2024 Turkey: An Introduction To Istanbul

 I would suspect - though I have no hard data on this - that almost every trip to Turkey starts and ends in Istanbul.  Part of that is simply due to the fact that Istanbul airport is the largest airport in Turkey and, in 2023, was the second busiest airport in Europe - so every flight likely touches down here.  The other is that, well, Istanbul is Istanbul.

The current city of Istanbul is huge, both internally to Turkey as well as to the world at large.  Currently almost one of every five inhabitants of Turkey lives in its environs (15 million in a total population of 85 million), making it the largest city in Turkey; the next, the capital city of Ankara, has 5.1 million inhabitants.  It is also the most populous city in Europe as well as the 15th largest city globally.

Although the area of Istanbul was likely settled in the Neolithic era, the city itself was founded in the 7th Century B.C. by colonists from the Greek city of Megara.  The legend of the founding is that the leader of that expedition, Byzas, consulted the Oracle of Delphi prior to leaving and was told to build his city in the land opposite the blind.  He sailed to the Bosporus Straits and realized that another Greek colony - Chalcedon - had been founded on the Asian side of the Straits and had completely missed the geographic advantages that the location of Byzantium offered: A sheltered harbor and a defensible site.  Deciding the "blind" were the Chalcedonians, he founded a colony and married the daughter of a local lord. The city became known as "Byzantion".

The colony prospered: the tibes of Thrace needed trade goods and, as time went on, ships traveling for trade to the Pontus Sea (Black Sea) needed a port as well.  Byzantion was well situated for both of these needs.  Although subject to those passing through - The Persian Empire during The Greco-Persian Wars and The Athenian Empire during the Delphian League, it became independent in 335 B.C. and remained so until 73 A.D., when it became part of the Roman Empire

The dominant feature of Byzantion (Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul) is the Bosporus Straits, the narrow waterway (31 km/19 miles) that connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara and eventually the Aegean/Mediterranean Seas.  This narrow sea lane - incredibly strategically important almost since the founding of the city - comes to with 700 meters/2300 feet of the two continents of Asia and Europe within the limits of Istanbul.  This has two impacts:  the first is that Istanbul is the one of the few cities that is on two continents.  The second is that Istanbul has always been in a place - even, apparently, in pre-history - of trade and human contact.

When Constantine the Great (A.D. 272-337) gained control of the Roman Empire, he sought out a new capitol away from Rome, a recognition that the Eastern Half of the Roman Empire had gained in power and importance.  The city of Byzantium already existed; he took it and made it into the Imperial Capitol of Constantinople.  Officially "founded" in A.D. 324, it would serve as the capitol of what would become the Byzantine Empire until A.D. 1453.

Traces of both Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Byzantium and Constantinople seem hard to come by, at least in modern Istanbul.  2800 years of human habitation combined with multiple building programs (Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Turkish) combined with a region given to the earthquakes has reduced many such buildings to either ruins or markers indicating their location in the modern world.

The Byzantine Empire lasted for just about 1,000 years following the loss of the Western Roman Empire.  Under Justinian I (A.D. 482-565) it tried to regain the geographic range of its predecessor but the world had changed.  Over the next 1,000 years it essentially fought a long, rearguard action against newer peoples and kingdoms that sought to replace its power and geography.

Coveted for its wealth, Constantinople fell first not to the invading nomads or Vikings or warriors of Islam who all tried and failed, but rather to its Christian co-religionists in A.D. 1204 during the rather poorly named Fourth Crusade.  Almost 1,000 years of wealth and culture were stolen or despoiled.  The successor states - The Latin Empire of Constantinople (A.D. 1204 - 1261) or the revised Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos Dynasty (A.D. 1261-1453) were at best empires marking time, subject to the whims of its more powerful neighbors.

In the case of Constantinople, its nearest neighbors (as we discussed last week) were the Turks, initially the Seljuk and then the Ottoman.  In A.D. 1453 the Ottomans realized a Turkish ambition of almost 400 years in their conquest of Constantinople.

Under the Ottomans, the city - which was still called a version of Constantinople until the 18th century, when the colloquial word "Stambul" began to enter formal usage (based, interestingly enough, on the Greek term "in the city"), Constantinople being the only city of note in the region), remained a capitol.  The Turks adopted the Byzantine bureaucracy and made it there own. From the Topkapi palace (and later, the Dolmabace Palace), the Ottoman Sultan ruled an expanding empire until A.D. 1683, and then a declining Empire until A.D. 1923.  Through all of this - the expansion, the retreat - the Turks built and made Constantinople their own, even as their predecessors had done.

Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in A.D. 1918, the Allies negotiated with the Sultan and his government.  An independence movement lead by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was declared in Ankara. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in A.D. 1922, the final chapter of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul as a capitol city after almost 1600 years - finally closed.

But although its history as a capitol may have closed, its existence as a crossroads of cultures and the lure of exotic lands continues to this day.  Even though stripped of its title as capitol, it maintains an attraction far beyond just a center of power.

One would like to think Byzas would not be displeased with the outcome of his vision.

Responding To The World At Large II

Anisthenes

Yesterday I touched, on a personal philosophical level, of how I am managing my response to The World at Large.  And a basis is important for having a reason for doing something.  But basis without practice is merely a set of ideas.  So practically, what does someone do who is seeking to thread the needle of living according to one's principles and mores in a world which is at best thinks poorly of them and at worst is vehemently opposed to them?

I have had to put some thought into these to bring them into the form of a written form, as it is not something that I had done before consciously.  I do not know that they rise to the level of a manifesto, but certainly the represent my current thinking and to the best of my ability my current practice.

1)  Do Not Engage

This principle can take many different forms.  It appears in simply to refuse to engage in certain conversations and activities - much like traffic law, as a citizen or organizational member or employee I will do what it asked of me - read the document, attend the training - as long as it does not undermine some belief that is a core principle (and trust me, few of these things rise to that level).  But that is all.  If conversations start on such subjects, I do not offer opinions or thoughts.  If no more is required of me than "read and acknowledge" that is all I do.  

I find as a consequence of this, I simply tend to disappear from many people's radar and calculations.  This is an unexpected feature, not a bug.

One especial thing I personally have to fight in this matter:  the need to respond to things.  This is especially prevalent in the electronic world, where responding is as quick as a simple typing exercise.  I do not have to respond to every thing I disagree with or every bad comment I see.  I really do not.

2)  Do Not Support

This principle takes two forms.  The first is simply to not support, by my presence or involvement, anything that is outside of what I support.  This is actually much easier than it sounds:  Just do not go. Do not show up.  Do not follow the group or post or person.  Just walk away.  This denies them attention, something that the modern world and the movements in it desperately crave

The second form is that of the pocketbook, one of the real remaining powers that we possess - especially in a consumer based society.  Many if not most of the businesses that exist are somehow based on providing a consumer service or a consumer product.   Those businesses depend, ultimately, on someone buying something to pay for something.

I know what some may say:  "TB, the companies are too big.  My not-spending there does not make an impact or difference.  Boycotts do not work."

I agree that boycotts - generally - do not work in the modern world, but that is as much a function of the fact that the word "boycott" will immediately invoke a visceral response as due to the size of the companies.  But if we think people walking away do not make a difference, it may be that we are not looking in the right places.

If you have an hour or three, I might suggest doing a study about events in the entertainment and video game industries of late.  In short, they have chosen not to serve their markets.  And their markets are responding with a lack of support, both verbal and financial.  That lack of support has critical impacts for those companies and those industries.  

I suspect that as time goes on and economy continues, this lack of support will become easier for many (due to economic reality) and more impactful to those companies that remain.  Extend that to every sort of human endeavor and association and one can begin to see the potential for impact.  All done, I note, with any sort of formal declaration.   The reason people have left will become clear to any that have the curiosity to understand.

 3)  Do Become The Quiet Revolution

Since my last two points have been detractive in nature ("Do Not"), it makes sense to have something that is a positive action that I can take.  After all, someone who is only ever negative tends to drive people away instead of pulling them on.

Becoming The Quiet Revolution is going to look different for every person depending on any number of factors including location, economic position, relationships, etc.  And people will likely participate in all kinds of different ways that I cannot imagine.  Here, at least, is what I am trying to do:

1)  Become Independent:  Independence can mean a lot of things.  To some it means complete self sufficiency.  To others it means being able to do something which is not dependent on "The System" to do (even a single planter box in an apartment balcony or making yogurt is a step in the direction).    To others it means foreswearing social media to focus on actual human relationships.  But in all of these, it is taking action to free one's self in some way from a system that wants us to just "Go along" and "Be Dependent".

2) Make Money Count:  To some extent this is the opposite of Item 2 above (Do Not Support), but it is meant as more than that.  It may mean swearing off national chains or even local chains that do not comport with one's views and practices.  It may mean being willing to settle for not new items and going without certain things (A note:  In a society as rich as ours, "going without new things" is not hard at all if one knows where to look).  And it certainly means spending with those individuals or companies that we do find are compatible with our beliefs and practices, even if it costs a bit more.

3)  Become Intellectually Independent:  A subtype of the first item on this list, it could go there but I feel it important enough to break out separately.

We, as a society, have the knowledge of ages at our fingertips but for the most part limit ourselves to a paltry number of sources for our information.  This is something that I have had to actively work on for years myself, to give myself a second education  which 100 years prior would have been par for the course but even in my high school years was quickly fading.

What could it be?  Literally this is a choose your own adventure experience.  History, economics, science, public policy, philosophy, theology - literally any subject is out there for gaining more information on.  A small note here:  the closer information gets to our modern era, the less without bias it becomes.  So it has ever been, so it will ever be - even the great historians of old tended to write in a way that would not offend their current rulers.   And as a second note, expect this to take time.  Knowledge is not gained in a single short span.

4)  Be A Engaging Example:  The World At Large has a public image that they like to portray of people that will not fit in.  It is generally a cross of a Neanderthal savage with the learning power of the mob trying to burn the library at Alexandria clothed as the Spanish Inquisition and the economic sense of a miser on the day that rent is due.  It certainly not flattering and while by no means completely earned - but by actions in the past, we who do not fit in have made ourselves a target for this.

Be different.

Be engaging.  Be knowledgeable.  Be the man or woman with the pleasant demeanor and a quick hand to help.  Know things.  Do not make every event an opportunity to "preach" about the problems of The World At Large or what is wrong with them.  Be helpful and share what you know. 

And, of course, always be kind.

Because here is the thing:  listening to people talk and discuss in my own circle of contact, there is a sense that there is "something wrong with the world today", to quote those great purveyors of modern wisdom Aerosmith.  People cannot bring themselves to identify it but they know it is there.  It is staring them every day in their personal economics; it shouts from the current narrative where things should be better but are not;  it cries to them to them as the hint of things not quite right from history begin to resemble the current circumstances in which they live.

They do not need someone lecturing or shouting.  They do not need the equivalent of Pharisaical demands that demands complete adherence before forgiveness.  They do need someone - us - to show them a different way.  And that we can do not by the volume or decibels or vehemence of our words, but by the simple act of living a different and better life.

Gandhi is quoted as saying that we should be the change we want to see in the world.  If the world does not see it in us, in whom will they see it?

Responding To The World At Large I

 

I have often struggled with my response to "The World At Large".

I really do my best to keep anything of general political or social nature out of my writing, partially because of the fact that (as denoted in my thoughts about Relevance) I am not very good at it in general, partially because of the fact that writing about such things only divides and never unifies, and partially - indeed perhaps mostly - because of the fact that what I desire more than anything else as a result of this space is the promotion of thought and occasionally discussion about such things in a manner where things can be heard, instead of words hurled as weapons.

But even I acknowledge both that I myself have opinions about things and that we live in a world where things of general political, social, and even religious nature impact my daily existence.  In fact, they thrust themselves into my face on a regular basis.

However, I have also had the experience of both living long enough to see how the inception of things is often not the indicator of how things end and being some that loves to read history and so having an understanding of how things often end.  Perhaps to the surprise of no-one here, humans are not nearly as clever as they think themselves and most of their plans for multi-generational/multi-year building of anything tends to sputter out more quickly than they would have imagined (insert reference to Ozymandias here).

So, in a world that continually impinges on me to have opinions and take actions, what is someone like myself to do?

I am not inherently a person of violence - my one and only experience with "fighting" was in the 4th grade where, confronted with the potential for a fight, I hurled my skateboard at the parties in question and sprinted home.  This is combined now with many years of training in a martial art - Iaijutsu - which brings one to the swift realization that even training with wooden weapons can result in serious injury or worse; one comes to understand that potential risks any time force is used.

Nor am I a person of strong ability to debate. Long ago in college, the professor assigned to guide me through my program noted that I tended less to debate than hurl my opinions out there as if they were gospel and do the equivalent of what we now call a "mike drop", supreme in the "knowledge" I had proved my point.  That does not make for good debating of course, and it has taken me years (35 plus) to reach the point where I learned that I lack the qualities required of a good debater and more importantly that not every comment represents a disagreement.

What I can do, as it turns out, is live in a way that to the best of my ability and does not further enable those individuals and movements that are opposed to me intellectually, morally, economically, or religiously.

Which is why I found the above quote from Charlton Heston both such a surprise (I had never seen it before) and so pleasing.  Because I realize that is exactly the way I am trying to live my life.

Is it somehow surrender-driven and hopeless?  I can see that argument being made - after all, I am essentially committing to a non-violent long haul path of quiet disobedience.  And certainly the results are the sorts of thing that may not manifest in my life time.  But men like Vaclav Havel and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn suggest otherwise.  

Is it without cost?  No, not at all.  The costs can come in ways that only a modern bureaucracy can think of devising. Just beyond the simple issue of losing opportunities or losing positions or losing money, it can turn into the blacklisting of one in all of society (The Soviet Union knew much of this; Communist China knows even more).  

But ultimately, as a Christian, I have a Master beyond any on this earth. And His questions on His commands and my motives and practices are not something that I can hope to avoid or side step.  Perhaps said differently, God expects His work to be accomplished in His way by His people.

Note the repeated "His" there.  There is no second option given.

Jesus Christ Did Not Say

 

Relevance And Obedience

One thing that I have written about here from time to time in the past is our current society's deep-seated need for relevance.

I have most often done this in the context of the Modern Church movement, which (in my opinion) has often pushed the historic Christian faith to the side in order to appeal (be relevant) to the current population (sometimes known as "seeker friendly").  But really it has become embedded in every aspect of our population, driven largely by a social media experience that rewards attention and novelty, sometimes to the detriment (even death) of those that participate in it.  Studies have come out where portions of the population of the young say they want to be a "social influencer" - someone who is relevant to the culture by creating content or even movements consumed and followed by others (often rather than creating something of value, be it a physical creation or any sort of actual existing work).

I would argue that it is a deplorable development.  Instead of encouraging others to critically think, we teach them that to be thought of as almost worshipped is the most important thing.  Instead of teaching others the importance of creating, making, and implementing things, we teach them that a high-level razor-thin depth of knowledge and practice of anything is more important as long as one can make it look good.  And we teach them that influence - on others, on the culture, on the world - is the only meaningful metric for success.

In my haste to critique the world of this, it has come to my attention that I suffer from the exact same need to be relevant.

The initiating action was both logical and silly:  over the last 1.5 months, there has been a steady reduction of "visits" to the blog.  Part of that, undoubtedly, was due to a spammer finally being blocked in a meaningful fashion.  But it continued to fall.  In my pride, I saw it as "significant".

The second factor that confirmed this was a comment on another blog.

On the whole, I have a pretty narrow ring of blogs that I visit and comment on - most of them are two the right there (all reliable and solid people over there) but there are also a few which, due to the sort of content we do not discuss here, I never link to but do visit.  In my haste one morning to perhaps be "relevant" and make what I perceived to be a deep and penetrating comment, I posted.  And was effectively cut down (by words, mind you) at the knees for the better part of the day.  If one could measure relevance by follow comments and discussion, I had "achieved" it.

But what it really did was make me question my own need for "relevance".

Oddly enough (as it turns out), "relevance" is not something that The Bible specifically speaks to.  Oh, it speaks to relevance in the sense of the relevance of God's word to our daily lives, but almost nothing about any command where we are told to "Be ye relevant".  There is, however, a great deal in there about "Be ye obedient".

Obedience is, obviously, not relevance.  If the two cross paths at some points - where our obedience makes us relevant - it is only by accident and almost, I suspect, never by choice or chance. We are called to be obedient as obedient children, as witnesses of the orderliness of the Christian live, to demonstrate our sanctification (holiness) through obedience.  It is even suggested that good things come from obedience.

Obedience is commanded, relevance never so.

It has certainly made me go back and re-examine my own life.

That re-examination has taken two paths.  The first is simply - for a lack of a better phrase - to "stay in my lane".  My ability to generate relevant posts, at least on other sites, is demonstrably minimal at best.  Better to simply let that go.

The other path is in my own writing.

Every since I started this blog (many years in the rear view mirror now), I secretly had in my heart that somehow this was going to be a "relevant" blog (of course, in those younger days "relevance" was also measured by the vain notion that people make money at this).  I let that part go, but secretly all these years it appears I have still cherished that desire in my heart. And when I feel like I am not hitting it, I try to go be "relevant" elsewhere - with predictable results.

It likely will not change how I write (although I have already asked God about why I am doing this anyway and is it what He still thinks is good).  It will, likely, change a little what I write about though - perhaps my personally worst blog posts are the ones where I try so hard to be relevant that the whole thing is forced: forced in reading, forced in understanding, and indeed forced in somehow pretending I did my best work.

What I reminded, as it turns out, was exactly what I have pointed out in others:  my call was and is never to be relevant.  It is to be obedient.  Because, as Scripture demonstrates, God works on and through the Obedient.  Almost never does He work through the Relevant - except usually as an object lesson.

That Was The Twelve Months It Was

 On Wednesday, The Dog Whisperer (now safely ensconced in her own New Home 2.0), mentioned that that day - the 29th of May - would have been her one year anniversary at our for employer.  The date rang a bell - sure enough, 29 May 2023 was the last day of my first layoff in 2023.

(Thanks, InterWeb, for allowing me to preserve these milestones.)

She made a comment about the fact that it was funny how quickly things could change.

I started doing some reflection.  In the 366 days since this last layoff  (Leap Year and all), I have been hired three times, laid off once, left one job (Produce (A)Isle, due to my current job), had a child graduate from high school and start college  (Nighean Dhonn), have another one start graduate school (Nighean Bhan), had two children move back home (Nighean Gheal and Nighean Bhan), had a parent die (my mother), had a pet die (P the Rabbit), had an engagement (Nighean Bhan), and moved halfway across the country

I was out of the country three times (Greece, Turkey, Japan) for a total of 5 weeks, unemployed at a main job for 4 months, enjoyed a 37% income drop, trained with my headmaster twice, hiked in the Sierras for a week (and felt like I almost did not make it), and made at least 8 trips back to The Ranch.

Also, we had to replace our roof.  Mostly out of our pocket.

In other words, it turned out to be quite an unexpected year.

If I sit and look at all of that, I feel...well, exhausted.  Any two of the events listed in the first paragraph would have been been a lot.  All of them together?  No wonder I feel a bit overwhelmed at times.

The funny thing to me is that some years are not like this.  2015?  Relatively straightforward, other than likely I was having issues with my job (like almost every year).  2017 and 2018?  Other than a graduation or two from high school and the knowledge of my mother's Alzheimer's and what was likely starting to manifest itself as my job stress, not much (good heavens, we even went to Iceland in 2018).

So why this "year"?  Why all this now?

I do not fully have the reasons for it.  I am sure, in God's economy, it makes sense.  If I had to hazard a guess - always risky when involving God but based on what continues to be the outcome of these events in my own mind - is simply that I needed to have my attention grabbed and shaken to think about other things.  Things like getting too programmed, of having too many things, of not being able to make decisions that I needed to make.

Suffice it to say that I hoping for a relatively "dull" next twelve month cycle.

The Collapse CXXXXIX: Going Home

 23 July 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

I know, I know – Three days must seem like an eternity after daily updates. This was due to the simple fact that the days were largely spent walking.

After our meeting with Epicurus and Themista and our evening return to Cato’s, we had a last meal with him, Cato The Younger, and his men. It was a pleasant enough evening, with the weather cooling nicely (as it will do here from time to time). Other than the comradeship and the suggestion to Cato The Elder that likely Crossroads had some things worth picking through, the biggest development would be a regular check-in time with the Garnet Valley – and, it sounded like, with Epicurus and Themista.

After they left, the Colonel laid out his thoughts for our trip home: we could make it three days if we went from here to Crossroads, from Crossroads to Little City, and from Little City to Birch. He said “could”; everyone turned to look at me.

I gave the Colonel a raised eyebrow. 17 mile days, he responded. I nodded back; 17 miles on an overall level track was possible.

The next morning, early, we set out.

The trek back was essentially like the trek out in format: Someone, usually The Colonel or The Leftenent on point, Ox or Young Xerxes in the rear, and myself chugging along with whomever was not leading or following. The weather held for us overall, although we experienced at least two of the sort of short showers which can happen here from time to time. For one we found cover at Crossroads. For the other we just marched through.

Conversation during the day was at a minimum; everyone else’s mind seemed set on returning back to familiar territory as quickly as possible while mine was simply focused on making it through the day. The packs had lightened up a bit ominously as we started to eat out the food that we had brought with us.

The trip through Little City on the third day was quiet as it had always been; I am not sure if it that we never come here during normal hours or the fact that the people were just becoming more and more cliquish. Passing by, we headed up over the hills to Kentucky City – the most difficult part of the walk as it was only uphill for 3 hours or more. I was chuffing by the time I reached the top – but it was all downhill from there (literally, in this case).

At Kentucky City, The Colonel left us – things to do and set up, he alluded, giving each of us another hug as he sent us on our way. He would talk to us again soon, he assured us. And so it was we made the slow afternoon walk back to Birch with The Leftenent and Ox making sure we returned home.

Both Stateira and Pompeia Paulina were ecstatic when they sighted us from the road. By then it was hinting at darkness; The Leftenenant and Ox were starting to turn back but Stateira would not hear of it. With that she shuttled both them and her husband back to their home.

My wife, bless her, could see that I was just about spent – 17 miles a day is a lot for anyone, let alone someone of my age and the last two months. She carefully narrowed her questions to a very vague sort of update and filled in the conversation with the doings in Birch, which mostly sounded like continuing to work on preparing for Winter.

I suspect the grilling will come tomorrow.

During one of our evening stops, The Colonel asked me how I felt about everything. Mostly a failure, I confessed. He pressed into the question a bit and my response was that in terms of a pure mission objective, we had failed. There was wheat, but we could not really get at it.

His face became a little annoyed as he corrected me. “Couldn’t get at it” was not really the outcome; we had never been told that. We would have to share it if we could get there, but that was not the same as there not being wheat there at all. Besides, he pointed out, we made contact with not one but two groups, groups that could be allies and contacts in the years ahead. Surely that was not wasted effort? And further, he said, you added to your annals. Who else was doing that?

I hemmed and hawed as I am want to do when I am caught as a victim of my own sort of advice. Perhaps, I conceded, the outcome was as good as could be expected.

Conceded, he responded with a smirk. Without your suggestion, none of this would have likely happened. You might have a little more confidence in your ideas – and after all, he pointed out, unlike many I was at least willing to prove theory myself.

I am not sure how I feel about being recognized as a potential resource – but Pompeia Paulina, when I told her, merely laughed at me with a twinkle in her eye.

There is no rest, Luculius, for the wicked.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca

A (Very) Brief History of Anatolia II

The acquisition of Anatolia by Rome happened in stages. Some of the Kingdoms – Bithynia, Pergamon – were granted to Rome by their last ruler. Some kingdoms – Pontus, portions of the Seleucid kingdom – were conquered. And some parts remained a part of successors to the Seleucid Empire – the Parthians and the Sassanids.

Asia Minor in 188 B.C.

Roman Empire in 117 A.D.

Early Imperial Rome became late Imperial Rome and Late Imperial Rome became the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. The Eastern Roman Empire retained control of Anatolia during this time, inheriting the Roman Empire’s territorial disputes with the Sassanids and then, in the 7th century, with the expansion of Islam.

Byzantine Empire Under Justinian A.D. 555

The expansion of Islam was a traumatic event for the Byzantine Empire. The recovered provinces of Northern Africa were swept away. Egypt, the breadbasket of the Byzantines as it had been for the Romans, was gone. Jerusalem, the Holy City, was swallowed up as was all of Syria and even parts of Armenia and far eastern Anatolia.

Expansion of Islam A.D. 622 - A.D. 750

This process in the East and South, combined with the invasion from the North of nomadic tribes - the Bulgars, Slavs, Hungarians, Pazterneks, Pechenegs, and Turks – started the slow slide of disintegration of the Byzantine Empire as geographic portions were lopped off in both the West and the East. The process accelerated in Anatolia when, in A.D. 1071 at the Battle of Manzikert in Eastern Anatolia, the Byzantine Army was destroyed, allowing penetration from the east of the Turks.

The Byzantine Empire circa A.D. 1097

The story of A.D. 1071 to A.D. 1453 is the long, slow story of the loss of Byzantine Anatolia to the Turks. First was the Seljuks, until they were dissolved and a series of local Turkish warlords fought for control. The period of warfare ended with the rise of Osman, the founder of what would become the Ottoman Empire (A.D. 1299 – A.D. 1923).

The Byzantine Empire circa A.D. 1400

The Ottoman Empire’s early history is overall one of going from victory to victory. In within 100 years, they had moved from central Anatolia across the continent to the Balkans. They continued on this track (albeit with some short lived defeats) slow devouring the remaining lands of the Byzantine Empire until in A.D. 1453 they conquered Constantinople.

The Ottoman Empire in 1683

The Ottoman State continued to expand until it met with a series of defeats – the Battle of Lepanto in A.D. 1566 by sea (for those readers that remember, we visited the town of Nafpaktos last year, near where this battle took place) and the Siege of Vienna in A.D. 1683 when, defeated by the Western Powers at the Siege of Vienna, it began a long 200 plus year loss of territory throughout Europe, Africa, and the Near East through a combination of local movements of peoples and the growing colonial powers. Even as these territory losses occurred, the heartland of the Ottomans – Anatolia – remained firmly in their grasp.

Turkey Under The 1920 Treaty of Sevres

As a result of their loss in World War I (A.D. 1914-1918), the Ottoman Empire was broken up and Anatolia occupied by the victorious powers (France, Great Britain, Greece, and Italy). The counter reaction to this was the War of Turkish Independence (A.D. 1921-1923) led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which eventually saw the end of the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate and the foundation of the modern Turkish state, largely within the borders of Anatolia (as well as the small slice of Europe which encompasses Istanbul and Edirne).

Turkey Under The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne

This all comes to bear on the trip, because when one says “I am going to Turkey”, what one is really saying is that I am going to a place with thousands of years of history and culture packed into a fairly small area. Yes, there is a dominant culture – the Turkish one – but it exists within and around the voices of thousands of years.

Modern Turkey

A (Very) Brief History Of Anatolia I

One of the first things that I needed to remind myself of when I started on day one of our trip to Turkey is that Turkey the country and Turkey the landmass are two interconnected but not synonymous things. Turks (the people) have a history in the region since the mid to late 11th Century A.D. Turkey the country has a history dating back to 1923.

Turkey the landmass has a history going back thousands of years.

If we speak of Turkey the landmass as Anatolia, we would both be using a historically accurately name as well as allowing some room between what we currently understand and what historically have been two very different places.

Source

Anatolia has several geographic factors that define it: A high interior plain (the Anatolian) plain. Two major mountain ranges that run parallel through the landmass, creating a series of valleys. A coastline that abuts onto the Mediterranean Sea, including a series of islands that could be taken all the way to Greece by ship. And perhaps most significantly, the Bosporus Strait, a 6 mile/3.1 km strait between the continents of Asia and Europe, which makes transit between the continents convenient instead of taking the longer routes of sailing from the Black Sea to the other side or taking the longer land route around the Black Sea.

Source

Kingdom of Lydia

As a result of its location, Anatolia found itself both as a route for trade and invasion as well as a place of multiple cultures and civilizations – ultimately becoming the last point in the Silk Road that allowed overland trade with China. The Hittite and Neo-Hittite cultures flourished here, and in the south of modern Turkey is the ancient city of Ur of the Chaldeans. While Ancient Egypt never conquered the Anatolian plans, their culture moved along the Levant. In time the Phrygians and Lydians arrived and built empires, while to the West, the Greeks – those ever adventurous travelers – engaged in trade in the Mycenean era (and went to war, if The Iliad is to be believed) and later founded colonies along the coast and followed the Bosporus through to what we now know as The Black Sea (The Pontic Sea in their day) to trade and grow the grain they could not grow at home – at one point, the coast of Anatolia was considered simply an extension of the Greek mainland and the “Ionian Greeks” were simply Greeks citizens of another polis, not barbarians from another country.

Ionian Greece

Persian Empire - Fullest Empire

The Lydians were overcome by the expanding Persian Empire, which swallowed up both the Lydians and intervened in the Greek colonies, a clash of cultures that would result in almost two hundred years of what would be called the Greco-Persian Wars. Twice the Persians moved from Asian Anatolia to Greece to invade and were repulsed twice at the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) and the battle of Platea (479 B.C.), after which the Persians reduced their activities to making alliances and supporting one side or the other in the Peloponnesian War, seeking to influence the war to sow disruption among the network of city-states: if they could not outright defeat them, they could at least keep the Greeks divide.

The Peloponnesian War did not result in the unification of Greece or a major threat to Persia; after a short period of invasion of Anatolia led by the Spartans in 3XX B.C., the Persians turned their money to restoring Athens and sowing discord in Greece. This combined with the internecine wars meant that Greece fell farther and farther into disarray until from the North, Philip the Second of Macedonia moved in and by a series of battles and diplomatic intrigue, became the effective head of all of Greece. He looked toward invading the Persian Empire but was assassinated in 336 B.C.; however his son, Alexander, proved to be even more brilliant a tactician than he and in 334 B.C. invaded Anatolia, allegedly under the guise of bringing justice to the Persians for their invasions of Greece. Advancing down the Anatolian Coast, he never truly moved to the interior of Anatolia – but his defeat of Darius III and acquisition of the Persian Empire meant that all of Anatolia fell to him by right. At his death in 323 B.C., the Empire splintered and Anatolia became a patchwork of Macedonian successor states.

Kingdoms of Anatolia circa 240 B.C.

Anatolia came to split among three successor states: Antigonid Macedonia, the kingdom of Pergamum, and the Seleucid Empire with smaller states such as Bithynia and Pontus. The successor states were part of the larger Hellenistic World, and Anatolia continued to serve as as conduit for trade and for international warfare, the empires and kingdoms sought to maintain and even increase their power.

The successor states enjoyed various degrees of success until the Romans – first the Republic and then the Empire – acquired power by inheritance or outright conquest. By the first century of Christ, the Anatolia was a series of Roman provinces, its Eastern border with Sassanid Persia now an international flash point.

The conquest by Rome represents a major shift in the history of Anatolia. For the next almost 1500 years, Anatolia would be considered Roman, not Greek, Persian, or Sassanid.

Memorial Day 2024

 

(Hat Tip:  Old AF Sarge)

Your Life As A Christian

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) has, in my opinion, never quite gotten the love and attention he should have by the Western Church.  A German who became a pastor in the 1930's, he was determined opponent of Hitler and the Nazi regime.   A leader in the Confessing Church (created to oppose the established church's obedience to the state), he spent time both in London and the United States in the late 1930's, but return to Germany prior to the outbreak of war because, as he wrote:

"I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America this time.  I must live through this difficult period in our national history along with the people of Germany.  I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share this time of trials with my people...Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that a future Christian nation may survive, or else willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization and any true Christianity.  I know which one of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that choice from a place of security." (source)

Monitored by the Nazis and forbidden to preach or write, he joined the Abwehr (German intelligence) and served as conduit for the German resistance and helped Jews escape.  He was likely knowledgeable of the plots to kill Hitler.  Imprisoned in 1943, he was executed on 08 April 1945, weeks before the concentration camp he was in was reached by the Allies.

The books translated into English which are most often quoted are The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics, and a compilation of his letters from prison presented as Letters and Papers from Prison, considered one of the finest series of letters of prison and compared with Vaclav Havel's Letters to Olga.

It is a shame he has not gotten the attention, because the time of his major works was time very similar to our own in terms of political acrimony, national disunity, and a church which was ineffective.  He never pulls his punches - one of the lines in The Cost of Discipleship is "When God calls a man, He bids him come and die".  He followed Christ at great cost to himself, his life, and his earthly future.

Which makes his unspoken question even more profound:  Are we - me, you - the sort of Christian that makes an unbeliever question their unbelief?

8 Weeks In

This weekend represents my eighth week living in New Home 2.0, more or less the two month mark excluding my two week trip to Turkey.  I simply have nothing to complain about.

In terms of my job, I am finding my way into my role.  Part of that is working through what our role is as a department in a fairly new start-up system and space.  Part of that is finding where I can both fit in and add the most value.  Somewhat interestingly - at least to myself - it is not primarily in the Quality aspect; there are fellow employees that have much longer time served with this company and know its systems much more intimately than I do.  Where I do bring value is my Project Management experience:  apparently setting schedules and resource management is a skill which it turns out is needed, even if not in a formal project management format.

The apartment is not really "coming together" any faster - as there still remains little enough here to rise to the level of "coming together".  I bought myself an air mattress (which can double for hiking purposes) as my major furniture upgrade.  And interestingly enough, even though I do not have that much here, the stacks in my closet shelf continue to grow.

Not a lot of closet space here - something to bear in mind.

In terms of this feeling like home, I am not quite there yet.  Likely this is due to the fact that my schedule here has been unsettled:  three weeks in a hotel, two weeks away, three weeks, my mother's funeral, another two weeks and a trip back to New Home followed by another trip back home a month later.  There is not fully a sense of being in place here; I still feel strung between locations.

My trip home in two weeks, besides the opportunity to train in Iaijutsu, will be to make one more pass at what we are bringing before the movers come.  Having seen the apartment, I can much more easily visualize the space we have available - see, for example, the above comment above comment about closet space.  I simply have to start making some hard choices on non-essentials.

Finally, we are starting to get an idea of when The Ravishing Mrs. TB will locate here full time, likely in September or October.  Just having that date means we have something to set our targets on.

So on the whole, things are going about as well as could be expected - or perhaps even a little better than expected.  And frankly, the 20-30 F degree drop in Summer temperatures makes the whole thing a little bit easier.

Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture III: Profile of a Culture (Part II)

When we last left our review of Foolishness to the Greeks:  The Gospel and Western Culture by Lesslie Newbigin, he had established two items:

1)  The Enlightenment both propelled forward the scientific revolution by explaining the universe in terms of cause and effect and natural laws, but had stripped the creation of purpose;

2)  By stripping humanity of higher purpose than their own selves (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), the nation-state (which was the remaining institution after the Church retreated from the public sphere) became the only vehicle for ensuring that purpose - and since life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can be limitless to the individual, the nation-state as guarantor will become all encompassing.

Newbigin moves to point out the impact of these two ideas.

With the establishment of the principle of scientific laws and cause and effect, the world comes to be viewed solely in this manner - including "human behavior, work, and society".  Human labor is transformed as the craftsman becomes the human laborer, working on the smallest division of labor - "His work assimilated more and more into the repetitive actions of a machine rather than the purposeful work of the craftsman" - and is without purpose, as the universe of Newton does not allow for it.  Work - an act of creation that "leads to something that will endure after the worker is dead - an artifact, a poem, a system of laws" -is gone, replaced by labor, "an unending cycle of production for the sake of its consumption.

This change of labor led to the division of labor.  Suddenly, production was not for the local family unit or the local economy but rather for the "market" economy with money becoming the main unit of exchange.  The market, not the local exchange of goods, becomes the main factor.  The modern social science of economics is born - again, removing teleology and sense of purpose from the economic realm.  The market now exists under a series of economic laws, functioning like the Newtonian Universe.

From here, says Newbigin, two additional factors occur.  The first is that the family is no longer the main unit of work and the home is no longer the main place of work.  The focus has shifted:  work is the "outer" or public world and home the "inner" or private world.  Externally, workers become anonymous, replaceable parts (we are all replaceable at some point in the modern job market); it is only at home that they are irreplaceable parts of something more. And the second development, coming from both the division of labor and the idea of working outside of the home, is that urbanization increases dramatically.  Not only does this impact the family unit; it also has the impact of placing the individual in "a multiplicity of human networks, each controlled by a single purpose".  Before, most individuals lived in typically rural societies with a single society which defined all their activities - work, worship, play, friends, family (our proverbial "small town").  Now, the individual has a plethora of options - but they are not integrated into a whole.  Work is one, but religion may be a second and the apartment building a third - each not related to each other, each serving a separate purpose. 

The final factor introduced here is the fact that as an outcome of division of labor, development of a market economy, the growth of public and private worlds, and urbanization, bureaucracy develops.  In a way it has to exist, given the complexity which has been introduced:  "It provides the machinery in which there is a high degree of division of labor, of specialization, of predictability, and of anonymity." But - and this is important - "It is of the essence of bureaucracy that it sets out to achieve a kind of justice by treating each individual as an anonymous and replaceable unit".  It has taken the outcome of the Enlightenment - reduce everything to its smallest possible component and understand how to manipulate it - and applied it to the human relationships and existence which can be expressed in the terms of mathematics - or ultimately, a computer (timely in our age of Artificial Intelligence): "In its ultimate development, bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny.  The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility".

The Enlightenment, posits Newbigin, provided a lot of things, allowing for the voyages of discovery that opened the world, of the growth of technology and the application of science to every area (of which we are a beneficiary).  However, it comes at a cost:

"But we shall not be wrong, I think, if we take the abandonment of teleology as the key to the understanding of nature for our primary clue to understanding the whole of these vast changes for the human situation.  I shall argue that this is what underlies the decisive feature of our culture that can be described both as the division of human life into public and private, and the separation of fact and value."

(Apologies, this seems to just keep extending out.  Newbigin's thoughts are so dense, I cannot do them justice by smashing them together.)

The Collapse CXXXXVIII: Epicurus And Themista

 20 July 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

The following would likely not have happened except that Cato The Elder brought over one of our hosts, Themista. “This is the one to talk to” he said gruffly, pointing at me as I looked up from making notes. “He wrote down my story. He’ll probably write down yours. Seems foolish to me given everything goin’ on, but there’s no harm I suppose”. And with that he left, leaving the two of us awkwardly alone.

As with Cato, I had to explain why I had chosen the names I had chosen. Themista chuckled after she understood. “Epicurus (or what was his real name) would love this” she said with an accented smile. “He has always loved gardens.”

----

Our history? Ah, we are refugees – or were, once upon a time. You are of an age to remember the Iron Curtain, no? We as well. In fact, we remember it too strongly as we grew up under it.

You, too, remember the Wall falling? Hah! Few do anymore, or if they do it is a small historical note at the bottom of the page. But if you lived through it – you remember too, I see – you knew what a huge change it was in the world. The ability to go abroad without restrictions, to live life without observation – it was the ability to escape.

And escape we did, from there to here. We were married by then, and Epicurus had completed his graduate work….Hmm? Oh yes, he is a Ph.D. His degree was in agriculture, specializing in ancient grains. And mine? A Ph.D as well, but in the use of ancient grains by ancient peoples. My dissertation was on the use of the Crimean Peninsula by the Ancient Greeks for grain supply. His was on ancient grains and their dispersal throughout Europe.

You are chuckling. A match made in Heaven, you no doubt think. Us too.

How did we end up here? As odd as you might find it, paleo-agriculture and paleo agricultural techniques are not as...popular? Is that the right word?...as one might think – and this was over forty years ago, when such things mattered a bit more. This is a grain growing region that had an adjunct position that could become a tenured one. And so we came.

Living here was not difficult, at least for us. Yes, the weather is cold – but the weather was cold (and more) where we grew up. And while this is not quite the America we had thought existed – this is no New York City or Chicago – it was so much better than the Eastern Europe of our youth. We made a life here, raised children. Summers were spent either teaching or doing field work abroad or at home (your own peoples, they did things differently in growing but equally as fascinating). Epicurus also spent time with farmers all around here. He loves grains and farming and will talk to anyone about it, how to increase outputs and decrease inputs by using different sorts of grains, some we no longer use.

And then everything changed.

We are college professors. We are used to discussions of declining revenues and what department gets defunded. But we are also children of a place where bad news was visible to all but not discussed by the government until it became too obvious to hide. And this, this second situation, was what we faced.

The university, one morning in September, just stopped holding class – canceled, they said, for “the duration of the emergency”. This was Eastern European governmental speak for “things are going badly.”

And at that moment, I became more proud of my husband than ever.

In the immediate aftermath of that, the University was a swarm of people trying to leave – students, teaching staff, administrators. But there was one group that could not leave: the students that were from overseas or from other places in the US. A few had places to go here, but many did not. My husband reached out to some of his that were in that situation, and found out that there were more in the same situation.

No problem, he said. We will all stick it out here.

In passing out the door, he mentioned “Themista, I am going to the University. We will need to take everything we need there.” And he was gone.

By the time I had gotten back to the University, he had already started rounding up students – from them, I learned he was literally going one dorm knocking on every door; then as he found students, he sent them off to start knocking on other doors in other dorms. “Come on”, he would tell them, “we are going to make it together”.

This is my husband. Ever the optimist, ever believing everyone can be saved.

We needed a base of operations. The plant labs we worked and taught would have been ideal – also, as he pointed out, likely one of the first places people would come. We choose the school library instead – located in the center of the University (thus less likely to be sought out), multiple floors between us and any potential invaders, and the third and fourth floor were already split into smaller areas. And water available on the first floor, at least as long as the power was on.

By the time he was done, he had recruited almost 100 students from all over the world who were stuck there. He also recruited at least three faculty members, older ones like ourselves that had no family close and for whom the university had become their family. Between us, we started sending the students out that September to gather things: food from the dining halls, medical supplies from the health center, anything else we thought might be useful. Epicurus was relentless and brimming with confidence in this: “Tell them you are on official university business and give them my phone number” he would tell them, confident that somehow that alone would be enough to convince them.

He should not have worried so much, though.  Given what was the madness at the time, almost no-one noticed.

At the same time, we tried to make the best use of the plant labs and its greenhouses that we could. How long would the power be on? We didn’t know, but we started working as if we could get some kind of planting done for the Spring.

By early October, we had retreated to the library.

It was tough – I, an Eastern European having lived under Communism, am saying this. It was cold. We improvised heating for water. We walled off smaller rooms with sheets and blankets we had taken from the student housing.

Some did not make it - they just gave up.

Gangs? We hardly saw any – but that is just as likely that we were buried in the center of campus in Winter. In a library clearly marked as such. We were not, I think, the main focus of anyone’s searching.

What did we do besides surviving?  Idle hands are the devil's workshop, as they say.  Beyond organizing and cleaning up and continuing to scrounger throughout the university (and try to cover our tracks), we read and lectured.

I know – this surprises you. But we were in a library filled with knowledge, with students and instructors that had spent their live to this point lecturing and learning. And so we lectured – on every subject; everyone had to take a turn. Russian literature, quantum physics, trees of Africa – every person had to give at least one speech.

By late Winter/early Spring, we were working on plans for growing more food. The power eventually failed so some of the greenhouses failed – but some of the smaller primitive units survived. Epicurus went looking for spots where we could start planting the ancient grains, hardy and able to survive without modern agriculture. He also tried to think of places where grain might have already been planted, far enough away to be safe but close enough to be accessible.

Which brought us here.

Now? Compared to what? Before everything fell apart? Everything is much more difficult. But compared to when Epicurus and I grew up? It is bad, but not all that bad. Cold, heat, shortages – we have dealt with all of these before.

But being with young people is infectious.  They have been so adaptable to the circumstances.  They are willing to try. They are willing to learn.  And thankfully, we have a slowly growing population - young people will in fact be young people!

No, I am not “depressed” about things. This is a very American concept, that somehow one’s circumstance determine one’s state. There is so much that we still have to be thankful for, at least in our group – ourselves, that we have a place to shelter, that we have food and the ability and knowledge to grow it, and we that we have a place where the learnings of Mankind are available to us freely.

We have far more than peasants or workers of our homeland ever had.  How can we not be grateful?

----

It saddens me, Lucilius, that Epicurus and Themista and their group are so far away. A dose of hope is what a great many people could use at the moment.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca