#welcome to eastern middle europe

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Frequently Asked Questions

This post answers the following questions:

Who are the Catalans? Where are you?

Which are the Catalan Countries? (each Catalan country)

Where can I learn the Catalan language? (free online resources and where to find classes)

What social media accounts can I follow that post in Catalan?

If your question isn't answered here, you're more than welcome to send me an ask!

1. Who are the Catalans? Where are they?

Catalan people are a cultural group who come from the area known as the Catalan Countries. We speak the Catalan language (a language that descends from Latin) and have a distinct culture (cuisine, traditions, holidays, dances, music, literature, etc) and history since the Middle Ages.

Our nation is the Catalan Countries, located in the coast of the Mediterranean sea, in South-Western Europe.

As a result of past wars and invasions, most of the Catalan Countries are under Spanish rule and a part of it is under French rule (+1 city in Italy). In fact, Spain and France have harshly persecuted, illegalized and tried to exterminate the Catalan language and culture for a long time, well into the 20th century. But Catalan people have survived the ethnocide and we still exist, even though we continue to face discrimination and there are some settings where it's still not legal to speak Catalan (for example, public schools in the French-controlled part, or European Union ambits, among some others).

There is also Catalan diaspora around the world.

We are not a closed culture, we are very open to foreigners learning our language and culture, and the Catalan diaspora often organizes celebrations for our holidays or groups to do traditional activities (most famously the castellers, aka human towers) that everyone can join.

2. Which are the Catalan Countries?

We say the Catalan Countries in plural because it's made of different areas for historical reasons. The Catalan Countries are all the areas where Catalan is the native language, which have historically been part of a whole, and which share a common culture (with local variants, of course). Here they are:

From North to South:

Northern Catalonia. Capital city: Perpinyà. It's under French administration (part of the region Occitanie in the new French regions system, used to be Languedoc-Roussillon in the old one).

Andorra. Capital city: Andorra la Vella. It's an independent microstate.

Catalonia. Capital city: Barcelona. It's under Spanish administration (it's the Catalonia region in the Spanish regions system).

Eastern Strip, also called Aragon Strip. It's under Spanish administration (it's part of the region of Aragon in the Spanish regions system).

Balearic Islands, including Mallorca, Menorca, Eivissa (in English also known as Ibiza) and Formentera. Capital city: Palma. Under Spanish administration (Balearics region in the Spanish regions system).

Valencian Country. Capital city: València. Under Spanish administration (called Valencian Community in the Spanish regions system).

El Carxe. Tiny rural area. Under Spanish administration (part of the Region of Murcia in the Spanish regions system).

L'Alguer. One city in the island of Sardinia. Under Italian administration (part of the region of Sardinia in the Italian regions system).

3. Where can I learn the Catalan language?

We are thrilled that you want to learn our language. Catalan people love it when others learn our language. Here I'll link you to classes and free online resources.

If you want face-to-face classes outside of the Catalan Countries, you can check this website to find if there's a university that offers Catalan classes near you. There are 101 around Europe, 25 in North America and Cuba, 5 in Asia, and 4 in South America. Students from these courses can also participate in language stays and internships in the Catalan Countries.

If you're already in the Catalan Countries, you will easily find courses for foreigners which the government offers for free or for a cheap price (depending on the level and each person's economic situation). Check out your local CPNL (Consorci per la Normalització Lingüística).

If you want to learn independently on the internet, there are two resources I recommend the most, both are available online for free.

One is the book "Life in Catalonia. Learn Catalan from..." that you can find in various languages. Here I add the link to the official government page where you can legally download the PDFs for free, you only have to scroll down and click under where it says "text complet". You can find the book Learn Catalan from English, from Spanish, from Arabic, from Tamazight, from French, from Hindi, from Urdu, from Punjabi, from Romanian, from Russian, and from Chinese.

The other resource I recommend the most is the online course Parla.cat. It has different levels for beginners or advanced learners. You have to create an account (it asks for an official document number, don't worry about it, it's not a sketchy site, it's because it's an official course paid by the government of Catalonia and if you immigrated to Catalonia having taken this course would officially count as a language course and can give you some benefits). You can either use it for free (all the learning material is available in the free version) or you can use the paying version. In the paid version, you will get assigned a language teacher from Catalonia who can help you and correct you.

There are many more resources. You can find more free resources in this post, this post, or in this link.

Here you have some recommendations to start practising. And remember that you can watch Catalonia's public TV streaming service 3Cat for free from anywhere in the world!

4. I want to follow social media accounts that post in Catalan. Can you tell me some?

Of course! According to the WWW Consortium, Catalan is the 35th most used language on the Internet, out of the more than 7,000 languages in the world.

Here's some lists with recommendations by topic:

Anime and manga

Cooking

Travel accounts

Videogames

Fashion and lifestyle

More lists will be coming soon

If your question wasn't answered, you can send me a question clicking here. 🙂 You can also browse this blog by topics here.

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Vampires before they were cool... (2)

In my last post, I left you by the 16th century. But it was the 17th century which was the BIG century for the evolution of the vampire myth.

During the Middle-Ages, the vampire manifestations were mostly localized in Western Europe: vampire tales came from the British Isles, from France, from Spain, from Portugal. However, throughout the 16th century, these phenomenon rarefied themselves in the West… Only to brutally amplify and multiply by the East. In the 17th century, vampires popped up everywhere in the Balkans, in Greece, in Russia, in the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In fact, by the 17th century, vampires had turned so rare in Western Europe that some people (like Voltaire in France) would later believe vampires were “invented” by the 17th century and did not exist prior to this date…

Why such a big shift? Well, sociologically speaking, Eastern Europe was a poor and isolated part of Europe at the time. The great innovations and inventions of the Renaissance had not crossed over to the East, unlike things like the vampire tales, which travelled very fast – and while the bourgeoisie and the city-dwellers of Eastern countries were educated, the rest of the population, the peasants and the folks of the countryside, usually did not know how to read or write. It was a fertile ground for folktales to take root and superstitions to manifest themselves… But there was a second reason that amplified this one: a religious difference. In Western Europe, it was a time of hunts and persecutions of all kinds – be it the Catholic Church and its Inquisition who led a merciless fight against anything deemed an “heresy” or a superstition contradicting its canon beliefs; or the Anglican Church of the Stuarts who caused one of the largest witch hunts of history. These phenomenon caused the disappearance and erasure of the vampire myth in Western Europe… But to the East, the Byzantine-descending Church had a more open-mind and a greater tolerance when it came to local folk-beliefs, even including superstitions in its rites and practices: as such, the vampire myth was welcomed by the religious authorities – a case being the brucolacs of Greece.

The Greeks have very ancient beliefs when it comes to the dead who do not rot and get out of their graves: the archetypal case is the one of the “vrykolakas” (usually re-written as “brucolac”). They were people turned undead because they were not buried in a holy ground (death by suicide, or being excommunicated). However when the legend of the vrykolakas started they were… harmless and pitiful creatures. They were tormented souls who only sought to escape the physical body they were trapped within, and did not harm humans: to send them to an eternal rest, the Church just had to remove its excommunication and their soul would be at peace. However, from the 16th century onward, the nature of the vrykolakas changed with the arrival from the West of these yet-unnamed harmful undeads. And this lead to a confusion with werewolves.

Yes, werewolves: “vrykolakas” was also a Greek term to designate werewolves, who were very present in the folklores of the Balkans or the Carpathians. The werewolf myth was, just like the vampire myth, crystallized by the Christian medieval beliefs. And just like the vampire, it had an “official” recognition: Sigismund, king of Hungary and leader of the Holy Roman Empire (1368-1437) had the Ecumenical Council of 1414 recognize officially the existence of werewolves, and in the 16th century the Roman Church led official investigations on lycanthropy. Between 1520 and the mid-17th century, more than 30 000 cases of lycanthropy had been reported in Europe (in the West, France was the most touched, while in the East they were found mainly in Serbia, Bohemia and Hungary). A rumor started spreading around, about how when werewolves died they turned into “blood-sucking undead”. This led, in the end of the 17th century, to the apparition in popular culture of vampire-werewolves entity. They were found in Silesia, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Moldavia, Russia, and of course Greece, where the peaceful brucolacs were turned into bloodthirsty monsters ; and by the 18th century they covered pretty much all of Northern and Central Europe. Every country had its own terms, its own names, and its own traditions when it came to these undead: “upir”, “brucolac”, “blutsauger”, “vulkodlak”… In Slovakia and Romania for example, the “dead that walks” was accused of every misfortune: famines, diseases, disasters and misfortunes were supposedly all caused by them, and it could only be solved by opening their graves and plunging a stake in their bodies. People feared the “strigoi” and the “moroi”, these corpses that got out of their coffins at night to drink the blood of the living, and they were FAR from the glamorous vampire we think of today. They were these fleshy, bloated corpses that wandered around with their eyes bulging and wide-open, never blinking, repulsive monsters with barely anything human left in them. To recognize one, you had to a find a corpse that was still fresh despite being buried for quite some times, and who had nose either on its mouth or nose. Then, you needed to pierce it with a stake, or removed its heart to burn it. In Romania, the families of the recently deceased brought wine and bread on the graves in hope of appeasing them. Slovakians rather sent elderly ladies in the cemeteries to stab graves with hawthorn branches or old knives: five in total, four for the limbs and one for the chest, to “nail” the corpse to its coffin. Eyes were closed with coins so they wouldn’t open, mouths were filled with garlic and wired shut, and if these rituals were useless a special person would be brought to destroy the corpse by decapitation, fire and religious symbols – a holy man, or a “dhampir”, a man rumored to be half-vampire… In Romania, many, MANY people could turn into vampires, not just werewolves: seventh sons of seventh sons, babies born with a caul o with teeth, individuals who had both red hair and blue eyes, and of course all the criminals, suicides and other disgraced people who did not receive proper burial.

All the fuss and commotion in Eastern Europe ended up alerting the capitals of Western Europe. In October of 1694, the French review “Le Mercure Galant” (a courtly magazine for the nobility) had an entire issue dedicated to these vampires of the east. By the end of the 17th century, while the word “vampire” still did not exist, it was a true mass psychosis, an “epidemic of undeads” followed by ferocious “hunts” during which corpses were dug up to be “killed again”… At the beginning of the 18th century, the authorities decided to take measures to calm things down and quiet this upcoming chaos. Though at this moment, the mass panic about vampires still relied on rumors, oral culture and other travel-tales: there was no written text or official report per se… Until the 18th century, when the authorities stepped in.

Cases of so-called “vampires” were studied and mediatized in Austria and Serbia, Prussia and Poland, Moravia and Russia. When the plague hit the eastern part of Prussia in 1710, the local authorities dug up themselves the corpses accused of having caused the epidemic. But two specific cases became the most famous and spectacular ones, making vampirism a full European thing.

The first was the death of a peasant: Peter Plogojowitz. He died in 1725, but his small village of Kizilova quickly called him a vampire and accused him of having caused eight deaths within the village. Testimonies talked of Plogojowitz being seen in people’s bedroom at night, trying to strangle them. When the grave was opened by the authorities, it was testified that his body had not yet rotten, and that fresh blood was on his mouth. He was quickly staked and burned. The second case was the one of Arnold Paole, a peasant from the small town of Medwegya who died falling from a cart in 1726(27?). He had apparently confessed to his fiancée, some days before his death, that he had encountered what he thought to be an undead… Paole himself was accused of having turned into a vampire, and caused the death of the village’s cattle and four people. His body was ug up and pierced with a stake. The case of Paole was extremely interesting because an authority was sent to study the case: Johann Flückinger, who investigated in his quality of both high-ranked major and army doctor. The result of his presence was the famous “Visum et Repertum” document, a 1731 report of the entire case and his conclusion, cosigned by other doctors and officers, and where (according to Antoine Faivre) the word “vampire” first appeared in the history of written texts, spelled “vanpir”. The “Visum et Repertum” became an object of curiosity for all the ruling classes of Western Europe: we know that Charles VI of Austria and Louis XV of France were both invested in the outcomes of the Plogojowitz and Paole cases. The Paole case was notably described with many details in “Le Glaneur”, a famous Franco-Dutch review often read at the Versailles court (issue of march 1732) – and it was in this “Le Glaneur” issue that the word “vampire” first appeared in the French language, spelled “vampyre”. The very same year and month, an article was published in the “London Journal” which brought over the word “vampire” to the English language.

These two cases also led to a LOT of treaties and dissertations being written about vampires, by both pseudo-scientists and actual men of the Church, which in turn caused intense debates and huge controversies among universities and literary circles. The first of those treaties is from the latter part of the 17th century, published at Leipzig in 1679, “Dissertatio historica-philosophica de Masticatione Mortuorum”, by Philip Rohr. This text tried to explain why the dead would “masticate” in their graves by explaining it was a demonic possession of the corpses. This book caused a huge controversy in the 18th century, splitting people in two sides: either you agreed with Rohr’s supernatural explanation, either you deemed this an ignorant superstition. Another famous treaty was published in Leipzig, in 1728 this time: “De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis Liber” by Michael Ranft. This book opposed and discredited the thesis of Rohr by claiming the devil had no power onto the corpses of the dead, and that while the “undeads” would influence the living, they could not appear to them under any tangible form. Many other treaties would follow, such as Johann Christian Stock’s “Dissertatio Physica de Cadaveribus Sanguisugis” (1732) or Johann Heinrich Zopft’s “Dissertatio de Vampiris Serviensibus” in 1733.

Though the most famous of them all is Dom Augustin Calmet’s 1746 Parisian text, “Traité sur les revenants en corps, les excommuniés, les oupires ou vampires, broucolaques de Hongrie, de Moravie, etc », published in two volumes (Treaty on the undead in body, the excommunicated, the upirs or vampires, brucolacs of Hungaria, Moravia, etc). This Benedictine monk and famous commentator of the Bible wanted to refute the belief in vampires: to do so, he collected and analyzed an enormous amount of trivia, testimonies, folktales and “cases” surrounding vampires. While his work is mostly a naïve collection and compilation of anecdotes, it still held in the future a huge importance for the study of historians, sociologists and anthropologists, as it is one of the most complete catalogues of vampire phenomenon of its time. Other high-ranking members of the Church also tried to express the official position of their religion on vampires: Giuseppe Davanzati (archbishop of Florence, patriarch of Alexandria) wrote in 1774 “Dissertatione sopra i vampire”, and the pope Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini) wrote a few pages about vampires to discredit their existence in the fourth book of his enormous “De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et de Beatorum Canonizatione” (1749). Unfortunately, these anti-vampire testimonies were perceived as the Church giving a form of credit and recognition to these undead…

In France, meanwhile, the authors of the “Encyclopédie” (aka the very first encyclopedia ever) were greatly annoyed and irritated by this obsession for vampires. Voltaire, in his 1787 “Philosophical Dictionary”, wrote an entire rant about them, while Rousseau denounced the belief in vampires in a letter he sent to the archbishop of Paris. Both wondered how such superstitions could become so popular in the age of “reason and progress” that was the Enlightenment. But indeed, all these texts and treaties about vampires simply helped spread the legend, making people who had never heard about these monsters learn all about them – and most importantly, it popularized and stabilized the use of the term “vampire”, and its Latin equivalent “vampirus” (though it was still spelled differently depending on the countries and time eras: vampyr, vampyre, wampire…).

However the 19th century would see the end of the actual belief in vampires. While at the end of the 18th century vampires were still the hot talk of universities and literary salons (especially in France and Germany), the actual “cases” and supernatural phenomenon the myth built itself upon were rarer and rarer. The ideas and philosophies of the Enlightenment had finally made their way across Eastern Europe, plus the great era of the plague was over: education and health worked together to erase the vampire from people’s minds, especially as the industrialization of Europe changed heavily the lifestyle of people and the landscape of the countries. There were still cases of vampirism in the 19th century, but they were isolated, and we never saw any mass panic or large-scale “vampire hunt” as there used to be. The vampire was a manifestation of ancient and primal fears in a world filled with superstition, darkness and disease – in this new era of the miracles of technology and wonders of science, dominated by materialism and positivism, the vampire had no place in people’s hearts… The early 19th century still has magazines and newspaper talking from time to time of an Hungarian or Serbian remote village where coffins are opened in quest of vampires, but nobody is interested anymore, everybody focused on gas-lamps and railroads. Nobody dreams of the vampires, except maybe for the Romantics, who are repelled by this era of bourgeoisie and businessmen dominated by obsessive work, absolute religion and social hierarchy, and in the vampire find back this nostalgia of a distant, frightening, fascinating “magical past”…

And thus the vampire would move from a being of religion and science, of superstition and newspapers, to an entity of poems and novels – from Ossenfelder’s poem to Stoker’s Dracula…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Zipper at Vox:

Despite a recent slowdown in US sales, global forecasts for electric vehicles remain bullish. Countries across North America, Europe, and Asia are expanding charger networks and offering EV subsidies; global EV sales are projected to nearly triple by 2030, reaching 40 million vehicles annually. The incipient wave of EV purchases raises a question: What will happen to the millions of gas-powered cars whose owners no longer want them? The likely answer: Rather than scrapping used gas vehicles or selling them domestically, rich nations will dispatch them to developing countries where limited incomes and low levels of car ownership have created eager buyers for even older, substandard models.

An influx of used gas cars would be a welcome development for those in the Global South who aspire to automobile ownership, a luxury that many in affluent countries take for granted. But it would undermine efforts to mitigate climate change, since shifting gas guzzlers from one country to another doesn’t lower global emissions. For developing countries themselves, a sharp increase in car ownership could amplify calls to build auto-reliant infrastructure, making it harder to construct the dense neighborhoods and transit networks that can foster more sustainable growth. And since these imported used cars would be fueled by gasoline, air quality would further decline in cities that are already choked with smog. The world is in an era of polycrisis, facing concurrent challenges including climate change, toxic air, and extreme inequality. Difficult trade-offs are often inevitable. Such is the case with the thorny issue of what to do with the millions of gas cars that the rich world will discard as its fleets are electrified. Electrification is a necessary goal. And it’s natural for people in the developing world to desire the same luxuries that characterize middle-class comfort in wealthier countries. The question is how to manage a transition with enormous stakes that has largely been ignored. The experts who do pay attention are growing alarmed.

[...]

How used cars move from rich nations to poor ones

Although it generates few headlines, a massive industry transports used cars across borders every day, with exporters collecting lower-quality models from dealers and wholesale auctions. Ayetor noted that colonial legacies are reflected in the trade flows: the UK, with its car cabins designed for drivers who keep to the left, tends to ship to former colonies like Kenya and Tanzania that still follow the same rules.

According to a report issued in June by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), some 3.1 million used cars were exported in 2022, up from 2.4 million in 2015. Most come from Japan, Europe, and the United States. (In the US, around 7 percent of all cars no longer in use are sent abroad. The rest end up in junkyards where their parts and materiel are sold off.) About one in three exported used vehicles is destined for Africa, followed by Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Imported models often dominate local auto sales, since international carmakers send few new vehicles to the Global South and rarely establish production facilities there. (In sub-Saharan Africa, only South Africa has local factories.) The developing world’s demand for cars is robust, in large part because comparatively few people own one. According to one 2020 estimate, the US had 860 cars for every 1,000 residents, while South Africa had 176, Morocco 112, and Nigeria just 56. Meanwhile, growing populations provide a steady supply of new potential customers. Africa is home to all of the world’s 20 fastest-growing countries, with Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Uganda expanding their populations by at least 3 percent per year. (For comparison, the US population is growing at a 0.67 percent rate).

[...]

The world needs a plan to adapt

The risks of aged, polluting cars sent abroad will not be borne by the Global South alone. Climate change is a planetary phenomenon; driving a gas guzzler produces the same amount of emissions in Lusaka as it would in London or Los Angeles. Reducing greenhouse gasses requires reducing total vehicle emissions, not just shifting their location. In an ideal world, electrification would enable the rich world to scrap its most decrepit gas cars. Instead, wealthy nations are likely to ship them to poorer countries, which will be left to figure out what to do when even the most MacGyver-like mechanics cannot keep them running. “All of your worst vehicles end up here,” Ayetor said. “When we want to get rid of the vehicle, what do we do?” No wealthy nations currently screen exported vehicles to weed out those that flunk basic quality tests, Kopf said. But that may soon change. The European Union is now considering new regulations that would prohibit exporting “end of life” vehicles, requiring that cars shipped abroad obtain a certificate confirming their roadworthiness. Its adoption would be a “game-changer,” according to UNEP’s Akumu. (She and Kopf said they know of no comparable proposals under consideration in North America.)

With the increase of electric vehicles in the developed countries, used gas-fueled cars are headed to a developing country (aka the Global South) at increasing rates.

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The Vikings who attacked the Byzantine capital in the summer of 860 were hardly unknown to Photius and his contemporaries. The patriarch called them Rus’, like the members of the Rus’ embassy of 838. He even stated that they were subjects of Byzantium but left it to subsequent generations of scholars to figure out the details. Who were they? The search for an answer has spanned the last two and a half centuries, if not longer. Most scholars today believe that the word “Rus” has Scandinavian roots. Byzantine authors, who wrote in Greek, most probably borrowed it from the Slavs, who in turn borrowed it from the Finns, who used the term “Ruotsi” to denote the Swedes – in Swedish, the word meant “men who row.��� And row they did. First across the Baltic Sea into the Gulf of Finland, then on through Lakes Ladoga, Ilmen, and Beloozero to the upper reaches of the Volga – the river that later became an embodiment of Russia and at the time formed an essential part of the Saracen (Muslim) route to the Caspian Sea and the Arab lands.

The Rus’ Vikings, a conglomerate of Norwegian, Swedish, and probably Finnish Norsemen, first came to eastern Europe mainly as traders, not conquerors, as there was little to pillage in the forests of the region. The real treasures lay in the Middle East, beyond the lands through which they needed only the right of passage. But judging by what we know about the Rus’ Vikings, they never thought of trade and war – or, rather, trade and violence – as incompatible. After all, they had to defend themselves en route, since the local tribes did not welcome their presence. And the trade in which they engaged involves coercion, for they dealt not only in forest products – furs and honey – but also in slaves. To obtain them, the Vikings had to establish some kind of control over the local tribes and collect as tribute products that they could ship along the Saracen route. They exchanged these in the Caspian markets for Arab silver dirhams, troves of which subsequent archaeologists have discovered. They punctuate the Viking trade route from Scandinavia to the Caspian Sea.

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

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Meduza's The Beet: Starting from scratch in Armenia

Hello, and welcome back to The Beet! 

I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of this weekly dispatch from Meduza that brings you underreported stories from across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. If some kind soul forwarded this email to you, sign up here to receive future issues straight from the source. (And be sure to check out last week’s report on the uncertain fate of Georgia’s endangered languages.) Subscribers get access to all our features first — but we’re not asking you to be a gatekeeper. Quite the opposite: Tell your friends to subscribe to The Beet, too! 

This week, we’re returning to the South Caucasus to follow up on our coverage of the fall of Artsakh, the erstwhile breakaway republic in Nagorno-Karabakh. After more than three decades of bloody conflict that included two full-scale wars (fought from 1988–1994 and in 2020), Azerbaijan launched a blitz offensive on September 19–20 that forced the surrender of the separatist government and its army. Following Stepanakert’s capitulation, Baku finally lifted the Lachin Corridor blockade, opening the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia after nine long months. Fearing reprisals at the hands of Azerbaijani forces, Karabakh’s predominantly ethnic Armenian population began fleeing the region en masse. Cars and buses packed with people and what few possessions they could carry formed traffic jams that lasted days on end. By October 1, Armenia had taken in more than 100,000 displaced people — nearly the entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

For many Karabakh Armenians, this was not their first evacuation from the region. But with Azerbaijan in full control of Nagorno-Karabakh, it seems unlikely that they will return. With this in mind, the Armenian government has rolled out financial assistance and is offering a “temporary protection status” for the displaced, as well as the prospect of full citizenship (a rude awakening for the many Karabakh Armenians who have long held Republic of Armenia passports but didn’t realize they were only good for international travel). In the meantime, many displaced families struggle to find adequate housing and make ends meet. For The Beet, Yerevan-based journalist Sona Hovsepyan reports on how Karabakh refugees grapple with the difficult task of rebuilding their lives from scratch. 

‘We left everything’

Uprooted and jobless, Nagorno-Karabakh refugees start from scratch in Armenia

By Sona Hovsepyan 

“My six-year-old grandson woke up in the middle of the night and cried, ‘Grandpa, I want our home,’” Areg Mirzoyan recalled, breaking down in tears.

Mirzoyan’s family is originally from Arajadzor, a village in Nagorno-Karabakh. They are among the more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians rendered homeless and unemployed after Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive drove them from the disputed enclave in late September. Mirzoyan’s family settled in Malishka, a village 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. Locals provided them with temporary housing: a single bedroom for a family of six.

“I never imagined it would turn out like this. I thought we would go back to our homes,” Mirzoyan told The Beet.

But nearly two months after the exodus, finding permanent accommodations and employment are now top priorities for former Nagorno-Karabakh residents. 

On October 17, during his speech to the European Parliament, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that Armenia had accepted 100,000 displaced people in the space of a week “without establishing refugee camps and tent settlements.” He also added that Armenia needs more international assistance, including financial support.

Earlier, Armenian Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Khachatryan reported that various governments and international organizations had donated more than 35 million euros ($37 million) in aid through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  

Mirzoyan’s family members are struggling to find jobs in the village, where farming is the only occupation. His son, Amran, was a soldier in the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army, but he has yet to find work and does not plan to continue serving in the military. Mirzoyan and his wife, Sevil, are both retired but have yet to receive pensions from the Armenian government. 

In late October, the Armenian government announced that displaced Karabakh Armenians would be granted “temporary protection status.” Labor Minister Narek Mkrtchyan later clarified that refugees registered at an address in Armenia may also be eligible for pensions and other government benefits. However, those who take Armenian citizenship would forfeit the social support provided to refugees.

During the interview, 63-year-old Mirzoyan pointed to the clothes on his back — the only things he could save while fleeing his home during the Azerbaijani attack. 

The family left in a rush without taking additional clothing, money, or food with them. Mirzoyan’s three-year-old granddaughter, Alice, arrived in Armenia barefoot because her shoes were broken. Neighbors and volunteers in Malishka donated new clothes and other necessities for the children.

‘The stores in Artsakh were empty’

Mirzoyan recounted how his grandson, also named Areg, was astonished upon entering a grocery store in the Armenian border city of Goris, which was the first to receive displaced people from Nagorno-Karabakh.

“He said to me, ‘Grandpa, look at how many candies there are here.’ The stores in Artsakh were already empty, with literally nothing in any of them. The child was amazed,” said Mirzoyan.

In the nine months leading up to Azerbaijan’s September 19–20 attack, Nagorno-Karabakh was under a blockade. It began when Azerbaijani activists blocked the only road connecting Karabakh to the outside world: the Lachin Corridor, or “the road of life,” as Armenians call it. As access to food, medicines, and vital services dwindled, the region descended into a humanitarian crisis. 

On the eve of the Azerbaijani offensive, Nagorno-Karabakh’s human rights ombudsman, Gegham Stepanyan, told The Beet that the region was experiencing a “humanitarian catastrophe.” 

“Nagorno-Karabakh residents had no access to basic necessities such as food and healthcare during the blockade, nor the right to free movement,” said Mariam Muradyan, the children’s rights officer for the Caucasus at Global Campus of Human Rights. The blockade and subsequent exodus have had a huge impact on children from Nagorno-Karabakh, she added. 

“The government has to look at the individual demands of Karabakh refugees, which is a challenging process,” Muradyan said. The most important thing now, she continued, is that the Armenian government provides psychological help to displaced children and their families.

UNICEF-supported social workers reported in October that Nagorno-Karabakh’s displaced children — who number more than 30,000 — were showing “signs of severe psychological distress” and were at risk of deteriorating mental health unless they received immediate support. 

Mirzoyan said his grandson Areg remembers the recent fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh well; even weeks later, every loud noise makes the six-year-old jump out of his skin.

‘Everyone calls for peace, but nothing changes’

Despite everything they’ve been through, the Mirzoyan family still hopes to return to their homeland one day. However, they fear living under Azerbaijan’s control.“If we have the opportunity to go back, we will go back immediately, but we can’t live side by side with Azeris,” Mirzoyan said. 

After taking control of Nagorno-Karabakh in September, Baku presented a plan for reintegrating the region’s ethnic Armenian population. However, Human Rights Watch warned that Baku’s assertions are “difficult to accept at face value” given the months-long blockade of the enclave, decades of conflict, impunity for apparent war crimes, and Azerbaijan’s poor human rights record.

Seda Avanesyan, 69, fled Nagorno-Karabakh with her family on September 25 after Azerbaijan opened the Lachin Corridor. Initially, they stayed with relatives, but now they rent a house in Malishka. Avanesyan’s family members are willing to undertake any work to earn a living, but her daughter has yet to find a job. Her son-in-law, a soldier, plans to continue serving in the Armenian army. And her grandchildren, eight-year-old Anahit and 11-year-old Nare, have already started attending a local school.

Avanesyan, who is from Askeran, recalled a time when Karabakh Armenians used to interact with Azerbaijanis from a neighboring town. But now, she said, people find it difficult to trust the reintegration process.

“We had a good relationship during the Soviet Union; we used to communicate and trade with Azerbaijanis from Akna, but now it is not possible to live alongside each other,” she told The Beet. (Akna is the Armenian name for the town of Aghdam, which was left completely destroyed and deserted after the first Nagorno-Karabakh war. Yerevan ceded Aghdam to Azerbaijan under the ceasefire that ended the 2020 war.)

“We were hungry and thirsty for 10 months, but in the end, we hoped everything would be fine,” Avanesyan continued. “The opposite happened. Everyone calls for peace, but nothing changes.”

The ICRC reported that only a small number of Karabakh Armenians had chosen to stay in their homes as of mid-October, while others had been unable to leave the region. According to Red Cross teams, some of these people required medical help, food and water, or assistance securing transportation out of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

Earlier, a U.N. mission estimated that between 50 and 1,000 ethnic Armenians remained in the region.

‘We don’t have another option’

Emma Baghdasaryan, a 20-year-old student living in the town of Armavir in the west of Armenia, assisted displaced families in the aftermath of Azerbaijan’s September offensive and throughout the 2020 war. She volunteers with the Armavir Development Center, a non-profit organization providing the displaced with food, blankets, and sanitary items.

“Volunteering is a form of patriotism for me. I don’t have extra money to help families. It’s the only thing I can do for Artsakh’s people,” Baghdasaryan explained. “I believe that families from Artsakh simply need warmth, understanding, and appreciation.”

According to Naira Arakelyan, executive director of the Armavir Development Center, there is still an urgent need for volunteers. Arakelyan also emphasized that many Karabakh refugees are living in poor conditions. 

“Karabakh Armenians need social and psychological support; everyone is under immense stress right now. The living conditions in the temporary housing that people have rented are terrible,” Arakelyan told The Beet. “There are no beds, refrigerators, washing machines, or other necessary items in most of the apartments.” 

Andranik Aloyan, 44,fled Nagorno-Karabakh along with his pregnant wife, two small children, and 71-year-old father. Their journey from the town of Martuni to Armenia took an exhausting three days; at night, the family slept in their car. 

“We didn’t have bread after September 19. My children had nothing to eat for [a] few days. My wife was pregnant, and, in that condition, we left everything and fled to Armenia,” Aloyan said.

This marked the family’s second flight from Nagorno-Karabakh: they previously fled the region during the 2020 war. In the months before the exodus, the family experienced constant fear and anxiety due to the blockade, Aloyan recalled. His wife, Hasmik Antonyan, lacked access to vitamins and basic healthcare throughout her pregnancy, causing a delay in her childbirth. She was then hospitalized on September 19, during the Azerbaijani attack. She eventually gave birth to their son after the family reached Armenia.

Today, Aloyan and his family live in the village of Getap in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor province, a two-hour drive from Yerevan. Their new house, which they are renting, is unsuitable for winter. Some of the windows are broken, and the gas and water supply lines need to be replaced before the colder weather comes, Aloyan said. “The house is in terrible condition; it’s very damp. We are cleaning it so that we can move in. Right now, we don’t have another option,” he explained. 

On November 13, Aloyan told The Beet that, so far, only he had received a support payment from the Armenian government, which has promised to provide each displaced person with a one-time payment equal to $250 and an additional $125 per month to cover rent and utility costs (for a period of six months). His wife, father, and children were still waiting to receive their respective payments, he said.

Aloyan was a soldier in Nagorno-Karabakh and is still looking for a new job. His son and daughter have yet to start kindergarten in Armenia. For now, their parents’ priority is readying the rental house for winter, and afterward, they will send the children to nursery school.

Having fled Nagorno-Karabakh for the second time in three years, the family has decided not to return. “No, we don’t want to go back. I am scared for my children,” said Aloyan. “We can’t live there anymore.” 

[bobemajses]

I am half Sephardic & my ancestors came from the Balkan peninsula (not exactly Eastern Europe but South Eastern Europe), from Podgorica and Istanbul! I currently live in Istanbul.

I would like to say some things about the city that I live in. Here we had a large community of Jewish people. Mainly located in the European part of the city. But my family had been living in Yel Degirmeni (Anatolian side) – which is also a neighbourhood with great amount of Jewish population.

Nowadays the Jewish community have left the region although there's still a significant population in Turkey unlike other Balkan countries, most of them have migrated to Israel, USA, Spain etc.

If anyone would be interested, there's a book called Anyos munchos i buenos by Laurence Salzmann (Good Year And Many More, Turkey's Sephardim 1492-1992).

Very nice! The Jewish community of Istanbul and Turkey has such an interesting history and was earlier so diverse, being comprised of Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Romaniotes, Karaites and Georgian Jews (now Sephardim constitute 95%). In 1992 the community celebrated the 500th anniversary of its official existence in Turkey since the Spring of 1492, when a big wave of expelled Spanish Jews came to Istanbul under the reign of the sultan Beyazid II.

But Turkish Jewish history is actually much older than that. Early (Romaniote) Jewish settlements in Anatolia are mentioned by the historian Josephus Flavius (37-100) when he relates that Aristotle “met Jewish people with whom he had an exchange of views during his trip across Asia Minor.” Ancient synagogue ruins have been found in Sardis, near Izmir, dating from 220 B.C.E. The Rabbi Yitzchok Zarfati wrote in the Middle Ages a famous letter to his fellow Jews, saying, “I assure you, Turkey is a country of abundance where, if you wish, you will find rest.” Thus, a wave of Jews from Hungary came in 1360 and from France in 1394, as well as Jews from Bavaria, Georgia, Portugal, Sicily, Crimea and Salonika. In 1477, Jewish households in Istanbul numbered 1,647, or 11% of the total. Half a century later, that number had quadrupled. Most of the Sultan’s court physicians were Jews, including Hakim Yakoub, Joseph and Moshe Hamon, Daniel Fonseca, and Gabriel Buenauentura.

The Great Ashkenazi Synagogue is one Istanbul’s most famous Jewish landmarks. This synagogue which was built with the support of financial contributions made by Austro-Hungarian Jews was opened in a grand ceremony in the year 1900. The opening ceremony was marked by the attendance and  remarks of the ambassador of Austria-Hungary to the Ottoman Empire, representing the importance and significance of this synagogue for the upper echelons of Ashkenazi society in Istanbul at the time. Today, it remains resolute, standing proudly on Yüksekkaldırım street, seen and pictured on a daily basis by locals and tourists alike.

During World War II, Turkey under Ataturk was a safe passage for many Jews fleeing the Nazis. Several Turkish diplomats persevered in their efforts to save the Turkish Jews from the Holocaust and succeeded.

The present size of the Jewish community is estimated at 14,500. Since the 1980s and especially under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish Jews have been the victims of violent antisemitism on multiple occasions. Turkey, a country that once welcomed Jews worldwide, is losing its Jews to emigration and assimilation. In an ironic twist, there are many Turkish Jews that emigrate to the relative safety of Spain and Portugal, reversing the historical path taken centuries earlier.

And here are some pictures from the book you mentioned:

They are so incredibly beautiful, I will make a separate post about them (Tumblr only lets me add 10 pictures to a post ;()

[tetsunabouquet]

Personally, I am kind of rolling my eyes at a Guardian article. It's about the rejection of Visas of African and Asian artists, some of whom are crying and calling it another version of apartheid. The results of the top countries of EU and the UK rejection literally includes predominantely white countries too like Ukraine and the US and the few Asian countries that are included aren't nearly as rejected as often as African or middle Eastern countries. In regards to that I feel like part of the rejection stems from most of those countries being unsafe and having a lot to do with international criminal activities and that they are extra strict for the safety of our countries. Which is also why Russia is in that rejection list! That has nothing to do with being against people of color, that is our governments preferring to be safe then sorry. As for the expenses, newsflash: Europe isn't just a goldmine for people to earn money of, we have to pay a lot of money to have these high quality living standards. Like, one artist complained about having to pay for a healthcare insurance of about 290 British pounds. I'm sorry but the average citizen in a lot of north-western European countries wether it's the EU or not pay about a third of that every month. Healthcare insurances are sleazy as fuck so of course a temporary healthcare insurance is going to be even more costly as that because they want to make money off of you. If you also calculate the additional health risks you might be bringing along as you're from a country with a way poorer healthcare system, then that price doesn't seems far-fetched or racist to me. Welcome to European healthcare insurances honey. It's not nearly the paradise you expected. As for the price tag on the visas, thats just the price everyone has to pay, including people in the US. That you're from a poor country with lesser money sucks but are you expecting us to to lower the price just because you're poor? Newsfash but there are plenty of people in our countries that are poor and cannot afford a visit to the US and a US visa. The cheapest US Visa I could find for temporary visits after a quick Google search is literally double the amount that we ask. So we don't even have the most expensive visa costs in the world! That's the thing with richer countries, we actually also have to pay a lot to live here too! If you want to go to a country vastly richer then yours, you also have to pay a lot more then you would for a fellow poor neighboring country and because businessmen are greedy they will milk you out more then the average citizen as they want to earn as much as they can from your stay. I grew up poor so I know that life is unfair and they're not going to hand you freebies all the time. They didn't with me, and I am mostly white, raised as one and about 99% of people treat me as white, even some anti-black people don't look at me oddly for looking a little Asian and treat me as white. So don't chalk it up to racism. That's just you being unable to accept you are too poor to travel to a country richer then yours and thus having higher standards of costs too. It's pathetic to cry to the press and call it apartheid. Is it apartheid for the Russians too? Is it apartheid to the poor Americans and vice versa to poor Europeans wanting to go to the US? I hate people trying to find racism in everything. I have a dental insurance and my regular check ups are completely free, yet I still need to pay nearly 5 euros for administration costs anyways. If going to a dentist practise in a wealthy small town already costs about 5 euros in terms of administration, then how expensive do you think administration costs handled by the government are? That's all going into the overall price tag. This is life, deal with it.

[orthodoxadventure]

☦︎ What is Orthodox Christianity? ☦︎

"The Orthodox Christian Church, also called the “Eastern Orthodox,” “Greek Orthodox” Church, or simply “the Orthodox Church,” is the oldest Christian Church in the world, founded by Jesus Christ and with its beginnings chronicled in the New Testament. All other Christian churches and groups can be traced historically back to it.  With roughly 250 million members worldwide, Orthodoxy is second in size only to the Roman Catholic Church. However, in spite of its size, relatively few Americans are aware that it exists.  The Orthodox Church has deep and lasting roots in Christian antiquity and is steeped in rich Biblical tradition. It has been the context of Christian living for millions of Christians for almost twenty centuries.  Yet one cannot understand the Orthodox Church merely by reading about it. Just as reading a biography about someone is no substitute for knowing the biography’s subject personally, Orthodox Christianity must be experienced firsthand to be understood. We welcome and invite you to come worship with us, to “come, taste and see” (Psalm 34:8). Even though Orthodox Christianity must be experienced directly to realize the fullness of its life, there are questions that are commonly asked when first visiting an Orthodox Church that can have some light shed upon them with a few brief words.  Orthodox Christianity is not familiar to most Westerners. So, what is Orthodox Christianity? It is the life in faith of the Orthodox Church, inseparable from that concrete, historic community and constituting its whole way of life. The Orthodox Christian faith is that faith “handed once to the saints” (Jude 3), passed on to the apostles by Jesus Christ, and then handed down from one generation to the next within the Church, without adding anything or taking anything away.  The purpose of Orthodox Christianity is the salvation of every human person, uniting us to Christ in the Church, transforming us in holiness, and giving us eternal life. This is the Gospel, the good news, that Jesus is the Messiah, that He rose from the dead, and that we can be saved as a result.  Historically, the Orthodox Church is the oldest of all Christian churches. Ultimately, all Christian communities can trace their own history back to the Orthodox Church. In the pages of the New Testament we read the beginnings of the Orthodox Church, and even today Orthodox Christianity continues to live on in most of the places mentioned in the New Testament where the Apostles first preached the Gospel. This is the Church that wrote, compiled and canonized the Holy Scriptures, that formulated the traditional doctrines of Christianity, and that has believed and lived the same faith for 2,000 years.  Today, Orthodox Christianity’s largest communities exist primarily in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, though there are also sizable communities in North America, Western Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, primarily through immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also through a growing number of converts to the faith. It is the second largest Christian communion in the world, smaller only than the Roman Catholic Church. The Orthodox Church is sometimes referred to as “Greek Orthodox” or “Eastern Orthodox,” but the best term is simply Orthodox Christian."

(http://orthodoxinfo.com/)

[saphira5]

David x Lycan Reader Part 4

Y/n arrived back home to see the rotting bodies of y/n friends and packmates. Y/n buried your packmates and friends in the middle of the castle.

Once y/n had buried your friends, y/n waged war against Viktor.

Y/n had killed him and most of his Coven, those who survived fled and made their own Covens. Y/n had found Lycans were slaves to Viktor, y/n released the Lycan prisoners, they have spread across the globe killing many vampires.  

Y/n got up from the throne and headed to the graves of your friends.  

Y/n walks through a stone arch, y/n then follows the old stone path to y/n friend graves. Y/n had planted a bunch of different colored flowers near your friend's grave. Behind their graves y/n had put a gray fountain, white roses surrounded the fountain. Soon the white roses begin to ascend on the fountain. Over time the roses had hidden the fountain. 

 Y/n misses them so much, y/n bent down, you placed your hand on each grave. Y/n then stands up and you head to the library. You open the big wooden door, y/n walks inside and goes to the end of the library. A huge table lies in front of the window, a huge portrait of y/n and your friends hangs above. Y/n had a painter paint y/n and your friends on horses and wearing armor.  

Everyone was smiling in the picture. 

 Y/n pulls out a chair and you look outside, y/n hears thunder in the distance. The once clear sky had turned dark. You then see heavy rain coming y/n way, the rain began hitting the windows. Y/n gets up and heads to your room, you couldn't believe y/n would ever be back here.

A couple of days after the death of Viktor, y/n had locked down the castle and y/n moved from place to place, when y/n finally settled in Western Europe.  

Y/n had walked past many doors and staircases going up and down until y/n had stopped in front of a black metal door. Y/n opens it, and you step inside, y/n sees the fireplace on the left. Above the fireplace is a huge flag, y/n had made a pack flag. A huge black wolf barring fangs, with the word wulf under it. Y/n and your pack have lived more like wolves than humans.  

A huge bed lies near the right wall, and in the far back a huge window is covered by a dark red curtain. Y/n walks to the curtain and pushes it aside, then something had grab y/n by the throat. You went through the glass, y/n sees Marcus Corvinus, his huge pale grey wings flapping silently. 

 His body is also pale grey, Marcus brings your neck close to his mouth. He bites you and drinks you blood, Marcus then gets shot rapidly. 

 He let's go of y/n; you fall to the ground. Y/n makes a huge dent in the ground, y/n gets up and sees David, Selene, Micheal and Eve, also the elders Amelia and Thomas, some members of the Eastern Coven. Marcus lands in front of you, he transforms back into a person. 

 Marcus smiles at you. "I cannot believe it is true, my brother had a child". 

 "A bastard child", y/n says, you then tackle Marcus, you bite him in the neck. He pushes y/n off, Marcus stands up and holds his neck. Marcus looks at y/n with anger in his eyes, y/n does the same, you swallow his flesh. Y/n sticks your tongue out and licks the blood off your lips. 

 Marcus shifts and begins flying, y/n watches him fly towards the lowering moon.  

Y/n then looks at the vampire's, Micheal and Eve. "YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE", the ground beneath y/n begins moving. Pale white Grey hounds emerge from the ground, they begin running toward the vampires and Micheal and Eve. The Grey hounds circle the group, then they attack. 

 A Grey hound drags a vampire to the castle gate, David fights off the grey hound and begins walking towards you. But the grey hound grabs his leg, tripping him. David falls to the ground; the grey hound drags him to the entrance; he looks at y/n. "I wanted to apologies", y/n turns and begins walking into the castle.  

You walk up to y/n room, you look through y/n broken window and see everyone gathered outside. The Grey hounds are in front of the entrance growling and barking at the Vampires and Lycan-vampire hybrids. 

Part 5! coming 9/13/23

[bandedbulbussnarfblat]

y'all if the shows gives us any Bianca Solderini, I think she should be either Middle Eastern or black.

(and bc i knew the racists would try to shut it down, i did research and added links. but before we get into all that let me say some other stuff.)

I think Bianca was probably related to this guy. His name was Piero Soderini, he was from Florence, and the ambassador to France. Like, basically this guy had a decent career until he ruined it and got exiled so he went and hung out in Croatia. Anne Rice loved to mention real historical people in her fics, so the last name could have been a reference to him. I mean it was only one letter apart.

Now we know Bianca was being forced to kill by some family members. I can't remember much, but I think they may have been distant cousins. Maybe a part of the family that branched off and began spelling the name a different way.

Now, back in the day, Venice was hot shit. It was the cosmopolitan city and it was basically Europe's gateway to the rest of the world. I'm saying, you'd see a lot of different races here day to day.

But what you would see most of were Moors and Saracens. (That's what they would have called them, at least.)

Moors were what they called black people. Like Othello from Shakespeare.

Alright, bc I'm lazy, I'm just gonna copy and paste this section from the site I'm using:

"The term “Saracen” (Greek sarakenos, Latin saracenus), carried a slightly more specific connotation of “Eastern,” and sometimes “Muslim.” It was the word the Venetian Crusaders used when stirring people to launch medieval religious wars to wrest Jerusalem from the hand of the infidel, and to justify the plundering of Constantinople. At the same time, Venice welcomed merchants from the Near East, and they must have been a familiar sight in the city."

In modern day terms the 'Near East' is same as the Middle-East. So it is entirely possible that Bianca could have been Middle-Eastern, realistically. Or black, but I think her and Armand both being middle-eastern could give them a deeper bond, as they would understand each other's situations better. And also Armand had some amnesia in the book, and it would be a great way to introduce him back to his religion.

Oh, I'll add one more thing from the article "some Venetians of color took on the surname “Bianco,” which means “White.”" Bianca is a more feminine version of that, seeing it also means white.

[verita-lapalissiana]

so anyway I know this means nothing cause I'm just some dumb idiot with a phone, but imho there's every reason to claim that the biggest part of the Middle East is historically more closely tied with the Mediterranean and Europe than with Asia. Surely, it's got deep connections with both regions but if we just started teaching kids that the border between Europe and Asia was the Iranian plateau or some shit, I think it would give us just a bit of a different perspective in general, especially regarding the current events. After all, the border Europe/Asia is an arbitrary line anyway, why not move it to include the easternmost territories of the Roman/Byzantine/Ottoman Empire? The birthplaces of the Great Abrahamic Religions? The place where the alphabet, beer and the hexadecimal timekeeping methods come from? Like, I swear the more I think about it the more it just seems to me that whoever drew the line at the Caucasus only wanted to exclude the Arabic/Muslim/Middle Eastern populations out of spite.

And yeah I don't mean to say these countries don't have equally as strong ties with the Indian subcontinent, northern Africa or Central Asia, but meh, after all with Africa the geographic boundary at the Suez isthmus works perfect as is; the only thing I'd probably get along with would be to just come up with a whole new continent which groups the Middle East, the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent, but then there's the nightmare of deciding where this new continent ends, and also what should we name it. Anyway yeah if anyone reads this and has any feedback to give you'd be much welcome to share

[aronarchy]

https://www.reddit.com/r/JewsOfConscience/comments/1aef2x5/comment/kk7prli

u/s_y_s_t_e_m_i_c_:

Top Members of Far-right Swedish Party With neo-Nazi Roots Meet Israeli Minister in Knesset (Haaretz, January 29, 2024)

I’m reminded of a study that Peter Beinart wrote about on European antisemitism and how it is moderated by support for Israel.

Beinart explains, citing the findings of a study by Andras Kovacs, a sociologist and professor of Jewish Studies at the Central European University, and Gyorgy Fischer, the former research director for Gallup in Hungary:

In Europe, the story appears somewhat similar, but with a disturbing twist. This fall, Andras Kovacs, a sociologist and professor of Jewish Studies at the Central European University, and Gyorgy Fischer, the former research director for Gallup in Hungary, published a fascinating study entitled, “Antisemitic Prejudices in Europe.” To some degree, the evidence they find resembles evidence from the US. As a general rule, for instance, Western Europeans like Jews more but Israel less whereas Eastern Europeans like Jews less but Israel more. For instance, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic exhibit some of the continent’s highest rates of both support for Israel and hostility to Jews. In Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands, by contrast, sympathy for Israel is far lower and so is antisemitism.

The reasons for this aren’t a mystery. Kovacs and Fischer find a strong correlation between antisemitism and xenophobia. “Antisemitism,” they write, “is largely a manifestation and consequence of resentment, distancing and rejection towards a generalised stranger.” Which is why Europe’s most antisemitic countries are also the most Islamophobic. But the very xenophobia that leads some Europeans—especially Eastern Europeans—to dislike Jews can also make them admire Israel.

The Beinart Notebook - Are Zionists more antisemitic than anti-Zionists?

Beinart states that the reason for this contradictory support is xenophobia and an admiration of Israel’s policies.

Israel, after all, has exactly the kind of immigration policy that many European xenophobes want for their own countries: an immigration policy that welcomes members of the dominant group and keeps out pretty much everyone else. Moreover, if you’re a xenophobe who dislikes the Jews in your country because they dilute ethnic and religious purity, Israel offers them a place to go and be with their own kind. That’s one of the reasons Arthur Balfour embraced Zionism in 1917. He liked the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in part because he wanted Eastern European Jews to go there and not to his country.

The Beinart Notebook - Are Zionists more antisemitic than anti-Zionists?

In a nutshell, the study found a “strong correlation between antisemitism and xenophobia”—and Peter noted that xenophobic countries admired Israel, because they wanted to emulate similar policies towards immigrants.

While this news article in-question is about a Swedish figure (and Sweden overall, Peter notes, is less xenophobic, less antisemitic and thus, less pro-Israel), I think the politics at play here makes it applicable to Peter’s thesis. The Swedish party in-question are categorically fascist, ultra-nationalists. So one could see why they would find common cause with the far-right in Israel who would like to expel the Palestinians.

In England, one can observe a similar phenomena with the alliance between the English Defense League (EDL), in particular Tommy Robinson, and right-wing Zionists. The EDL has a branch for British Jewish members—and notable pro-Israel activists are supporters of such right-wing groups.

Supplemental:

Haaretz - Why the U.K.’s neo-Nazis Are Posing With Israeli Flags

Robinson in particularly has been coddled by right-wing Zionists, who have paid his legal fees when he continually fucks up in life.

The Philadelphia-based think tank Middle East Forum is one of the British extremist’s biggest sponsors. Daniel Pipes, MEF’s president, confirmed to The Times of Israel that his group has spent roughly $60,000 on three demonstrations defending Robinson’s legal trial.

The Jerusalem Post - Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?

[pagan-stitches]

Jerusalem - The mosaic of The Lamb of God among the saints in side apse of Dormition abbey

“Christians celebrate Christ's death and resurrection by sacrificing a lamb and eating its meat. In such acceptation, the lamb is considered Christ's Body. Therefore, eating lamb at Easter is a way for Christians to welcome Christ and His sacrifice within them.”

Our Porters Lamb with Red Wine Gravy from two years ago.

I imagine that there is also the practicality of eating lamb at Easter because it is available. Where I live in the American South ham is the dominant meat dish served. Neither my husband or myself are particularly crazy about ham (I remember loving it as a child at Gran’s house at Easter . . . and Christmas . . . and New Year’s—quite honestly I think I grew sick of it.). And this is the one time of the year when the local markets do carry a small selection of lamb.

Why don’t Americans eat lamb? Supposedly:

“Blame it on World War II, when American servicemen in Europe were fed mutton dressed up as lamb and hated the strong musky flavor of adult sheep. When the soldiers returned home, many of them banned lamb from their dinner tables, which meant a generation of kids grew up unfamiliar with the delights of real lamb.”

Before the Porters recipe experiments began I had only had lamb when eating out at Indian, Greek, and Middle Eastern restaurants where I fell in love with the robust taste. So I was excited to try the Porters recipe, but a little hesitant as well. Both of us had grown up with moms who cooked rather uninspired roasts. I wasn’t sure how receptive he would be. But his reaction was quite positive, though he finds the gravy a bit overly sweet and dabs on the tiniest amount.

This year’s lamb.

I rather suspect now that we’ve had it for Easter dinner several years in a row that its become tradition.

In addition to my Porters cooking to celebrate my Scots-English heritage I had to do something inspired by the Czech side of the family—I made my first manzanec, which is basically an easier version of the Czech Christmas bread (no braiding!!!). Czech breads have made the scent of lemon peel and vanilla an integral part of the holidays for me!

Manzanec pictured with my kraslice and new embroidered Easter cloth.

I also planned on celebrating White Sunday/Provody (kind of a spring time Day of the Dead the Sunday after Easter) and wanted to have the red Easter eggs to bring as offerings to the graves I visit and for my ancestral altar. The eggs didn’t turn out as red as the picture in the onion skin dye recipe and I was quite disappointed (my mother in law and I had been saving the skins for months!) but the orangey color has grown on me.

White Sunday ancestral altar

As always thank you @graveyarddirt for sending me down this Porters journey with your gift of the cookbook several years ago.

Everyone is invited to follow along and participate in the @portersposse seasonal cooking challenges.

[generation1point5]

Though I’m waiting for The Smoke Room to be finished before I offer a full-blown review of my thoughts on the game and themes, I have a few thoughts on each of the routes as I’ve encountered them thus far.

1915 is a chaotic era in both US and world history. Being set in a historical era means that I approach the subject matter more from my analytical side than personal side; in some ways I relate with many of the other characters, but it isn’t to the same degree that I have with Echo; not that this is a bad thing, but it will certainly influence my analysis to follow.

It makes sense to me that The Smoke Room using Echo as a setting would not be concerned with world affairs; that being said, I figured Cliff’s story might have involved itself a little more with the Great War; he would have been around fighting age, and any relatives he had as a member of the gentry would have been conscripted as part of the Dutch’s contingency in case the war came to the Netherlands, not that it did. Even so, nationalist sentiments among all the countries of Europe at the time were arguably at its height; many of the world’s biggest empires in this era were in an existential fight for their place and prestige on the world stage. I wouldn’t expect Cliff himself to have any particular notions of pride in nationhood, but I would have thought to have glimpsed some of that in at least some of his family.

By that same measure, I’m curious to know more of Nik’s own situation, given that his own homeland is the chief battleground for the Eastern Front; any family he has left there would be in a kind of peril that no amount of money he might send could save them from. Even if he could pay for safe passage, any escape through the Baltic would have been at risk of attack from unrestricted U-Boat warfare as soon as they hit the North Atlantic. For both narrative and character reasons, these considerations are extremely peripheral to the central focus of the Smoke Room as a whole, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder how these factors would play into the psyche and the motivations of the characters, however minor. 

On the domestic front, The Smoke Room constructs a much more sophisticated picture. The more developed eastern United States coming into the modern age, slowly brings its technological progress and the dominion of capital upon the last vestiges of the United States frontier. With the growing assertion of federal oversight on these lands, the last vestiges of native independence are slowly but surely extinguished. On the opposite coast, the rapid development of California as a (former) hub for immigrants from the East and the gold rushes up and down the coast has capped the other side of the United States with a cosmopolitan hub and economic powerhouse in its own right. In the middle of all these developments, Echo becomes the confluence of a number of diverse characters of all sorts of backgrounds, the nexus of dire changes that bear down on a small town founded in the middle of a lurking, and growing, horror. In contrast to the Echo of 2015, the boomtown’s population was much larger, and much more diverse. Many more will presumably be witness to the horror that will begin the town’s slow but inevitable decline.

The inclusion of Chinese immigrants into the picture was a welcome surprise for me; the story of the diaspora that came in the late 19th century and their reaches is not readily portrayed outside of places beyond their point of origin and a brief mention of their work on the railroads, but some Chinese did in fact settle in the United States frontier (and in parts of the South!), as early as the closing years of the Wild West era. Their own eventual involvement in what may befall the town is a point of keen interest to me; as far as Echo itself is concerned, there will be more reasons than just racial tensions that would prompt their eventual exodus from the town.

In contrast to the paranormal forces of Echo as experienced in the modern day, the beings as they exist The Smoke Room thus far has been relegated to the background, presumably to erupt towards the end of the routes as events come to a head. A greater emphasis is placed on horrors of the artificial sort; the class disparity, the racism, the homophobia, the various factors that divide the town into haves and have-nots set the stage by which the supernatural events will inevitably unfold. I get a growing impression of “the Sins of the Fathers” as a theme in The Smoke Room; but this is by no means as black and white as the term implies. Like its predecessor, the lines between protagonist and antagonists are blurred. Among the more sympathetic characters there are real flaws that lead to devastating consequences. Sam kills in self-defense, kicking off the awakening of the evil that will eventually consume the town. William’s sense of justice, while not legalistic, is still bound by laws as applied by the pressure and the influence of those in power and led to the shattering of a family. Murdoch’s people-pleasing behavior puts him between the conflicting goals of his loved ones. Cliff’s well-intentioned anthropological pursuits retains the imperial paternalism of his privileged origins in Europe, and Nik’s protectiveness puts him at risk for the same pitfalls as Leo will fall into 100 years later. Countless external and internal factors, at a socioeconomic scale impacting the psyche of many individuals, create the dialectic which will set the destructive cycle of Echo to follow. From the beginning, the end is a foregone conclusion.

To bring this full circle with my initial observations before, I anticipate (and hope) that The Smoke Room will retain much of my initial impressions of Echo; a microcosm of the human condition at a point in time; accelerated by supernatural means to an inevitable conclusion. What we observe in the Smoke Room is Echo at its height, where the confluence of people from all around the world, great and humble alike, coalesce around a point at which its slow, entropic decline will begin. It serves as the counterpoint to Arches, where a small external group of strangers is witness to the final moments of the cycle burning through the cinders of its last victims, its last perpetuators. 

[mariacallous]

Meduza's The Beet: Dispatch from Podlaskie

Hello, and welcome back to The Beet!

Eilish Hart here, the editor of this weekly newsletter from Meduza that brings you long-form journalism from across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here to join our mailing list. And be sure to check out last week’s feature about Nagorno-Karabakh’s tragic final act if you haven’t already. 

As you may know, Poland is set to hold a doubleheader this weekend. The ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) has called a controversial four-question referendum for the same day as the October 15 parliamentary vote. Voters will be asked if they support dismantling border defenses and accepting “thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa” — the antithesis of the PiS government’s handling of the border crisis with Belarus since 2021. By all appearances, the ruling party designed the referendum questions to highlight key talking points in their campaign and to undermine their main rival: the opposition Civic Coalition led by former Prime Minister Donald Tusk. However, both the PiS and the opposition have been pushing anti-migrant rhetoric in their campaigns in an apparent attempt to outdo each other in what polling shows will be an extremely tight race. 

And so, ahead of this weekend’s vote, we’re bringing you a bittersweet dispatch courtesy of journalist James Jackson, whom you may remember for his past work with The Beet on a borderless tripoint in Central Europe. This week, James takes us back to summertime in Podlaskie, a province in northeastern Poland that, in addition to sharing a highly fortified border with Belarus, is home to two Tatar villages. As the descendants of asylum seekers who settled in the region centuries ago, Podlaskie’s Tatars are living proof of Central and Eastern Europe’s diverse past — and, boy, do they have stories to share. Moreover, since 2021, these communities have experienced the border crisis firsthand and responded with compassion, distributing aid to stranded migrants and refugees and even conducting Islamic funerals for the deceased among them. I hope you find their story as fascinating as I did.

Dispatch from Podlaskie

In Poland’s Wild East, Tatar culture is alive and well 

By James Jackson

There’s something ethereal about driving through the vast Polish region of Podlaskie in the summer. Best known for its bison and Żubrówka Bison Grass Vodka, this is Poland’s own Wild East, a frontier province along the reinforced border with Belarus. Yellow corn fields and seemingly endless rows of green pine trees punctuate its wide-open blue skies. Locals drink a moonshine called duch puszczy, “the spirit of the forest.”

Podlaskie even boasts its own historic horse-riding warriors, the Tatars, one of Europe’s oldest and one of the world’s most northern Muslim populations. With their wooden houses of worship, the Tatar villages of Bohoniki and Kruszyniany have the air of a little mosque on the prairie. Their cemeteries boast gravestones inscribed with novel-sounding Polish-Muslim names like Aisza Poltorzycka and Mustafa Bogdanowicz, alongside flourishes of Arabic and a smattering of Cyrillic lettering.

Kruszyniany Mosque, August 2022

GRZEGORZ GAJEWSKI / ALAMY / VIDA PRESS

JAMES JACKSON

Painted wooden shutters on a wooden house in Kruszyniany. June 2018.

EDWIN REMSBERG / ALAMY / VIDA PRESS

Crimea’s indigenous Tatar population may be larger and better known today, but the Lipka Tatars were Muslim islands in interflowing Catholic and Orthodox seas spread across Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania before modern statehood. There are around 2,000 Tatars still living in Poland today, half in Podlaskie’s Tatar villages and the others scattered to the cities.

‘We don’t feel like outsiders’

In the Western imagination, Central Europe isn’t known for its diversity. Behind the Iron Curtain, everything was communist or Christian, gray with soot, and rife with decaying prefabricated tower blocks. But sitting down over a bright purple chłodnik soup of beetroot, cucumber, and eggs outside a colorful yurt in the Tatar village of Kruszyniany, these preconceptions seem far away. 

As both the nationalist government and catch-all opposition take aim at migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa ahead of the parliamentary election on October 15, the Tatars serve as a reminder of a diverse and tolerant Poland that can sometimes be hard for modern observers to recognize.

Dżenneta Bogdanowicz runs a local restaurant and a visitor’s center with her husband. The Bogdanowicz family received this land hundreds of years ago as a gift from the legendary Polish King Jan III Sobieski for bravery in the Battle of Vienna. This battle looms heavily in nationalist myth-making as a time when the Polish Winged Hussars saved Christian Europe from the Turkic hordes of the Ottoman Empire. Some would perhaps rather forget that they fought victoriously alongside Muslim Tatars, just like they did in the Battle of Grunwald to throw off the yoke of the Teutonic order.

Bogdanowicz is a diminutive, effusive woman with a bowl haircut. As we eat, she chatters away in Polish, her first language. “The Polish Tatar language disappeared in the 16th century. Tatars are military men; they came to the area and married women, but children usually learn language from their mother, so that’s why the language disappeared,” she explains. “Many Tatar tribes didn’t have a common language, so they usually spoke the local language of where they were.”

Bogdanowicz’s family once owned 500 hectares (1,235 acres) of land in what is now Belarus, but it was lost in the great redrawing of Poland’s borders after World War II. Her grandfather fought for Poland in the war, following a family tradition of sorts. When he returned from exile in Britain on his wife’s orders, the Communist secret police hunted him down as a former Polish officer. He was kept in a prison camp in the center of Warsaw before he was executed in the 1950s.

She tells us this before instructing us on how to eat the traditional beef pie — “you cut the top off and eat it from the inside” — that she’s served alongside a babka ziemniaczana, a peppery potato cake with salty pickled cucumbers from their garden.

JAMES JACKSON

The Bogdanowiczs’ hospitality took a bittersweet blow five years ago. “We lost everything in a fire, even historical artifacts and souvenirs,” our host says, pointing to a freshly built wooden house that took the place of their burned home. But well-wishers from across Poland rallied to their aid. “We didn’t realize people even knew who we were, but many came to support us financially and mentally, as well,” she recalls. 

“We don’t feel like outsiders,” Bogdanowicz adds. “Polish people see Tatars as equal citizens.”

The frontier of the Islamic world

“The Tatars are a remnant of an extremely multicultural world,” historian and Goodbye, Eastern Europe authorJacob Mikanowski tells The Beet. With nomadic origins as part of the Mongol Golden Horde, the Tatars were invited to settle in the region by a Lithuanian duke who granted asylum to Khan Tokhtamysh’s clan after they lost a war with the conqueror Timur in 1395.

At that time, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — which later became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — was home to a wide range of ethnic and religious groups, including Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians, alongside Ashkenazi Jewish minorities, who would experience the Jewish Golden Age. Then, at the end of the 18th century, Poland-Lithuania’s more centralized and militaristic neighbors in Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg Empire teamed up to extinguish this diversity and partition the commonwealth, spelling the end for what was once the largest state in Europe.

Nomadic fighters were an invaluable asset on this western edge of the flat Eurasian Steppe, and the Lipka Tatars often crossed sabers with Cossacks, Crimean Tatars, and Ottomans in service of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In a prime position in the Bogdanowiczs’ kitchen, there stands a crescent-shaped standard bearer their ancestors carried centuries ago to fight for this flawed, unstable, yet precocious European republic.

“Eastern Europe is one of the frontier regions of the Muslim world,” Mikanowski explains. “We shouldn’t see it from just the West; you can change your perspective and equally well view it as one of the northernmost extensions of Islam.” Indeed, some Balkan countries have been Muslim longer than Latin America has been Christian, and Tatars have played a crucial role in Eastern European and Russian history.

The Muslim cemetery in Kruszyniany. October 2018.

TOUCH OF NATURE / ALAMY / VIDA PRESS

This consistent exposure to Islam led to one of the strangest trends in Polish history. From the 16th until the 18th century, members of the aristocratic Szlachta elite (who made up around 15 percent of the commonwealth, which by then they viewed as the bulwark of Christendom) started dressing in the Ottoman style and calling themselves Sarmatians, an ancient term for eastern European nomadic tribes taken from Ptolemy’s Geography.

Even when riding into battle against the Ottoman Empire, these nobles wore curved sabers, Turkic kalpak hats, and colorful Persian sashes. “When [Jan III] Sobieski was defeating the Turks during the 1683 Battle of Vienna, his Polish troops were dressed almost exactly the same way as their opponents,” writes journalist Marek Kępa. 

As the only people able to vote under Poland-Lithuania’s Golden Liberty system (also known as the Nobles’ Democracy), the Szlachta relied on an imagined, ancient-Iranian warrior ancestry. “That was to differentiate the gentry from the peasantry. It was about being better than your serfs,” Mikanowski explains. Some nobles even saw the Tatars as their brethren — with the caveat that, as non-Christians, they were unsaved.

Doing something good

Though the Renaissance-era daydream of Sarmatism eventually died out, the Lipka Tatars did not, and they preserved their own traditions despite the disappearance of their language. 

In the village of Bohoniki, half an hour’s drive from Kruszyniany, a wedding party gathers outside the community center while we wait for Maciej Szczęsnowicz, the chairman of the local Muslim community. As we sit down for tea across from the square brown house of prayer with its subtle minaret and red fence spiked with a crescent moon, the sounds of clapping and accordion music waft over to us, along with the scent of cardamom. The celebrants are dancing in a circle; among them is an older man who looks uncannily like a Tatar Lech Wałęsa.

Maciej Szczęsnowicz

JAMES JACKSON

Szczęsnowicz and his community attracted international attention in 2021 after Alexander Lukashenko’s regime tried to send tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers over the Belarusian border and into neighboring Poland. A humanitarian crisis ensued, with Polish border guards carrying out unlawful and sometimes violent pushbacks. The Polish government accused Minsk of waging a “hybrid war” and declared a state of emergency along the country’s eastern frontier, barring access to journalists and activists. 

Szczęsnowicz, however, got permission from the Polish authorities to help the migrants, and he was one of the very few allowed to enter the tightly controlled border zone. Together with his community members, he began handing out 300 meals a day. 

Some migrants didn’t survive the journey, succumbing to hunger, thirst, exposure, or injuries from beatings at the hands of border guards. That November, the Bohoniki Tatars conducted an Islamic funeral for 19-year-old Syrian Ahmed al-Hassan, who reportedly drowned in the river that runs along the Polish-Belarusian border. As the Imam read the rites, al-Hassan’s family watched via video link. “We wanted to spread the news that we were doing something good for people,” Szczęsnowicz tells The Beet. 

Despite the bureaucratic hurdles in getting permission from embassies and the Polish authorities, Bohoniki’s Muslim community has held eight more funerals since then, burying the dead on the edge of their cemetery. The most recent ceremony took place in January of this year. 

“They found him close to the Białowieża [Forest]. His brother came for the funeral, and so did the ambassador of Iraq,” Szczęsnowicz recalls. 

Imam Aleksander Bazarewicz (center) says a prayer during the funeral ceremony of a 19-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the border river trying to get to Poland. Bohoniki, November 15, 2021.

WOJTEK RADWANSKI / AFP / SCANPIX / LETA

At least 49 people have died since the border crisis began, and more than 200 others are still missing. One body was found with a piece of paper that had the address of the Bohoniki community center written on it, Szczęsnowicz says.

The response to the funerals hasn’t always been positive, however. Szczęsnowicz has even received death threats, as well as offers of police protection.

Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s The Green Border, a film based on the true story of refugees stranded between Belarus and Poland in 2021, has met similar backlash — including from figures in the Polish government. Before the film’s premiere at last month’s Venice Film Festival, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro likened it to Nazi propaganda. (The film won a special jury prize, and Holland filed a lawsuit against Ziobro for defamation.) 

Though the crisis has somewhat abated, the electronic sensors on Poland’s newly constructed border wall registered 20,000 attempts to cross between January and August. 

On election day, October 15, Poles at the polls will also take part in a national referendum, which will ask (among other things) whether they support the “admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa” as part of the European Union’s migration pact. 

The referendum is widely regarded as a way to boost turnout ahead of a tightly fought race where both sides have used immigration has as a rhetorical chess piece. How Poles respond may show how much of the commonwealth’s legacy lives on today. As loyal Muslim defenders of Poland and descendants of refugees, the Tatars will be watching.

JAMES JACKSON

That’s all for now! 

For more of The Beet’s reporting from Poland, check out our March dispatch on how Ukrainian refugees were faring there after one year of all-out war. Until next time,

Eilish

[mizz-sea-nymph]

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