161k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>We continue for about two hundred meters along the marshy stream that flows from the well. The houses of the village follow the road on the right, and gardens surrounded by stone walls on the left. Most of them are made of carefully carved large stones, apparently taken from ancient cultic structures. However, most of the houses are now uninhabited and empty.</p>
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<p id="sumatarcave"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:883" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We arrive at a cave. Mehmet goes forward.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/162.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/162k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The three walls, floor and ceiling of the cave were carved out straight. And the three walls are in fact covered with sculptures, or more precisely, reliefs. Standing men in tall, peaked hats and knee-length tunics, in the style of the Parthian – i.e. Hellenized Persian – art of the 2nd and 3rd century, of which they are thus the westernmost representatives. Next to the heads of the states are eloquent Aramaic or rather Edessan (Urfan) Syriac texts. I look it up, and these inscriptions were published with translation and commentary in Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies series, in <i>The Old Syriac Inscriptions of Edessa and Osrhoene</i> (1999). We have it in Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek, so as soon as I get home, I will borrow it and report the exact text. Until then I will have to rely on the brief summary of <i>Eastern Turkey.</i></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/163.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/163k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A wide, empty niche opens in the middle of the western wall opposite the entrance. On its two sides, in two narrower niches, two men are standing. Both are called Aurelius Haphsai, but the one to the right was commissioned by Bar Nahar, son of Rinai, while the left one by the son of Tiridates. Both pilasters separating the niches have a crescent moon, above which a cross was carved probably much later. Rinai and Tiridates were successive Arab rulers of the region, which explains the function of the reliefs. They probably immortalize the memory of important political figures and offer them into the protection of the main deity, the moon god Sin here, in the cult place of the dead. The reliefs were commissioned in different times of the 2nd and 3rd century by donators who were relatives or friends of local rulers. All this indicates that the local Arab elite did not adhere to the desert religion of their subjects, but adapted the Harran moon cult instead, which was considered nobler, as well as the Aramaic/Syriac language of Edessa, and certainly tried to fit in with the Edessa elite.</p>
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<p>The southern wall has a low arched entrance into a small alcove in the middle. To its right stand two figures, father and son, both named Waʿel. The father was a ruler of the area. Both were commissioned by a third Waʻel, probably a relative. On the left side of the arch, in an arched niche, stands a very worn figure, without inscription.</p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<p>On the right (northern) wall there are four figures. The relief of the first, Abgar, also a local ruler, was commissioned by Manu, Grand Vizier of Edessa, who lived at the turn of the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC, and whose name also figures on one of the columns of the citadel of Urfa. The next one is Bar Nahar, son of Rinai. Next to him is Tiridates, who founded the entire cult place in 165. Next to him stands his younger brother. On the narrow section of the wall next to the entrance there is a niche for a very worn figure without any inscription.</p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<img border="0" height="273" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/28/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#brumi28" width="550" /></p></div>
<p>It is a poignant feeling to stand here, on the borderlands of vanished empires, in the unknown cave of an abandoned village, the last witness of a forgotten religion that was so powerful and extraordinary in its time that, while it survived world religions for millennia, empires declined because of it, and its lunar calendar is still used by two great religions; and the knowledge it created, al-Battani’s tables recording the changing distances between the Sun and the Earth, led Copernicus to the idea of a heliocentric world model.</p>
<p>The children who have accompanied us up to this point probably don’t understand the reason for our emotion, but they seem to feel something of it because they too are silent. Only the gecko hiding in the cracks of the wall distracts them for a while.</p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<p>Mehmet leads us ahead, first back to where the bus is standing, then further south. Meanwhile, his younger brother Ahmet points to the surrounding heights, on which there are some ruins, perhaps former observatories, and lists their names: the mountain of Venus, of the Moon, of Mars. It is as if he were looking at them through the eyes of Nabunaid standing on the Harran Stele. It is amazing how this knowledge has been preserved here in the village for three thousand years.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/167.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/167k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/168.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/168k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>And in the middle, ahead of al-Battani’s tables and Copernicus’ model, is the Hill of the Sun, surrounded by the remains of former ashlar walls.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/170.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/170k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>We pass through the garden of the only brick building in the village, the school, and climb the limestone hill behind the Hill of the Sun. A chamber carved into the side of the hill is yawning before us. Inside there are niches in the wall, with a cross scratched above them, and nothing else but dry sheep manure thickly covering the floor.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/172.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/172k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/173.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/173k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/174.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/174k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="sumatartemple"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:884" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Climbing even higher, you can see that a rock wall rises on the flat top of the hill, through which stairs lead up to the plateau. On the wall of the right side of the stairs there are two reliefs, a worn bust in a semicircular niche, on which five folds of clothing can still be seen, and next to it, in a higher semicircular niche, under a conch, a standing male figure. Both are accompanied by a Syriac inscription carved deep into the wall. Ahmet steps up to them and, as if performing a ritual play, asks them: “Tell me, <i>Suryani,</i> Syriac, who are you?” Then he answers in a high voice in the name of the bust: “I am Sin”, and translates it as “Ay”, meaning the Moon. And in the name of the full-figured statue, in a deep voice: “And I am Shamal, that is, Güneş”, i.e. the Sun. Ahmet’s knowledge is impressive, but the literature disputes it, considering both reliefs to be images of Tiridates, the local ruler who founded the cult site in AD 165. Only their inscriptions dedicate them to the god Sin.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/175.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/175k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/176.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/176k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/177.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/177k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/178.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/178k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/179.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/179k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/180.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/180k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/181.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/181k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A moon sanctuary once stood on the plateau, the center of the entire cult site, but today only a few ashlars remain on the western edge. But nine Syriac inscriptions were also carved into the plateau. The two outermost are founding inscriptions in the name of Tiridates, and the other seven perpetuate the memory of living persons.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/182.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/182k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/183.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/183k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/184.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/184k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>From the plateau, we once again look around the barren limestone hills of the Tektek Mountains, the heights dedicated to the stars, and the valley, where once lived a people who were tent-dwelling nomads, but they knew and venerated the movements of the planets, and passed this knowlege on to their late descendants.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/169.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/169k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
</div>
<br />
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/05/nap-fiver-hold-nover.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-28776542103936357572023-05-28T08:53:00.004+02:002023-05-28T10:19:10.420+02:00The Red Church<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/124.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/124k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/05/a-voros-templom.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
This morning in the Mardin museum, standing in front of the map of Mardin’s monuments, I catch sight of the Red Church, marked with the red number 54 and emphasized with a small drawing. And the passion that a hunter can feel at the unexpected reappearance of a capital deer that has been scouted for years flares up in me again.</p>
<p>I have been looking for Kırmızı Kilise, the Red Church, officially called Surp Kevork, i.e. St. George Armenian Catholic Church in Mardin for years. Google Maps gives its location, and the available literature also roughly locates it there, but there is no church of any kind in that place. The people in the neighborhood haven’t heard of it either, they shrug their shoulders. At this time last year, Noémi and I spent an entire morning visiting the whole quarter, with the only result that we were able to typologize the informants: there are those who admit they do not know it (mainly women), those who quite resolutely steer you in the wrong direction (mainly men), and those who even lead you to the wrong address, mostly to the Mor Hürmüzd Syriac Catholic Church on the other side of the main street, which I have seen many times (red number 18), and there they ask for the bakshish (mainly young boys).</p>
<p>This time I am stubborn. I dismiss the group at five o’clock, I have time until seven. I put on my chamois-feathered hat, I load my rifle, and sit down where everyone knows everything, <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:877" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> the Kiraathane, the smoky old boys’ café found in every Turkish neighborhood.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/125.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/125k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><i>Affedersiniz, Kırmızı Kilise’nin nerede olduğunu biliyor musunuz?</i> excuse me, do you happen to know where the Red Church is? I ask the waiter after the first coffee. He frowns deep, then admits that he is new here, he does not know it, but will ask someone. This someone is the owner of the café, Servet, who willingly comes to my table. “Hungarian? There were many Hungarians in the city this morning.” I congratulate him on his insight, and tell him that it was my group. I will bring the next one to him. “A hundred meters ahead on the main street, under the Sultan Sofrası restaurant you go down into the bazaar, down to the Great Mosque, from there straight down to the well of the Jews, and everyone will tell you there.” Because the above map is not meant for flat terrain, but for a hillside, so that each street is at least thirty meters lower than the previous one. “And if you are interested in anything else, feel free to come. We can help with everything here.” He lets himself be photographed under his grandfather’s photo. The café was opened nearly a hundred years ago.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/126.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/126k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/127.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/127k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>My descent through the winding alleyways is followed by the suspicious glance of three-headed lions, worrying for their prey. I am only a hundred meters away from the destination marked on the map, when the manager of the Mardius historical guest house would direct me back on the main street, because he had never heard of the Red Church either. But I’m moving on.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/128.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/128k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/129.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/129k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A steep staircase leads up from the well of the Jews. The block on the left, where Google Map marks the Red Church, really stands out, it is surrounded by a fortress wall with a gabled roof, and tall buildings with large arches rise above it. But at the place marked by Google Map there is no entrance.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/131.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/131k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A man comes down the stairs with a water can in the hand. I ask him, too. He answers firmly – but not with the Oriental male determination which is just making it up – that I should go up the stairs to the Cevheriye fountain, turn sharply back on the other stairs, and there will be an entrance.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/132.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/132k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:876" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The 14th-century Cevheriye fountain is an important point of reference in the Great Mosque neighborhood. Its water is considered to have a healing effect.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/133.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/133k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/134.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/134k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>From there, steep stairs lead up along the west side of the block. At the turn, a fourteen-year-old boy stands in front of a house. He looks at me and asks: “Are you looking for the church?” I say yes.<a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:875" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> He steps forward and pushes open an iron door that you would have never thought was open.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/135.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/135k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/136.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/136k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>After the iron door, there is a dark doorway a few meters long, followed by a former church courtyard densely overgrown with fig trees. The church gate rises several steps to the left, but is locked with a chain and padlock.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/137.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/137k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>To the right, an open gate leads to another courtyard, whose arcades recall a former monastery courtyard. I just enter and start taking photos, when a belligerent old Kurdish woman comes out of the end of the courtyard, and shouts that it is forbidden to take photos. I am saving the trump card, the red-bellied tranquilizer, for the next week, when I am going to come here with a small group, so now I am just eagerly nodding while taking photos around the yard from left to right.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/138.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/138k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/139.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/139k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/140.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/140k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/141.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/141k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In the courtyard itself, there are a few carved gravestones, most of them in secondary placement. Their inscription is mainly Arabic. Yıldız Deveci Bozkuş in his study <a href="https://docplayer.biz.tr/42021396-Mardin-yoresinde-ermeni-arap-iliskilerinin-ermenice-arapca-uzerindeki-etkilesimleri.html"><i>Mardin yöresinde Ermeni-Arap ilişkilerinin</i> (Armenian-Arab relations in the Mardin region)</a> writes that the Armenians of Mardin used the majority language of the city, Arabic, as their everyday language and on tombstones, and he illustrates this with several tombstones of the Red Church (which, according to the photos of the article, were in the wall of the courtyard, but I could not find them).</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/142.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/142k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/143.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/143k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/144.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/144k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The Arabic text of the fragment used as a stair begins with the year 1904, which refers to the Christian calendar, since the Muslims only wrote 1322 at that time<br /></span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/145.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/145k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">A retaining wall assembled from carving fragments. The boy who let me in is still standing next to me and retails me information: “A Christian tombstone. You know, this is a Christian church. Here there were Christians and Jews, that is, </span><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giaour"><i>giaour</i>s</a></span><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">”, he uses a term with absolute nonchalance which I thought was used the last time by the 16th-century Ottoman conquerors<br /></span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/147.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/147k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/148.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/148k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">An Armenian-language tombstone fragment on the top of the retaining wall</span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/149.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/149k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Tombstones with Arabic and Armenian inscriptions in the garden of the Red Church. From Bozkuş’s article</span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/150.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/150k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Tombstone of Father Der Hovsep Kendiryan from 1822, with Arabic and Armenian inscription, in the garden of the Red Church. From Bozkuş’s article</span></p></div>
<p>Bozkuş reports, that during the repair of the church in 1791, an inscription was found, which dates the foundation of the church to 420. <a href="https://www.mardinsoz.com/yazi/mardin-de-bir-kirmizi-kilise-2171.html">Nesrin Aykaç’s informative article in <i>Mardin Söz</i></a> (December 1, 2022) also adds that after the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – which claimed especially many victims in Mardin – the two Armenian Catholic churches, Surp Kevork and Surp Hovsep, were used as barracks and as an orphanage for children left without parents in the genocide. The two churches were returned to the Armenian community in 1949. The latter was restored in 1949, the former between 1950 and 1954, and opened for worship. Today, however, most of the surviving Armenians have left Mardin, and the church is permanently closed. It seems that several people live in its courtyard and monastery building. The municipality has not yet decided on its fate.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/146.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/146k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<br />
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/05/a-voros-templom.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-69558361205177466962023-05-22T07:22:00.005+02:002023-05-24T11:26:09.762+02:00The vanished Van<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/112.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/112k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p></p><table border="0" style="float: right; margin: -2pt 0pt 5px 20px; width: 170px;"><tbody>
<tr><td><span style="color: #999999; font-size: 85%;">
<a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/05/van-ami-nincs.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
This text grew into a complete post from the originally planned two paragraphs of <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/04/northern-mesopotamia-minute-by-minute.html">our travelogue <i>Northern Mesopotamia minute by minute</i>.</a></span></td></tr></tbody></table>Van’s downtown is large, modern and lively, with a decidedly French atmosphere. Its wealth is partly due to the fact that this is the Turkish city closest to the Persian border, and the people from the other side easily come over for a pinch of freedom. This is often mentioned with awe in Iranian films. And they leave their money here with Persian generosity. In the hotels and on the street, everything is written in Persian as well, and when I accidentally ask in Persian, rather than Turkish, how much the parking will cost for an hour, the parking lot guard easily answers in Persian that it will be twenty liras.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/090.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/090k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“We buy dollars and euros at a high price” (in slightly faulty Persian). Just imagine at what high price it was bought on the other side of the border, before changing them here.<br /></span></p></div>
<p>Towards the lake, a huge limestone rock, an upturned geological table, rises one hundred meters and extends one and a half kilometers. Its astonishing height can be clearly seen from Mount Erek, rising to the east of the city. As if it were a beached whale or a primeval being, which it actually is.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/092.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/092k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The city ends at the base of the rock, from which a large, slightly swampy green field stretches south. The edge of the field on the city side is cultivated as a park, where families are having picnics today, it being the First of May. But inside its vast interior there are only a few scattered ruins, with cows grazing among them. The remains of a fortress stands on the plateau of the rock. Some of its stones still have Urartian cuneiform writing. According to local Armenian tradition, this was the castle of Semiramis, who was so in love with the Armenian king Ara that, after his death, she tried to revive his corpse. This story was probably taken over by Plato in a narrative of his <i>State,</i> as <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2008/07/dying-and-resurrecting.html">I have already written.</a> The impressive effect of the rock fortress is also conveyed by engravings of 18th and 19th-century European travelers, with obvious exaggeration.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/095.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/095k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/096.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/096k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/091.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/091k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In this 1838 engraving by Eugène Boré, you can also see that the castle was not always a pasture. In his time, there was still a city here, with walls, a citadel, mosques, and churches. This was the old town of Van, founded in the 9th century BC as Tushpa as the capital of the Urartian kingdom. The walled city is also shown on <i>armenica.org</i>’s 1915 map of Van, upper left, at the southern base of the Citadel (Shamiramabert), full of small red Armenian churches. What happened to these, where did they go?</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/093.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/093k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/094.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/094k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p></p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="float: right; margin: 5pt 0px 10px 18pt; padding: 0px; width: 200px;"><tbody><tr align="center"><td valign="top" width="100%"><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/099.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/099k.jpg" style="border: 0px none; margin: 0pt 0px 8px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a><span style="color: #999999; font-size: 85%;">Rafael de Nogales Mendéz, a Venezuelan military officer who served under Djevdet in the Ottoman army, and, in 1925, published a detailed account of the Armenian and Syriac genocide he witnessed<br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table>
In Van, the Armenian genocide began much earlier than April 24, 1915, or “Bloody Sunday”, which is considered its official starting point. In the summer of 1914, on the eve of the war, local governor Hasan Tahsin, who was sympathetic to the Armenians, was transferred to Erzurum, and the notoriously cruel Albanian Djevdet Pasha, the brother-in-law of Enver Pasha – the Ottoman minister of war, the actual ruler of the empire, and the initiator of the Armenian genocide – was sent to replace him. Djevdet’s Turkish soldiers and the Kurdish irregular troops that joined them ransacked the surrounding Armenian villages in the name of tax collection and in search of hidden weapons, slaughtering thousands of Armenian and Syriac Christians – about 55 thousand of them, according to the American physician Clarence Douglas Ussher practicing here. At the sight of this, the Armenian population of Van built ramparts around the city, and organized armed resistance in case of an eventual attack.<p></p><p>The attack began on April 20, 1915. The government forces put the city under artillery fire. The Armenians defended it for a month until the advancing Russian army drove the Ottoman forces out of the city on May 17. However, in July, the Ottomans launched a counterattack and gradually pushed the Russians out of the region. Van’s Armenian population and the Armenian survivors of the countryside who fled into the city, a total of 250 thousand people, joined the retreating Russians towards Yerevan. In the attacks of the Ottoman army and the Kurdish robbers, 40 thousand of them perished before they could cross the Russian mountain passes.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/098.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/098k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“Armenian refugees in Van around a public oven, hoping for bread”. An illustration of the diary of Henry Morgenthau, US Ambassador in the Ottoman Empire, published in 1918<br /></span></p></div>
<p>Since then, the official Turkish historiography has presented the event as an Armenian rebellion and collaboration with the Russian enemy, which had justified the “displacement” (as they call their massacre) of the Anatolian Armenians. However, the chronology of the events clearly refutes this. Even a few years ago, there was an exhibition on the first floor of Van Museum, that illustrated the genocide allegedly committed by the Armenians against the Turks, in the form of a staged picture with real human skeletons and skulls. Due to international protest, this was first closed and then removed.</p>
<p>The city of Van was completely destroyed during the fighting. The present-day city center to the east of the fortress – the former garden city – has since been rebuilt, but the old town within the historical walls is now a mere pasture, with the ruins of a few buildings, which, however, still hint at the city’s former greatness.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/097.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/097k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><iframe height="560" src="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=van-hu/0/18" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 20px; text-align: center;" width="560"></iframe><span style="color: #999999; font-size: 85%;">• If the interactive map is not visible, replace <i>https</i> with <i>http</i> in the url of this post •</span></p></div>
<p>In the middle of the field are the ruins of two medieval mosques, and the lower parts of their minarets. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:864" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The western one, built of simple bricks, was the Ulu Jami, the Great Mosque, while <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:863" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> the eastern one, decorated with diamond-patterned tiles, was the Red Minaret Mosque. The former was built in the 12th century by the Karakoyunlu Turkic tribe that conquered the city, the latter by the Seljuk Turks in the 13th century.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/100.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/100k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/van/1/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#brumivan1" width="550" /></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:865" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Near the rock are the ruins of two churches. One, whose vaulted apse is still partially standing, is the 15th-century Surp Vardan (Saint Vardan). On its walls you can still see traces of linear decoration giving off six-pointed stars, perhaps traces of painting. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:866" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The other, smaller church whose dome collapsed is Surp Stephanos. Farther away, near the former city wall, there is another small church, <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:867" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> the Dsirvanarov chapel, which was restored for an unknown purpose, without any Christian signs, but its bottom is now filled with algal water.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/101.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/101k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:868" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> In the middle of the former city, roughly where the old map marks “Topchu Plaza”, stands a large ruin with several halls whose vaults, judging from the corbels, were rather low. Through a crack in the wall, I see a young Kurdish man sitting outside, reading his phone. I ask what this building was. “A bath”, he says.</p>
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<p>On the southern edge of the field, along the road, there are two intact mosques. They may have been renovated recently, because Openstreetmap still marks both of them as “ruins”. Both were built in the 16th century as typical small Ottoman mosques, with a single dome above a square floor plan, and with an arcaded porch. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:869" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> With the one to the east, the Kaya Çelebi mosque, we are lucky, because the person with the key is just coming and opens it for us.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/102.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/102k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:870" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The one to the west, the Khosrow Pasa mosque, is open all the time. This is a larger complex, with a <i>türbe</i> at its corner, probably the tomb of the founding pasha. The courtyard in front of the mosque is surrounded on three sides by a ground-floor building, perhaps a former <i>tekke</i> – a dervish monastery –, and in the middle there is a fountain house for ritual ablution. A wedding photo shoot is taking place in the yard. The bride is surrounded by several beautifully dressed bridesmaids, looking like colorful birds.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/104.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/104k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/103.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/103k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/105.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/105k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:871" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> On the other side of the road is a huge field surrounded by a wall. It looks like a former cemetery, although now it has only four graves, of four Turkish military officers from the 1910s. And a small building that totally looks like an Armenian bell tower. Nevertheless, to avoid any confusion, a modern plaque is exposed on it: “Timuroğlu Derviş Mehmet Paşa (18th century)”. Next to it are the ruins of a former stone building, with some carved stones, as well as several standing stones which look like <i>khachkars,</i> Armenian tombstones, but any inscription they once may have had has been effaced.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/106.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/106k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/107.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/107k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/108.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/108k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:872" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We don’t have the time to go up to the castle now. We can only look up from the field at the rock wall, where the Persian Great King Xerxes left <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I_inscription_at_Van">a three-language – Persian, Elamite, Babylonian – cuneiform inscription</a> around 480 BC, in a a frame polished by his father, Darius. The inscription glorifies the Zoroastrian one God, Ahura Mazda, and asks him to bless the king and his kingdom, including Tushpa, present-day Van. It badly needs it.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/110.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/110k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/111.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/111k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><audio controls="controls" preload="none"><source src="http://www.studiolum.com/wang/audio/harutyunyan-nazami.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"></source></audio><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Hasmik Harutyunyan: <i>Nazani.</i> From the CD <i>Armenia Anthology</i></span></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/109.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/109k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<br />
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/05/van-ami-nincs.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-82147645295781795172023-04-27T11:51:00.104+02:002023-06-03T07:01:17.144+02:00Northern Mesopotamia, minute by minute<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/04/eszak-mezopotamia-percrol-percre.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
The first and funniest book I read about Catalonia, my country of choice at the time, sixteen years ago, was expat Matthew Tree’s travelogue <i>Un anglès viatja per Catalunya per veure si existeix</i> (An Englishman travels through Catalonia to see if it exists).</p><p>I am now embarking on a similar, though I expect a much less fun journey, to see if Northern Mesopotamia, from Gaziantep to the Syriac monasteries of Tur Abdin, still exists after the terrible earthquake in February.</p><p>That it exists geographically is confirmed by recent Google Earth photos. But I have to find out what the conditions are there, whether our journey leads to disaster tourism.</p><p>After the two highly successful trips to Mesopotamia early last summer, I announced two more trips for the end of May and the beginning of June this year. Every fellow traveler had already bought the not-cheap round-trip flight tickets when the news of the earthquake reached us. Instead of canceling immediately, I wrote around: let’s wait and see what happens in three months, and I will travel the planned route at the end of April, and will report – honestly, leaving all business interests aside – on what’s going on in Mesopotamia, whether it’s worth undertaking the trip.</p><p>I am starting this journey now, sitting here in Brussels airport.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Boarding. It is not chimney sweeps that bring me luck on a plane. Eighty Hasidim cannot be wrong.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The plane arrives in Gaziantep after ten in the evening. You can see the lights of the old town from the window. It shines with full illumination, like a cool tourist town, where everything is fine.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="anadoluevleri"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:841" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Our well-established accommodation, Anadolu Evleri, an old Ottoman merchant palace in the downtown is thirten kilometers from the airport. Driving inward, we try to recognize the signs of possible destruction, but we see nothing of the sort. In recent years, high-rise residential complexes and huge tower blocks have been built in this part. I’ve been in and out of them enough between the airport and the city to remember them, but I see no change, no empty plots, no ruins. The earthquake made no destruction here.<br /></p>
<p>After unpacking at the hotel, we take a short tour of the city center around midnight. In the restaurants, set up in the courtyards of the caravanserais, music is still playing, in some of them there are only the waiters, but the usual evening life has apparently not been broken. Now we see the first damage. The pointed top of Karagöz Mosque’s minaret has fallen, and the building was surrounded by an aluminium screen. And the wall of the castle has collapsed in several places, but as far as you can judge, it was not the original wall but the replacements built onto it during the restoration. Well, if this is the price for definitely closing the hideous exhibition of plastic figures about the heroic Turkish defenders of Gaziantep against the greedy French advisors and their treacherous Armenian helpers, it is not even too much.<br /></p>
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/1/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#brumi1" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="bakircilar">Early in the morning the bazaar is just waking up, the most diligent traders are putting their goods on display, they are eating tripe soup or boiled eggs with tea in front of the small stalls, talking, soaking up the sun like frozen lizards, they don’t even have the strength to call a potential buyer. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:843" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The famous Coppersmiths Bazaar and its surroundings are just as they were, life is going on in the same way. Only in the Zincirli Bedestan, the covered corridor built in 1719, that once sold silk, but now only cheap Chinese wares, is closed due to cracks in its walls.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/046.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/046k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="gaziantepcastle">In daylight, we take stock of the damage. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:844" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The biggest one hit is undoubtedly the castle. But in daylight it is even more visible that it is basically the mantle of square stones, put on it during the restoration ten years ago, that have fallen off, and the original Hittite-Roman-Byzantine-Seljuk structure has remained largely intact.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="mosques">Less, but spectacular, damage was done to some small mosques. Since the Ottoman occupation of the Arab provinces in the 16th century, Gaziantep has been the trading twin of Aleppo, which lies further down the Euphrates, an important stop for caravans before crossing the Syrian desert. For this reason, the old town is full of Ottoman-era caravanserais and 16th and 17th-century mosques, founded out of gratitude for the successful business. One corner of the <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:845" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Şirvani Mosque (1677) under the castle has collapsed. Not long after the earthquake, the Hungarian <i>Járdasziget</i> blog <a href="https://index.hu/kultur/jardasziget/2023/02/13/torokorszag-foldrenges-gazientep-muemlek-var-pusztulas/">reported in a dramatic post</a> – probably from a Turkish source – about the collapse of another important house of worship, the <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:846" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Tahtani Mosque (1557), also mentioned by Evlia Çelebi. However, it is completely intact. It is the <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:847" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Karagöz Mosque, where the top of the minaret fell.<br /></p>
<div class="mosaic">
<p><map name="brumi2">
<area alt="brumi2" coords="0, 0, 87, 272" href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/2/01.jpg" shape="rect" title="Tahtani-mecset"></area>
<area alt="brumi2" coords="93, 0, 271, 181" href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/2/02.jpg" shape="rect" title="Tahtani-mecset"></area>
<area alt="brumi2" coords="278, 0, 458, 87" href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/2/04.jpg" shape="rect" title="Karagöz-mecset"></area>
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<area alt="brumi2" coords="278, 93, 458, 272" href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/2/10.jpg" shape="rect" title="Şirvani-mecset"></area>
<area alt="brumi2" coords="93, 186, 180, 273" href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/2/14.jpg" shape="rect" title="Şirvani-mecset"></area>
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</map>
<img border="0" height="273" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/2/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#brumi2" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="kurtulus"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:848" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> And there is more serious damage that the Turkish press does not like to talk about, partly due to its location a little further from the castle, and partly because it has a history that is better not to be touched. This is the Kurtuluş (Independence) Mosque, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/turkey-gaziantep-armenian-genocide-a7362771.html">its maiden name the Church of the Mother of God,</a> which was taken from the Armenians after the genocide and used as a stable and then a prison before being converted into a mosque in 1986. The beautiful church, designed by the Sultan’s architect Sarkis Balyan in the Tuscan Neo-Renaissance style, has a collapsed dome and the tops of the two minarets have fallen. Ill-gotten gains seldom prosper. Next to the church-mosque is an entire ruin area, with only a standing wall facing the church. This destruction, however, was not caused by an earthquake, but by humans. Armenian church and community buildings once stood here, built in a similar fine style. Turkish children are scavenging among the ruins.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="azizbedros"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:850" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Opposite the ruins, another former Armenian church is standing closed, the three-nave Aziz Bedros basilica, dedicated to the Mother of God in 1723. Its façade features the same black-and-white basalt-and-marble inlay that spread throughout Gaziantep from the church of Sarkis Balyan. According to its inscription, it is now Ömer Ersoy Kültür Merkezi, i.e. cultural center. What exactly it means is illustrated by the guard coming out of the neighboring stall and driving us away without saying a word. Going around the church, we see that the artistically designed grassy hills of the garden are maintained by goats. This is how much food we get for understaing the local meaning of culture.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/025.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/025k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/026.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/026k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Ümit Kurt from Gaziantep, a doctoral student at Harvard University discovered and then revealed <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674247949">in his book</a> <i>The Armenians of Aintab: The economics of genocide in an Ottoman province</i> (2021), how the Young Turks and then the Atatürk government allowed the Turkish elite of Gaziantep to appropriate the property of the local Armenians, thus making them supporters of the genocide and of the subsequent political system. In his book, he also provides an accurate map of the neighborhood, specifying the original Armenian owners and the function of each building, and narrating their history. I can’t wait to have time to tour the neighborhood with this map and publish its current state on an interactive map.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p id="papirus"><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:849" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The monogram of the former Armenian owner above today’s Papirus Café</span></p></div>
<p id="gaziantepsynagogue"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:851" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Incidentally, there are also similar, not recent and not earthquake-caused gaps in the former Jewish neighborhood under the castle. The Turkish government proudly advertises its excellent relations with its Jewish citizens and how much it sheltered Jews during the Holocaust. But the fact that in the same years he deported its Jewish citizens to concentration camps in northeastern Anatolia on the basis of origin and wealth was only reveales to public opinion by the highly successful Turkish-Sephardic film series <i>Kulüp (The Club),</i> released last year. The Jewish quarter of Gaziantep was also depopulated at that time.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p id="papirus"><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/038.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/038k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The synagogue, founded in the 16th century, has been restored, but is permanently closed. In the once large Jewish neighborhood today some 100 Jews live.</span></p></div>
<p>“Here in Gaziantep, there was hardly any damage, and very few deaths,” says Özkan, the receptionist at Anadolu Evleri, one of my best fixers for organizing trips to Anatolia. “And east of here, where you will travel, even less. Not like to the west, towards the coast, where entire cities collapsed.” We list exactly where we are going to travel, to stop, we want to see. We call one after the other the contacts, accommodations, museums and everything else in the itinerary. Everything is open, everything works. Actually, I could go home with the evening flight. Nevertheless, I will travel the full route to see it with my own eyes.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In Turkey, I always buy a phone card at the airport, which is valid for one month, although it needs to be reactivated after two weeks. Don’t ask me why. I won’t ask either, I’ve written it down on a long list of Turkish idiocies. Now, however, Lloyd, with his practical American way of thinking, draws my attention to the fact that the airport price of ca. 50 euro for the card is not much less than the 7 euros per day for 10 days to be paid for the use of on my German card in Turkey. So let’s try it in Gaziantep, it will be definitely cheaper there.<br /></p><p>Gaziantep’s Turkcell has probably never seen a foreign client before. For a while, they discuss among themselves what to do in this case, and then they put us in the care of the fool of the store. It would not matter that he can only speak Turkish between clenched teeth, so I can only hear the consonants, as if I were reading a transliteration in Ottoman script, but those twice. But at the threshold of every problem, aggression comes upon him, and he will come across plenty of such in a Hungarian passport. “What month was it issued?” he mumbles on the verge of insanity, or well beyond it. “In December”, I point out in the respective box. “Desember, desember… what is it?” “Oh, <i>aralık</i>”, I recall. He takes photo of the passport at least five times. This is the operation he understands, loves and enjoys. After that, however, he goes into an endless cycle until he finds a way out: to take a photo of the passport.<br /></p><p>Finally, a salesgirl without an impediment arrives. She sends the cretin packing, and she takes a photo of my passport. After this, however, she fills in the appropriate boxes on the tablet, and behold a miracle: I have my Turkish card within ten minutes. I pay 590 lira, approx. 30 euro. I have spent an hour with it, so I have worked for twenty euros an hour. Not bad for an hourly wage in Berlin either. And we had a great time.<br /></p><p>Lloyd says he’d rather skip this show and share the internet from my card. So we saved forty euros.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="imamcagdas"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:842" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We invest part of our profits in debauchery in the best restaurant in the city, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/imamcagdas1887">Imam Çağdaş.</a> A family restaurant, one corner away from our accommodation, with modern equipment, but very traditional and excellent menu. An Âlâ Nazik kebab – minced meat served in hot spicy sour cream – comes with <i>sabzi,</i> vegetable platter, pita, salad and <i>lahmacun,</i> flat bread spread with spicy minced meat. Such a feast lasts until the evening. The restaurant also has a beautiful Ottoman-era courtyard, covered with vines and filled with the chirping of canaries living in cages on the balcony.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/023.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/023k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/024.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/024k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><audio controls="controls" preload="none"><source src="http://www.studiolum.com/wang/audio/cagdasbirds.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"></source></audio><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Birds in the backyard of Imam Çağdaş Restaurant. Recording by Lloyd Dunn</span></p>
<p id="carchemish"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/037.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 5pt 0px 10px 10pt;" /><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:714" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Carchemish was one of the most powerful Neo-Hittite city-state in northern Mesopotamia. Its name may be familiar to readers of the Bible, since in 605 BC one of the most decisive battles of the ancient world was fought here, in which the rising Babylonian empire defeated the united Assyrian and Egyptian forces. Assyria ceased to exist as a state, Egypt was completely pushed out of the Middle East, and Babylon occupied and carried away the former vassals of Egypt, such as the people of Jerusalem and Judea. All this was foretold by Jeremiah in his 46th book, but as is the fate of the prophets, nobody listened to him.<br /></p><p>Today, Carchemish lies on the Turkish-Syrian border, along the Euphrates, on the outskirts of the modern city of Karkemiş, seventy kilometers from Gaziantep. From the excavations between the late 19th and early 21th century, several beautiful carvings were included in the museums of Gaziantep and Ankara, for example the <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2022/06/messages-from-mesopotamia.html">“royal photo album”, which I have already written about in detail.</a> The largest carvings, however, are still to be seen outside on the grounds, which, <a href="https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/hittites-city-to-become-open-air-museum-144333">according to the press, were turned into an open-air museum.</a> Trusting in this, we decide to make a small detour on our way to the Euphrates, and visit it.<br /></p><p>In the modern city we still see a rusty road sign with the inscription “Karkamiş Antik Kenti”, meaning the ancient city of Carchemish. At that time, we don’t know yet that we won’t see more of it.<br /></p><p>When getting close to the point marked by Google Map and Organic Map, we are stopped by a fence with a sign saying that we have reached a military area where entry is prohibited. We ask two men working nearby, they direct us to the town. In the town, they show a road at the end of which there is a military fence. The guard is already coming towards us with a gun ready to fire. We go back to the first place again and stop on a hill next to the cemetery, in front of the fence, from where we can see the whole area. We identify what we see based on the map of the archaeological area.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/027.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/027k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The asphalt road leading from left to right is the one that theoretically should take us into the area. This is closed by a wire fence, on which you can even see the red warning sign. The elevated hill was the citadel of Carchemish, nowthere is a military observation post on it. To the left of it is the bridge of the Berlin-Baghdad railway crossing the Euphrates, which also the Turkish-Syrian border there.<br /></span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/028.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/028k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Behind the hill rising to the right is the city of Carchemish with its large cravings. This means that the whole territory lies in military zone, and this is also confirmed by the tanks lined up to the right of the hill. That the plan was recently different, and that the gate to the field was open to tourists, is confirmed by the letters #KARKAMIŞ, intended for Instagram photos</span><br /></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/029.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/029k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/030.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/030k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">To the right of the hill runs the wall all along the Turkish-Syrian border. Behind it emerges the Syrian town of Jerablus, whose territory is hiding <a href="https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/jerablus-and-the-land-of-carchemish/">a part of the ancient Carchemish.</a></span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/031.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/031k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/032.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/032k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">And to the far right, barely fifty meters from the last houses of Karkamiş, opens the gate of another military base. The one where the guardian approached us with his gun raised.<br /></span></p></div>
<p>The story probably is that the open-air museum was opened in 2019 indeed, but then Turkey launched an offensive against Kurdish bases in Syria and strengthened the border points with Syria. In this way, the entire archaeological area was taken over by the military. On the map below, I indicate with a red line roughly where the military fence is now. It is clear that the ancient city marked with two amphorae lies deep inside the military area. And although the Turks don’t have the same conflict with Neo-Hittites as they do with the Armenians and the Jews, it’s nevertheless not good to imagine what might happen to the monuments inside.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/karkamismap.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/karkamismap-k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A shepherd approaches from the city. As a counter-test, we also ask him where the ancient city of Carchemish is. He points to the hills. “And how do you get in there?” “I would not attempt it”, he says.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/033.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/033k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>We are heading back. In order to see something of world historical importance, we stop beyond the city at the crossing of the Berlin-Baghdad railway.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/036.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/036k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>This way is Berlin. After the bend, you could already see the Alexanderturm:<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/034.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/034k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>And this way Baghdad. The wind carries here the scent of Semiramis’ hanging gardens:</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/035.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/035k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="rumkale"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:487" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> We continue towards the next stop of our planned trip, the port of Halfeti, where we will sail to the Roman-Byzantine-Armenian castle of Rumkale, which juts into the Euphrates. The road runs between the biggest pride of the Gaziantep region, the green pistachio groves that stretch to the horizon. At Birecik, under the former Crusader castle, we cross from the right bank of the river to the left. From here on, we see again and again the river flowing in the deep canyon on our left side.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/039.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/039k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/040.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/040k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/041.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/041k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/042.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/042k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/043.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/043k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/044.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/044k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="halfeti"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:853" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Today there are two Halfetis: the new one, which was settled ten kilometers higher due to the damming of the Euphrates, and the old one, whose lower houses and mosque stand half in the river. The cruise ships depart from here. Looking down from the top of the canyon, you can see that they are still going up and down. Nevertheless, we descend to the harbor, to make sure that this spectacular program will not be missed.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/045.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/045k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="nuhrut">We continue north along the Euphrates, and now that we have a car, we can finally make a seven-kilometer detour, which is impossible with a minibus on the bad access road. This access road leads to the church of Nuhrut.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:852" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The church of Nuhrut stands alone in the field near the village of Gürkuyu (known as Nixrût to its Kurdish inhabitants, and Nuhrut to its former Armenian inhabitants). Judging by its carved door and triumphal arch, it is late antique, perhaps from the 5th or 6th century, roughly when the similar churches in Ziyaret, Zerzevan or <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2022/07/hah.html">the earliest Syriac monastery churches</a> were built. Its façade, made of large ashlar stones and closed with a tympanum, has a gate closed with a horizontal lintel and three semi-circular windows. Interestingly, its side gate is not in the south, but in the north. Two surviving arches open to the south. This suggests that it may have had a side aisle – perhaps it was a double church, which is common in late antique and Syriac architecture –, or an annex, perhaps a monastery. Actually, this double arch and the triumphal arch of the sanctuary are the most amazing features in the whole church, still intact as they have survived for fifteen hundred years without any support or restoration. They make the church look like the skeleton of a huge animal, whale or dinosaur, lying in the field, when approached from the village.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/047.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/047k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>Since the church is so old, and thus not related to the Armenians, but rather to the Romans who lived here before them, and whose heritage the Turkish government gladly claims as its own, therefore the provincial and local administration is pushing for its restoration and inclusion in local tourism. In fact, it badly needs restoration. If anything of this will be realized, it must be begun with the asphalting of the road.<br /></p><p>It’s dusk. A large group of children gather around our car, parked at the edge of the village. A big man, their father, keeps order among them in Kurdish. He greets us warmly, invites us to tea and dinner, but we must leave behind the network of bad country roads before dark. He calls his children together for a group photo. I will print it and take it to them next time I go there. The other children are grinning at the car, showing that they are willing to pose for a photo for five lira.<br />
</p><p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/048.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/048k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/049.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/049k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/050.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/050k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/051.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/051k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="kantarma"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:885" target="_blank"><img style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> On the two banks of the Euphrates, where so many different cultures have been layered on top of each other, you can still find remains from totally different eras, a Byzantine church, a Seljuk bridge, a Persian cave city, an Armenian tomb. One of the most enigmatic remains is the three-by-three arches in the village of Kantarma, called a “Seljuk caravanserai”, although its arches and architectonic details clearly show a stylistic kinship with the Nuhrut Church 10 kilometers away, built in the 5th or 6th century, that is half a millennium before the Seljuks. And from its structure it is difficult to imagine how it could have been a caravanserai. So it’s rather a building with an obscure purpose from the Late Antique-Byzantine period. Its arches hold their ground even without any support, just like those of the Nuhrut church. But let it be Seljuk, I don’t mind if this is the key to its survival in today’s nationalist times.</p>
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<p id="adiyamanmuseum">Adıyaman, located north of the Euphrates, is actually outside our planned route. We will only spend one night here before heading to one of the most spectacular regions of our tour, the ancient kingdom of Commagene, about which I have already written a lot in <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#commagene">the discovery post of 2019,</a> and since then I have given several lectures about it. As I read more about it, I grow fonder of this strange little kingdom with its exceptional art and imperial aspirations.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/052.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/052k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Therefore now, that we have time, I finally want to see <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:854" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> the small museum in Adıyaman, which was founded in 1973 to present the antique material collected in the area.<br /></p><p>The gate of the museum is open, the security guards are having tea in the garden. However, the porter sadly informs us that the exhibition is closed because the museum’s wall was cracked in the earthquake and is now being repaired.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/053.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/053k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>But we can look at and take photos of the sculptures on display in the garden, among the blooming roses. This is also a rich collection, including a Parthian lion, a Greek sarcophagus, and tombstones with Roman, Syriac and Arabic inscriptions. If there is so much out here, what could be in there? We will see next year, inshallah.<br /></p>
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<p id="adiyamanruins">Here, in the center of Adıyaman we encounter serious earthquake damage for the first – and also for the last – time. In the city center, several high-rise buildings cracked or partially collapsed. It is conspicuous that these are all newly built houses. Some of which have not even been moved into. One must know that the town, originally called Semsûr, was swollen up with the populations of hundreds of Kurdish villages swallowed up by the Euphrates after the building of the dams in the past two decades. The Turkish government – and personally Erdoğan – considered the resettlement of the Kurds such a priority that he granted the contractors an exemption from costly earthquake safety regulations. Obviously these houses collapsed first, while the older buildings mostly remained intact. Opposite the museum, the remains of such buildings are just being demolished. From the façade of the neighboring election office, a huge portrait of Erdoğan looks benevolently at the results of his action. In a small park between the houses, dozens of local men are sitting on the benches of the tea house under a multitude of colorful flags of the ruling party, and, ignoring the dust that covers everyting and fills the air, are watching their young downtown disappear around them.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/054.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/054k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>In the schoolyard there is a tent camp of the Turkish Red Crescent for those who are left without homes. As soon as we enter the courtyard, a small man with a handsome and sensitive face invites us into their tent for a tea. Five or six tents surround a small yard, the gate is a large blanket, that of Ahmed is decorated with skulls and bones. Ahmed goes forward to tell the women to cover themselves before the strangers who come in, and them invites us into the guest room.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/055.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/055k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/056.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/056k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/057.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/057k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Ahmed fled to Turkey from Aleppo, destroyed by the Russians, with his family: his two brothers and a sister, his wife and five children, his father and mother. Back home he was a history teacher, in Adıyaman he became a baker. They rented an apartment on the third floor of a newly built house. “That day, as always, I went to the bakery at four in the morning. A few minutes before starting the work, the earth shook. I immediately called my brother, but his phone did not answer. I ran home, and for about twenty minutes, I was crying and praying. The side of the house where we lived collapsed. The two apartments below us were crushed, nineteen people died there. Our apartment was hanging in the air. But by the time I got home, everyone was standing on the street, safe and sound.”<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/058.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/058k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>What will they do now? “First of all, I have to find a job, because the bakery went bankrupt. Then we have to find an apartment, which is not easy now in Adıyaman, because everyone is looking for one. Turkish citizens are still somewhat taken care of by the state, but I don’t think they will care about us.”<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/059.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/059k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The two boys, Hassan and Hamid also take part in the conversation of the adults. “What will you do when you grow up?” “Hassan wants to be a doctor, but university costs in Turkey, unlike back home in Syria. Six thousand euros a semester, we can’t pay that much. So he’ll learn some kind of paying profession, perhaps he’ll become a computer mechanic.” “And Hamid?” “He is still young, he just started school. I hope that when he’ll grow up, the war will be over and he can go to university back home in Aleppo, inshallah.”<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/060.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/060k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In the school, the children only learn Turkish, but Ahmed holds an evening school for them and teaches them Arabic and English. Both Ahmed’s father and mother are seriously ill, but they don’t know a word in Turkish, so the children have to interpret in the hospital and in the market. “They must be able to read and write in Arabic by when then get home, and also in English, because without it they have no future.” He lets Hassan bring the board, and lets him write twenty words in English, Turkish and Arabic. Hamid looks at his brother’s performance in awe.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/061.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/061k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/062.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/062k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The most beautiful thing is how peacefully, with how much love and strength he bears this situation, these many variations of calamity which they have been going through for years. “We would not go far by ourselves, but God always sends good people who help us further.” We exchange phone numbers, I ask him to write if anything changes in their lives. I will come to Adıyaman again at the end of May, and will try to bring some support. If anyone wants to contribute, please do so. Write at wang@studiolum.com.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/063.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/063k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="karakus">Commagene’s most important historical monuments are Mount Nemrut with its monumental tomb of Antiochus I, the <i>just and excellent god,</i> and the Arsameia hillside, where he shakes hands with his colleagues, the main figures of the Greco-Persian pantheon on several stelae under the pretext of his father’s tomb. I have already <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#commagene">written about them in detail, illustrated with several photos.</a> But approaching from Adıyaman, the first monument is the <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:855" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> so-called Karakuş tumulus, the hill that hides the mortuary chamber prepared by Antiochus’s son Mithridates II for the female members of his family, his mother, sister and daughter sometime around 25 BC. From the hill there is a magnificent view of the fields of Commagene, the confluence of Kahta, the main river of the former country and the Euphrates, and the Taurus Mountains of Commagene, with Mount Nemrut rising 2,134 meters high in the middle.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/064.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/064k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>The hill was originally surrounded by three pairs of columns on three sides, but some of them have already collapsed. As we approach on the road, an eagle stands on the remaining pillar of the first pair – this gave the monument the Turkish name Karakuş, “black bird”.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/065.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/065k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/066.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/066k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Both columns of the next pair are standing, but only the statue of a reclining bull remains at the top of one<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/067.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/067k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/068.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/068k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>From the third pair one column has long since collapsed, and its stones have also mostly disappeared. Only the head of the lion that once stood on top is still standing on the ground. The other column was still standing last year, with a relief on top, showing Mithridates II and his sister Laodice – the wife of the Parthian general Orodes, who destroyed the Roman army in 53 BC – shake hands. However, this column also collapsed in the recent earthquake, and its rings crosswise block the path around the hill. The lion turns his back on him just as a cat turns his back on the harm he caused. He stares fixedly at the distant Mount Nemrut, as if thinking “it’s good that I got off it in time”.<br /></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/069.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/069k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="septimiusseverusbridge"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:856" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Continuing towards the interior of Commagene, a deep canyon of a swift mountain river, the Cendere (known as Chabinas in ancient times) stands in our way. Fortunately, the Romans thought of everything and built a stone bridge over the canyon 1,800 years ago. According the inscription on the pillar, the work was carried out by the XVI Flavian Legio stationed at Samosata – the capital of Commagene, today lying at the bottom of the Euphrates – under the leadership of centurion Marius “Ratkiller” Perpetuus and under the personal supervision of imperial praetor Alfenius “Dandy” Senecio, which shows how important the establishment of the bridge was for military emperor Septimius Severus (193-211), who tried to prepare the ground for the attack on the Parthian empire with a multitude of bridges and roads. The boys did a good job. The Roman and Parthian empires were long gone when this bridge was still used for public transport in 2002 without any restoration. It was only then that a modern bridge was built a little further away. Since then, the bridge of Septimius Severus serves only as a sightseeing stop and the backdrop for wedding photos.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/070.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/070k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/071.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/071k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/072.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/072k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Septimius Severus expertly managed visual communication to represent his family’s unity and power. Originally, two columns at each end of the bridge represented the four members of the imperial family, the emperor and his wife, as well as their two sons, Caracalla and Geta. When Caracalla murdered his younger brother and co-ruler in 211, after their father’s death, he also ordered <i>damnatio memoriae</i> against him, meaning that his image and name should be removed from all public depictions and inscriptions. I already have a small collection of such mutilated monuments, that I will soon publish. One of their most astonishing examples is this very bridge, where the legionnaires did not bother much with sanding off the inscriptions, but instead tore off the entire column of Geta. Since then, the bridge has been asymmetrical, which contradicts the basic principles of Roman aesthetics. But it’s still good like this for the countryside.<br /></p>
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<p id="mezra"><a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#commagene">At the other three-star attractions of Commagene, Kahta Castle, the Arsameian Via Sacra and Mount Nemrut,</a> we don’t stop now. They are open and we will be able to see them with the group. I mean Arsameia is closed, but Junus, the Kurdish owner of Café Roma, will open it for us.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:857" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Even so, it is already dusk by the time we reach the eastern border of the former Commagene at the Euphrates. And another hour and a half to Diyarbakır.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/073.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/073k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="sur"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:451" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> In Diyarbakır at ten o’clock in the evening, there is still a lot of life. The teahouses, cafés, pastry shops, restaurants, and the terraces of the caravanserais are full, people are chatting over tea at small tables in the square in front of the Great Mosque, Kurdish musicians are playing, singing and dancing in the streets. The earthquake has not reached this far. In fact, it stopped at the western border of Commagene. The fallen column of Karakuş was its last sign we saw. Diyarbakır had enough of <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#sur">what it got from the Turkish army in 2016.</a> But even those wounds are healing nicely.<br /></p>
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<p>In Diyarbakır, life is great not only in the night, but also in the daytime. The center of the old town, around the Grand Mosque but also everywhere else, is full of teahouses, music cafés, and alternative places. Mainly former Syriac and Armenian merchant houses with large courtyards, whose black tuff walls are decorated with white limestone inlays. But in general, wherever there is a small hole where they can put a table with a few chairs, there are already four or five young Kurdish people sitting together, drinking tea, chatting and playing music. In just a short walk, we saw at least ten concert posters for the month of June alone, and we also sat down for tea at a live music venue. I wonder what life can be here when you are here for at least a week.</p>
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<p id="diyarbakirmuseum">If Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization, then the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris, the southernmost part of the Anatolian highlands, is the womb that carried it. Here, on the hills along the river valleys, for one reason or another, enough people gathered to create something bigger than the individual. All this from the 11th millennium BC, i.e. at least five thousand years before the birth of agriculture. This means that they were not agricultural communities, but meeting places for hunters and gathereres. According to the latest theories – which try to explain the development of the Göbeklitepe sanctuaries, the largest of such places – it was not farming that made this kind of population concentration possible, but on the contrary, the supply of a large number of people continuously coming together made the invention of agriculture necessary. Either way, these places along the Tigris produced a fascinating stylized figurative art with wonderful fabulous animals (which suggests that storytelling also flourished here), the richest display of which is the <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:858" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Diyarbakır Archaeological Museum. Here I only show a few examples, but I will dedicate to them a lecture and a post, too.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/074.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/074k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="ciger">Just as <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2022/07/tao-klarjeti-minute-by-minute.html#çorba">in Erzurum the <i>çorbaci</i>s, soup makers,</a> so in Diyarbakır the <i>ciğerci</i>s, liver roasters, that is, various meat roasted on skewers, dominate the field. One of the best is <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:859" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Kemikli Ciğerci in the middle of the bazaar, which offers its excellencies on three floors.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/075.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/075k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/076.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/076k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>It is worth watching how they prepare the table for a simple kebab. Even before you order, they serve the appetizing <i>sabzi,</i> i.e. green leaves, then the salad with thick pomegranate sauce, then chopped tomatoes, onions sprinkled with sumac, and tomato-cucumber-pepper sauce. And to all this, freshly baked pita in a small wooden box.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/077.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/077k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/078.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/078k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>And then comes Adana kebab, minced lamb with pistachios, and <i>etsis,</i> which literally means skewered meat. But <i>et,</i> meat implicitly means lamb meat, what else? Along with it, they add hot – but not too hot – paprika roasted until slightly sooty. What is not visible in the picture is ayran, the thin yogurt juice, and the strong black tea.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/079.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/079k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="diyarbakirmosque"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:860" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Great Mosque of Diyarbakır is, according to the tradition, the fifth holiest place in Islam. It was originally the main Syriac church of the city, the St. Thomas Church, which was used jointly by Christians and Muslims for a while after the Arab conquest of the city in 639. In those first decades of Islam, the tradition that the church in which the leader of the conquering army first prays would immediately become a great mosque, like the Hagia Sophia or the church of Buda, had not yet been established. Later it was rebuilt several times, in one way or another taking the Great Mosque of Damascus as a model, but around its courtyard it has preserved the richly decorated late antique façade, further enriched with Kufic Qurʿanic verses and building inscriptions in the empty spaces above the arches and windows.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/081.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/081k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>The façade of the mosque still preserves the memory of the Christian church. Inside, however, the former church space was longitudinally extended on the two sides, divided into three naves by two rows of arcaded pillars. However, the focal point of the space is still the former sanctuary, which exceptionally faced south rather than east, so it could easily be transformed into a <i>mihrab,</i> a white marble prayer niche facing Mecca.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/080.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/080k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/artuqid-300.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 10px 10pt;" />The large arched entrance of the courtyard from the square in front of the mosque is flanked by two reliefs, two lions attacking two bulls. This motif, of Persian origin, was the coat of arms of the Artuqid dynasty. The Oghuz Turkic Artuq bey was the Seljuk Turkish governor of Jerusalem between 1085 and 1091, just before the beginning of the crusades, and his sons founded the dynasty that ruled the northern Mesopotamian region embracing Diyarbakır (marked as Amid on the map), Hasankeyf and Mardin between 1102 and 1409. The lion of the dynasty – affectionately nicknamed here <i>Artuklu kedisi,</i> the Artuqid cat – can be found in all three cities, I mean in the flooded Hasankeyf only underwater. In Diyarbakır, three copies of it are on the gate and in the courtyard of the castle. In Mardin, their grim-shaped little brothers flank the entrance of the city museum, converted from the Syriac Chaldean bishop’s palace. Their scaled-down replicas are popular items in local souvenir shops.<br /></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/082.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/082k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Artuklu cat with a confiscated soccer ball on the fountain of the castle courtyard</span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/083.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/083k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:449" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#hasanpasa">I have already written in detail</a> about Hasan Paşa Hanı, the oldest standing caravanserai in Turkey, built in 1572, but it is always good to return here, to the lavish stage of city life, where the few petrified regulars sit like motionless rocks among the waving crowd.<br /></p>
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<p>Do you still remember <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#hasanpasa">our visit to Hasan Pasa Hanı four years ago?</a> It was then that we saw, in Hüseyn’s upstairs antique shop, the Athenian tetradrachm of Pericles decorated with an owl, the emblematic coin of the golden age of Greek democracy. Lloyd wanted to buy it, but by the time we got back, the store was already closed. Now, after four years, I go there again, and the owl is still there waiting faithfully. So I buy it for Lloyd.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/185.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/185k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<p id="ilk8z">The book on which I photographed it – Babamin Tüfeği’s book about the Kurdish film director Hiner Saleem – was lying on the table of the Kurdish handicraft and book store Ilkiz. This small courtyard is a lovely oasis in the old town, right next to the Dengbêj House. Its young owner is rebuilding it for the second time after the Turkish bombings of the previous years. It sells beautiful handmade clothes, paintings and ceramics with emblematic motifs from Kurdish mythology, such as the Snake Queen or the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, as well as world literature in Kurdish translation, such as Ulysses, which is difficult enough to interpret in the original, let alone translate. Here I find Romeo and Juliet in a Kurdish translation, and I ask the owner to read aloud Juliet’s renowned monologue. Then he shows the famous Kurdish Romeo and Juliet on a ceramic. Even in the afternoon, Verona echoes in some Diyarbakır graffiti.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/186.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/186k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
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<p><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/832823201?h=12b95e07b0&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" width="640" height="352" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></p></div>
<p id="hasuni">When we did not know yet how good the situation was on the planned route of the tour from Gaziantep to Mardin and back, we planned to set up a B-route as well. If Northern Mesopotamia only offers disaster tourism, we would instead travel around Lake Van, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#akhtamar">where we have already visited several times.</a> Although fortunately it turned out that everything was in order in the region included in the plan, we had already booked the accommodations near Lake Van for this discovery tour, and anyway we are curious about those sections of the road where we have not been yet.<br /></p>
<p>From Diyarbakır, the road leads through an extensive karst region, between soft hills overgrown with green grass, sharp drops, sinkholes and karst streams. Here and there, we veer off the main road for the sake of a more exciting valley. Kurdish shepherds question us first suspiciously, but later become more friendly. Halfway, after Silvan, a huge limestone range rises a little further from the road, and a narrow valley leads to it. Even from the main road, you can see the multitude of man-made rectangular cave openings. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:861" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> This is the cave city of Hasuni, inhabited since the 16th millennium BC, that is, during the millennia from which the fantastic figures of the Diyarbakır Archaeological Museum originate. It is not known when it was depopulated, but even Syriac Christian inscriptions were found there.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/084.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/084k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/085.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/085k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="carpira">Traveling towards Lake Van, the mountains begin to rise dramatically. You can clearly feel that we have reached the Armenian Plateau. The landscape, the mountains, the geological formations are already the same as in present-day Armenia. The road runs in a deep river bed. Openstreetmap calls the river Başur Çayı, i.e. Southern River, while Google Map the Bitlis River, after the nearby city of Bitlis. The original name of the city, <a href="https://virtual-genocide-memorial.de/region/the-six-provinces/bitlis-vilayet/">in the languages of its majority Syriac and Armenian inhabitants, exterminated in 1896 and in 1916,</a> was Beth Dlis and Baghesh. But before reaching the city, we see <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=wangfolyo/all:862" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> a very nice little Ottoman-era double bridge over the river. The longer bridge with five arches leads over Başur Çayı, and the smaller one next to it over the small mountain tributary that flows into the Başur. Interestingly, this mountain river is not marked on any map, even though it is quite wide and has a significant water flow. Where it flows into the turquoise-colored Başur, its striking gray color shows how much sediment it brings from the mountains. The maps do not indicate the double bridge either. A local trail sign says it is called Çarpıra Köprüsü, which means “four bridges” in Kurdish, while a 2018 restoration sign on the smaller bridge calls it Dört Ululari Köprüsü, meaning “Bridge of the Four Nations”. I could not find an explanation for this naming. Curiously, T. A. Sinclair’s very detailed four-volume monumental topography <i>Eastern Turkey</i> (1987) does not mention it either.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/086.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/086k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>The bridge was really necessary in its time, because this is a section of the Silk Road leading from Persia through the Armenian mountains to Northern Mesopotamia. The roundabout before the nearby town of Ziyaret is a special reminder of this. In the installation, aside from the camel loaded with oriental goods, the large plastic imperial crowns <i>(Fritillaria imperialis)</i> deserve special attention. They proudly announce that this magnificent flower of the European Renaissance and Baroque comes from this mountainous region, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2009/10/imperial-crown.html">as I wrote in detail before.</a> From here on, we see more and more tent camps of Kurdish nomads along the road.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/087.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/087k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/088.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/088k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/089.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/089k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:475" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> On the southern shore of Lake Van, we just pass the port, where the boat leaves for the island of Akhtamar. <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#akhtamar">We visited it three years ago,</a> making a detailed photo documentation. Soon I will prepare a lecture and a post about the rich and unusual iconography of the reliefs of the monastery church built between 915 and 921, which was the seat of the Armenian Church for a thousand years.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/066.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/066k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/070.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/070k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/22/08.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/22/08k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In the city of Van we don’t expect much to see, as we know that it was completely destroyed by the Ottoman army during the Armenian Genocide in 1915. Nevertheless we walk around the impressive fortress rock. And in the swampy pasture south of the castle, on the empty site of the former old town, we come across so many interesting things that the visit, planned for an hour, will take the whole morning. In the same way, the two paragraphs I intended to write about it has turned into such a long description, with more than a hundred selected pictures, that I finally publish it as a separate post: <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-vanished-van.html"><i>The vanished Van.</i></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><iframe height="560" src="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=van-en/0/18" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 20px; text-align: center;" width="560"></iframe><span style="color: #999999; font-size: 85%;">• If the interactive map is not visible, replace <i>https</i> with <i>http</i> in the url of this post •</span></p></div>
<p id="varagavank">The city of Van and the region of Lake Van have been the central area of Armenian culture for thousands of years. At the end of the 11th century, with the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, the independent Armenian kingdom collapsed, and its provinces tried to survive as separate principalities. The area around Lake Van was the territory of the Principality of Vaspurakan, about which <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2008/11/armenian-monasteries-in-iran.html">I have written before, including its maps.</a> The hundreds of Armenian villages in the region, together with their hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, were swept away by the 1915 genocide. Their churches were looted, set on fire, and in the following decades their stones were also carried away. Still, the two largest monographs about them, Paolo Cuneo’s two-volume <i>Architettura armena dal quarto al diciannovesimo secolo</i> (1988) and T. A. Sinclair’s four-volume <i>Eastern Turkey: An architectural and archaeological survey</i> (1987) mention more than one hundred and twenty churches in the region, of which at least the memory, photo or sometimes even ruins have survived. Finding and approaching them is, however, not easy. This afternoon we only undertake to visit <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:873" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> the church of Varagavank, which is the closest to Van, because it still has visible details, and because it does not require a long hike on steep mountain paths, but can be reached on an asphalt road, since it stands in the center of the Kurdish village of Bakraçlı (in Kurdish, Yedîkilise).</p>
<p>This village is located on the side of the 3,200-meter-high Erek mountain – Varag in Armenian, hence its name Varagavank, i.e. the church of Mount Varag –, low enough that you don’t have to do many serpentines, and that the cloud-covered peak provides a majestic background for the monastery ruins. Height markers along the road show how high the snow can cover the road in winter.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/113.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/113k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/114.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/114k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/115.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/115k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The monastery was built by Senekerim-Hovhannes Artsruni, King of Vaspurakan (1003-1021) as a royal burial church at the place where, according to tradition, the 3rd-century martyr Saint Hripsime brought a piece of the Holy Cross from Rome. In the following centuries, the monastery became Vaspurakan’s ecclesiastical seat, as well as an important center of Armenian monastic life and manuscript copying. Over the centuries, six more churches were built next to the central Church of Our Lady, so that the Turkish and Kurdish population of the area knew it as Yedi Kilise, the Seven Churches.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/116.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/116k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The monastery and its floor plan in 1913 from Walter Bachmann’s <i>Kirchen und Moscheen in Armenien und Kurdistan.</i> The churches of Surp Astvatsatsin (3.), Surp Gevorg (4.) and Surp Sion (7.) still stand, albeit in ruins, as well as the apse of Surb Sopia<br /></span></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/117.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/117k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>On April 20, 1915, four days before the official start of the Armenian genocide, the troops of Djevdet Pasha invaded the monastery and massacred the monks. After ten days, they retreated, and from then on, six thousand Armenian survivors poured in from the surrounding villages, who also organized armed resistance. Upon hearing this, Djevdet’s soldiers returned and shelled the monastery with cannons, then set fire to it. Most of the remains were demolished in the 1960s.<br /></p>
<p>Upon entering the village, the lower part of the façade of the central St. George Church is immediately noticeable among the poor Kurdish houses. There are allegedly frescoes from 1779 inside, but the gate is locked. The person with the key lives in the house opposite, but he is not at home now, and the neighbors do not know when he will come back. Next time, <i>inshallah</i>. Adjoining the church to the right is a long vaulted square, the former Church of the Holy Cross, which until recently was used as a stable. We can go down into it. And further back, alone, the preserved apse of the former St. Sophia Church.</p>
<p>It is poignant to stand here, in front of the almost only surviving sign of a culture’s greatness and destruction.</p>
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<p>As we head back along the north shore of the lake, huge storm clouds arrive from the east, the color of the lake turns an angry green, and a hellish spell of a bad weather breaks out. Dense hail knocks on the windscreen, covering the road in white. The clouds and the lake touch each other, only the still sunlit ridge of the snow-capped mountains shines through from the other side.</p>
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<p id="ahlat">Ahlat (Khlat in Armenian, Xelat in Kurdish) was an important trade center along the Silk Road, on the northern shore of Lake Van. The city a more or less independent princely center from the Armenian kingdom through the Arabs, Kurds, Seljuks, Mongols and Ottomans until as late as the middle of the 19th century. To this it owes its many princely tombs and aristocratic cemeteries. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:874" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The gravestones of the cemeteries – although no local inscription or guidebook says this – are very similar to the Armenian khachkars, which we have already seen, for example, in the cemeteries of <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2009/08/noratus.html">Noratus</a> or <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2009/07/armenian-cemetery-of-julfa.html">Julfa.</a> No wonder, since Ahlat had an Armenian majority in the Middle Ages, and who would have carved the stones for the nomadic conquerors if not them? True, we find no Christian motifs on them, their place is occupied by braided decorations that fill large curved frames and give off star patterns, but the shape and basic structure of the stones are the same as of the Armenian ones. If the Julfa cemetery has been destroyed, at least this one preserves, intangibly, the memory of the former Armenian masters.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/118.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/118k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/119.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/119k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/120.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/120k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="hasankeyf">In August 2019, when Lloyd and I visited Southeast Anatolia for the first time, we had the privilege of <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2019/08/southeastern-anatolia-minute-by-minute.html#hasankeyf">being among the last to see Hasankeyf, one of the most important historical cities in the region,</a> the former seat of the Seljuk Artukid and Kurdish Ayyubid dynasties with its Armenian and Syriac cave churches and cave city, its mosques and palaces, and the medieval Artukid Bridge. By now, the Ilisu Dam, built on the Tigris in 2006, has been filled, and has flooded the city. We stop by the road and look down on it from among the houses of the new town. Only the Roman fortress above the old city stands out from the water, everything else has been submerged. “They sacrificed ten thousand years of history for a hydroelectrict power plant operating for fifty years”, as the opposition said a few years ago. Google Map still shows the monuments under water.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/122.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/122k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/123.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/123k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/121.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/anatolia/brumi/121k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Four years ago, we were terrified at the sight of the bridge, which spanned at an unimaginable height above the valley of the Tigris and the other bridges. Today, the raised water level has brought it to a normal height, and this has remained the only bridge. But life goes on. When the Kurdish shepherds have to drive their flocks to the other side, the traffic on the Van-Diyarbakır highway bridge will stop for half an hour.</p>
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<p><i>To be continued</i></p>
</div>
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/04/eszak-mezopotamia-percrol-percre.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-27672576648541116002023-04-25T17:01:00.009+02:002024-02-28T16:52:52.240+01:00Mussolini in new edition<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/04/mussolini-uj-kiadasban.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a> April 25. Italy’s day of liberation from Fascism.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-fascism-among-us.html">I recently wrote about</a> how Mussolini’s <i>frasi celebri</i> – quotes from his historical speeches, which, writes Umberto Eco, “<i>marked all my childhood, and whose most significant passages we memorized in schools</i>” – can still be read on many walls in Sicily. This may indicate that Sicilians still look with some nostalgia to the days that brought the island some economic boom and a harsh suppression of the mafia. Or also the fact that Italians are generally quite indifferent to political slogans, and actually don’t care if the inscription is there or not. This would probably be the most painful to Mussolini in hindsight. And finally, it also shows how the façades of many buildings have not been renovated for at least eighty years.<br /></p><p>The problem emerges when they are finally being renovated.</p><p><a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2013/01/min-nyet.html">Just ten years ago I wrote</a> about those brush-painted or stenciled wall inscriptions in Budapest, on which the occupying Soviet army announced in Russian, in the spring of 1945, that <i>Мин нет,</i> i.e. the house had been searched and no mines were found in it. When I was a high school student, there were still plenty of such historical relics all over the city, but after the change of regime in 1990, they were not spared during the renovation of the façades, and they disappeared one after another. At the time of the 2013 post, I had only found two of them intact. Even a friend of mine, a restorer wrote me that he himself had removed one during the restoration of the façade of the palace at Andrássy út 4. While in Vienna, <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:838" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>at the restoration of Bäckerstraße 13, special attention was paid to the preservation of the Soviet sign. Incidentally, this is the iconic house where <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man"><i>The Third Man</i></a> (1949) was filmed at the same time as the inscription was created.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:839" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a>Around this time last year, the owners of Lilie’s Café in Cefalù, roughly on the right edge of the panorama above, faced a similar dilemma. The façade of the building displayed for eighty years, increasingly worn, this quote of Mussolini:<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;"><i>«In sette mesi abbiamo conquistato l’Impero, in tre mesi appena lo abbiamo pacificato.»</i></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>“In seven months we conquered the Empire, and we pacified it in exactly three months.”</i></span></p>
<p>This quote is from Mussolini’s <a href="http://www.adamoli.org/benito-mussolini/pag0638-.htm">speech of December 18, 1936,</a> given to the residents of Pontinia, the new town founded on drained Agro Pontino. It refers to the occupation of Ethiopia, which was conquered by brutal methods during the seven months between October 3, 1935 and May 5, 1936. In fact, Mussolini considered it to be part of the great Mediterranean Roman empire to be restored, so much that he was also willing to accept international sanctions for it (about which see the Gangi marble plaque, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-fascism-among-us.html">presented in the previous post</a>).<br /></p><p>For eighty years, the inscription did not disturb anyone, just like all the other ones throughout Sicily. But in October 2021, Harrison Ford came to Cefalù to film the last episode of the Indiana Jones series. The location was Lilie’s Café, which was renamed Clemente Cafè, and the sign on its façade was covered with a large Cinzano advertisement.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://youtube.com/embed/Tqx9PBjVTIY" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 0px; text-align: center;" width="560"></iframe></p></div>
<p>And when filming ended in January 2022, they left a generous sum of money to the bar to restore the façade. That’s when the question became relevant: what to do with the inscription? It is one thing to indifferently watch it disappear for eighty years, and another thing to intentionally remove it during restoration, or, on the contrary, to preserve it when there was an opportunity to remove it.<br /></p><p>This question sharply divided Cefalù at this time last year. The local and provincial newspapers interviewed the residents one after another. These either <a href="cefalu_dopo_indiana_jones_ricompare_l_antica_scritta_fascista_l_anpi_rimuovetela_">feverishly demanded the removal</a> of the inscription “<a href="https://www.patriaindipendente.it/servizi/se-un-restauro-diviene-rivendicazione-dei-crimini-di-guerra-fascisti/">reminding of the most terrible crimes in history”,</a> or <a href="https://ilsicilia.it/cefalu-e-lantica-scritta-fascista-cancellarla-oppure-no-clicca-per-il-video/">voted to keep it</a> as a historical memento. <br /></p><p>In the end, the second solution won, with the support of the local office of the protection of monuments, but in a rather contradictory way. The façade was completely repainted, and the inscription was subsequently repainted on it – with a modern typography different from the original, in a different color, and on a slightly different place.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><i>“In this way, it’s worth nothing more than a graffiti hastily painted in the night”,</i> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/118835980777/permalink/10157304733315778/?locale=th_TH">says a comment</a> in the <i>Postazioni militari in Sicilia 1940-1943</i> Facebook group.<br /></p><p>The result is actually worse than that. The action did not preserve the original historical memento painted in 1936, but merely updated the memory of Mussolini’s saying. At its sight, you don’t feel like seeing a historical ghost sign, but that this saying, which reminds us of a tragicomic “Empire” created through genocide and despite international public opinion and sanctions, is still important to someone there. Between the two original alternatives, removal and preservation, this third was certainly the worst choice.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/sicilia/cefalu/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Ethiopians greeting Mussolini’s portrait in occupied Mekele, November 1935</span></p></div>
</div>
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/04/mussolini-uj-kiadasban.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-65192361620058104202023-02-22T09:15:00.004+01:002023-02-22T09:36:50.037+01:00Posed Jews<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/02/beallitott-zsidok.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a>
<a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:827" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Slat al-Azama or Lazama synagogue in Marrakesh was founded in 1492, which suggests that its founders were the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in that year. Today, the synagogue stands on Talmud Torah Street in the Mellah, the Jewish quarter, but it was not originally built there. How can this be? No, they did not move the synagogue there, but the Jewish quarter here. In 1557, the then-enthroned Saadi dynasty began the construction of “Renaissance” Marrakesh by building a beautiful mosque in the middle of the bazaar and surrounding it with a comprehensive urban development, the wealthy Mouassin district. And for the Jews living there up to then, they created the Mellah here, around the Lazama, right next to the royal palace: partly for a more effective protection, and partly so that the sultan would always have the inexhaustible wallet at hand.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The Jews resettled here were mainly Berber Jews, the oldest Jewish inhabitants of Morocco, about whom <a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2020/05/nalunk-todra-faluban-berber-zsidok.html">I have written before.</a> Today, a photo exhibition organized in the synagogue’s former yeshiva testifies to their traditional culture, and especially to their schools active in the villages of the Atlas. These often employed Ashkenazi Hasidic rabbis as teachers who settled in Morocco from the 19th century, and they were financially supported by French Jews from the early 20th century.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The synagogue, which is the only functioning synagogue in Marrakesh after the aliyah of the 1950s and 1960s, is no longer a reminder of those times. In the 1930s and 1990s, it was renovated with the support of American and Israeli Jews,in the uncharacteristic modern style usual there.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In these months, this Jewish mix is enriched by a new, exotic shade. In two rooms of the yeshiva, a photo exhibition was opened from the pictures of Dorit Lombroso from Israel, which presents a very interesting Jewish group from India, the Bnei Menashe, the sons of Menasseh.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:828" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Menasseh’s sons, writes the exhibit’s introduction, live in North-East India, in the swampland between Mizoram and Manipur. They speak various versions of the local Tibeto-Burman languages. Before the 19th century, they were animists and feared bounty hunters. They were converted to Christianity by British missionaries, and from the parallels between their own mythology and the Bible, they came to the conclusion that they were actually Jews, and that their mythical ancestor, Manmási, was none other than Menasseh, the son of patriarch Joseph.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>That’s it for the introduction. However, Israeli anthropologists <a href="javascript:;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" onmouseout="return nd();" onmouseover="return overlib('Weil, Shalva. Lost Israelites from North-East India: Re-Traditionalisation and Conversion among the Shinlung from the Indo-Burmese Borderlands. <i>The Anthropologist,</i> 2004, 6(3): 219–233.', BGCOLOR, '#7777aa', ABOVE, CENTER, MOUSEOFF, WIDTH, 300)">*</a> also add that the main evidence forthe parallels was that in 1951, one of the leaders of the then already Christian Mizo-Kuki-Chin tribes had a dream revealing him that his people came from Israel. With his followers, he founded a syncretic Presbyterian revival movement that recognized Jesus as the Messiah, but adopted several precepts of Jewish law and also incorporated many elements of pre-Christian local folklore into its cult.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The awakening to Jewish roots, writes Shalva Weil, probably would not have happened without the British Christian missionaries, who, wherever they appeared in the 19th century, tried to show out the traces of the “ten lost Jewish tribes” displaced by the Assyrians in the local population. Their most spectacular achievement is the Mormon Church, which, according to the self-produced second season of the Bible, <i>The Book of Mormon,</i> is descended from the ten tribes that fled to South America. It is quite ironic that the Mizo-Kuki-Chin tribes found their own Jewish identity through the guidance of lunatic Christian missionaries.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The movement would probably have remained a local Protestant cult, had Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, the founder of the Amishav organization working to resettle the lost Jewish tribes to Israel, not noticed them in 1983. Rabbi Avichail learned about the sensational discovery from a Mizo insurance agent, and he immediately traveled to the scene. During his local research, he found that the local legends in fact contain some elements that can be paralleled with the Bible. Based on these, he willingly recognized the ethnic group as Jews and introduced orthodox Jewish teachings among them. He even obtained money – from fundamentalist Christian organizations working to promote the Second Coming – to settle them in Israel, but the Israeli government did not recognize Menasseh’s sons as eligible for aliyah.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In the meantime, as it usually happens, <a href="https://www.israel21c.org/the-return-of-a-lost-tribe-of-israel-27-centuries-later/">another Jewish organization, Shavei Israel, was also created</a> to repatriate the lost tribes under the leadership of Michael Freund, a columnist for <i>The Jerusalem Post,</i> and the two men deadly fell out with each other. This was also facilitated by the fact that Menasseh’s sons also quarreled with each other regarding the leading clans – if nothing else, this is a strong evidence for their Jewishness. By 2005, Shavei Israel had Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, declare the Jewish descent of this ethnic group and its eligibility for aliyah. From then on, about 3000 of the movement’s members moved to Israel, where they were sent to Gaza and the occupied territories in the West Bank as Jewish settlers, to increase the Jewish population, for bullet catchers and, lacking other professional qualifications, for soldiers. This was probably the main motivation for right-wing Jewish politics to recognize the Mizo-Kuki-Chin as Jews.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>There were also many opponents of the recognition. DNA tests carried out in the meantime and Israeli academics both testified against the group’s Jewish origins. The local Presbyterian church and Hindu organizations, the other Mizo-Kuki-Chin tribes who deny that Menasseh’s sons are different from them, and the Indian government, which looks suspiciously at another outward-looking people in the border region already plagued by numerous separatist movements, have raised their voices against the local proselytizing activities of the Israeli rabbies.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Dorit Lombroso’s photos definitely cast their vote in favor of the group’s Jewishness. The photographer captures the bearers of exotic Jewish blood renewal in <a href="https://www.lombrosophoto.com/">the style of the orientalizing-idealizing soft porno portraits known from her site.</a> In the bosom of unspoiled nature, the young swampland Jews perform the ceremonies of Judaism or their own traditional works that can be paralleled with biblical Jews, in their most beautiful clothes – which are often so new that they are probably costumes borrowed for the occasion – and in front of beautiful settings, rich fabrics, piles of holy books and carefully installed objects of the tradition. Serious-looking boys and girls with eyes cast into the future, dancing in fields of flowers and under blossoming trees, practicing traditional male and female roles. A growing generation of Jewish settlers. It’s like seeing propaganda photos of the settlement to Palestine from the 1920s and 1930s. And that is probably the case.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/023.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/023k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/lazama/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p></div>
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<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/02/beallitott-zsidok.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-30338792303106896722023-02-14T06:30:00.000+01:002023-02-14T06:30:01.902+01:00Guardian angels 1. Mosques of Afanour<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/02/orangyalok-1-afanour-mecsetei.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a>
In Morocco, the law is that no infidel can enter Islamic holy places, mosques, working madrasahs, tombs of saints. Even the most beautiful historical mosques can only be seen in the excellent albums by Xavier Salmon, who, as a curator of the Louvre, was obviously allowed to take photos inside them with special permission. I myself know only two exceptions. Ironically, both are in Afanour, one of Morocco’s most Jewish towns.<br /></p><p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2020/05/nalunk-todra-faluban-berber-zsidok.html">In my summary about the Berber Jews</a> I mentioned that the northern end and business center of the “gold for salt” trade between medieval Morocco and the kingdoms of Benin and Ghana was the city of Sijilmasa at the southeastern foothills of the Atlas, at the confluence of the Todra and Draa rivers. Trade was mainly concentrated in the hands of Berber Jewish investors and caravan owners. In the mid-1500s, Sijilmasa ceased to exist for unknown reasons – according to Leo Africanus, due to a civil war –, and its inhabitants moved to about three hundred small settlements founded around the former city. Until the great aliyah of the 1950s and 60s, these were the most Jewish villages in Morocco. Among them stood out in particular Todra, the spiritual center of Berber Jewry – with which I also begin the above summary, and which I will write about in detail in a next post –, and, opposite it on the otherside of the Todra river, Afanour, one of the important workshops of Berber Jewish silversmiths.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Since the Jews moved out, the old Afanour, built of clay, is largely a ghost town. The beaten clay walls last a maximum of one or two decades without continuous maintenance, and that deadline has long since expired. The streets can still be discerned, but it is no longer possible to determine with absolute certainty whether an empty place was a square, an inner courtyard, or the site of a building that had already completely crumbled away. The roofs of the once rich, four- to five-story kasbahs have cracked, and often one or more of their walls collapsed, revealing the anatomy of a centuries-old living space.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div class="mosaic">
<p><map name="afanour1">
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/1/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#afanour1" width="550" /></p></div>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:825" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Through such a broken wall, you can enter a building that once served the Muslim community rather than the Jewish one. The floor plan of the small village mosque follows the tradition of the large Arab mosques, such as the Great Mosque of Damascus or the Mosque of Córdoba. Arches rise on the top of a forest of columns standing at the intersections of a regular chessboard, and they support the horizontal roof made of palm beams.<br /></p>
<div class="mosaic">
<p><map name="afanour2">
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<img border="0" height="273" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/2/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#afanour2" width="550" /></p></div>
<p>The central column square holds a prominent skylight dome. On the basis of this small mosque, we can form some idea of the large royal mosques in Fez, Marrakesh and Meknes, which we cannot enter.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Two niches open on the east wall. One is the mihrab, the prayer booth facing Mecca, and the other is a Moroccan characteristic: a booth into which the wooden mimbar, the pulpit can be pushed in.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The mosque is still relatively intact. Its columns are unbroken, and although the mud washed in from the outside seeps in through the windows and the cracks of the dome, even this latter appears to be structurally intact. Only the reed covering spread over the palm beans has been torn. It appears as if the mosque was abandoned later and maintained longer than the residential buildings.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:826" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> This is certainly the case with another mosque, which stands a little further south, on the edge of the palm grove surrounding the village from the side of the Todra river. This building is clearly marked by its dome, which rises above the surrounding clay walls. By following this as a compass and meandering through the labyrinth of clay streets, we will arrive to a columned façade, on the top of which the inscription MOSQUÉE IKELANE has been composed from pieces of palm wood. At the top of the façade, there is also a terrace with a palm tree railing, from which the guardian angel of the mosque, the Berber Aaddi Aqbli looks down on us and invites us with great joy to the mosque and madrasah complex, which must have seen no infidel in its heyday.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In fact, the former mosque of the Ikelane neighborhood performed many functions at the time. In addition to a mosque, it also had a primary and a higher school of theology. This latter also had a dormitory and a bathhouse, for which the water drawn from the local well was heated in a separate room in a cauldron dug into the ground.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The first verse of the Qurʿan was written on the blackboard of the former elementary school classrom for didactic purposes: <i>Bismillāhi r-rahmāni r-rahīmi,</i> in the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate<br /></span></p></div>
<p>That you can still see all this today is the merit of Aaddi. He was born and grew up here in the neighborhood, went to this school, and although he spent most of his life away from here, as a miner, he returned after his retirement. He was pained by the state of the mosque, which was in use for a while after the village was depopulated, and only abandoned for good in the 1990s. As the only resident of the old Afanour, he moved into the teacher’s room and restored the mosque complex with his own hands. One of the greatest experts in traditional Berber clay architecture, the Catalan Roger Mimo, was of great help in this, who also brought him together with other specialists and restorers, and whose designs and documents are on display on the wall of the mosque’s forecourt.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The structure of the mosque is the same as of the other, neglected small mosque: arches on top of a forest of columns, with a palm beams and reed covering. And in the middle is the dome, the upper circular window of which is covered by a green glazed ceramic bowl. Aaddi tells us that this is not the original, centuries-old bowl, which was stolen by a Berber worker, so he had to replace it with a similar but new one.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/3/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#afanour3" width="550" /></p></div>
<p>After the tour, Aaddi asks us to write in the guest book and documents our visit with a group photo taken with his mobile phone. As he says, with this documentation he can justify the maintenance of the mosque and claim some state support to it.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In addition to the fact that the structure of the mosque bears witness to the general structure of the large Moroccan mosques, the conditions of its survival are also characteristically Moroccan. I have met such guardian angels in several places, who have devoted their lives to the preservation of an abandoned community building, a mosque, a synagogue, a kasbah. I will write more about them soon.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/morocco/afanour/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/02/orangyalok-1-afanour-mecsetei.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-46530809763011424292023-01-25T16:42:00.012+01:002023-01-25T20:06:46.314+01:00The cathedral that failed<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-bukott-katedralis.html"><img border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" width="25" height="14" style="border: 0px none; padding: 0px; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; float: right;"></a> Biniamar is a small village of three hundred people at the eastern foot of the Sierra Tramuntana in Mallorca. Its name, like that of many other places in Mallorca beginning with Bini, comes from the fact that during the Muslim kingdom of Mallorca (902-1229), an Arab or Berber tribe lived here, who considered themselves the sons (<i>bani</i>) of a common ancestor, in the case of Biniamar, the sons of Amar (<i>bani Amar</i>). In the centuries following the Catalan conquest, Amar’s sons became Catalan peasants and good Catholics. Their medieval church was dedicated to Saint Thecla, disciple of Saint Paul and an early patron of female autonomy, whose veneration was widespread among the Catalan conquerors. The cathedral of Tarragona in Catalonia is also dedicated to her, where she is celebrated in every September with a spectacular ten-day (!) procession.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:823" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> In Biniamar, however, the most famous shrine is not the church of Saint Thecla, but the one called Església Nova, the New Church. However, this building is not marked as a church on the map, and although the commemorative plaque bolted to its façade in 2010 celebrates its centenary, it was never actually consecrated. You can only see why on site: because it has no roof, and never had. The ribs that start as cross vaults from the consoles above the Gothic arches of the side aisles stop immediately after starting, and the building is open to the sky. That is why the church is also called the Unfinished Cathedral.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>It is not uncommon for Gothic cathedrals to be left unfinished, such as the Dom in Cologne, which, as they say, “if will be finished, the world will end”. Or the Duomo in Siena with its large, empty main nave, or Beauvais Cathedral, where the five-hundred-year-old scaffolding itself is already considered a monument. This, however, had a reason as serious as the building itself: war, black death, earthquake. As comical as it was to build a Gothic cathedral in Biniamar, just as banal and farcical was the reason for its failure.<br /></p>
<p>The village’s three hundred inhabitants would never have thought of building such a large church, if it had not happened that <a href="https://dbe.rah.es/biografias/12392/antonio-maura-y-montaner">Antonio Maura (1853-1925),</a> a six-time prime minister of pre-Franco Spain, born in Palma de Mallorca, spent his childhood summers with his uncle who lived here.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Antonio Maura. A portrait by photographer Kâulak (Antonio Cánovas del Castillo y Vallejo) on the double page of the May 5, 1917 issue of the magazine <i>La Esfera</i></span></p></div>
<p>Already from the end of the 19th century, Maura clearly saw the structural problems of the Spanish state and the disasters to which they could lead (and did lead indeed). During his six governments, he consistently tried to change them with the reforms of his “revolution from above” and by breaking “caciquismo”, the power of rural landowner politicians (godfathers, oligarchs, or “NER knights”, as we would call them in Hungary, the beneficiaries of the <i>System of National Cooperation</i>). In contrast, as we will soon see, he was the first governor in 20th-century Spain who had to crush by force a revolution from below,and the first politician who, as a successful native of Mallorca, was surrounded in the island by a personal cult worthy of a “cacique”. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:824" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Art Nouveau monument erected by the city of Palma de Mallorca with the sculptor Mariano Benlliure in 1929 on the Plaça del Mercat is a witness to this.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Another witness is the “cathedral” of Biniamar, which could come to life only due to the fact that Maura wanted to set up a memorial commensurate with his own perceived importance in the scene of his childhood. During his <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobierno_largo_de_Antonio_Maura">second prime ministership</a> (1907-1909), the great returner of Spanish politics “found” 100,000 pesetas for the new church of Biniamar. The foundation stone was laid on September 25, 1910, two days after the feast of St. Thecla, and the amount was enough to raise the walls up to the beginning of the vault. At that time, however, it was already apparent that there would be problems with the continuation.<br /></p><p>The so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Melillan_campaign">second Rif War</a> that broke out around the Spanish enclave city of Melilla in Morocco, did not turn well for Spain, and Maura was forced to call up reserves. The conscript could be redeemed for 1,500 pesetas, which was a worker’s salary for one year. In this way, the rich got away, but the poor, many of whom were sole breadwinners, were dragged into a war that, in the eyes of the Spanish people, served only the interests of the rich mine owners around Melilla. Demonstrations and later uprisings broke out against the conscription, primarily in Barcelona, which was already an important center of Anarchism, which played a significant role in the later civil war. During the <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semana_Tr%C3%A1gica_%28Espa%C3%B1a%29">“Tragic Week”</a> at the end of July, the government put down the rebellion with guns. More than a hundred people died. Five organizers of the uprising, including its leader Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, organizer of the “Free Schools” in Barcelona, were sentenced to death. The sentence and the execution were accompanied by a huge European protest, and as a result, King Alfons XIII replaced Maura as prime minister.<br /></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>
<span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859-1909) free thinker, anarchist, educator</span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The burning Barcelona on July 28, 1909, about which Antonio Ribas made the film <i>La ciutat cremada</i> (The city burnt) in 1976<br /></span></p></div>
<p>And everything happened as usual. The projects of public interest continued under the next prime minister, Segismundo Moret: the Berber fighters of the Rif Mountains were pushed back from the land they were fighting for, expropriated by the mining companies. But the private projects stopped immediately. The promised next 100,000 pesetas did not arrive in Biniamar. The arcs started, but they did not continue. The church was left without a roof.<br /></p><p>And everything went on as usual with projects that only serve the pleasure and prestige of a powerful patron, but the local community does not really need them. The stadiums are overrun by weeds, the family estate built on the site of destroyed monuments becomes a sheepfold, drug addicts shoot themselves up under the torn ceilings of palaces of culture. <a href="javascript:;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" onmouseout="return nd();" onmouseover="return overlib('References to current prestige projects of Prime Minister Orbán in Hungary', BGCOLOR, '#7777aa', ABOVE, CENTER, MOUSEOFF, WIDTH, 300)">*</a> As <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2020/06/lilith-and-the-draconcopes.html">Isaiah dramatizes it:</a><br /></p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“Thorns will overrun her citadels, nettles and brambles her strongholds. She will become a haunt for jackals, a home for owls. Desert creatures will meet with hyenas, and wild goats will bleat to each other. There the lilith will also lie down and find for themselves places of rest. The owl will nest there and lay eggs, she will hatch them and care for her young under the shadow of her wings. There also the falcons will gather, each with its mate.”</span></p>
<p>In Biniamar, the large space surrounded by four walls was turned into a sports field and a community space, because that was all what the local community needed. By peeking through the main gate, you can see the soccer goal pushed aside, and through the south gate, the basketball blackboard in the transept as well as the stacked plastic chairs of the open-air cinema.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>And today, on <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2008/01/sant-antoni.html">the evening of Saint Anthony,</a> when every village on the island prepares for the holy theater of the temptation of the old hermit and the subsequent community pig roasting, you can already see the huge log of the community bonfire in front of the church, as well as the glowing “Happy Holidays!” inscription above the gate.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>It’s dusk. The sun is setting blood red over the surrounding houses. Dezső must die today. <a href="javascript:;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" onmouseout="return nd();" onmouseover="return overlib('A reference to the pig killing in Péter Bacsó’s “A Tanú” (The Witness), an 1968 Hungarian movie highly critical to the regime', BGCOLOR, '#7777aa', ABOVE, CENTER, MOUSEOFF, WIDTH, 300)">*</a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/mallorca/biniamar/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a style="color: rgb(85, 136, 170);" href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-bukott-katedralis.html">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-60514746373723310432022-11-30T19:58:00.200+01:002023-08-10T19:42:34.710+02:00Iran, minute by minute<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p></p><table border="0" style="float: right; margin: -2pt 0pt 5px 20px; width: 170px;"><tbody>
<tr><td><span style="color: #999999; font-size: 85%;">
<i>I wrote the original, Hungarian version of this post in November 2022, when I led a group to turbulent Iran. In the whirlwind of events, I had no time to publish it in English. But now, before I lead a group there again in September 2023, I want to translate it, at the same pace as I wrote, a few paragraphs a day. Check back from time to time. </i>
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<a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2022/11/iran-percrol-percre.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a>
The basic purpose of the “minute by minute” posts written about our travels is to quickly share the small stories, impressions and connections that would later be forgotten. However, this one now has another special purpose: to show you that it is not only possible to travel to Iran, which has been set up as a no-go zone by sensationalist, uninformed and irresponsible media workers (and also come back from there, unlike the Spanish saying goes: <i>Irán – y no volverán</i>). But it is also very worthwhile, because one encounters so much beauty and goodness there like nowhere else. And this applies even to the current tense situation, if one obtains information from credible sources, is sufficiently cautious, and does not succumb to mass hysteria.<p></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>It was always variable with the visa. In the past, you could apply only at the Iranian embassies, where it was mostly rejected, so you had to sign up for fake tours at Iranian tourist offices, whereupon they would grant it. Then, since the 2015 nuclear agreement, it was already possible to request it at the Tehran airport, and after some one or two hours of waiting there it was always granted. Now, however, I don’t want to take any chances, and I again apply for the visa for the whole group through a tourist office. With the visas received by e-mail, we go to the passport control right after landing, but they bluntly reject us. It turns out that this is just a voucher, and the actual visa is still issued by the airport visa office. It takes half an hour to check all of the codes on their museum-ready equipment, to collect the visa fee and to issue the actual visas. After that, the clerk switches to a human voice, and very warmly thanks us for waiting patiently.<br /></p><p>We still have to present our covid vaccination certificates before passport control. Galina has this only in her e-mail, but her mobile phone obviously does not connect to the Iranian internet. After a few minutes of trying, the clerk only asks her to tell her exactly what kind of vaccinations she received, and she believes her. After that, she can enter, too.</p><p>I have already philosophized <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2008/08/muska.html">once,</a> <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2021/06/georgia-minute-by-minute.html#secondrule">twice</a> or <a href="https://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2021/08/az-orosz-termeszet.html">thrice</a> about the natural history of various – German, Italian, Russian, Soviet – bureaucrats. These two examples now add to the taxonomy of the Persian subspecies, which acts brusquely and harshly to assert his authority, but afterwards he has duely received it, he behaves in a very humane and amiable manner.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="colorkarkas"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:808" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> On one side of the road from Tehran Airport to Kashan lies the desert and on the other the Vulture Mountain, the thoroughly eroded range of an old mountain system with jagged ridges and colorful peaks. Tomorrow we will venture into it.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<img border="0" height="273" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/1/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#iran20221" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="maral"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:809" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> After arriving at Khomeini International Airport, we barely drove for an hour when white-coated members of the Revolutionary Guard stopped and surrounded our bus. Amidst shouts of Death to America!, they forced us into the breakfast bar alongside the highway, where they used us for propaganda photos promoting Iran’s prosperity. In the traditional Persian <i>tonir,</i> the baker actually bakes the display bread from the last kilo of flour in the country.</p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Do you know the movie <i>Benvenuto al Sud?</i> A postmaster from Milan is transferred to southern Italy, and although he writes home about his positive experiences, his wife knows better what the South is like, and thinks that her husband only wants to appease her with good-natured lies. Therefore, when she visits him, the husband has to artificially create with his local friends the conditions of the mafia-dominated criminal South, so that she will believe she is in the right place.</span></p><p><span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">The same thing happened to quite a few of my readers when I originally published this paragraph about our first breakfast as a stand-alone Facebook post. I thought it was ironic, but it was not taken that way. Many readers, who already knew better from the press the terrible conditions in Iran read it as a confirmation of their own prejudices, and reacted with desperately sad and tearful emoticons and e-mails urging us to come back home. I advise such people not to read <i>Puck,</i> because it will only upset them. Lesson: never underestimate how much hysteria can turn people into sheep.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>We stand in line for phone cards at Irancell in Kashan, some in the shop, most of us on the street. The Iranians waiting inside willingly let us in, even though there are twenty of us. They have an endless amount of time here, while we are guests, and our time is precious. A woman comes by us and gives Galina her fist. Galina punches it, she turns it upside down, and opens it. It has a small mint chocolate in it. She gives it to Galina. We will come across this gesture later, the secret sign of the freedom movement.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>There is a greengrocer next to the bazaar, with a few teenage sales assistants in front of it. As we wait in front of the pedestrian crossing, one of them grabs twenty oranges and gives us one each. This is pure kindness.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="fingarden"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:810" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">“The Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Gen 2:8-15)</span><br /></p><p>If it happened thus, then the first man spoke Persian. This “garden” is פרדש <i>pardes</i> in Hebrew. And this comes from the Old Persian <i>pairi-daêza,</i> “surrounded by a wall”. Why should the garden be surrounded by a wall? So that the animals of the desert do not come to graze and drink its water. In fact, the <i>pairidaêza</i> necessarily stands in the desert, in the Persian desert, whose land is very fertile dure to millions of years of river alluvium, but it lacks water to make it produce. This water has been brought down from the mountains by the Persians and their predecessors through long vaulted underground canals, the so-called <i>qanat</i>s, for many thousands of years. The <i>qanat</i> is the “river originating in Eden”, which bursts into the surface in the form of a fountain in the middle of the garden and divides into four branches, dividing the garden into four quarters. This structure, the <i>hortus conclusus</i> divided into four quarters, first seen by the captive Jews in the Persian desert, has been the archetype of the garden in European and Islamic world ever since.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The earliest surviving <i>pairidaêza</i> is the World Heritage Fin Garden near Kashan, built by Shah Abbas I in 1590. Its “river” is led down here from the nearby Sialk Hill by a <i>qanat,</i> and emerges in the middle of the garden and divides into four branches, which then unite outside the garden and flow through the tables of the tea houses lined up along the road. But the charming, almost Rococo scenes of the garden pavilion, imitating Delft faience, are a century and half later. Nightingales conversing with roses (<i>gol va bolbol</i>), Qajar princes, geometric patterns.</p>
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<p>We meet a class of girls. They happily take photos and chat with us. “Do you have Covid at home?” they ask. “There was, but <i>hush!</i> it flew away”, I show. “What about you?” “We do not know, the government does not say anything about it.” Later I read that the vaccination level of the Iranian population is 81%.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>A young Kurdish couple from Kermanshah walks past us. The girl’s beautiful, lush hair is not covered by a scarf, but no one says anything in the garden. On the way out, she asks the Hungarian women: “Why do you wear a scarf?” “Because otherwise they would kick us out of the country.” “We must wear it”, she says, “and this is very bad to us”. Another married couple also hears the conversation, and they interject: “No, it is good to us.” We tactfully leave the unfolding religious debate.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>“The scarf and purity guarantee the durability of beauty and virtue.” Handwritten on the moral policing poster is the name of Mahsa Amini, who was killed because of the scarf. According to the locals, a sign with the slogan of the protests: “Zan, zendegi, âzadi” – “For women, life, freedom”, is pasted under the poster every night, which is only taken down by the police in the morning.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">My Armenian Christian friend seems to completely agree with the message of the moral policing poster [A JOKE!!!]</span></p></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">A sign in solidarity with Iran on the door of a costume shop in Venice, one week after our trip to Iran. The image is a cartoon of Marjane Satrapi, the illustrator of <i>Persepolis:</i> an Iranian woman combing the mullahs out of her hair. The caption is a wordplay: “For the women who unleash the wrath of God”, but instead of <i>ira,</i> “wrath”, it says <i>Iran.</i><br /></span></p></div>
<p id="timcheyeamin"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:811" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Kashan bazaar has been under continuous construction for a thousand years. Seljuk, Safavid and Qajar era elements are present in its rich and complex structure. Its most beautiful part is the huge caravanserai or rather plaza called Timche-ye Amin od-Dowle, built in 1863 by the great Kashan architect Ustad Ali Maryam, with a pool in the middle, surrounded by small carpet and antique shops, cafés and more plazas. The Zhee carpet shop has an amazingly high-quality – almost museum-like – offer at amazingly low prices. At the center of the exhibition is a large carpet from the time of the Afghan-Soviet war with tanks, helicopters and mutilated Soviet soldiers. “This is not for sale”, says the young shopkeeper, “we usually lend it to exhibitions”.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>The Kashan merchant families who built the bazaar’s shops and caravanserais, as well as the rich merchant houses of the old town around the bazaar, left from here a long time ago, either to the capital or abroad. Four or five of their houses have been turned into museums, but most of the rest are abandoned and decaying. My friend Mehdi changed this when he renovated the patinated <a href="http://riowang.com/2015/09/the-kamal-ol-molk-house.html">Kamal-ol-Molk house</a> into a guest house some fifteen or twenty years ago. Thanks to the success of the guest house, many people followed his example, and by now eighty of the most beautiful old houses in Kashan have been given a new chance for a dignified life as guest houses. At least that much more could be resurrected.<br /></p>
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<p id="god"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:201" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> And it is somewhere here, in the maze of merchant houses, in the forest of very simple and very kind faces, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/07/faces-of-kashan.html">that God lives</a> in a small adobe house.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.studiolum.com/wang/persian/kashanfaces/10.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.studiolum.com/wang/persian/kashanfaces/10k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>In Iran, money has so little value that cash is almost never used, because it would have to be carried in a separate bag for shopping. They don’t keep it in the shops either. When you pay in cash, they give you the return in chocolate or ballpoint pen. The idyllic times that I wrote about in the post <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-persian-banknote.html"><i>The Persian banknote</i></a> have passed. Today, a cup of good coffee costs three hundred thousand rials, the equivalent of one euro. The country has almost completely switched to card payments. However, only Iranians can get a card, and our bank cards are not valid here. Foreigners still have to exchange cash, but the banks have almost no cash any more. Mehdi spends a whole afternoon collecting enough rials from an unknown number of banks so that each of us would receive at least one hundred euros. In the evening, we cook and have dinner at a friend’s family. The shipment of money arrives here. We dump it in a big pile in the middle of the room, and are counting it.<br /></p><p>Our readers wrote that there is a way for foreigners to obtain an Iranian payment card, the Mah Card. I tried it, it did not work at all. I signed up for it, they promised to bring it to the hotel, but they did not come, and since then they have not responded to any e-mails.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p><i>Naphtali,</i> <i>Simeon</i> and <i>menorah:</i> Jewish tiles in a Kashan antique shop next to Ameri Historical Merchant House. The Jewish population of Kashan, this important trading city on the Silk Road, also called “the little Jerusalem”, was particularly important until the Islamic revolution of 1979, when some of them emigrated and others moved to the big cities. In the 17th century, some of them were forcibly Islamized. Many of today’s great ayatollahs acknowledge their Jewish origin. <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-tomb-of-queen-esther-in-persia.html">I have written about the Iranian Jews before,</a> and I will continue to do so below.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p id="tabatabaei"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:812" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Kashan’s Tabatabaei House is one of the famous merchant houses in Kashan. It was built around 1840 by Seyyed Jafar Tabatabaei, a rich carpet merchant of the Silk Road, with the greatest Kashan architect of the time, Ustad Ali Maryam, who also built the Timcheh-ye Amin od-Dowleh plaza in the Kashan bazaar we just saw. The house is organized as a group of small patios on the two narrower sides of a courtyard with a large pool, around the two arches (<i>eivan</i>s) open to the courtyard. The walls are richly decorated with stucco and mirror inlays typical of the Qajar era.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<img border="0" height="552" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/9/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#iran20229" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="borujerdi"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:813" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> When Mehdi Borujerdi proposed to the daughter of Seyyed Jafar Tabatabaei, his future father-in-law showed him around the house we had just seen and told him: you see, my daughter is used to this. Borujerdi was not only a rich merchant, but also a smart one, and he understood the hint. In 1857 he built Kashan’s most prestigious merchant house with the same Ustad Ali Maryam. This house is smaller than his father-in-law’s, but its decoration – designed by the leading painter of the time, Kamal ol-Molk, also of Kashan, but working for the Qajar shah’s court – is much more sophisticated. Symbols and motifs of the monarchy and the army appear again and again in the stuccos and wall paintings, as Borujerdi was a supplier to the court and the army. The wall of the reception hall is decorated with pictures of Shah Nasser ad-Din and his two sons. The faces of the shah and the heir to the throne were left blank, which refers to <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-zoo-in-my-luggage.html">the mandatory respectful depiction of Muhammad and his family,</a> thus flattering the shah.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The reception hall also has four cuckoo clocks made of stucco, which was a common motif in 19th-century Persian art and replaced the much more expensive real clocks imported from the West.</p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="ameri"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:814" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Kashan’s third most famous merchant house, the Âmeri House was built by Âmeri Khan, the governor of Kashan, in the second half of the 18th century. Thus, this is the earliest of the three, and it also served as a model for the Tabatabaei house. The huge, seven-courtyard house has been beautifully restored as an exclusive hotel and café.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/024.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/024k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="amirhammam"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:815" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Safavid-era (16th-century) public bath in Kashan’s old town is named after a descendant (<i>imamzadeh</i>) of Imam Sultan Amir Ahmad, whose mausoleum stands nearby. The magnificent octagonal dressing room is followed by a rectangular bathroom with several small bathrooms around its sides. On the roof, several skylight domes rise side by side, providing inspiration to Gaudí.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/025.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/025k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<img border="0" height="366" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/11/map.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" usemap="#iran202211" width="550" /></p></div>
<p id="puppetmuseum"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:816" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The puppet museum is located in a smaller merchant’s house near the historical ones. In the East, the puppet theater in the marketplace is not only a means of entertaining the people, children and adults alike, but also perhaps the only tolerated genre of public political satire. A puppet cannot be beheaded for saying that the pasha is stealing or that the padishah is losing battle after battle. This tradition allowed <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2021/06/georgia-minute-by-minute.html#gabriadze">Rezo Gabriadze to run an underground puppet theater</a> in Tbilisi in the 1980s, in which the vices of the Soviet system were caricatured. And this explains the many splendidly simple soldier, khan and official puppets in the Kashan Puppet Museum. <br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/026.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/026k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="aghabozorg">On the morning of December 15, 1778, exactly 187 years before I was born, Kashan was hit by a massive earthquake, a rarity in this region that has been left aside by major geological movements. The main buildings fell into ruins. Apart from a few earlier fragments, the architectural history of Kashan therefore begins in the 19th century, which is thus a period of wealth, innovation and development here, while the other cities of Iran rather show decline. The buildings are characterized by nostalgia for the lost buildings of previous centuries. They are full of Safavid-era motifs, although realized in a simpler and quicker way, for example with stucco or colored tiles instead of stone carving. Such are the previously presented merchant houses, but also <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:817" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> the Agha Bozorg Grand Mosque, which was built by the wealthy merchant Hajj Mohammad Taghi Khanian as the main mosque of Kashan between 1834 and 1849. Agha Bozorg, i.e. the Great Aga, the famous preacher and teacher of the mosque was his son-in-law. The courtyard of the mosque, like that of most merchant houses, was lowered by two levels so that the earth would cool them in the local dry, hot weather. The charming girls’ faces on the hidden arches at the back of the mosque were probably scratched by young student priests. Under the arches facing the street, the local population seeks refuge from heat.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/027.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/027k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="dates">Iran is a large plate, surrounded by high mountain ranges. The clouds drop their burden at the rim, and they do not reach the center of the plate. The water flows down on the sloping rim, but then it dies in the desert that fills the entire center of the country. The historical cities were established on the edge of the desert, where water could be brought down from the mountains with the <i>qanat</i> system, and the roads connecting them are accompanied by the mountain ranges on one side and by the desert on the other. Only very brave traders and nomads cut across this eight-hundred-kilometer-wide wasteland. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:818" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-persian-desert.html">I have already written about the Persian desert with the photos of Nasrollah Kasraian,</a> but now we ourselves have bravely ventured at least twenty kilometers deep to see the sand dunes, the white-crested honeycombs of seasonal salt lakes, and the date palms that are currently in bloom.<br /></p>
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<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/028.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/028k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/029.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/029k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: 85%;">Dinner at the Mozaffer traditional restaurant, next to Kashan’s merchant houses. Six types of kebabs (chicken wings, <i>kubideh</i> = minced lamb, <i>bakhtiari</i> = mixed chicken and lamb, chicken, lamb, <i>soltani</i> = spicy lamb), <i>dizi</i> (beans with mutton), <i>tah dig</i> (rie left at the bottom of the pot, fried with egg)<br /></span></p></div>
<p id="abyaneh"><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:190" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> I have <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/08/ashura-in-abyaneh.html">already</a> <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/08/abyaneh-red-village.html">written</a> in detail about Abyaneh, the red village hidden in the Vulture Mountains. Now we visit it again. The village, with its Middle Persian language of fifteen hundred years ago, Zoroastrian traditions and special, colorful folk costumes, is a destination of Iranian domestic tourism, but now there is not a single visitor except us. Iranians now have better things to do, and foreigners have been deterred by the apocalyptic reports of the sensationalist Western press. The elderly residents of the village – the young people have all moved to the city – welcome us with unusually great joy. At the beginning of the village, they just quickly run in for a bag of apples or pressed pomegranate jam, but by the time we get to the end, the small shops are already opened, and everyone is hoping to replace the income lost during Covid and the protests.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/030.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/030k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p id="abyanehjamemosque">Abyaneh has two Grand Mosques. One is public, and <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2015/08/abyaneh-red-village.html">I already wrote about it.</a> <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:819" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The other is reserved to the residents of the village. Only they can enter it on the feast days, otherwise it is closed. I have been to Abyaneh many times, but only now I was able to enter here for the first time.<br /></p><p>Apart from the richly carved, painted and copper-veined Safavid-era gate, there is almost no other decoration in the mosque. Its roof beams are supported by simple date palm columns, only their capitals and the ceiling squares are carved. It is precisely this simplicity that fascinates us, together with the light puring into the dark interior of the puritan wooden structure from above and through the small windows. On one of the pillars, names and words carved. I can read that of Mohammed, perhaps an <i>alhamdulillah</i> also starts, the rest only Allah knows.<br /></p><p>But what is even more impressive is that a small door opens on the side wall of the mosque, so small that you have to stoop to enter it, and then a staircase leads down to an even more puritan, even more archaic room with columns and beams. This was the village’s Zoroastrian temple – popularly, but misleadingly known as a “fire temple” – until the Safavid era. When, in the 16th century, Islam first came to this village closed between the mountains and forgotten for a thousand years, a copper-embossed <i>mihrab</i> was inserted into the wall of the temple, and a carved wooden <i>mimbar</i> was placed next to it. But then the present-day mosque was built above it, and, after the short Islamic intermezzo, the fire temple still dreams its Sleeping Beauty dream about Ahura Mazda.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/031.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/persian/iran2022/031k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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</div>
<p><i>To be continued</i></p>
<br />
<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2022/11/iran-percrol-percre.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4565845984512808077.post-47493709127381621862022-11-06T21:13:00.003+01:002022-11-07T13:08:09.023+01:00Swallow calendar<div style="text-align: justify;">
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/001.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/001k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2022/11/fecskenaptar.html"><img border="0" height="14" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/hu.gif" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 2pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" width="25" /></a><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:798" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> In the Sicilian Nicosia, next to Bar Antica Gelateria in the main square, <a href="http://riowang.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-fascism-among-us.html">on the façade of which fragments of Mussolini’s Victory Day speech of May 9, 1936 still can be read,</a> a steep staircase leads up to the hill of the twenty-four barons.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/011.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/011k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The hill got its name from the fact that, after the conquest of the city at the end of the 11th century, the cream of the new Norman-Lombard nobility settled here. The name has since become a trademark of Nicosia, which is referred to as “the city of the twenty-four barons”, but it is also the name of a local restaurant, brewery and craft beer pub. <a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:806" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The coats of arms of the twenty-four barons are displayed in the restaurant of the same name.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/002.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/002k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>Although the names of the twenty-four barons have been brightly preserved by tradition, time has not been so clement to their legacy. Most of their palaces stand empty and decaying. Some of them were closed so long time ago that the lock itself is slowly becoming a thing of museum value.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/003.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/003k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<p>Since the earth is constantly moving gently in Sicily, the door jambs of some gates have also slipped apart, and there is no one to get them right again.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/004.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/004k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:806" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The Salomone Palace, the largest among them, after which the steep street is named, is in the best condition. One of the most valuable old libraries of Nicosia is kept here. Above the gate, the coat of arms of the <i>converso</i> family includes the Star of David, or rather Solomon’s Seal, and the two lions next to it look like the lions of Judah raising the crown of the Torah on Jewish tombstones. Other Jewish noble families also often preserved these symbols of their most ancient pedigree, <a href="http://riowang.com/2014/11/a-jew-of-three-emperors.html">as Jakob Bassevi von Trautenberg did on his palace in Prague.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/008.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/008k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/009.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/009k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/010.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/010k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Steep streets climb up from the old and the lower town on both sides of the <i>salita.</i><br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/005.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/005k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/006.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/006k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>Soon the Lombard hill rising on the other side of the main square appears above the rooftops, with the “mother church” <i>(madre chiesa)</i> of Santa Maria Maggiore on the top. The Lombard warriors who were settled there by the Norman conquerors brought to Nicosia the typical <a href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetti_galloitalici_di_Sicilia">Gallo-Italian dialect,</a> which no one else in Sicily understands except them, and which does not even sound Italian. When sitting in the bar, I had to wonder for a long time what language they were speaking. Their church became a rival to the St. Nicholas church of the original Greek inhabitants in the main square, so it was necessary each year to change the title of the city’s cathedral between the two <i>madre chiese.</i> During their Holy Week processions, they regularly clashed, and struck each other with the procession crucifix. The same happened on the feast of St Nicholas, the original patron saint of the two churches. That is why the Lombard church had to be renamed Santa Maria Maggiore, so the two devotional processions would at least not meet during the feast of the patron saint.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/007.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/007k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>At the end of the road, you have to make one last effort to get up the steep SS. Salvatore stairs to the Church of the Savior on top of the hill.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/012.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/012k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:501" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> The effort is well worth it. From the small square in front of the church, you enjoy a gorgeous panorama of the old town of Nicosia and the landscape beyond it, all the way to Mount Etna, which is piping with a delicate white strip. The structure of the city unfolds below us in such detail and invites us to take a virtual walk like an animated Baroque city map, with its streets, squares, fountains, the façades of churches and palaces, the high towers and the inner courtyards lined with sloping tiled roofs, into which you can peer from above.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/013.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/013k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/014.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/014k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/015.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/015k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/016.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/016k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/map/index.php?q=riowang/all:807" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/gm/geo.jpg" style="border: 0px none; float: right; margin: 0pt 0px 0px 0pt; padding: 0px;" /></a> Directly below us is the main square with St Nicholas Church, which was rebuilt from a Greek church and an Arab tower in its current Renaissance-Baroque form after who knows how many earthquakes. Its Andalusian-style minaret tower is still surrounded by seven strong iron bands to at least somewhat counterbalance the inscrutable will of Allah.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/017.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/017k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<div class="mosaic">
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<p>But the biggest surprise is that the south side of the Church of the Savior, which is normally closed off from the rest of the square by an iron-barred gate, is now open. Its key is kept in the Ecomuseo Petra d’Asgotto, with whom you can arrange a meeting in advance by e-mailing to pinalagiusa@tiscali.it. And it is worth it, because here is a unique monument of the city: the swallow calendar (<i>calendario delle rondinelle</i>).<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/018.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/018k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The southern wall of the church is enriched with a 13th-century arcaded porch. In the eastern corner of the wall, a large limestone block was inserted, on the two smoothed sides of which they engraved year by year from 1737 to 1798, which month and which day the first swallows arrived in Nicosia. This happened most often in the first days of March, but sometimes in the last week of February, and even in mid-February towards the end of the century. Would the weather have been that much warmer?<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/019.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/019k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/020.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/020k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/021.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/021k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/022.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/022k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The continuation of the calendar can be found after passing through the arches, in the southwest corner of the church. Here, they inserted three block stones in the wall, but only the middle one has dates, from 1799 to 1820. Perhaps the lower one has some too, but you cannot read them any more.<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/023.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/023k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/024.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/024k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/028.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/028k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
<p>The arrival of the first swallows and the first storks, the official seal of the new spring, is a big event in the life of a small town. But since it is not about the visit of great people, saints or rulers, it rarely occurred to anyone to include this event in the local history.</p><p>History writing also has its history, as to in which age what was considered worthy of recording, of including into history books. Based on the ancient Roman-Greek model, for a long time they only focused on <i>dicta </i><i>et facta memorabilia,</i> the memorable deeds and sayings of famous people, or major events affecting the lives of entire peoples. That simple folks, everyday mentality, man’s relationship with nature and animals, <i>ad absurdum</i> the swallows of Nicosia can also have a history, was only established in the 20th century by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school">the French school of historiography <i>Annales.</i></a></p><p>I wonder who thought of this in Nicosia, which churchman was so much channeled at the same time into the cycle of nature and the routine of written chronicles, to start keeping this calendar and to create micro-historiography two centuries before <i>Annales.</i><br /></p>
<p><a href="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/027.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://studiolum.com/wang/italia/nicosia/027k.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center;" /></a></p>
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<span class="post-footer"><a href="http://wangfolyo.blogspot.com/2022/11/fecskenaptar.html" style="color: #5588aa;">magyarul</a></span>Studiolumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06377777909296284368noreply@blogger.com0