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What are the rest of Ottomans’s presence in present Greece?
Andrew Baird has blocked me, so I’ll post here my corrective that the Parthenon blew up because the Venetians bombarded it. Yes, the Ottomans stored their gunpowder there. They figured the Franks would never destroy the old stones they venerated. And there was noone in the Ottoman realm with the concerted evil of Michel Fourmont: the Ottomans, like their Greek subjects, did benign neglect of antiquities, not systematic destruction. They were not Wahhabis.
In fact, his picture of the Parthenon is an excellent illustration of what’s happened to the Ottoman presence in Greece for a different reason, and not even metaphorical. The Acropolis remained in use as the Athens citadel for millennia. There were any number of Byzantine, and Frankish, and Ottoman structures on the Sacred Rock. They were extirpated from the site in the 1830s, in the service of the single narrative of Hellenic Antiquity.
And a lot of the physical remains of Ottoman Greece were dispensed with in the same way. Particularly in Athens, and in Thessalonica only somewhat less so. (Not to mention turning the Hamza Bey Mosque there into the Alkazar porn cinema.)
So you have to look around to find minarets, and they’re something of a surprise when you do find them.
What are the best things about your country?
What I would have answered your question about my country (Australia) is largely already in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do Australians like being Australian citizens?
But I’ll pretend I didn’t already answer it.
Many of the best things about Australia, it shares with the US, and they have a similar reason.
- The optimism.
- The social mobility.
- The relative (relative) lack of sectarian and ethnic conflict.
- The relative affluence.
In addition:
- The professed (professed) egalitarianism.
- The irreverence.
- The healthy (healthy) skepticism.
- The relaxed attitude to life.
- The beaches.
- Lamb.
The best things about my country (Greece) are:
- The depth of history.
- The lyricism of both its high and its popular culture. Which is bound up with its depth of history—and not just its Ancient history.
- The ability of Greeks to have a good time, at any pretext.
- The level of political engagement, and political education.
- The theatricality of interaction between people.
- The beaches.
- Lamb.
Before Nixon met Mao Zedong in China was there strong opposition against it? Was it regarded as capitulating to freedom hating foreigners?
The opposition Nixon was truly worried about was the China Lobby, who determined US foreign policy for a couple of decades. But by 1972, the China Lobby seems to have been spent.
There was certainly opposition from conservatives, which is why it took Nixon to go to China to begin with. But their voices were drowned out in the applause.
From MacMillan, Margaret. 2007. Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World. New York: Random House.’
p. 297
[Taiwan] had counted, too, on the ability of the of the China lobby to keep American governments in line. They had failed to see that it was slowly fading away, although they should perhaps have taken notice when its chief organizer abruptly resigned in 1969 and moved to London to start producing plays and when the New York Times referred to the “once powerful China Lobby.”
p. 321–322.
At 98 percent, Nixon’s trip to China registered the highest public awareness of any event in the Gallup poll’s history. The right wing fulminated to little apparent effect. A furious Buchanan threatened to resign from the White House staff on the grounds that the United States had made a deal with a Communist regime and sold out its ally Taiwan, but in the end he did not carry out his threat. The conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr., who had been brought along on the trip in an attempt to win him over, publicly condemned the Shanghai communiqué and went off to support John Ashbrook of Ohio, a little-known Republican congressman who was trying to stop Nixon’s reelection.
Why is that people in UK do not share food? I am from India and have been 3 weeks in London. I have observed that people do not share their food with colleagues or friends in the office or in the restaurants/canteens.
Dansby Parker is almost there with his answer.
As with many cultural differences, this one comes down to Politeness theory. In many cultures, like India and Greece, good social behaviour involves breaking down the boundaries between people you like, such as friends. Sharing a table involves that, and sharing food at the table makes that even clearer. That is called positive politeness.
The land of the British where you find yourself is a land of negative politeness. That means that good social behaviour involves respecting the boundaries between people. That includes the notions of privacy and space, which you must find so puzzling to hear among your English friends. It also includes keeping your food to yourself.
It’s OK, OP. I feel your pain. We Greeks call them cold-arses behind their back. 🙂
What is your favourite march or anthem?
When I was in university doing computer science (because that’s how old I am), I had a Dutch lecturer, Tobias Ruighaver (now retired). At the end of his course, I arranged the Dutch national anthem Wilhelmus for the instruments I had handy (violin, bassoon, me singing), and someone else presented him with some Heineken.
The Dutch national anthem is a beautiful, solemn, glorious thing, with masses of historical depth, and it’s stuck with me since. I posted on it extensively on my now defunct blog: Animadversions on the Dutch and the Greek National Anthems.
I’m William of Nassau,
My blood is Dutch.
I’m true to my country
beyond death’s reach.
A prince out of Orange,
free, unafraid:
my word is my bond to
the king of Spain.
What has been the general outline of your intellectual evolution over the years?
Habib le toubib, what a tough question this is. There’s a reason I’ve put it off so long.
- I had some run up of development from 10 to 15, including teaching myself Latin, reading high school Greek literature anthologies, and working out calculus.
- Tried to be religious, gave up around 15, though still retained cultural affection for Orthodoxy.
- Much of my intellectual breadth, I picked up between 15 and 23. That includes music, language learning, literature, literary criticism, basics of history.
- That’s the time you have the time to learn. That’s the time you want access to a good library or three. (One with books in it.) That’s the time you learn more than what your lecturers teach you.
- It helped that I didn’t particularly care about engineering, so I had some spare intellectual energy to devote.
- From 23 to 28, I was laser focused on being a linguist. I gained an encyclopaedic knowledge of much Greek dialect.
- I wrote linguistics papers intermittently from 28 to 36. That was wonderful in some ways, working through problems. In other ways, it was immensely frustrating: I really didn’t have much of an audience.
- From 36 on, I’ve had a day job outside of university. In some ways I’ve atrophied away from it; Quora came up at the right time. Making a point of exposing myself to new stuff.
- Stopped reading around 35. The interwebs have destroyed my ability to focus on extended prose. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
- I was a fairly unreflective leftist in my youth, socially and economically. I’ve become more centrist economically, and have made my peace with the Market. I think I am more moderate socially, but that’s actually more about acknowledging my conservative roots than about my actual attitudes.
Was that the kind of thing you were after, Habib?
What do you think of the Glaswegian accent?
Ah, an utterly unscientific survey on Scottish accents.
I find Scottish accents sexy.
I find Glaswegian accents unintelligible and sexy.
Taggart was a formative experience in my upbringing. For years, I’d imitate him picking up the phone:
Halloo! Thes ez Tahghaghrt! … Whü?!
Mecha-Makarios
Now, to my eyes, this statue of Makarios at the Archbishopric of Cyprus is a reasonable and respectful depiction of the Father of the Nation.
But my friend Vlado did not alight in the Cyprus of 1961. […] So he made merciless fun to me of Mecha-Makarios, trampling the streets of Nicosia and crushing all underneath.
We can afford to be a little arrogant, not every country has a giant robotic religious leader at its disposal :^)
https://www.quora.com/What-are-s…
I actually laughed out loud!
… You know, this gets a cartoon.
Plinth:
Μακάριος Γʹ Αρχιεπ. Κύπρου
Makarios III Archbishop of Cyprus
Cypriot motorist (in dialect):
Ρε Μακαριώτατε! Έλα να δεις ίντα ’ν’ πὄκαμες!
Oy, Your Beatitude! Now look what you’ve done!
(Pun being, Beatitude is Makariotatos, the superlative of Makarios.)
Why is cheating out of control in relationships?
First, as my friend Sam Murray puts it (God, I’m sounding like Michael Masiello now), it was ever thus, and only attitudes to cheating have changed, by both place and time.
Never mind the Ancient Greeks and Paris shtupping Helen (which was much more about Bronze Age views of host–guest relations than either Menelaus or Paris particularly caring what Helen thought). In Modern Greece, there’s a huge backlog of pop songs about “illicit love”. That ain’t jailbait or gay sex they’re talking about. That’s adultery.
Is adultery out of control in Greece? If so, was it any less out of control in the ’70s, when adultery was a crime, and illicit couples would be nabbed by the husband, and frogmarched to the police station, wrapped in a bedsheet?
Was it any less out of control in the 19th century, when they came up with the couplet:
Όταν θα μάθει ο κερατάς την τέχνη του κεράτου
μέλι και γάλα γίνεται με τη νοικοκυρά του
When a cuckold learns the art of being cuckolded,
he becomes all honey and sweetness with his lady.
Was it any less out of control in the Middle Ages, when one of the first vernacular Greek expressions explicated by the scholar Michael Psellos was keratas “horned man = cuckold”?
Cheating is part of the wiring of humanity. In the good old patriarchal days, a hell of a lot of social structures were set up to prevent it, because women were their fathers’ or husbands’ property. (Again, it’s not clear women had much of a say in any of it.)
(The notion dies hard. This year it came out that a sports show host in Australia was having sex with his co-host’s wife. The public was somewhat perplexed with the host’s grief, given that they’d already divorced. But hey, it’s well within the bounds of post-divorce trauma, go easy. Rather less sympathised with was how the host put it: “It’s just wrong, mate — you don’t touch a man’s wallet, you don’t touch his wife.” Billy, your wife is nothing like your wallet.)
There’s more opportunity for cheating now than in 1000 BC, and more visibility of it, because those social structures have indeed been worn down, and because the sexual revolution has happened. People are much more free to pursue what they want to do with sex, and can get away with much fewer biological consequences.
But you know what? We’ve done away with the leaden hand of legalised patriarchy, and obligate pregnancy, and globally enforced monogamy. But we haven’t done away with notions of commitment and moral reciprocity. In fact, they’re reinforced, if anything, because we now choose to work out what the right thing is to do, and we choose to stick with it.
One of the cool things about the poly folk here, like Franklin Veaux or Claire J. Vannette, is that they say, eloquently and vividly: I choose to be poly. You can choose to be mono. And if you commit to being mono, then I will respect your commitment—and I will call you out for breaking that commitment, and thereby hurting the person you’ve made a commitment to.
Not because they want to safeguard the community store of virtue. But because they genuinely get morality. Would that more people did.
If you could take one historical person from history as a lover/date, who would it be and why?
A2A Pegah Esmaili
Pegah, canım, you don’t expect an ordinary answer from me, do you? Like Cleopatra (meh, inbred Greek), or Catherine the Great (she’d fricking squash me) or Joan of Arc (back away from the crazy)?
Good. Because you’re not going to get one.
In the modern cornucopia of female objectification, do straight men need to go back centuries to fantasise about getting it on with someone? As Lyonel Perabo’s answer well illustrates, no we do not. (Although Lyonel, I must correct you. Ariella Ferrera being 37 years old does not make her a “historical person”. The word you’re looking for there is MILF.)
Now look what you made me do, Pegah. How am I going to save face after that?
Maybe with this answer. Let’s see.
It is a naive fantasy to have, to my mind, and I’ve only allowed myself that fantasy once, in my teens.
– Daily Muse – Inspiring Hellen Waddell Conference…
If you’re interested to learn about amazing, strong, intelligent women from the past then this conference at Queen’s University is sure to inspire you!
Great, so my adolescent fantasy is going to annoy several departmentfuls of Women’s Studies students.
Grace Henry-PORTRAIT OF HELEN WADDELL
Whaddaya mean, “The auction is over for this item. The auctioneer wasn’t accepting online bids for this item.” I call shenanigans!
I don’t care if that blog is about desert monks. Yes, she’s a geek. And she’s fricking glorious!
OK. I’ll settle down now.
Helen Jane Waddell (31 May 1889 – 5 March 1965) was an Irish poet, translator and playwright. […] She is best known for bringing to light the history of the medieval goliards in her 1927 book The Wandering Scholars, and translating their Latin poetry in the companion volume Medieval Latin Lyrics. […] A prize-winning biography of her by the Benedictine nun Dame Felicitas Corrigan was published in 1986.
In 1986, I was 15. I read the Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, and I read the Wandering Scholars. And then I read the biography.
And as an unenlightened callow youth in the dim dark ages of the patriarchal 80s, I thought it a terrible thing that someone with such fearsome erudition, with such delicate poetic sensibility, with such a clear sense of what was beautiful and lovely about life and romance and scholarship and redemption, and everything that the mediaeval Latin poets wrote about, should live out her days alone. And I wished I could have been with her to share all that with her.
And you know. Get it on like Donkey Kong too, if the chance came up.
I’m a little better informed now, I trust. She may have been devout and she may have chosen to be alone, but that does not mean her cheeks were never flushed; she wrote too knowingly for that. As Wikipedia writes, she had longterm relationships, including being the “other woman” with Siegfried Sassoon. (I wonder how I missed that at 15: did the nun leave it out?) She was a PhD back when being a female PhD was positively dangerous. She hardly needed me to go back in time and rescue her, and she hardly lacked for people to share her verses with.
But yeah. If I had to pick, I’d pick someone with poetry in their blood, an awkward smile, and gentle donnish erudition. Someone like Helen Waddell.