A Dark Day in History
On May 29, 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Muslims. It was a dark day for Christendom and for all civilized humanity. His pleas ignored in the West, his supplies running out after six weeks’ siege, his soldiers outnumbered 15 to one, Emperor Constantine XI Dragas knew that his cause was hopeless. Like Prince Lazar at Kosovo 64 years earlier, he chose martyrdom.
On May 22 the moon, symbol of Constantinople since its founding, rose in dark eclipse, fulfilling an old prophecy on the city’s demise. Four days later the Bosphorus was shrouded by thick fog, a phenomenon unknown in eastern Mediterranean in late spring. When the final assault started on the 29th and the walls of the city were shattered, the Emperor discarded his purple cloak and led the last defenders to charge into the breach. The Turks were never able to identify his body; the last Roman Emperor was buried in a mass grave along with his soldiers.
When it was all over, bands of Turks went on a rampage. Pillaging and killing went on for three days. The blood ran down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. All the treasures of the Imperial Palace were promptly removed. Books and icons were burnt on the spot, once the jeweled covers and frames had been wrenched off. In the monastery of the Holy Savior, the invaders first destroyed the icon of the Mother of God, the Hodigitria, the holiest icon in all Byzantium, painted—so men said—by Saint Luke himself. When the Turks burst into the Hagia Sophia, Sir Steven Runciman tells us in his Fall of Constantinople,
The worshippers were trapped. A few of the ancient and infirm were killed on the spot; but most of them were tied or chained together. Many of the lovelier maidens and youths and many of the richer-clad nobles were almost torn to death as their captors quarreled over them. The priests went on chanting at the altar till they too were taken . . . The inhabitants were carried off along with their possessions. Anyone who collapsed from frailty was slaughtered, together with a number of infants who were held to be of no value . . . [The city] was now half in ruins, emptied and deserted and blackened as though by fire, and strangely silent. Wherever the soldiers had been there was desolation. Churches had been desecrated and stripped; houses were no longer habitable and shops and stores battered and bare.
Sultan Mehmed II is said to have been shaken by the spectacle as he rode through the burning streets, but the same carnage and bestiality was to be repeated, in one form or another, dozens of times over hundreds of years. Eugene Delacroix’s depiction of The Massacre at Chios: Greek families awaiting death or slavery is a masterpiece of horror depicting the systematic extermination of the entire population of an Aegean island. It graphically illustrated how being a Greek, Armenian, Serb, or indeed any other Christian, in the Ottoman Empire meant living in daily fear of murder, rape, torture, kidnap of one’s children, slavery, and genocide. Indeed, the last century of Ottoman rule—from the defeat of Napoleon until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War—witnessed a more thorough and tragic destruction of the Christian communities in the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, than at any prior period.
The tragedy of Christian communities under Turkish rule, as Gladstone rightly pointed out, was not “a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race.” The Turks, in his view, “were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law.”
The Ottoman Empire gave up the ghost right after the Great War, but long before that it had little interesting to say, or do, at least measured against the enormous cultural melting pot it had inherited and its splendid opportunities between East and West. Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could prompt creativity that was not there.
A century later the Turkish Republic is a populous, relatively prosperous and self-assertive nation-state. The Turkish nation has developed a culture based on a blend of European-style nationalism, which is very un-Ottoman, and an underlying Islamic ethos inherited from the Empire. Kemal Ataturk hoped to impose a strictly secular concept of nationhood, but political Islam has reasserted itself. Popular Islamic political movements of the past three decades have produced a Turkish-Islamic synthesis whose “post-Islamist” upholders are firmly in power in Ankara. Their success is due to the fact that most Turks remain Muslim in their beliefs, values, and world outlook. The Kemalist dream of secularism has never penetrated beyond the military and a narrow stratum of urban elite centered in Istanbul, and today it is in retreat. The Kemalist edifice, uneasily perched atop the simmering Islamic volcano, will remain tentative at best.
The re-emergence of an empire centered on the Bosphorus is unlikely, for now, but less so than the integration into the European Union of a democratic, secular and stable Turkey.
The freeing of Hagia Sophia from the four ugly bars imprisoning her is even less likely, for now; but miracles do happen, and therefore this one can happen. On this melancholy anniversary let us pray that it will happen.
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What you fail to point out is the fact that Constantinople fell six months or so after an attempted illegitimate unia with the Latins. Thanks to St. Mark of Ephesus, the unia did not take place. Of course, the fall of Constantinople was a blow not to "Christendom" -- some ecumenical notion embraced by those who have to rely on traffic with Latins for their pay -- but a blow to the one, holy Catholic Orthodox Church -- not Rome. Why is it that you as a Serb continue to play step-and-fetch-it to Rome? Why do you continue to ignore the countless outrages of Rome against Orthodoxy -- never mind the actions of Croatian Latins during WWII, the sacking of Constantinople, or the Uniates in the Ukraine. Constantinople fell in no small part because Rome wanted to capitalize on the vulnerable state of Byzantium, ever looking to "convert" the Orthodox to their heresies and innovations. And why all of this non-sense about Islam? I don't see any Muslim names heading up media outlets that pump pornographic entertainment into our homes every night of the week through the television and radio. I don't see any Muslim names heading up organizations demanding the removal of any and everything associated with Christianity from the public square. I didn't hear any Muslims calling for a new Pearl harbor event. For whom do ye not speak for fear of?
There is another icon of Mary in Sednaya, Syria - also reportedly painted by St. Luke. Very popular local and regional attraction - even Gulf tourists, who are Muslims, regularly pray there.
Re Union etc, cf. my "1204 AND ALL THAT": http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:tzzgBCPSIswJ:www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic04/NewsST121404.html+1204+and+all+that&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
Mr. "Nayus" is misguided on his history. The Council of Florence took place in 1439 -- roughly 13 years before the fall of Constantinople. However, it is interesting to point out that Emperor Constantine XI was, for all practical purposes, a Uniate: he attempted to force a union with Rome. In fact, he was not crowned in Constantinople because of the fierce opposition to his uniate views. In December of 1452, he allowed a uniate liturgy to be served in the Hagia Sophia in which the Pope was commemorated. Then, six months later, Constantinople fell. The spiritual import of this will, one supposes, divide Orthodox and Catholic alike. However, Emperor Constantine XI's uniate sympathies cannot be denied nor can Rome's attempt to capitalize on them.
So much for "Ottoman tolerance"! Much to often we hear European bureaucrats and western elite talk of Ottoman Empire’s kind treatment of non-Muslims ! This excellent column might make them reshape their enthusiasm for Muslim open-mindedness.
I cannot help but read of the fall of Constantinople without getting the shivers. Glorious, doomed Constantinople. Yet I think you protest too loudly about the Evil Turk of Ottoman times. For all their (correct) complaints about being treated as second-class citizens, all the Balkan nationalities managed to preserve their language and msot their religion under the Ottomans. Not a feat that would have been repeated had, say, Serbia been annexed in the 15th century by the Austrians. And the killing, well, yeah, it was hardly confined to the Ottomans.
So boo. The Ottomans were hardly tolerant by today's standards, but until the 19th century, it would have been more pleasant living as a minority in Ottoman lands than, say, Spain or France. With the probable exceptions of Poland-Lithuania and the Dutch Netherlands.
As for today, your comment "The Kemalist dream of secularism has never penetrated beyond the military and a narrow stratum of urban elite centered in Istanbul, and today it is in retreat." is way off. In many respects, Istanbul is the most conservative of Turkey's larger cities. And if the recent series of massive demonstrations against the Government do not convince you that Ataturk's reforms took hold, then I suppose you also believe in Creationism?
As for your final statement: "The freeing of Hagia Sophia from the four ugly bars imprisoning her is even less likely, for now; but miracles do happen, and therefore this one can happen. On this melancholy anniversary let us pray that it will happen." This is childish melancholy.
Turkey is hardly a model country, but I see an energy and a will to betterment here that is missing anywhere else in Europe or the Middle East. Next time you visit the Balkans, travel a little further afield to Turkey. Not just to Babylon-on-the-Bosphorus. Go into the heartland of Anatolia and speak with the peasant farmers and the grocers, the taxi drivers and the professors. It will prove enlightening.
"I didn’t hear any Muslims calling for a new Pearl harbor event." Ira, prhaps you've heard of: Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Hassan Nasrallah (just for starters), who have all called for the destruction of the U.S.? Or have you been in a cave the past 28 years?
It's a shame to see people of the West still harboring ancient grudges that prevent them from uniting against a common foe, who is only too glad to stoke those fires of division.
"Better the Turban of the Sultan than the Tiara of the Pope."
The man quoted lived to see his sons raped by the Sultan before his eyes. Right before he himself was killed.
Alistair, I don't know how much time you've spent on religious blogs, but there are Orthodox who do not think of themselves as part of the West, even in the social sense.
My mistake, they weren't raped. They were beheaded when the speaker didn't "bless the engagement."
This "uniate" debate is thoroughly lost on me, but Darcy's silliness is plain to see. If to love one's own is childish, and "adulthood" is found in romanticizing an alien, antiChrist culture, then we are truly far afield. I don't know what "energy", etc., means, but I do know about the "honor killings" those energetic inhabitants of outer-Anatolia have brought with them to the US and Europe.
Such enlightenment, I wager Dr. Trifkovic will respond, could be desired only by a Western European whose people were sheltered from the Turks for centuries by the Slavs and Austrians you revile. For shame. Go away.
Good article Dr. Trifkovic,
I did not know about this prophecy you mention about Constantinople's demise. Can you give more information about the moon rising in dark eclipse being an ominous sign for the city and who issued such prohpecy?
Regards,
H.A.
I've first encountered this in Roger Crowley's "1453"
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/history/article572140.ece
The "prophecy" was astrological and therefore rejected by the Church, but the effect on the populace was profoundly demoralizing.
Also on 1453 prophecies and omens:
http://www.geocities.com/athens/academy/5990/byzantine/byzantine07.html
Much of this may have been due to the cataclysmic Kuwae eruption in the Pacific, causing "planetwide volcanically forced cold episode"
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AGUFMPP52A0951P
Kevin Pang, formerly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has written on this:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/93/release_1993_1543.html
As a Catholic, I applaud Dr. Trifkovic's fair and even-handed approach. I also deplore the pressures put on Byzantium to reunite with the West. The greater the pressure, the more the resistance. A similar pressure was put on Djuradj Brankovic, despot of Serbia, and it cost the Hungarians a valuable ally. I do not know which is worse today, the Catholic bigotry that regards the Orthodox as barely Christian or the Orthodox bigotry that sends all Catholics to Hell and insists that every Catholic goes to bed each night praying for the destruction of Orthodoxy.
In a better world, we might work together for a unified Church that recognizes the autonomy of the patriarchates, but in this world Catholic and Orthodox should at least learn to swallow some of their rancor to work against the commn enemy, which best represented by the Ottoman Empire. Darcy admits the Ottomans wer "hardly tolerant" but praises them for allowing the Balkan peoples to survive. This is like praising the rapist when the woman, after being violated, escapes with her life. Some Ottoman rulers, violent as they were, kept faith with their subject and enemies. One thinks of the fat but energetic Murad II. His son Mehmed, however, violated treaties and slaughtered defenseless populations, time after time. Anyone who knows even the story of Admiral Lukas Notaras knows better than to trust the Turk.
It is hard to tell what is going on in Turkey these days. There is definitely a religious revival, however, even among intellectuals and military officers. I spoke a few years ago with an American woman who taught in a school for officers' children. She told me she had a very high absentee rate on Muslim holidays. This is a very ominous development.
I have long since stopped thinking of Anatolia as 'Turkey' and started thinking of it as occupied eastern Greece and western Armenia. They now have company from later history. There is the incipient Republic of Pontus, and the unpunished slaughter of Greeks and Armenians throughout Anatolia in the 1920's. There is also the ruin of Rhodesia called 'Zimbabwe', who's ruler is a farcical characature of a Turkish sultan, and the greatly reduced European population there. To it's south, the ruin of South Africa, and the narrowly averted ruin of Spain and Portugal in the 1930's. None of it had to happen but for the evil and callousness of those who should have come to the aid of their kinsmen.
When are Westerners going to learn to stop stabbing their own in the back, then standing by aloof as they go under? Is there something about the character of West Europeans and North Americans that makes them this way, which may have to do with more basic issues than cultural, theological or ideological disputes?
I could also mention the ruins of the Old South called the 'New South'.
Now that they dont have any more distant kinsmen to backstab, West Europeans and North Americans are busily stabbing their own countrymen in the back and cutting their own throats as well. What's wrong with us as a race that makes us do such things? Is this just the working out of a universal human phenomenon amongst us, or is it somehow more pronounced in our own race than others?
We Armenians will not agree with Darcy's statement that "... until the 19th century, it would have been more pleasant living as a minority in Ottoman lands than, say, Spain or France". The dhimmi's life in the Ottoman empire was a daily nightmare, contrary to the whitewash promoted by Western historians, Arabs, and Turks.
Actually and ironically, the real revision of Christian and Western interaction with the Islam and the Islamic Turks in particular began in the Enlightenment as Protestant and anti-Habsburgian historians began to place the "blame" on the interactions, most often failed, between Turks and Europeans on the Catholic Church and the Kaiser. Their revisionism was thorough and is regrettably quoted as fact in "scholarly" works, on so-called history channels, and even on these fora. Thus are the Arabs, the Turks and most of Islam portrayed as progressive, forward-thinking, and tolerant. Catholics and Austrians are painted quite the opposite. For most Western intellectuals, Eastern Orthodoxy does not even exist, its great contributions to the Evangelium and to our cultures being made a foggy addendum to an obscure footnote.
IN THE CRIMEAN WAR both Catholic and Protestant "West" overcame their mutual antipathy and joined forces with the Sultan against Orthodox Russia, just as today's "liberals" and "neocons" join forces in supporting Chechen child-murderers and Albanian church burners. Eastern Orthodoxy does exist, indeed, as the point of convergence for Soros, Blair and Wolfowitz: the only part of Europe still resistant to postmodernity! All three deem the identity of the East European Christians as an obstacle to their millenerian design. Those peoples lost so much—under the Ottomans and the Communists—that their survival, let alone revival, is scarcely imagined today except on Western terms, as faithful imitation of, and absorption in, the West. In the ongoing replay of 1204 any gap between the Sorosite Left and imperialist Right, the United States and Europe, and between Europe "old" and "new," disappears almost completely. Yes, this is the one crusade that the Muslims can support with glee. It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.
A dark day indeed.
Does anybody know if the fall of Byzantium was officially and publicly commememorated in anyway, anywhere in Christendom, especially Orthodox Christendom? I assume not, since the default position in Christian countries (or perhaps that should be 'countries of the Christian tradition') is an exaggerated regard for muslim sensibilities in these matters, and a corresponding unwillingness to honour their own past and traditions, wherever that past and those traditions are not to the taste of muslims.
Death by courtesy.
Re canonical status of Constantine XI, cf:
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Medieval/Bio/ConstantineXI.html
In the centuries of Ottoman rule, any effort on the part of the Orthodox Church to officially glorify Constantine XI as a saint would have been seen as an act of rebellion, and hence decidedly ill-advised. After the Greek War of Independence (1821-1831), when the Greek Orthodox Church once again had freedom to act, an official act of glorification was thought to be superfluous, on account of longstanding veneration as a saint and martyr, specifically, an ethnomartyr, Greek ἐθνομάρτυρας. However, the erection of the statue of "Saint Constantine XI the Ethnomartyr" in the Cathedral Square in Athens, with the formal blessing of the Church authorities, appears to be a semi-official act of recognition. His feast falls on 29 May.
ALSO: http://rumkatkilise.org/statusconstantineXI.htm
Re "Third Rome" cf e.g. http://www.geocities.com/kitezhgrad/prophets/rom3.html
When I lived in Chicago, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Trikofic, and as a Greek lliving in Greece I very much appreciate his commemorative note on the fall of Constantinople, a date which lives in infamy for all Balkan Orthodox. I also appreciate his words concerning the last Emperor, the Hero Constantine XI Dragas Paleologos, the last Roman Emperor, who was killed defending his hearth against a perfidious enemy who held us in bondage for 500 years. Dr. Trifkovic can share the pride in this last Byzantine Emperor also because his mother, Helena Dragas, was a Serbian. This summer I plan to take my family to Mistra, the Despotate in southern Greece which he ably administered until he accepted the martyrs crown of Byzantium.
Hvala vam, Gospodin Trifkovic
Not every " Catholic goes to bed each night praying for the destruction of Orthodoxy" and not every Turk is bad ! On the state level, however, their political goals were atrocious, as far as Christian Orthodox (Serbs) are concerned.
"The pattern is as follows: When it comes to their petty interests and their endless games of conquest, the Western Christian powers apply one rule only: "Might is Right". For centuries, Western Christians watched with calm and disinterest as Islamic Turkey perpetrated endless, increasingly gruesome atrocities on its subjugated Eastern Christian subjects. For centuries, thus -- and to this very day, in the first half of 21st century -- this open anti-Eastern Orthodox racism persists in the West. It was honestly expressed only by Hitler but it was the same way vigorously pursued by both British and American Empire." (Posted on http://www.srpska-mreza.com)
I wish Dr. Trifkovic would comment briefly on (what is to my mind often ) a wrong perception of the Ottomans' tolerance, which "enabled Serbs to preserve their language and their religion". (Turks used Serbian churches as stables to keep their horses in…)
Regarding the Orthodox countries beuing sandwiched between the Catholic West and the Muslim East, Lord Byron, who died fighting for Greek independence, said it well: "Trust not for freedom from the Franks (the Catholic West)." He further admonishes, that "Turkish force, and Latin Fraud, will break your shield, however broad."
ON OTTOMAN "TOLERANCE": The Ottomans from time to time shrewdly applied limited toleration of select minorities. The act that resonates with modern Turkish propaganda was the invitation to the Jews of Spain to resettle in its lands after expulsion. In reality they were invited not because of any motivations involving tolerance, but to replace the vast swathes of Christians that had been eliminated, and thus to maintain the area’s commerce and the Sultan’s tax base. The fact that they held a favored status within the Empire over the subhuman giaours (infidel Christian dogs) is as much a reason for celebration of the Ottomans’ “tolerance” as the fact that the Nazis were “tolerant” of occupied Slavs in comparison to their treatment of the Jews.
As Turkey declined, its provincial governors and warlords—often local converts to Islam with a suppressed guilty grudge against their former co-religionists—asserted rebellious independence. Notably in the Balkans, it was demonstrated in far harsher treatment of their Christian subjects than was either mandated or normally practiced from the Bosphorus. . .
The last century of Ottoman rule—from the defeat of Napoleon until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War—witnessed a more thorough and tragic destruction of the Christian communities in the Levant than at any prior period. But Great Britain in particular supported the Turks, on the grounds that the Mohammedan empire was a “stabilizing force” and a counterweight against Austria and Russia. The scandalous alliance against Russia in the Crimean War reflected a pernicious frame of mind that has manifested itself more recently in the overt, covert, or de facto support of certain Western powers for the Muslim side in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor, and Kashmir. The advocates of Turkophile policy at Westminster went beyond Realpolitik: they devised the theory that the Ottomans were in reality agreeable and tolerant. They paved the way for the Armenian atrocities – a prototype of the mass murder of Jews in Europe. (“Who remembers the Armenians?” Hitler told his inner circle.)
It is remarkable that in this age of rampant victimology, the persecution of Christians by Muslims has become a taboo subject in the Western academy. A complex web of myths, outright lies, and deliberately imposed silence dominates it. Thirteen centuries of religious discrimination, causing suffering and death of countless millions, have been covered by the myth of “tolerance” that is as hurtful to the few descendants of the victims as it is useless as a means of appeasing latter-day jihadists. The upholders of the myth are secular Western freethinkers who hate persecution and discrimination—sexual, racial, religious, or any other—with one exception: when Christians are the victims. Recent attempts by some such apologists —notably a British journalist by the name of Noel Malcolm—to present the sordid chaos of Ottoman overlordship in southeast Europe as “tolerant,” or even enlightened, are as intellectually dishonest as they are factually insupportable. At no time was the Ottoman arrangement concerning “the people of the book” meant to be a constitutional edifice based on mutual rights and obligations; at all times it was a device of jihad, a mechanism for their immediate exploitation and eventual destruction.
What Darcy?
It is not possible to compare the democracy of Socrate's Greece with the democracy of today's Greece.
You can not have wings and roots - pick one or the other.
This is the very first time I ever heard of having an advantage by being under the Mohamedanist rulers.
Darcy, what say you about the handful of Jews who held a silent Shabat service at both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanpek? Dare you say they profitted much? Or was it the choses Jewish Kapo of the barack that had the largest gain?
It is beyond stupid to blame the Islam for one culture's thousand years history, with genetic makeup, traditions and values being passed on father to son - mother to daughter. That is NOT because Islam allowed it - it is because it is the native's will to live and live their own lives at all cost.
Will somebody please take out this Darcy in front of a firing squad? I have absolutely no tolerance for this much supidity unless this was again the ever present Steven Suleyman Schwartz or the Tour de Frace Pellumbi Velo (unless he is no in Giro d'Italia).
It is contrary to the laws of nature to even attempt to derive benefits and advantages once there is an element of slavery and absolute subjugation. For Chirs's sake Darcy - go to some other boards.
A very modest modicum of intellect is prefered over here - we are not an "elitist bunch" but you have to have some small sensibility of telling the right from the left or the wright from from wrong.
I seem to be the only one to break up the mutual lovefest here. With your permission, I would like to reply to a few of the comments on what I wrote.
11. "Darcy’s silliness is plain to see. If to love one’s own is childish, and “adulthood” is found in romanticizing an alien, antiChrist culture, then we are truly far afield. ... For shame. Go away." One may indeed love one's own. However, what is alien can easily become one's own, one's beloved. To believe that the sum total of knowledge, virtue and wisdom is contained in the West is, to me, ignorant. Call me silly if you will, but I prefer to keep my horizons broad. I shall return the compliment: "shame, go away" is a very silly statement.
15. "Darcy admits the Ottomans wer “hardly tolerant” but praises them for allowing the Balkan peoples to survive. This is like praising the rapist when the woman, after being violated, escapes with her life." Darct admits that this might have been an apt comparison. Yet it does not negate the main thrust of his argument: they *survived* nonetheless. My counter-example from western Europe during much of this time would involve both rape and murder. Though both actions are wrong, criminal sentencing in all western legal systems of which I am aware treat them differently.
16. "I have long since stopped thinking of Anatolia as ‘Turkey’ and started thinking of it as occupied eastern Greece and western Armenia." is a remarkable statement. It reminds me of the golden rules of nationalism, which I picked up from an Ukrainian blogger:
a) If an area was yours for 500 years and ours for 50, it should belong to us – borders must not be changed.
b) If an area belonged to us 500 years ago but never since then, it should belong to us – it is the Cradle of our Nation.
c) If a majority of our people live there, it must belong to us – they must enjoy the right to self-determination.
d) If a minority of our people live there, it must belong to us – they must be protected against your oppression.
e) All of the above rules apply to us but not to you.
f) Our dream of greatness is Historical Necessity, yours is Fascism.
17. "The dhimmi’s life in the Ottoman empire was a daily nightmare, contrary to the whitewash promoted by Western historians, Arabs, and Turks." I'm sure it was. Yet it still was damn sight better than that of a minority living (or, to use a far better phrase, "not being allowed to live") in Western Europe.
I am particularly distressed by poster 27.
"It is not possible to compare the democracy of Socrate’s Greece with the democracy of today’s Greece. You can not have wings and roots - pick one or the other." I do not recall commenting on this.
"Darcy, what say you about the handful of Jews who held a silent Shabat service at both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanpek? Dare you say they profitted much? Or was it the choses Jewish Kapo of the barack that had the largest gain?" I note the fact that the Nazis managed to exterminate most of European Jewry within the space of a few years. I also note that the Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians managed to survive for several hundred years. Comparing the Ottomans to the Nazis does not make them so, nor does it add any credit to your argument.
"Will somebody please take out this Darcy in front of a firing squad? I have absolutely no tolerance for this much supidity unless this was again the ever present Steven Suleyman Schwartz or the Tour de Frace Pellumbi Velo (unless he is no in Giro d’Italia)." I do not know half of these references, but saying that someone with whom you disagree ought to be shot should have gone out of favour long ago. I strongly urge you to practice the tolerance you demand from others, especially as we all supposedly live in a more enlightened age.
"It is contrary to the laws of nature to even attempt to derive benefits and advantages once there is an element of slavery and absolute subjugation. For Chirs’s sake Darcy - go to some other boards. A very modest modicum of intellect is prefered over here - we are not an “elitist bunch” but you have to have some small sensibility of telling the right from the left or the wright from from wrong." I find to my surprise that I am having a conversation with a man who has the temerity to call for my being shot and in the next breath say that he has a modicum of intellect. If that be civilised behaviour, rejoice! Darcy has little interest in the company of thugs.
I would like to make my final comment direct to Dr Trifkovic. Whether statements such as "The freeing of Hagia Sophia from the four ugly bars imprisoning her is even less likely, for now; but miracles do happen, and therefore this one can happen. On this melancholy anniversary let us pray that it will happen." are bizarre is one on which we may well disagree. I may be wrong; if I am, I tender my apologies. But if the standard of discussion that arises from such a comment is as brutish as what I have experienced, it certainly proves that it is incendiary.
As per the other posters' demands, I shall not be visiting again.
"I do not know half of these references, but saying that someone with whom you disagree ought to be shot should have gone out of favour long ago."
Except in Islamic countries where amputation or beheading are punishment for crimes under Shari'a ranging from theft to being a Christian. There, it is not mere hyperbole on a website, but a daily reality.
Today intolerance is bad when it happens in the West, but perfectly acceptable in Muslim countries. We permit Islamic adherents the right to build mosques in our countries in the West, but the attempts to spread the Christian faith in the Middle East or merely converting is punishable by death.
In Christendom (West and East), there have been abuses, inquisitions and catastrophic events driven by misguided, evil people in the name of the Christian faith. We should renounce them and strive to act as Christ commanded us.
But if one is intellectually honest, any objective comparison between the tenets of Christianity and Islam vis a vis non-believers (or "apostates") shows a decided cruelty and intolerance on the part of the latter. (In practice, excommunication from the Eucharist vs. beheading seems to offer a pretty stark contrast, don't you think?)
Read Trifkovic's book "Sword of the Prophet"; it is a serious exposition of the tenets of Islam and their practice over the past 14 centuries. How someone, anyone, can look at that practice as anything other than a "religion of war" is beyond me.
While I was perhaps naive enough 5 years ago to think that democracy in Islamic societies was possible, I now believe the two are completely incompatible.
I've seldom had a chance to read such an outrageous comment as that one written by Mrs Ira Nayus. It would be interesting to know who is she?(a Greek suffering from anty-western hysteria and thus acting in the best interest of Turkey? An "Arab" Christian with Stockholm syndrome?)...
An "illegitimate unia", she says, but from a Christian (whether orthodox, catholic or protestant) point of view can a permanent division of the churches ever be considered as legitimate? Are we to think of it as God's will and not as consequence of our human sinfulness? Hasn't it favoured so far only the enemies of Christianity (Islam in the first place. Mrs Nayus should remember the fate of the "Arab" Christians and the Copts after the failure of the "illegitimate unia" with the Chalcedonians). As far as St Mark is concerned, one cannot help but regret that all the energy displayed by him in Florence was afterwards lacking in his native Ephesus against the local missionary zeal of the dervishes, who, helped by centuries old brutal invasions and colonisation, have succeeded in turning one of the cradles of Christianity into what it is today. And, by the way, whatever the "countless outrages" of Rome can they even remotely be compared with what begins with the sweeping out of the entire Hellenic Civilisation from the Middle East and ends with the genocide of the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in Asia Minor? As far as the genocide of "Croatian Latins" is concerned the family of the one who writes these lines was lucky enough to escape from it thanks to the “Italian Latin" occupation of a part of the Adriatic Coast during the IIWW. Finally, regarding the "non-sense about Islam" it hardly deserves any comment.
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Mr Srdja Trifkovic and etc!
1. We came and conqured this region like other peoples did (Europeans in America, in Australia etc.).
2. Turkic peoples have been living in Eurupea continent since 5th century (Please look at "Karl H. Menges, Turkic Languages and People, Wiesbaden, 1968") Ottoman conquests are just 3rd wave.
3. Where (and when) did Slavs come to Balkans from?
4. Please be honest!!
5. and please remeber Sezar: VENI VIDI VICI.
THAT'S ALL!!!
TurkicGlory