If you want to know what's being studied and learned at Göbekli Tepe (and don't we all?) without the pseudoscience and claptrap, Tepe Telegrams seems to be the place.

 Silphion discovered growing in Turkey (maybe).

We'll never know for sure what it was like to hear the Homeric epics performed 2,800 years ago, but I can't help but think that this Kurdish singer of tales must come close:



Hat tip: Poemas del Río Wang

People say American taxes are too complicated, but I have no idea what they could be talking about. Nope, no clue:

Check out this very enjoyable little educational video about Constantinople's land defenses. Of course, some of these may still be seen, walked and climbed, in the neighborhood of Istanbul's wonderful Sunday morning pigeon bazaar, among other places.

Today's challenge: name a common element uniting Turkish conspiracy politics, a Muslim faith movement, American charter schools, the Poconos, and New Mexico legislative junkets.

The answer: a man named Fethullah Gülen. Claire Berlinski boldly endeavors to make it all comprehensible.

Best use of Twitter ever: tweets from the Byzantine Empire. A bummer even in 140 characters.

Via Byzantine Blog.

This'll really piss off the Greeks!



Turcophile though I am, I can't say this is in the best taste. Plotting papists notwithstanding, they're really stretching to portray the Ottomans as noble underdogs in this fight. But, historical nuance be damned, the giant cannon and the carrying of the ships over the hill to the Golden Horn are events which really deserve to be portrayed on film, and it wasn't likely to happen in any context besides Turkish nationalism (though John Bellairs' Trolley to Yesterday could make a good movie).

They should do the battle of Manzikert next. I'll bet it could be filmed largely on the actual location too: pretty sure it's still nice and empty out there in Muş. And Alp Arslan with his giant mustaches tied behind his head is surely a dream role for some actor.

Hat tip: Byzantine Blog.

A little foodblogging: Tonight we tried an appealing recipe for "Pear-Shaped Meatballs Stuffed with Creamy Eggplant." I don't really feel like putting the effort to plagiarize it whole, and if this sort of thing appeals to you, you'd be be well advised just to find a copy of The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean by Paula Wolfert. She locates this recipes origin as Aleppo; it seems very Turkish to me, though perhaps it represents a strain of Arabic cuisine I haven't been fortunate enough to experience. (Virtually every Levantine restaurant I've visited in the western U.S. has left me thinking, "Surely Arabs must occasionally eat something besides hummus, tabouli, falafel and dolmas." But it is the mountain West in question, so I'm sure there is indeed more out there.)

This is something of an inversion of the dish karnıyarık ("riven belly"), which is a large eggplant stuffed with meat and other goodness. In this instance, one fries some small eggplants and stuffs them into the (nicely seasoned) meat, leaving the stems exposed:

Then you fry them a bit:

Make up a sauce from tomatoes, onion, garlic and seasonings:

Pour the sauce over the meatballs, bake for half an hour and serve:

Recommended, especially if, like me, you enjoy eggplants but wish to downplay their vegetable nature.

Wolfert calls this dish "ormuk kebabi," but a Google search for the phrase produces only a single irrelevant website in Hungarian. Ormuk certainly sounds Turkish rather than Arabic, but my casual searching has only found the word to be a) the name of a volcano near Lake Van [pg. 6] and b) "A fine, soft fabric, made of the hair of young camels in Turkestan." My curiosity is piqued.

Useful reference: Off-color Turkish slang. Apparently the company Amway didn't do so well in Turkey (exercise left to the reader). And apparently mention of the number 31 (otuz bir) is something foreigners may want to avoid. It's better to know these things than not.

Initially inspired by Claire Berlinski, in the less prurient context of impending Turkish Internet censorship, I hasten to add.

Black Sea sparrow hawking. Very well done little film. They even have good Pontic music in there. I imagine that throwing a bird like that would be one of life's great satisfactions. Got to make another trip out that way!



Via Steve, who will no doubt blog it better shortly.

Speakers of archaic Greek in northeastern Turkey:

The community lives in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon in what was once the ancient region of Pontus...

Linguists found that the dialect, Romeyka, a variety of Pontic Greek, has structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not observed in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka's vocabulary also has parallels with the ancient language....

"Use of the infinitive has been lost in all other Greek dialects known today – so speakers of Modern Greek would say 'I wasn't able that I go' instead of 'I wasn't able to go'. But, in Romeyka, not only is the infinitive preserved, but we also find quirky infinitival constructions that have never been observed before – only in the Romance languages are there parallel constructions."

The villagers who speak Romeyka, which has no written form, show other signs of geographic and cultural isolation. They rarely marry outside their own community and they play a folk music on a special instrument, called a kemenje in Turkish and Romeyka or lyra as it is called in Greek....

Romeykas-speakers today are devout Muslims, so they were allowed to stay in Turkey after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, when some two million Christians and Muslims were exchanged between Greece and Turkey.

If you're interested in this region, I highly recommend revisiting this post (which we blogged in 2008) on Kazim Koyuncu and Black Sea Ethnorock.

Via Cronaca, of course.

The Free-Range Kids blog has posted the 2010 Golden Helicopter Parenting Awards, the Ig-Nobel Prize of parenting and sanity generally.

Doomed, I say.

I really approve of the Free-Range Kids blog, but I don't check in much because it's just too damn depressing. Leaves me thinking that the only options are vasectomy, purchase the Unabomber's land (lately for sale!), or move to Turkey. Turkish kids wander the streets of major cities at will, negotiate urban traffic and run cheerfully to greet strangers. You'd think they'd all be dead of tetanus, splattered on undercarriages, or held captive in basement gimp-rooms. And yet they seem to thrive....

Talking to Strangers

This was downtown in a city of over 360,000, no parents in sight. Some of the most striking things about Turkey were the large numbers of (very friendly) young people, and the moments of feeling like you were in a '50s movie, where street urchins say "Hi, mister!" and everyone acts proud of their hometown. I don't want to digress too far, but suffice it to say that within 12 hours of arriving in Gümüşhane, we two random travelers had our picture taken with the mayor. Turkey certainly has problems, including some very big ones, but there's a sense of pride and optimism there which I never feel here (not even at the Salmon demo derby).

An amazing set of photographs from throughout the Russian Empire, taken from 1909-1912:

In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.

There's a lot of shots in there from Central Asia, the Caucasus and eastern Turkey, besides Russia proper. Truly an incredible record!

Merry Christmas to all!

Detail from Nativity icon, 11^th century, Tokalı Kilise, Cappadocia, Turkey.

There have been some really interesting musical oddities on the last couple episodes of Performance Today. There's really not much music out there that will literally drop my jaw. But such was the case yesterday when I heard a fairly typical orchestral opening of an 18th Century concerto, waited for the soloist to come in, and heard a jaw hap. Really! The composer's name is Albrechtsberger, he wrote seven of these (really!) and you'll find the excerpt a ways into the first hour here, at about 14:15. (Performance Today, alas, doesn't allow linking of specific pieces; probably copyright/record company issues.) The whole thing may be had here, and if any reader would like to donate a copy for review, feel free!

Not much can follow a concerto for jaw harp and orchestra, but the next day's show included a very, very alla Turca piece by one Dmitri Kantemiroğlu, or Cantemir, a Moldovan who spent quite some time at the Ottoman court in the late 1600s (at 9:43 in the first hour). Later, we get a fiddle and orchestra number that contains a Nathaniel Gow composition (at 45:45, also in the first hour). It's actually one of my favorite numbers from the Gow collection, Three Good Fellows Down in Yon Glen. My edition notes that it was "a favourite of Neil Gow," so I wonder if Nathaniel was the actual composer, though a piece by his son may perfectly well have become a favorite.

Update: A complete finale movement from a jaw harp concerto is now to be had.

Greetings from Istanbul! It's a wonderful, if draining place; very easy to get around, though. But it's a horrible place to try and practice Turkish, as every time you try, you get a sympathetic chuckle followed by pretty fluent English. We're catching our flight to Erzurum today. Aya Sofya and all that sort of thing are wonderful, but we're already glad to be getting off the tourist track, hoping perhaps to interact with some Turks who aren't selling something.

Can't really blog now: leaving for Istanbul in the morning. Mrs. Peculiar and I are bound ultimately for northeastern Turkey, Erzurum and historic Georgia. One major destination is likely to be Gümüşhane: as Odious will appreciate, this is near where, after a grueling march across Anatolia to the crest of the Black Sea Range, Xenophon's exhausted troops exclaimed, "Thalassa! Thalassa!"

If anyone wondered what (besides sloth) was consuming my blogging output lately, here's your answer: researching Turkey, making the agonizing decision as to just where to go: the place is just crawling with worthy destinations. It's as big as Texas, but oh! so much more fascinating. And I've been studying Turkish,a very laudable tongue, barbaric and yet refined in its intricacy. I really enjoy non-Indo_European languages. The lack of grammatical gender alone makes them greatly superior, and what bliss is Turkish or Finnish regularity, where rules apply consistently enough to be worth remembering.

With any luck, I'll be much more interesting in a couple weeks. Here's a shot from the Selway this summer to tide you over: