Holy Friday litany in Spetses island, Greece by Michael Liaroutsos.

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

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

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

ok yes the misplaced nostalgic yearning for a mythical past is clearly a reactionary position, but simply flipping the valences and replying that Everything Back Then Was Worse Actually is just as superficial an engagement with history

the presumption of progress over time misleads with respect to the vast amount of variation in the historical record & it also serves to present whatever is the current arrangement as the apotheosis of human advancement... these are not value-neutral claims

heeeyyyyyyyy.

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii<3

Facing The Facts: Resources on the Armenian Genocide

Eye Witnesses

Sephardi Jewish costumes from Thessaloniki, Greece. 1986, by Nikos Stavroulakis.

Dune landscape in Athens

Every year Greece gets sandstorms from the Sahara desert. Their intensity depends on the area and season.

An American Historian's Attempt to Explain the Backlash to Netflix's Cleopatra Documentary

Hi friends. I am going to do my best to do this with nuance, though I’m probably sending this into the void considering my dearth of followers. I might actually blaze this, we’ll see. Before I begin, my professional training in historical ethics is reminding me to disclaim that, while I have spent a not insignificant amount of time studying Egyptian history (especially the life and family of Cleopatra VII), I am not technically specialized in the classical period or Egyptology. That being said, I do have years of training in the academic field and am currently getting my PhD in history. I'm gonna try to link sources easily available to the public, but a lot of the nuance of academic scholarship is unfortunately stuck in academic journals and published books.

Anyway, I’ll get into it:

As a (Macedonian) Greek, thank you for this very thorough and accurate post, OP! A must read, for sure!

OP already acknowledged the nuances of the "race" discussion, but please let me additionally highlight how Egyptians, Greeks, and other surrounding nations didn't and don't categorise people into "races" (instead they use different and broader distinctions), and have different views of how a "mixed" person looks.

Just something for people to keep in mind since the online discussions about the subject are very UScentric, which forces Greeks, Egyptians and everyone else to jump through USian logical hoops in order to defend very basic and easily confirmable facts about Cleopatra's appearance. Instead it makes more sense to acknowledge the respective local terms when speaking about a foreign figure, like Cleopatra, since the US' ideas on "race" are specific to the North America, and ever-shifting. (Greeks were not considered White two generations ago, and today in many cases they don't "white-pass" in appearance and culture)