Smyrna Burning

In my last post, I showed you a selection of historic Greek houses from Smyrna. Here is the continuation of my adventures in that city, as I accidentally witnessed the death of one such historical house, this time in the Kemeralti district. At around 3.00 AM, me and my friends were drinking on the slopes of Varyant, a neighborhood with an amazing vista of the city. Suddenly, we noticed a plume of smoke wafting through the distant air.

Being drunk and very excited, we quickly rode up to the point the smoke was coming from. An disturbingly bright light illuminated the narrow, darkened streets.

The source of the light soon became visible: Fire. One of the abandoned Greek mansions was burning, exploding into the night. Firefighters were already at work, hopelessly trying to extinguish the blaze. Here are some of the Hieromyus Bosch - style night shots I took.


At one point one of the front walls collapsed, showering everywhere with sparks and cinders.



It wasn't long before a second fire engine arrived on the scene to combat the fire.



We did not stay to watch the inevitable outcome. Overcome with sadness of watching a landmark disappear, but also a perverted, primal pleasure at having survived a fiery adventure, we rode off into the Smyrniote night.

Still not sober, we tried to sell these photos off to Yeni Asir (the New Century,) one of the city's more popular local newspapers. We were greeted by a scruffy-looking journalist with a smug smile on his face. "We already shot the blaze, better luck next time boys!" he grinned as he shooed us away. Next time? I hope there will never be a "next time" when one of the beautiful houses of Smyrna burns down.

The Great Smyrniote Adventure: Greek Houses from Alsancak

Last spring, I took a completely out-of-the-blue trip to Smyrna, or Izmir. By any name, this is one of the most beautiful cities in the Eastern Mediterranean, and certainly the most livable, human-friendly city in all of Turkey.

Smyrna owes much of her beauty and splendor to the long-departed Greeks of Anatolia, who in the relatively tolerant atmosphere of the late-era Ottoman Empire transformed the city into a cosmopolitan paradise.

After the Turkish reconquest and the following Greco-Turkish population exchange, Smyrna became Izmir and lost a great deal of her metropolitan beauty. Even in its current state, however, it is a beautiful city, and the people of Smyrna are still the most educated, liberated and westernized citizens of Turkey.

Below is a selection of nicely preserved Greek houses from the historic Alsancak neighborhood.










Many of these houses are currently used as cafes, restaurants, pubs, bars and clubs. At weekend nights the streets fill up with people, making Smyrna all the more charming and beautiful.

History in a Stack of Old Newspapers

With the Turkish Republic now celebrating her 85th year, a neat co-incidence landed a pile of 53-year old newspapers into my possession. Here is a selection from their funny, nostalgic and occasionally horrifying contents.

All dating from the time between 1954 and 1955, these newspapers shed a light to the recent history of my country, and illuminate some interesting parallels between the media of then and now.

I found a number of titles, including Vatan, Yeni Sabah, Milliyet, Dünya and the ever-present Hürriyet. Remember, all of these photos are large-sized and you can zoom-in on them by clicking on the pictures.



The typography, graphics, design and the language of certain ads in the papers were a boon to contemporary graphic designers, who are attracted to such artifacts with an exaggerated passion for the ironic and the kitsch.

Here's another...

And another... Kayo is supposed to be a foot ointment, while Opon is a headache remedy.

Here is a sexist ad in comic-strip format, for a brand of razors called Poker-Play. "If she is avoiding you, it's your fault! Buy a Poker-Play now and get a nice, clean shave. Oh, how nice..."

Some of the news are also hilarious. Here, we are informed that the "Society for Those Who Want to Go to the Moon" has been disbanded due to the lack of interest and public ridicule. How surprised must those disinterested, mocking masses have been when, sixteen years later, mankind did walk on the Moon.

The plight of the Society for Those Who Want to Go to the Moon also neatly illustrates why it was the United States, and not a country full of incompetent, arrogant oafs like Turkey who achieved that momentous feat.

What about this one? A kid supposedly put his boss to sleep using a form of magical earth from someone's grave, and was duly caught by the police. This article is written in such a form that the sleep-inducing properties of graveyard soil is mentioned like an established fact. Science education must not have been very advanced, by then.

This one is rather cute; a baby bear in Siberia was damaging phone lines by climbing to the top of the poles and plucking the phone-line cables "...harmoniously, as if he was playing a guitar."

This one is bizarre: A woman, identified only as "Ayşe from Konya," has supposedly kept a snake alive in her stomach for over a year! Well it's either her stomach or uterus, for the newspaper uses a very vague language when referring to the snake's location as "Karın;" a word that can be used for both organs.

I think something like this is faintly possible if the snake was indeed in her vagina, but for the stomach - no way. Perhaps the paper's editors didn't know the difference between a snake and a tapeworm. Judging from their previous errors, I wouldn't put it past them.

While some of the news are funny or just plain weird, others are simply depressing. Consider this article: Two villages from the around Samsun, on the black sea coast, had a little "war" involving more than two thousand people rushing the opposing village and burning it down to the ground and klling all of their livestock. Fortunately, "only" one person was killed.

What the f*ck?!? Modern Turkey can still get pretty ugly, but this is a huge event even by today's standards. I wonder what other horrors must have taken place?

Another sad Turkish classic: After a moderately large earthquake in Smyrna, or Izmir, religious shit-heads have run amok, harassing women in modern clothes and urging them to wear the characteristic Mohammedan rags lest the "wrath of God" strike their city again.

The exact same shit happened in my lifetime after the big 1999 earthquake that killed my grandmother.

This small snippet, on the other hand, is possibly the scariest piece I've ever read in the entire stack of newspapers. All copies of an encyclopedia on the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey from 1703 to 1924 were forcefully collected and burned in a Nazi-esque bonfire organized by a cheerful Turkish Students' Union. The reason? The book had not mentioned Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. What's even scarier is that a "group of youths" were at ready for the spectacle.

Imagine what such a generation would do when they were adults. Actually, don't - for here in Turkey, we are seeing them, grown up and in action right now. The recent spate of internet bans, including that of Youtube for hosting a video that insulted Atatürk, represents the exact same diseased mentality. From burning books to banning the internet in fifty three years - what a shame.

Make no mistake about it, I'm not against Atatürk, or his principles. Heck, I adore the guy for actually achieving his wildest dreams and forging, in blood and fire, the world that my generation grew up in. However, censorship and bigotry are still censorship and bigotry, whether they are done in the name of Atatürk or not.

It gets worse. All of these newspapers all date from around 1955, during which the horrifying "Istanbul Kristallnacht," the pogrom against the Greeks of the City, took place. What's shocking is that almost all newspapers engage in purposeful propaganda against the Istanbul Greeks until the events, and then immediately bigan wailing and crying about the "unfortunate tragedy." Here is a page from the infamous Hurriyet, pointing out to a (completely fabricated) link between the Greek Patriarchiate in Fener and the Greek terrorist bands in Cyprus, who were gering up for an ethnic cleansing of the island's Turkish populace.

What happened after all of those provocations will live forever in the history of this country.

An Amazing Coincidence

Holy Shit! I recently purchased this book on mythological imagery. As I paged through its weird contents, little did I know that I was about to discover a wonderful, and slightly unnerving similarity between the worlds of natural history, speculative evolution and North American Indian iconography.

This picture, number 401 A, in Chapter 8; Indian America, literally made me gasp. Labeled "The giant bird Kaloo, the most terrifying of all creatures," it bore a more-than-passing resemblance to...

Ok, this part is going to need some explaining to my non-zoology-nerd readers, who constitute about %90 of my readers and %99 of the real world. You know about ancient flying reptiles, right? Well, they are called pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were a really diverse group, and among their members were the Azhdarchids, gigantic flyers with wingspans up to 10-meters wide.

Azhdarchids had enormously extende, fishing-rod like necks, giraffe-like long legs and huge heads, not to mention gi-normous wings. No one was certain on how these animals lived, until famous zoologist and my close friend Darren Naish (and co-worker Mark Witton,) worked out a comprehensive review of their lifestyles. Now we know that these animals lived like gigantic storks, foraging on all-fours for small prey, and flying from one food-rich location to another. You can see Darren's blog post on the subject here, or read the technical paper here.

Anyways, the story here is: The picture in the book looked frighteningly simillar to the revised Azhdarchid postulated by Darren and Mark. The stilt-like legs, the long, curving head, the stubby tail, the straight, fishing-pole like neck with hints of lengthened vertebra inside, are all the same. Hell, even the fingers and the toes are there in the correct number and order.

But it gets even weirder. "Kaloo" does not seem to have any wings. This would have seemed odd and unlikely, had the possibility of Azhdarchid pterosaurs evolving into flightless forms not been considered after Darren and Mark's anatomical revision. Darren even wrote a follow-up in his blog, speculating on what a truly flightless Azhdarchid would have looked like. The drawing you see above is from Darren's blog. Compared with the old indian drawing, the convergence becomes even more evident. (Click on it to enlarge!)

Could this mean that a relict population of Azhdarchid pterosaurs had survived the K-T extinction, evolved into truly flightless forms, and survived until historical times to face the early American Indians? North America already has folkloric myths about giant "Thunderbirds". Could these be flightless Azhdarchids?

I think not. Although I can imagine conspiracy theorists, over-the-top cryptozoologists and of course, creationist scum having a field day with the idea of giant flying reptiles surviving until the present day, the entire prospect is highly unlikely.

To begin with, the book that contained the illustration, "Mythology Pictures," is a seriously artsy-fartsy book. Artsy-fartsy means only one thing: ambiguity. The publishers have conveniently decided not to include any sources or bibliography for the illustrations inside, so we are in complete darkness over the exact age, location or even the authenticity of the "Kaloo" image. Even the word "Kaloo" might be made-up or distorted, a search on the internet does not reveal anything simillar.

Secondly, it is very unikely that something as big as an Azhdarchid, flightless or not, to survive until the present and not leave any fossil remains during the intervening 65-million-years.

In conclusion, we are left with several options on the identity of "Kaloo" as an Azhdarchid. It is either:

1-) A bona-fide memento of a surviving animal. (Highly unlikely.)
2-) A myth started by the chance discovery of Azhdarchid fossils by Native Americans. (Still very unlikely, for such animals do not fossilize easily.)
3-) A complete co-incidence. (My opinion, despite the eerie resemblance of the drawing to the real thing.)
4-) A mistake or a forgery caused by the carelessness of the artsy-fartsy book publisher. (Seems possible, but artsy-fartsy publishers generally know jack shit about natural history, and even if they did, what would be their motive? Furthermore, Darren and Mark's revised Azhdarchid model was published after the book.)

So, dear readers, pick your choice, and feel free to add theories of your own. Probably it's all nothing, but... weird, huh?

UPDATE!

Thanks to the help of fellow blogger Leonardo Ambasciano, we now know that "Kaloo" is indeed a true Native American myth. The drawing apparently is authentic, and was labeled "Culoo" on a book called Picture-Writing of the American Indians.

In the book, Culoo is defined as the one "who caught up the mischievous Lox in his claws and, mounting to the top of the sky amog the stars, let him drop, an fell dawn to sunset." In the illustration Culoo is soaring among the stars, and appears to possess an extra pair of legs armed with claws.

Thanks Leonardo! Another great mystery is (partially) illuminated!

Human Error

Due to the absolutely shit care it received from my parents and seven-year-old sister, one of our pet red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) recently developed infections in both of its eyes and refused to eat its food.

A few days after this picture was taken, we were forced to euthanize the poor thing by wrapping it in a wet towel and placing it into the freezer. Death was painless, but infuriating nevertheless. Only sheer human error was to blame for the death of this beautiful creature that could have lived for more than forty years. Bummer.