With a quarter-century of Germany unity being observed this weekend (and importantly, we’ve been afforded many reminders to reflect on the meaning and the different stages of the reunification process that led up to this formalised recognition), it seems especially poignant that this anniversary come at time when Germany is preoccupied with a refugee-crisis, which although of a different character, does revisit many of the same challenges.
alba amicorum: the Dutch friend books of the seventeenth century, via the Presurfer
percival lowell’s canals: NASA confirms that briny water is flowing on Mars presently
Spargelzeit (Asparagus season) with all its fanfare and focus is a distant memory by now but one up-side to the change of seasons and the cool and damp days ahead is the
advent of Mushroom Time. Pfifferlinge, a savoury scalloped fungus found
on tree trunks, is my favourite—celebrated with just as much intensity,
and while any foraging for these gourmet delicacies, such work is best
left to seasoned experts, many keeping the faithful locations of the appearance of this heritage fruiting a secret guarded as well as that for a prized vintner, since there are many more varieties that are deadly poisonous than edible. This time of year, many restaurants adjust their menus—Tageskarte, Speisekarte—to showcase this time-honoured mania.
This season was quite nicely bookended by two astronomical events, I thought, what with the partial eclipse of the Sun—for those of us in Central Europe—just as the weather was beginning to wax comfortable and the Blood Super Moon just as the daylights and temperature begins to turn. I was not able to capture either event that I witnessed too terribly well and did not do justice to the Moon coloured red and by no means lost in the pre-dawn horizon but I did like the airplane flying in its direction and of course most things are better imparted first-hand and every one of us will be treated to privileged spectacles, however the rarity, I’m sure.
Perhaps a global crisis can only be solved by becoming more cosmopolitan, as this interesting article from Quartz suggests.
Faced with a comparable refugee situation in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution when all Russian expatriate were summarily stripped of their citizenship and made stateless—nearly a million diaspora and growing to include former residents of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations became the competent issuing authority for travel documents, realising that no one place could hope to absorb all the displaced. Bearers of the these passports, which were the laudable idea of Norwegian explorer Fritjof Nansen, included shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, artist Marc Chagall, author Vladimir Nabokov and composers Igor Stravinski and Sergei Rakhmaninov as well as hundreds of thousands of other souls, which entitled them to travel internationally and settle as appropriately. Such an elegant solution may need to be reinstated, with the reluctance national authorities have demonstrated for legitimising an undocumented refugee and much preferring to keep them in transit and making migrants seek out the help of smugglers rather than official channels and discard whatever official identity papers that they might have and preclude their chances of having a homeland to return to one day. Mindful that there is no place like Utopia, what do you think? Could such a scheme work again?
As if the destruction of of the ancient temples and yet to be fully studied and adjured archaeological sites by the keystone caliphate of Palmyra and other sites of historical significance were not already a great enough loss for our shared cultural heritage and the inscrutable past—purges and terrors always result in loss and revision, there is another personal legacy that I fear will fall into greater obscurity over the razing of her city, a historic character called Queen Zenobia (a somewhat strained Latinisation of the Aramaic name Beth Zaynab). Unlike her ancestor, Cleopatra of Egypt or warrior queen Boudica who’ve been celebrated for centuries for standing up to the Romans, Zenobia is mostly forgotten though her exploits.
Living during the latter half of the third century, the client province of Syria was experiencing a time of economic stability—removed from the political intrigues that were affecting the government of, a succession of weak rulers and the transition of the Empire’s capital to the East. The changing regimes did eventual visit Zenobia’s family with the usual paranoia of unproven power and assassinated the queen’s husband and heir-apparent. Instead of capitulating to the governor’s demands that the remaining royal family relinquish claims to the throne and devolve into direct Roman rule, Zenobia instead declared herself regent, ruling in the name of her infant son. Unprecedented in the potential for revolt among any of the peoples that the Roman Empire had subjugated, Zenobia socked them right in the bread-basket by conquering the province of Egypt, whose grain supplies were absolutely vital for feeding the populace, and when on taking large swaths of Anatolia (Asia Minor), crossing and controlling important trade routes, to constitute an empire that nearly rivalled that of the Sassanids on the periphery of Roman control and certainly with more strategic importance. The Palmyrene Empire was short-lived, just a mere three years but more than just a blip historically speaking as Rome had seen the year of three then four Emperors and that it survived politically in any form goes against reason, and Roman forces only were able to recapture Syria and Egypt by shifting troops out of its theatre in Gaul, effectively giving up those lands as unruly lost causes, and Zenobia was defeated on the fields of Antioch—taken to the capital in chains. Paradoxically, this revolution might have given the Western Empire the impetus to limp along a few years more. Perhaps Zenobia’s story can be a rallying point for good again. There are varying accounts as to what happened to her afterwards (Cleopatra rather dramatically avoided this humiliation—which is perhaps a reason why Shakespeare did not write a play about her) with the cheeriest accounts having the Emperor grant Zenobia clemency and she lived out her life happily in a villa in Tivoli—kept in the manner she was accustomed to and uncensored, playing a role in the community as a pre-eminent philosopher and active political advisor.
