#Greco-Turkish

[hzaidan]

01 Work, The art of War, Fausto Zonaro's Battle of Domokos, with Footnotes

Fausto Zonaro (1854–1929) wikidata:Q1398809Battle of Domokos (1897) in Greco-Turkish War of 1897Oil on canvasDolmabahçe Palace The Battle of Domokos took place between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Greece. This battle was a part of the Greco-Turkish War (1897). After Greece tried to annex the island Crete the Ottoman porte declared war on Greece. The commander of the Ottoman army at…

[gemsofgreece]

Turkey is about to convert another Greek Orthodox church to a mosque in Istanbul. They have been doing it relentlessly with many churches in the country, the most well known example being Hagia Sophia of course. This time they are about to convert the Church of Chora, a 4th century monastery which is particularly notable for having some of the best preserved religious art, icons and mosaics of the Byzantine style. It is the prime example of the Paleologan renaissance of the 13th century which was critical for the post-Byzantine and modern Orthodox style as we know it nowadays. Of course all the monument’s masterpieces are going to be covered for the church to be converted into a mosque.

It should be noted that as a city of 15 million, it already has more than 3,000 mosques, yet the need to turn historical churches to mosques seems to feel most urgent to them for some reason. Surely the reason must not be that Istanbul feels threatened by the presence of the remaining 2,000 Constantinopolitan Greeks (aka those who survived the islamisation, the pogroms, the deportations, the death marches and the genocide 🙃). So what is this urgency about?

Taking into consideration that from the next year they are also adding the irredentist fabrication of “Blue Homeland” (since when are Turks indigenous to islands for them to have a blue homeland?!?!?! 😂😂😂) to their schoolbooks, aka Turkey’s claim to half of Greece’s territorial waters in the Aegean Sea and all the islands located in these waters, and because it is obvious to me that a country of 80+ million cannot possibly feel threatened by a country of 10 million, I conclude once again that Turkey is simply threatened by the very easy modern international access to historical sources. So you have to start the brainwashing and the hate speech from an as early age as possible and you have to erase all signs of an alternative view of history from your streets to fight all the contradictory facts that can be learned from international sources within seconds from your phone.

[roscoe-conkling]

In the spring of 1897, novelist and poet Stephen Crane was working as a war correspondent for the New York Journal covering a possible war between Greece and Turkey. In between dispatches he posed for this photograph in an Athens studio.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

Hi Theitsa this might be a weird question, but is the word “Turk” itself considered insulting or does it have a negative connotation in Greece? I grew up in a Greek household abroad and I got that impression. Maybe my family is just exceptionally racist(which they are to be fair) but as a result I catch myself reacting negatively to the word itself by default. It’s was implied that becoming Muslim = becoming a turk like they are one and the same. Also that nationalities like Bosnians and Albanians “sold out” and became like the turks by converting. Idk I really don’t mean to be offensive, it’s just something I have noticed. Are these ideas at all prevalent in Greece?

Yes all that is true to a point. Turk can be used as a slur, although, not as much today. Because of the violence of Turks when we were under the Ottoman Empire, and later, in the 1821 Revolution, this ethnicity had negative connotations in the Greek collective mind. The Greek phrase "He became (a) Turk" means "he became extremely angry and violent".

Religion was the biggest identifier for centuries under the Ottoman empire. Muslims had certain benefits from the state compared to Christians so that's why the Christians considered it negative when one went to the "oppressor" side.

These all are not applicable today, of course. I would say they are far from prevalent. Many years passed since then and the sentiment fades more and more as the years pass.

I am happy to notice that through memes the Balkan people get more connected, and we can make fun of each other in a healthy way that faces these stereotypes head-on. And we realize we have more things in common and it's not worth it to stay divided. Greeks are mostly chill about Turkish people, and Turkish people are chill about us.

There is some Turkish state propaganda involved even today, that erases the Greek, Armenian and Assyrian genocide and cultural erasure but that's a "country" issue and not an ethnicity issue. Also, Greek school books tend to not treat the Greek invasion of Turkey as an invasion, and the Greek state goes too hard on "corrective action" against Muslim minorities in Greece, as a "payment" for centuries of oppression. We have issues to work on, that's for sure. But in the general sense, the people go along and I haven't heard anything bad about Turks in years in all domains of my life in Greece. Others might have, especially if they are ethnically Turkish in Greece, but these statements I think are not as spread as others.

Many immigrant Greek households abroad hold on to older ideas, the ideas their family had when they left Greece, and so some old sentiments could have remained.

[doubtspirit]

Battle of Dumlupınar - Greek soldiers near Afyon Karahisar on 29 August 1922 (16 August in the Old Calendar)

The Battle of Dumlupınar marks the beginning of the final battle in the Greco-Turkish War, which will seal the end of the Greek presence in Anatolia.

[clemsfilmdiary]

The Surrender of Tournavos / La prise de Tournavos (1897, Georges Méliès)

2/12/23

[qroier]

now that the olympics are officially over, i wanted to share some more of my favorite moments from the second week of these games:

Rebeca Andrade finally got her gold in floor!!!!

the kayak cross course in canoe slalom is wild, it starts with a huge drop into the water and ends with a required barrel roll

the entire men's pole vault final was awesome and had everything! Armand Duplantis of sweden broke the olympic record and his own world record while his fellow athletes cheered him on. Emmanouil Karalis won bronze for greece and gave Mondo (duplantis) a bandaid after he hurt his hand. Sam Kendricks, who won silver for the U.S., also cut his hand and wiped it off on his arm. Mondo's mom filmed his record breaking jump on an ipad. after making the jump, Mondo posed like Yusuf Dikeç (turkish shooter guy) and ran off to kiss his girlfriend. incredible. iconic. showstopping.

actually, posing like Yusuf Dikeç became the go-to pose for a bunch of athletes

Mijaín López from cuba won his 5th CONSECUTIVE gold medal in greco roman wrestling. that's 20 straight years of being the reigning olympic champion

Arisa Trew, the 14 year old aussie who won gold in women's park skateboarding, is getting a pet duck from her parents for winning

a whale decided it wanted to try its fin at surfing during the surfing semi-finals

UK's skateboarding team looked like a middle school field trip with the class' favorite math teacher, except that teacher just happened to be 51 year old skating legend Andy Macdonald. just to put it into perspective, Andy Macdonald is on the same legend level as Tony Hawk. they're close friends and used to compete in vert doubles together. Tony Hawk cheered him on from the stands with Snoop Dogg, and he got a huge ovation after his run. also shout out to Sky Brown, who's 16 and got bronze again this year, even with a recent dislocated shoulder injury.

Alice D'amato's reaction to winning gold on balance beam <3 the first gold women's gymnastics medal for italy

Tara Davis-Woodhall and her husband's reaction to her winning gold in long jump for the u.s.

there were so many proposals. sooooo many proposals

Guatemala and Botswana also won their first ever gold medals, with Adriana Ruano Oliva winning women's trap shooting and Letsile Tebogo winning men's 200m

and, of course, Imane Khelif winning gold after all the harassment against her

[bobemajses]

Old tombstones from the Jewish Cemetery in Chios on display in a museum, Greece, ca. 1980

According to Josephus, Yevanic-speaking Jews lived in Chios in ancient times, mostly as Roman slaves. After 1492, Sephardic exiles from Iberia ultimately became the Jewish majority group in Chios, mixing with the already prospered Romaniote, Italqi and Ashkenazi communities. Common occupations for Jews of the time were the making of silk garments, weaving, wine production, and olive and fig farming. They were also involved with the production of the islands' most valuable commodity, mastic. For many centuries, the Jewish life was thriving under the Ottoman Empire alongside, and in harmony with their Greek Christian and Turkish Muslim communities. Everything changed with the start of a chain of wars taking place in the region: the Greek War of Independence, the Ottoman Massacre of Chios, the First Balkan War, the Greco-Turkish War, and finally the Second World War, which effectively ended the long and rich Jewish history of the island.

[happypuppypuppy]

🇹🇷 Handsome, muscled & big cocked turkish greco-roman wrestler Feyzullah Atkürk of 92Kg, 1.8m & 25yo (credits to anadoluimages & @higienist)

[eggtrolls]

I wish every single picture of my grandfather wasn’t him giving a borat-esque blue steel directly into the camera, this kinda brawny Greco-Turkish wrestler build cigarette-eating version of Rock Hudson looking ass man, because it just confirms the family lore that he was an unabashed pussyhound. absolutely chasing that thang. from everything I’ve heard about him via his children he was pulling bitches with both hands since 1947.

Look at this. None of these women are my grandmother

[annachum]

The fashion elements inspos these GOT Realms got in the GOT Universe serieses ( some are confirmed, some I think ) :

. The North fashions : Ancient/Olden Scottish, Slavic and Nordic elements

. Iron Islands fashions : Ancient/Olden Scandinavian elements

. The Reach fashions : Ancient Gaul, Ancient Athenian and Olden French fashion elements

. Westerlands fashions : Ancient/Olden British and Ancient Spartan elements

. Stormlands fashions : Ancient/Olden German and Ancient Germanic elements

. Dornish fashions : Ancient/Olden Arabian, Persian, Hindi and Turkish, Ancient Egyptian, and Al Andalus elements

. The Vale fashions : Ancient/Olden Alpine and Polish elements

. Riverlands Fashions : Ancient/Olden Rhinelands, Welsh and Irish elements

. Valyrian fashions : Ancient Greco Roman, Medieval Italian and Byzantine elements

. Qarthian fashions : Byzantine, Ottoman and Ancient Grecian elements

. Braavos fashions : Ancient/Olden Venetian and Ottoman fashions

[gemsofgreece]

Hello! When looking at the history of greek turkish relations I have recently come across turkish people pointing out violence that the greek army has committed againt turks. Specifically during the war of independence. Although I feel uneasy cause that information seems to always be coupled with a underestimation of the greek genocide and the ottoman occupation. From what I have seen from brief research, there were massacres against turks of the Peloponnese at least during the war of independence. So I guess my question is, do you think that it is wrong to celebrate march 25th, or to be so upset with the history of what the ottomans and/or turks have done to greek people if there were also massacres against turks (although maybe not as many)?

Maybe this is a dumb question, but I get uncomfortable and confused when i hear these things.

I hope that makes sense and if you answer this thank you so much in advance!

Hello! The Greek war of independence was a violent movement against an established conqueror reigning over the indigenous people. All wars are violent but the motives of the wars are in fact not created equal. There are wars, such as the defensive and independence wars, that are generally more justified than the conquests, the civil wars and most other types.

I remember the Greek history post series I made a few years ago - I started the Revolution post with a note saying something like “it is viewed as a time of glory for the Greek history but be warned that it was not a walk in the park”. It definitely wasn’t. You should take into consideration that it had little chance to be anything other than a violent revolt - it was the uprising of a small bunch of people, with no military training except for their few commanders who had been either missionaries or bandits, no resources, not much hope, against a vast empire. This was a war that mathematically could not happen with diplomacy or any sort of political or financial leverage as there was nothing Greeks could offer in return for their freedom that could ever tempt the Ottomans to agree. The Greek revolution which started from the Peloponnese, was in fact part of the trio of planned revolts, the other two in the Danubian Principalities and Constantinople. These two were suppressed by the Ottomans in time. Furthermore, a little known fact is that for all the 350 years - give or take - of Ottoman hegemony over the Greeks, a revolt sprang on average every three years in some place of Greece. Make the math for how many efforts these people did over the centuries. And these were all suppressed. So when the Peloponnesian revolt worked, almost against all odds, this was a development that took even the victors by storm and in the early months of the war, those masses of vengeful irregular rebels at times lost sense of right and wrong.

I am talking of course about the Sack of Tripolitsá, as I bet you mostly mean as well and as I know this to be the Turks’ favourite mantra. However, an important difference between Greek and Turkish wrongdoing I have observed is that Greeks do not gloss over or revise or deny the atrocities of Tripolitsá. Not only that, but what happened there was fast condemned by the Greek warriors themselves and was in fact sobering, as for the remaining years of the war Greeks were definitely more restrained in their dalliances with the enemy. What happened in Tripolitsá is known to have happened by the masses in the absence of the general commander (Dimitrios Ypsilantis), who rushed back when he heard of it, and the at least distancing from it even by some of the most fearsome warriors, such as Theodoros Kolokotronis. Kolokotronis, in his memoirs, seemed to be aware that the Greeks will storm into the city and kill non-Christian civilians, and made pacts to protect some Albanians, which he honoured. But he entered the city late and what he saw far exceeded what he expected to happen. He expressed reproach for the atrocities, which however he explained was actually somewhat mollified when they led him in front of a tree in the city square which was used specifically to hang Greeks.

When I entered Tripolitsa, they showed me a plane tree in the market-place where the Greeks had always been hanged. I sighed. "Alas!" I said, "how many of my own clan – of my own race – have been hanged there!" And I ordered it to be cut down. I felt some consolation then from the slaughter of the Turks. ... [Before the fall] we had formed a plan of proposing to the Turks that they should deliver Tripolitsa into our hands, and that we should, in that case, send persons into it to gather the spoils together, which were then to be apportioned and divided among the different districts for the benefit of the nation; but who would listen?

- from Kolokotronis’ memoirs

The death toll varies for Tripolitsá, somewhere between 8,000 - 15,000 gruesomely slain according to contemporary historians. Kolokotronis himself is open and real enough to number them at 30,000, but according to historians this was a miscalculation on his part. The point is that this gruesome bleak time in Greek history is not denied by me, you, Kolokotronis himself who was a symbol of this war, the Greeks, nobody. Nobody takes pride in it. And this is not the reason we celebrate the independence war.

Reasons to celebrate the independence war were clear, unspoiled and hard victories such as those of Dervenakia, Alamana, Gravia and numerous others and some reasons to commemorate the Greek revolution are, say, the Sortie of Missolonghi:

Or the essentially permanent destruction of Psará:

Or the massacre of Chios:

Or the treatment of Greek Cypriots:

Ever heard a Turk analyse these (and many more) and view them through an introspective critical light? Nope. Maybe there are but I haven’t seen any yet. The best most understanding thing I have heard is “the past is in the past”. And well this is 200 years stuff. What about 100 years stuff??? Like you said, Turkey officially denies the Greek, the Armenian and the Assyrian genocides, plus all the progroms against the Greeks which were happening till the freaking 50s.

*The Armenian genocide counts 1.5-2 million victims.

Should they justify themselves for how the Greeks - indigenous of Asia Minor and having majorities in the coasts even a hundred years ago - have ended up being 3,000 in all this massive country? They do. They give a range of answers from “no, Greeks weren’t indigenous here” to the fantastic “they deserved it”, I don’t know which one is better. For Constantinople alone:

My dear Anon, Greeks HAD to revolt against the Ottoman Empire. We do not know how history would unfold if the Greek revolution didn’t happen, the Ottoman Empire would most likely fall again, but since the Greek independence weakened it earlier than it otherwise would, and if the revolution hadn’t happened, a lot more Greeks would have ended up assimilated before the fall. And I believe we would be so very different. We all know that we all still face issues due to the feudal and corrupted system of the empire that has infiltrated Greek politics still. Imagine if all that stuff was a few decades fresh. No European Union. And of course no Northern Greece. Things would be sooo different at our expense, if things didn’t happen in the way they did back then. I am frankly weirded out by a few Greeks - usually young and of certain political views which have turned into their entire identity - (not talking about you and not at all against the political views, I am only criticising the lack of moderation) who are really trying to deconstruct and renounce the Greek revolution, with arguments such as that;

a) Greeks fought because they thought they would live better and be richer if they were independent, so they also did it for themselves and for the spoils and not just for the nation (yes and? You just described all humans on the planet who think that they can prosper better in their own sovereign state, so what exactly is your problem with that?????)

b) Greeks had a great time in the Ottoman Empire because the Rum Millet was governed by the Greek Patriarch and they were allowed to be Christian (yes which is why they attempted 100+ revolts to which Turks always retaliated with thousands of killings. Fun times indeed. It was also so great to have no education and sense of your heritage unless you were a rich merchant in Constantinople or became a tax collector taking taxes from Christians and giving them to Turks or converted to Islam and spoke Turkish and got a a Turkish name so ESSENTIALLY DEGREEKED YOURSELF, the very definition of freedom, quite right.)

Those types of Greeks, they frankly baffle me. History itself shows that Greeks overall wanted out of the empire. In fact, most if not all subject nations in the Balkans and the Arabic ones in Middle East and North Africa at several points revolted against the Ottoman Empire. Subjects wanted OUT of it. Even Muslims wanted out of it. Could they all be unfair to the nice empire? Just because a few ones had managed to prosper through diplomatic relations with the Ottoman officers or just because some didn’t want to partake in the wars because they obviously dreaded their failure and what it would cause to them (all very human, normal concerns) it doesn’t mean they had a great time in the empire. I am so weirded out by such arguments when they don’t come from Turks. And of course, if you have to change name, religion and language in order to prosper, then immediately the argument of freedom and equality falls apart on its own!!! “Greeks were privileged in the empire because they could prosper if they converted to Islam and spoke the Turkish language” So, Greeks were privileged if they stopped being Greeks. Nice. Are those people proof-reading the things they write? I wonder. Next thing, they will start apologizing for gaining independence.

In the end, the Greeks of the 19th century were products of the Ottoman society they lived in. They rebelled violently against an - ultimately - violent state. It would be hard to be accustomed to drinking tea in pretty china and killing enemies only with the sharpness of your words as a subject in the Ottoman Empire. That revolt was harsh indeed - and it was frankly what was needed to succeed. Unfortunate but true. Nobody - certainly not the Greeks - ever takes up arms cheerfully. We grieve for our wrongdoings in Tripolitsá, well at least I do, but heck no I don’t feel bad for the War of Independence, I feel proud of it and I feel like I ought to acknowledge the sacrifice of people, who were hardened humans far from perfect, few of whom could also have their own motives, but did have a hope for their descendants to be who they are now with their opinions on the Internet in their sovereign state in their geographically and historically indigenous lands. I found this insistence of certain young Greeks to strip those Greeks as a whole - from the biggest warriors to the unknown soldiers - from all sorts of noble ideals offensive and disgraceful. The Society of Friends were indeed inspired by their ideals. Even foreign Philhellenes were inspired by ideals enough to come here and fight! So why are these Greeks now dying to argue that all Greeks were ready to die along with their families for the chance of some spoils?! It doesn’t even make much sense! Some would be corrupt or desperate enough for that, and some would not. People are people and there are all sorts of them. It comes down to the fact though that the Greek revolution succeeded because people believed it was the right time, and the right mentality had been formed, and it spread from the three initial members of the Society of Friends (Xanthos, Tsakalof and Skoufas) to a great part of Europe. It was never a little thing and it was not an era fallen from grace. It was an important era with its undoubtedly bleak moments. As it happens with all important eras that change history, including the other two revolutions of the romantic period; the American and the French.

Meanwhile, the Turks happily celebrate annually the Sack of Constantinople inside Hagia Sophia. They have the sack as an annual anniversary. The SACKING. The Fall of Constantinople. Like, the CONQUEST. You understand? The invasion. Seizing the foreign city and celebrating this 600 years later inside the biggest landmark of the defeated inhabitants. Have you ever seen another nation celebrating such a thing in 2023?! Not a liberation, not an independence, A CONQUEST. 600 YEARS LATER. Beating up the corpse! STILL!

So, I personally am not confused at all. My heart aches for all those non-Christian women and children and peaceful civilians who were lost, maybe gruesomely, certainly unfairly. But it also aches for so many Christians who had the exact same fate without ever being the attacker first. Confused overall about the Greek revolution? Heck no! For all the evil Greeks have ever done, Turks have managed to outdo them in retaliation or in advance every time somehow. This is a feat in its own right, I guess. I can not be guilt trapped by anyone who speaks only of Greek war crimes in relation to their affairs with the Turks. I am laughing. Think about it, and perhaps you will start laughing too.

[definitely-greece]

Croatia has made the statement thata. Greco-turkish union is a good idea

What? When did that happen?

[allycat75]

Important events that actually took place on September 9th and were in no way a figment of a sad, delusional man and his advisors' imagination in order to continue a nefarious and daft lie.

1543- Mary Stuart, at 9 months old, is crowned Queen of Scots

1675- New England colonies declare war on Wampanoag Indians

1753- 1st steam engine arrives in North American colonies

1776- Congress officially renames the country as the United States of America (from the United Colonies)

1817- Alexander Twilight, probably first African American to graduate from a US college, receives BA degree at Middlebury College

1836- Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his influential essay "Nature" in the US, outlining his beliefs in transcendentalism

1850- California becomes a state

1880- President Rutherford B. Hayes visits San Francisco

1888- Easter Island / Rapa Nui in the Pacific is annexed by Chile

1892- Edward Emerson Barnard at Lick Observatory discovers Amalthea, Jupiter's 5th moon

1904- Boston Herald again refers to NY baseball club as Yankees, when it reports "Yankees take 2," Yankee name not official till 1913

1908- Orville Wright makes 1st 1-hr airplane flight, Fort Myer, Virginia

1908- Russia annexes part of Poland

1911- 1st European post delivered by air (Hendon to Windsor, England)

1921- Guatemala, Honduras and San Salvador agree to Central American Union

1922- Turkish troops take the Greek-held Anatolian city of Smyrna during the Greco-Turkish War

1926- National Broadcasting Company created by Radio Corporation of America

1936- New York Yankees beat Cleveland Indians, 12-9 at League Park to clinch AL pennant on the earliest date in history

1939- Nazi army reaches Warsaw

1942- Compulsory work for women, children and old males in Batavia

1944- Allied forces liberate Luxembourg

1945- 1st "bug" in a computer program discovered by Grace Hopper, a moth was removed with tweezers from a relay & taped into the log

1950- 1st use of TV laugh track by "The Hank McCune Show" in the US

1951- 1st broadcast of soap opera "Love of Life" on CBS-TV

1955- Don Zimmer, hits 4,000th Dodger home run

1956- Elvis Presley appears on "The Ed Sullivan Show" for the 1st time

1957- US President Eisenhower signs 1st civil rights bill since Reconstruction

1960- Pakistan ends India's run of 6 consecutive Olympic field hockey gold medals with a 1-0 win over their sub-continent rivals at the Rome Games

1963- Alabama Governor George Wallace served a federal injunction to stop orders of state police to bar black students from enrolling in white schools

1965- LA Dodgers future Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax throws his 4th career no-hitter and first perfect game in a 1-0 win over the Chicago Cubs at Dodger Stadium

1966- The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act signed into law by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1st federal safety standards for vehicles and roads

1967- 1st successful Test flight of a Saturn V

1969- The Official Languages Act comes into force in Canada - making English and French the country's official languages (replaced 1988 by new Official Languages Act)

1971- Apple Records releases John Lennon's second solo studio album, "Imagine" in US; it tops the charts in US, UK, Australia, and 3 other countries

1972- West German equestrian rider Liselott Linsenhoff follows her dressage teams gold in Mexico City with the individual dressage title at her home Olympics in Munich

1975- Paul McCartney & Wings begin their "Wings Over The World" tour in Southampton, England; 65 concerts in Europe, Australia, Canada, and United States, runs through October of 1976

1978- Ayatollah Khomeini calls for an uprising in the Iranian army

1979- 31st Emmy Awards: "Taxi"; "Lou Grant"; Ron Leibman & Ruth Gordon win

1983- Radio Shack announces their color computer 2 (Coco2)

1985- President Reagan orders sanctions against South Africa, targeting apartheid

1987- Larry Bird of the Celtics begins an NBA free throw streak of 59

1987- Gary Hart admits on "Nightline" to cheating on his wife

1990- George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Helsinki & urge Iraq to leave Kuwait

1990- Liberia president Samuel K Doe is captured by Mr Johnson's forces

1991- Mike Tyson indicted for rape of Desiree Washington

1993- Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization exchange letters of mutual recognition

2010- A court in the Philippines orders Imelda Marcos to repay the government almost $280,000 for funds taken from the National Food Authority by Ferdinand Marcos in 1983

2012- Armenia wins the 40th FIDE Chess Olympiad

2015- Apple unveils the iPad Pro and iPhone 6S in San Francisco

2015- Queen Elizabeth II becomes Great Britain's longest-reigning monarch at 63 years and seven months, beating the previous record set by her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria

2017- Egyptian archaeologists announce the discovery of a 3,500-year-old tomb of a goldsmith and his family in Draa Abul-Naga, Egypt

2018- CBS chief Les Moonves departs the company after six more women make allegations of sexual abuse in "The New Yorker"

2019- Poet John Milton's own copy of Shakespeare's First Folio of 1623 has survived with his annotations according to scholar Jason Scott-Warren in Philadelphia library, could be world's most important modern literary discovery

2020- San Francisco Bay area blanketed by dark orange skies and smoke due to California wildfires

2021- Tom Brady becomes first player in NFL history to start 300 regular season games as he guides Tampa Bay Buccaneers to an opening day 31-29 win at home to Dallas Cowboys

ALL of these are more important than something that never happened on this day.

[phykios]

please don't be sorry this is so cool! southern euro is basically ignored in western education and its so annoying. i do have some questions: can you expand on metaxas and the colonels? do you have book/paper recommendations on this topic? how is this related to your dissertation? also maybe percy drinks mountain tea (is that still a thing?)

OH mountain tea is such a wonderful idea, yes <3 yes i am taking that

with regards to metaxas, his big thing was establishing the "third hellenic civilization," which was basically his answer to both the third reich and the third rome (metaxas was an authoritarian with more than a few fascist leanings). it was the third civilization bc it followed the first (pagan greece) and the second (christian byzantium), and was kind of a replacement for the irredentist megali idea (lit. "the great idea") which was the greek national policy of the early 20th century to try and reconquer all "historical" greek lands, incl places like constantinople and the western shore of asia minor. the megali idea fell apart after the greco-turkish war of 1922 and the destruction of smyrna, so metaxas, with the authority/appointment of king george ii, refocused political efforts on the current territory of greece. coincidentally, a lot of really big archaeological excavations were happening at the same time, like the athenian agora and the excavation at thermopylae, so you can imagine this gave the metaxas regime MASSIVE clout in western europe

on the other hand, the greek junta took a HARD right turn into greek christian nationalism, being an even more authoritarian/fascist regime than metaxas'. they also leaned hard into the idea of greece as the "source" of western civilization, but it was largely a cover to go after suspected communist activity in greece (the regime which was heavily supported by the us, btw)

my dissertation is about music in greece in the 1940s as part of this debate on cultural continuity, so you accidentally hit my infodump button 😭 sorry lmao. if you're interested in reading some more, i'd recommend starting with Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece by michael herzfeld and then going from there

[slaymate]

Would love to know more about Fani and her mom. What’s their relationship like pre and post fire?

You guys really love the family drama, huh!

To keep it vague, Faní's mother Dimitra is an extremely sensitive person whose mental illness is aggravated by her negative experiences of getting married too young, being abandoned by her philandering husband, and taking on his trading business to raise her daughter as a single mom. She tries to protect Faní from repeating her own mistakes (namely, getting involved with any man), but ends up isolating both of them from family and friends the older Faní gets. The Greco-Turkish War is only the last straw that makes her turn increasingly violent against her child.

Faní consequently has been brought up as a people pleaser who does everything in her power to preserve her ailing mother's better moods and health. Their relationship before the fire is certainly one of co-dependency - a dysfunctional family dynamic if you will - although they genuinely love each other.

Now, Alki's entrance during the Great Fire of Smyrna is probably Dimitra's worst case scenario. They were acquainted on a business level before, in fact, and hated each other's guts. Reuniting after 6+ months of separation, Dimitra is positively delusional, and doesn't seriously acknowledge Faní's marriage or, later, the existence of Faní's children. In practice, Faní becomes her caretaker for part of the year, and only stays with Alki for the rest.