#Greco Turkish relations

[gemsofgreece]

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.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

Hi Theitsa this might be a weird question, but is the word “Turk” itself considered insulting or does it have a negative connotation in Greece? I grew up in a Greek household abroad and I got that impression. Maybe my family is just exceptionally racist(which they are to be fair) but as a result I catch myself reacting negatively to the word itself by default. It’s was implied that becoming Muslim = becoming a turk like they are one and the same. Also that nationalities like Bosnians and Albanians “sold out” and became like the turks by converting. Idk I really don’t mean to be offensive, it’s just something I have noticed. Are these ideas at all prevalent in Greece?

Yes all that is true to a point. Turk can be used as a slur, although, not as much today. Because of the violence of Turks when we were under the Ottoman Empire, and later, in the 1821 Revolution, this ethnicity had negative connotations in the Greek collective mind. The Greek phrase "He became (a) Turk" means "he became extremely angry and violent".

Religion was the biggest identifier for centuries under the Ottoman empire. Muslims had certain benefits from the state compared to Christians so that's why the Christians considered it negative when one went to the "oppressor" side.

These all are not applicable today, of course. I would say they are far from prevalent. Many years passed since then and the sentiment fades more and more as the years pass.

I am happy to notice that through memes the Balkan people get more connected, and we can make fun of each other in a healthy way that faces these stereotypes head-on. And we realize we have more things in common and it's not worth it to stay divided. Greeks are mostly chill about Turkish people, and Turkish people are chill about us.

There is some Turkish state propaganda involved even today, that erases the Greek, Armenian and Assyrian genocide and cultural erasure but that's a "country" issue and not an ethnicity issue. Also, Greek school books tend to not treat the Greek invasion of Turkey as an invasion, and the Greek state goes too hard on "corrective action" against Muslim minorities in Greece, as a "payment" for centuries of oppression. We have issues to work on, that's for sure. But in the general sense, the people go along and I haven't heard anything bad about Turks in years in all domains of my life in Greece. Others might have, especially if they are ethnically Turkish in Greece, but these statements I think are not as spread as others.

Many immigrant Greek households abroad hold on to older ideas, the ideas their family had when they left Greece, and so some old sentiments could have remained.

[phykios]

please don't be sorry this is so cool! southern euro is basically ignored in western education and its so annoying. i do have some questions: can you expand on metaxas and the colonels? do you have book/paper recommendations on this topic? how is this related to your dissertation? also maybe percy drinks mountain tea (is that still a thing?)

OH mountain tea is such a wonderful idea, yes <3 yes i am taking that

with regards to metaxas, his big thing was establishing the "third hellenic civilization," which was basically his answer to both the third reich and the third rome (metaxas was an authoritarian with more than a few fascist leanings). it was the third civilization bc it followed the first (pagan greece) and the second (christian byzantium), and was kind of a replacement for the irredentist megali idea (lit. "the great idea") which was the greek national policy of the early 20th century to try and reconquer all "historical" greek lands, incl places like constantinople and the western shore of asia minor. the megali idea fell apart after the greco-turkish war of 1922 and the destruction of smyrna, so metaxas, with the authority/appointment of king george ii, refocused political efforts on the current territory of greece. coincidentally, a lot of really big archaeological excavations were happening at the same time, like the athenian agora and the excavation at thermopylae, so you can imagine this gave the metaxas regime MASSIVE clout in western europe

on the other hand, the greek junta took a HARD right turn into greek christian nationalism, being an even more authoritarian/fascist regime than metaxas'. they also leaned hard into the idea of greece as the "source" of western civilization, but it was largely a cover to go after suspected communist activity in greece (the regime which was heavily supported by the us, btw)

my dissertation is about music in greece in the 1940s as part of this debate on cultural continuity, so you accidentally hit my infodump button 😭 sorry lmao. if you're interested in reading some more, i'd recommend starting with Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece by michael herzfeld and then going from there

[monaluisa]

14. Dumbest reason for fandom drama

19. Has anyone ever gotten mad over how you've portrayed an character or over a headcanon or something?

20. In what ways do you think this fandom should step outside it's comfort zone

4. Best historical Hetalia takes

6. Shout out to someone on Tumblr who has the best takes for your favorite character

12. What makes this Fandom different in a positive way compared to other fandoms

14. Probably the USUK/FrUK shipping wars in the days of yore. This is my second stint in the hetalia fandom; the first one was circa 2015-2017 when it was starting to die down, and I was pretty young and inexperienced, so I heard more about the drama then I really saw, but I think any shipping war is pretty stupid. I was into ATLA early in the pandemic and somehow I got caught up in the Zutara vs. Kataang wars even though I don't really ship either of them, so I've seen how irrational shipping wars make people.

19. Not yet, because I haven't made much, but I'm always terrified of it happening lol. A central plot point in the fic I'm working on now is that Greece is trying to kill Turkey to avenge Byzantium's death, and I preemptively put a disclaimer on the fic that it wasn't a commentary on Greco-Turkish relations just in case someone got mad.

20. I know that Hetalia isn't meant to be taken seriously at all, but I love to see when people do. I'd love to see more people explore the worldbuilding of it, like their immortality; I take it that they can die (ex: falling in the ocean and drowning or something) and then come back, but we know they can also die for real because it happened to Rome and Holy Rome, and I want to know at what point they die for real. What does death mean for them when it works like that? Also, what are the implications of the nation's existence? How much do they identify with humans and human culture, and how much are they seperate from it by virtue of immortality and literally being a political entity? Are they more in charge of their nations, or are they just immortal puppets to their boss of the day? What does family mean to people who cannot die and who are rarely (if ever) biologically connected to each other in the way that humans are? And how have all these things shaped them each individually as characters? Now I'm just listing stuff I like to write about lol.

4. The HRE, Austria, and Prussia were all children together; Austria and Prussia grew up, but Holy Rome, being pretty weak, never did, and so Austria essentially became his caretaker, and watched him wither away from the 30 Years War until finally succumbing to the clusterfuck that is Napoleonic Europe. Austria was so torn up that he ordered the creation of Germany (or the German Confederation) primarily for political reasons, but also maybe as a way to replace Holy Rome as a person. Germany then spent like 1815-1866 torn between what Austria wanted him to be and what Prussia wanted him to be, all while Prussia is slowly taking the reigns from Austria and essentially forcing Germany to grow up too fast into war and conquest, ultimately pitting him against Austria in the Austro-Prussian War. Taking all of my own headcanons into consideration, I just think that Prussia, Austria, and Germany are really interesting characters to examine.

6. It's hard for me to pick a favorite character (Probably Prussia or Romano) but @sailorgreywolf-german has some of the best takes on the HRE I've seen.

12. First of all, there's the fact that you can never leave it, so like the theoretically-immortal characters, it's hard for the fandom to truly be dead. Second of all, the only thing really uniting the fandom is the concept of the show and the loosely-agreed upon characters in it, and you have all of history to work them into, so for a history nut like myself, that mean ideas come fairly easily. I wrote a fic about HRE dying where I briefly mentioned Byzantium throwing Greece off of the wall of Constantinople, so then I wrote a fic about that, and now I'm writing a fic where that wall-yeeting (and the subsequent fall of Constantinople and death of Byzantium) is a big sticking point of Greece's character. Hetalia is the gift that keeps giving lol.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.27 (after 1920)

1922 – Greco-Turkish War: The Turkish army takes the Aegean city of Afyonkarahisar from the Kingdom of Greece. 1927 – Five Canadian women file a petition to the Supreme Court of Canada, asking: "Does the word 'Persons' in Section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?" 1928 – The Kellogg–Briand Pact outlawing war is signed by fifteen nations. Ultimately sixty-one nations will sign it. 1933 – The first Afrikaans Bible is introduced during a Bible Festival in Bloemfontein. 1939 – First flight of the turbojet-powered Heinkel He 178, the world's first jet aircraft. 1942 – First day of the Sarny Massacre, perpetrated by Germans and Ukrainians. 1943 – World War II: Japanese forces evacuate New Georgia Island in the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. 1943 – World War II: Aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe razes to the ground the village of Vorizia in Crete. 1955 – The first edition of the Guinness Book of Records is published in Great Britain. 1956 – The nuclear power station at Calder Hall in the United Kingdom was connected to the national power grid becoming the world's first commercial nuclear power station to generate electricity on an industrial scale. 1962 – The Mariner 2 unmanned space mission is launched to Venus by NASA. 1963 – An explosion at the Cane Creek potash mine near Moab, Utah kills 18 miners. 1964 – South Vietnamese junta leader Nguyễn Khánh enters into a triumvirate power-sharing arrangement with rival generals Trần Thiện Khiêm and Dương Văn Minh, who had both been involved in plots to unseat Khánh. 1971 – An attempted coup d'état fails in the African nation of Chad. The Government of Chad accuses Egypt of playing a role in the attempt and breaks off diplomatic relations. 1975 – The Governor of Portuguese Timor abandons its capital, Dili, and flees to Atauro Island, leaving control to a rebel group. 1979 – The Troubles: Eighteen British soldiers are killed in an ambush by the Provisional Irish Republican Army near Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland, in the deadliest attack on British forces during Operation Banner. An IRA bomb also kills British royal family member Lord Mountbatten and three others on his boat at Mullaghmore, Republic of Ireland. 1980 – South Korean presidential election: After successfully staging the Coup d'état of May Seventeenth, General Chun Doo-hwan, running unopposed, has the National Conference for Unification elect him President of the Fourth Republic of Korea. 1982 – Turkish military diplomat Colonel Atilla Altıkat is shot and killed in Ottawa. Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide claim to be avenging the massacre of 1+1⁄2 million Armenians in the 1915 Armenian genocide. 1985 – Major General Muhammadu Buhari, Chairman of the Supreme Military Council of Nigeria, is ousted from power in a coup d'état led by Major General Ibrahim Babangida. 1985 – Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-51-I to deploy three communication satellites and repair a fourth malfunctioning one. 1991 – The European Community recognizes the independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. 1991 – Moldova declares independence from the USSR. 1992 – Aeroflot Flight 2808 crashes on approach to Ivanovo Yuzhny Airport, killing all 84 aboard. 2003 – Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing 34,646,418 miles (55,758,005 km) distant. 2003 – The first six-party talks, involving South and North Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, convene to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. 2006 – Comair Flight 5191 crashes on takeoff from Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky, bound for Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta. Of the passengers and crew, 49 of 50 are confirmed dead in the hours following the crash. 2011 – Hurricane Irene strikes the United States east coast, killing 47 and causing an estimated $15.6 billion in damage.

[psychoticen]

07.07.23 | Berlin How people’s perception can get you arrested

“What’s in a name?”, laments Juliet to her beloved Romeo in Shakespeare’s infamous play of the same name. That, if he were not a Montague and she a Capulet (in name), they would be perfect together. Unfortunately, the British Home Office does not agree. My aunt growing up as a teenager in the yuppie streets of Crouch End in the 1980s was investigated for a couple of months because of the greek (mis)spellings of her name. YEOPOULLA is not the same as GEORGINA. It seemed that the Home Office thought there might be two different people and that my grandparents had trafficked some rogue child, like out of the Greek film Eternity and a Day (there is a scene were the protagonist saves an Albanian child in Thessaloniki from being bought by people who want to illegally adopt children). She still lives in Crouch End where you can safely say that she is not being investigated at her grocery shop at M&S, but she did have to change her name via deed poll. 

Likewise, in January this year, Seán Binder, a German Irish rescue diver, and Sarah Mardini, a Syrian refugee behind Netflix’s The Swimmers, stood trial in Greece with the rescue NGO they volunteered at. While the Greek court rejected charges of espionage, they are still being investigated for human trafficking, money laundering and fraud, with a prosecutor recently appealing to reinstate the espionage charges. Seán explained that, at the time of his arrest, an article from local Greek media read “a German spy had been arrested in a military jeep trying to infiltrate a naval base to steal state secrets”. Unfortunately, Greco-German relations are still quite bitter. The whole fiasco could be compared to Nikos Perakis’s Sirens in the Aegean, a Greek satire that follows army soldiers assigned to guard a small rock island from Turkish troops. In the film, a Turkish boat is sent there for a modelling photo shoot, which results in several comic situations. At one point, the soldiers think someone is pretending to be a Kurd to get political asylum or that he might be a spy. Oxford Anthropologist, Ruben Andersson, has traced how the roots of “border security works much like what Sigmund Freud would call projection, the process by which repressed feelings are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing (i.e. an irregular migrant or asylum seeker)”. Maybe Seán and Sarah will be inspiration for a sequel before Perakis’s dies.

Many philosophers have tried to understand how one’s perception influences public policy. In the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty defines phenomenology as a method of describing the nature of our perceptual contact with the world and argues that the ultimate source of meaning and value is lived experiencewith human consciousness always assigning meaning - true or false - to the world. Thus, there is always the intersubjectivity of a person (formed by their ‘cultural environment’) guiding every conscious action. For example, Journalist Anna Funder in her book Stasiland interviews former East Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Miriam’s story, who was arrested as a 16 year old for sticking up leaflets, she tried to escape to the West one night and got as far as the last wire at the border until the sirens set off. She was tortured via sleep deprivation because, although she had acted alone and decided to escape on a whim, the Stasi wanted to extract the name of the secret, underground organisation she was a part of. They simply could not understand how a “16 year old with no tools, training, or help could crawl across their anti-facist protective measure, including a dog, on her hands and knees”. So after 10 days on interrogation, Miriam cooked up a story using Goethe’s Faust as inspiration. Despite so many loopholes and inconsistencies, the Statsi believed it because they wanted a story. After sending his men to search for this organisation, the interrogator realised she was lying because she wanted to sleep. She got 1.5 years in Staurberg.

I’m still trying to figure out how to avoid the (mis)perceptions of others, while also working on my own. Turns out we cannot separate ourselves from our perceptions of the world and we’re all screwed.

[feybeasts]

Because I don't believe in admonishment without correction, here's some topics to look at:

The fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab Revolt, and its betrayal with the Sykes-Picot Agreement

The formation of the modern Czech state from the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire

The formations of the Polish state, both during and immediately after WWI, including the Soviet-Polish War of 1920

The "Stab In The Back" myth, the postwar German civil war, and the foundations and tactics of the early fascists (unfortunately extremely relevant today- the rulebook those fuckers wrote is being played out today)

The campaigns in Bessarabia at the end of the war

The Armenian Genocide, and the Greco-Turkish population exchange and subsequent wars

The October Revolt, specifically how it was backed and supported by Imperial Germany with the return of Vladimir Lenin to Russia

The Italian Front, and their war aims, and how those not being met lead to the rise of the Faschist party in Italy

The Russian Civil War of 1919

Other topics not related to exact events but very important to your understanding of modern history:

The Suez Canal and its history

The foundations of wartime propaganda as a tool used by all sides

Fritz Haber and the creation of Chlorine Gas

Radio as a direct outgrowth of WWI, and how it became a tool of both entertainment and propaganda- specifically how it was utilized by Italy and Germany in the interwar years

If you can't name even one of the effects of WWI outside of "trenches", you have been failed in your education. The last 110 or so years of history globally point RIGHT back to the Great War, and the sheer ignorance of the causes, events, and effects of the conflict is incredibly harmful.

What, do you think the middle east just "got that way" somehow? That Lenin showed up in October of 1917 by chance? That modern Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechia, Finland have been around for centuries? That WWII started "just because"?

For every gap in your understanding of modern history, I almost guaran-fucking-tee the missing piece is "you know nothing about WWI". The modern age as we know it was pulled, bloody and screaming, from the hills of the Carpathians, the blood-soaked beaches of Gallipoli, the sands of the Arabian Peninsula- remain ignorant of how the War To End All Wars shaped us at your own peril.

[mapsontheweb]

Linguistic Origins of Province Names in Turkey.

by u/zulufdokulmusyuze

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponyms_of_Turkey and specific Wikipedia articles for provinces.

Note  that these are province names, not the names of capital cities (in a   few cases, they are different). For city names Kocaeli (currently red)   would become blue (izmit), Hatay (currently red) would become green   (Antakya), Sakarya (currently purple) would become red (Adapazarı).

When  there is ambiguity or multiple opinions (there are many such cases for  obvious reasons), I chose the option that sounded most reasonable to me.  For example, the Kurdish name for Ağrı is Agiri and it is likely that  neither was derived from Ararat, the Armenian name of the nearby   mountain. The town was founded relatively recently with a predominantly Armenian population with the name Karakilise, but that name is not in   use anymore. However, this information indicates that the Kurdish name   is also quite recent. Since there are sources claiming that the Turkish name has been in use for the mountain since medieval times, I chose   Turkish. Similarly, there are claims that Erzurum has Arabic origins,   but the Armenian root Artze likely had an influence on the Arabic  name.

Indirect  Greco-Roman means that the name of the city is not the Greco-Roman name  of the city per se, but has Greco-Roman roots. Istanbul, Bolu: The  word/phrase is Greek, Balikesir/Usak: The name is meaningful in Turkish,  but phonetically similar to the Greco-Roman name, Kirklareli: The name  is Turkish but is related to the Greek name ( Ekklisiès (Forty churches  in Greek) -> Kırkkilise (Forty churches in Turkish) -> Kırklareli  (Land of the forties in Turkish).

I posted an earlier version with Batman marked as "DC Comics" and Bilecik marked as "does not exist", but the post was removed with no explanation. I assumed this was because of the inaccuracy, thus I am posting again after removing the jokes.

[gemsofgreece]

Hey, question: what are your thoughts on baklava? Is it turkish or greek?

It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of facts and the lack of them. The answer to this is normally an one-liner but I would like to give some context because there are foreign people out there who don't understand these feuds.

The one-liner is that the origins of the baklava are unknown.

Now the context: It is funny that what you will constantly hear is the "turkish vs greek" discourse when in actuality baklava is a traditional pastry in at least a dozen more countries in the Balkans, the Middle East and South Caucasus. The reason the discourse always zooms in in these two countries is because of their historically tense relations, which makes nationalists from these places channel their frustrations even in the pettiest of topics. Another reason is that this is a region which has nurtured numerous multi-ethnic empires but Turkey and Greece are the countries which are typically the most connected to these imperial pasts.

We do not know who the cook who came up with the baklava in the Ottoman empire was or to which of the various ethnic communities of the empire they belonged. We know for a fact that baklava's name is Turkish because this was the official language of the empire. Some turkish nationalists treat the turkish name as proof but this is not a good enough reasoning in an imperial context because everything is almost always popularised via the first language of an empire. With the same reasoning, we could say that since the basis of the baklava is the phyllo (filo) dough which is a Greek word, then baklava is a turkish sweet that is half-Greek because it has a Greek basis? These things are unserious.

We also do not know whether that first cook in the Ottoman Empire created the pastry out of thin air or was heavily inspired or was copying a pastry that was already a known delicacy in these regions before the establishment of the Ottoman Empire. Actually, we know that there was a suspiciously way too similar pastry in the Byzantine Empire, named "koptoplakýs¨, a Greek name corresponding to the official language of the Byzantine Empire. We still don´t know if koptoplakys was purely a Greek recipe or it was first made by one of the other Byzantine ethnic groups or it was also inspired by something else prior to it. Several speculations place the origins of baklava and that of koptoplakys to a variety of regions, such as Ancient Greece, Armenia, the Assyrian Empire and more.

The point is that since all these regions of the Balkans, Anatolia and the Middle East were parts of empires, various ethnicities cohabitating in the same place, in the same ecosystem with the same produce, even if this coexistence was not exactly dreamy, it is natural that all these people pretty much ate similar or the same foods and such foods with "controversial" origins are genuinely part of their culinary heritage. There's no "stealing" when it comes to regular everyday things massively consumed by people living together. It's a pastry. It's not some sacred, religious or national symbol. It's a pastry, traditional and with historical presence throughout most of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Like Farya Faraji correctly says, if anything, the differences were regional and not national, since nation states are a very recent development in world history. Meaning, all these countries make the baklava but you may notice slight differentiations in each country / region's version. The standard Turkish baklava is made with pistachios. The standard Greek baklava is made with walnuts. A baklava I had in Montenegro had a lot of lemon zest in it, which definitely is not a thing in Greece. Spices can vary too.

Also, sometimes there is so much discourse about dishes with the same name when in fact the dishes are not even the same. For example, turkish and greek moussakas, another huge discourse, are literally two different dishes!

Turkish mussaka:

Greek mussaka:

(Needless to say various types of mussakas are present throughout the aforementioned regions as well, again.)

"Yes but the similarities" the similarities can be found in literally all neighbouring regions in the world, let alone in places where different ethnicities have been crammed upon each other in empires for centuries. It's inescapable and you sometimes merge so much you cannot tell who started what. (Unless in cases when we DO know thanks to documented history. Then it's a HUGE no-no to confuse or conflate different neighbouring cultures. This is often very important when it comes to actually serious things like languages, religions, historical incidents instead of... nuts and doughs.)

If you are concerned what you should define it as, simply say "I'm having an x style baklava", x being whichever nation you're getting the pastry or the recipe from. Hope that helped.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

https://www.evros-news.gr/2024/08/05/komotini-proklisi-tragoydhsan-to-embathrio-katastrofhw-thw-smyrnhw/

A Turkish Cypriot woman sang in Κομοτηνή a song about the Smyrna catastrophe... :/

A few months passed since this happened. I am sorry I couldn't reply earlier. I am not easily heated when it comes to such issues but on Greek ground, one singing a happy marching song on how their people took Smyrna, is objectively quite offensive.

Cause they didn't just "take Smyrna". They caused one of the most known massacres and destruction of cities of the early 20th century which was documented in real-time on the shores, and it was also the height of the Christian years-long genocide (Greeks, Assyrians, Armenians) they did, a genocide so cruel to the point Hitler himself was inspired by it.

The festivity was done based also on Greek funders. Out of respect to the Greek funders and the Greek town they were in, the whole production ought to stop this. There are many ways to foster community among the Turks of Komotini, and ways that are way much better than that.

It's like Israelis coming to Gaza a hundred years in the future and singing a romanticized marching song about what they did to Gaza. Simply disgusting.

[venicepearl]

Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (26 June 1914 – 24 November 2001) was by birth a Greek and Danish princess as well as Princess of Hesse-Kassel and Princess of Hanover through her successive marriages to Prince Christoph of Hesse and Prince George William of Hanover. A sister-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, she was for a time linked to the Nazi regime.

The fourth of five children of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie spent a happy childhood. Her early years, however, were affected by the First World War (1914–1918) and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). For the young princess and her relatives, these conflicts had dramatic consequences and led to their exile in Switzerland (between 1917 and 1920), and then in France (from 1922 to 1936). During their exile, Sophie and her family depended on the generosity of their foreign relatives, in particular Marie Bonaparte (who offered them accommodation in Saint-Cloud) and Lady Louis Mountbatten (who supported them financially).

At the end of the 1920s, Sohpie fell in love with one of her distant cousins, Prince Christoph of Hesse. Around the same time, her mother was struck by a mental health crisis which led to her confinement in a Swiss psychiatric hospital between 1930 and 1933. Married in December 1930, Sophie moved to Berlin with her husband. She then gave birth to five children: Christina (1933–2011), Dorothea (1934–2002), Karl (born 1937), Rainer (born 1939) and Clarissa of Hesse (born 1944).

Close to the Nazi circles, in which her husband and several of her in-laws were involved from 1930, Sophie joined the National Socialist Women's League in 1938. Deceived by Adolf Hitler, whom she saw as a modest and charming man, the princess got close to Emmy Sonnemann, who became her friend and later married Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Göring in April 1935. Attached to Nazism, Sophie and her in-laws therefore served as unofficial intermediaries between the Nazi regime and the European dynasties to which they were related. Under these conditions, the social status of Christoph and Sophie continued to improve and they moved into a large house located in Dahlem, in 1936. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, forced the couple to separate. An SS officer since 1932, Christoph joined the Luftwaffe, which led him to various European theaters of operation. For her part, Sophie moved with her children to her mother-in-law at Friedrichshof Castle in Kronberg im Taunus.

The Führer's growing distrust of the German aristocracy (from 1942) and the betrayal of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (in 1943) led the Nazi regime to turn against the House of Hesse-Kassel. Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian monarch and sister-in-law of Sophie, was thus imprisoned in Buchenwald, where she was seriously wounded and died shortly after, while her husband, Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, was confined in Flossenbürg until the victory of the Allies. At the same time, Christoph was found dead in mysterious circumstances, leaving Sophie almost alone with her four children and a fifth one under way as well as the children of Philipp and Mafalda. The tragic events made Sophie realize the true nature of Hitler's regime and turn against Nazism.

The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies brought new difficulties in the life of Sophie, who found herself in a precarious financial situation due to the theft of her jewelry by American soldiers in 1946 and the sequestration of the property of her first husband until 1953. After living for several months in Wolfsgarten, she started a relationship with another one of her cousins, Prince George William of Hanover, whom she married in 1946. She had three more children by her second husband: Welf Ernst (1947–1981), Georg (born 1949) and Friederike of Hanover (born 1954). The couple then moved to Salem, where George William worked as director of Schule Schloss Salem (1948–1959), before settling in Schliersee (from 1959).

Excluded from the 1947 wedding of her brother Prince Philip to Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom (later Queen Elizabeth II) because of her past links to the Nazi regime, Sophie was reintegrated into the royal circles in the early 1950s and attended major events of the aristocracy afterwards. She nevertheless led a discreet and withdrawn life, spending her time through reading, listening to music and gardening. The last of the Duke of Edinburgh's sisters to die, she died in a retirement home in Schliersee in 2001, after losing one of her sons in 1981 and a grandson in 1994.

[wordsmithic]

A Turkish politician chases a Greek "butterfly" for his "non-aggression pact" collection. (Cem 1 October 1927. 14498.a.91)

The butterfly, to me, resembles Eleftherios Venizelos (Ελευθέριος K. Βενιζέλος), a remarkable Greek politician of the time who played a big part in the Greco-Turkish relations of the time.

[blueiscoool]

Statue of Mythological Goddess Hygieia Found in Turkey.

Excavations in western Turkey have revealed a marble statue depicting Hygieia, the Greco-Roman goddess of health and cleanliness.

As Muharrem Cin reports for the state-run Anadolu Agency (AA), experts unearthed the life-size sculpture during digs in the ancient city of Aizanoi, located in the Çavdarhisar district of the country’s Kütahya province.

Aizanoi also houses one of the most well-preserved temples in Anatolia devoted to Zeus, the thunderbolt-carrying Greek Olympian. This second century B.C.E. structure features several doric columns and a central space known as an agora, which is where archaeologists uncovered the recently discovered statue, writes Maria Gabrielle for National Geographic Indonesia.

Speaking with AA, dig leader Gökhan Coşkun of Turkey’s Kütahya Dumlupınar University says, “We’re trying to reveal the columned galleries on the west and south wings of the agora (bazaar) and the shops right behind them.”

Experts have been excavating Aizanoi—which was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2012—for almost a decade. Per AA, a team of 100 workers and 25 technicians in the region aided this summer’s dig.

The effigy depicts a woman wearing elegant, draped clothing, but her head is missing.

“Unfortunately, it hasn’t survived to the present day, but in its current form, we can see that this statue is about the size of a human,” Coşkun tells AA.

Per Mark Beumer of World History Encyclopedia, early civilizations usually relied on rituals and herbs to cure sick people, but they also turned to deities to safeguard their health. Ancient Greeks often worshipped Hygieia alongside the medicinal god Asclepius, and a healing cult dedicated to them existed in Athens from around 500 B.C.E. until 500 C.E. After a plague broke out in Greece during the fifth century B.C.E., the cult spread, eventually reaching Rome in the second century C.E., according to Science Museum Group.

Hygieia’s devotees erected statues to the goddess in the temples of Asclepius, some of which were located in Epidaurus, Corinth, Cos and Pergamon. Per the Science Museum Group, these sculptures often showed her holding or feeding a large snake, which was the symbol of Greek medicine.

Aspects of Greco-Roman culture spread to Aizanoi when the Roman Empire took control of the region in 133 B.C.E., according to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. During Roman rule, the city’s population swelled to between 80,000 and 100,000 people, and locals often frequented various attractions around it, including the Temple of Zeus, an amphitheater that held up to 15,000 people, a theater and a mosaic bathhouse, per AA.

Per the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the metropolis reached its heyday between the second and third centuries C.E. and became “the center of the episcopacy in the Byzantine era."

Between 1970 and 2011, the German Archeology Institute excavated a number of structures in Aizanoi, including a theater, a stadium, a gymnasium, five bridges and the sacred cave of Metre Steune, a religious site dating to before the first century B.C.E.

In addition to these discoveries, experts have also uncovered other statues of Hygieia in the region.

“During past digs in Aizanoi, finds related to Hygieia were also found,” Coşkun tells AA. “This situation makes us think that there may have been some construction and buildings related to the health cult in Aizanoi during the Roman era.”

n 2017, a separate team of archaeologists also unearthed a headless, two-piece effigy of the goddess in Turkey's southern province of Adana. The nearly 5.7-foot-long limestone figure, which dates to the third or fourth century B.C.E., revealed that the area’s previous inhabitants valued medicine and pharmacology, reported the Hurriyet Daily News in 2017.

By Isis Davis-Marks.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.27 (after 1900)

1908 – The Qing dynasty promulgates the Qinding Xianfa Dagang, the first constitutional document in the history of China, transforming the Qing empire into a constitutional monarchy. 1914 – World War I: Battle of Étreux: A British rearguard action by the Royal Munster Fusiliers during the Great Retreat. 1914 – World War I: Siege of Tsingtao: A Japanese fleet commanded by Vice Admiral Sadakichi Kato imposes a blockade along the whole coastline of German Tsingtao, initiating the Siege of Tsingtao. 1915 – Attempted assassination of Bishop Patrick Heffron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona, by Rev. Louis M. Lesches. 1916 – World War I: The Kingdom of Romania declares war on Austria-Hungary, entering the war as one of the Allied nations. 1918 – Mexican Revolution: Battle of Ambos Nogales: U.S. Army forces skirmish against Mexican Carrancistas in the only battle of World War I fought on American soil. 1922 – Greco-Turkish War: The Turkish army takes the Aegean city of Afyonkarahisar from the Kingdom of Greece. 1927 – Five Canadian women file a petition to the Supreme Court of Canada, asking: "Does the word 'Persons' in Section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?" 1928 – The Kellogg–Briand Pact outlawing war is signed by fifteen nations. Ultimately sixty-one nations will sign it. 1933 – The first Afrikaans Bible is introduced during a Bible Festival in Bloemfontein. 1939 – First flight of the turbojet-powered Heinkel He 178, the world's first jet aircraft. 1942 – First day of the Sarny Massacre, perpetrated by Germans and Ukrainians. 1943 – World War II: Japanese forces evacuate New Georgia Island in the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. 1943 – World War II: Aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe razes to the ground the village of Vorizia in Crete. 1955 – The first edition of the Guinness Book of Records is published in Great Britain. 1956 – The nuclear power station at Calder Hall in the United Kingdom was connected to the national power grid becoming the world's first commercial nuclear power station to generate electricity on an industrial scale. 1962 – The Mariner 2 unmanned space mission is launched to Venus by NASA. 1963 – An explosion at the Cane Creek potash mine near Moab, Utah kills 18 miners. 1964 – South Vietnamese junta leader Nguyễn Khánh enters into a triumvirate power-sharing arrangement with rival generals Trần Thiện Khiêm and Dương Văn Minh, who had both been involved in plots to unseat Khánh. 1971 – An attempted coup d'état fails in the African nation of Chad. The Government of Chad accuses Egypt of playing a role in the attempt and breaks off diplomatic relations. 1975 – The Governor of Portuguese Timor abandons its capital, Dili, and flees to Atauro Island, leaving control to a rebel group. 1980 – 1980 South Korean presidential election: After successfully staging the Coup d'état of May Seventeenth, General Chun Doo-hwan, running unopposed, has the National Conference for Unification elect him President of the Fourth Republic of Korea. 1980 – A massive bomb planted by extortionist John Birges explodes at Harvey's Resort Hotel in Stateline, Nevada, after a failed disarming attempt by the FBI. Although the hotel is damaged, no one is injured. 1991 – The European Community recognizes the independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. 1991 – Moldova declares independence from the USSR. 2003 – Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing 34,646,418 miles (55,758,005 km) distant. 2003 – The first six-party talks, involving South and North Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, convene to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

[kavkasia]

hey jade I know you said you're busy but 👉👈 could you tell us more about your georgia of? i love the vibes I get from him and I'm not very well versed in the history of the caucasus so I'd love to hear more about him 👀

You know the way to my heart... ❤️

I’m going to ramble, so if you want me to expand on anything don’t be afraid to send an ask about it! I’m just trying to compact my notes and not write one giant paper LOL.

NAME

Human Name: Giorgi (Ilias Dze / Ilyich) Davitashvili

Giorgi — His first name actually started as a joke (Georgia... Giorgi... very clever) but it also works well. The patron saint of Georgia is Saint George: a military saint which has been popular in Georgia for centuries (parts of Georgia post-Christianization are believed to have combined the cult of Saint George with the cult of the pre-Christian moon god Armazi). Giorgi is also the most common male name in Georgia and the name of many Georgian kings.

Ilias Dze / Ilyich — He doesn’t actually use his patronymic anymore, but during the USSR he did have one because Obligatory Russification Time™. It’s after Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, a major contributor to the revival of the Georgian national movement in the late nineteenth century and widely considered to be the “Father of the Nation”.

Davitashvili — A Georgian surname roughly meaning “David’s child”. It’s a reference to the Bagratoni King David IV of Georgia (also known as David the Builder) who is famous for keeping the Seljuk Turks out of Georgia at the Battle of Didgori. It was under his reign that Georgia began to experience its Golden Age and much of the Caucasus region fell into Georgian hands.

AGE

He is around 2500 years old (physically he is in his mid-late 40s).

He considers himself to be an ancient nation like Armenia and Iran. Not that he’s wrong! It’s just not often acknowledged by others who aren’t familiar with him.

PERSONALITY

[steals bits of this from my RP blog because I got tired from linking wikis in an upcoming section oops]

MBTI: ESFP

• hospitable • sociable • stubborn • prideful • short-tempered • charismatic • confident • passionate • brave • spontaneous • lazy • sincere • boisterous •

Ok, listen. He is a bit of an asshole I’m not going to lie LMAO.

He is the type of guy that argues a point even when he knows jack shit about it (he knows more than a professional!!).

He has an opinion on everything.

He is super prideful to the point where he genuinely believes his culture is superior and his language/food/people/etc. are the best.

He has a bit of a temper (the kind that just jumps out with some build up) and he is sensitive to feeling slighted.

He is a flirt but it is not cool at all. He is an attractive guy (I have a reason lol) but he uses the worst pick up lines.

At the same time:

He is very devoted and loves genuine relationships. If you gain his favour he will do almost anything for you (there is also the reverse of this though).

He is so hospitable he is famous for it.

He treats his guests with the utmost respect.

He can be very chivalrous towards women (but it can come from a sexist place oops).

He is very friendly once you break through his initial serious shell.

He loves jokes and anecdotal humour.

Miscellaneous:

He loves rugby, wrestling, football, singing, dancing, wine, this movie, and eating absurd amounts of (hopefully Pasanauri) khinkali.

He hates rules, not having enough money for cigarettes, if you put on a seat belt when he’s driving, criticism, refusal, and being called “Gruzia.”

He also plays the panduri.

TIMELINE

Before I start, I have to say Giorgi is not a collective personification of Georgia. Giorgi is actually the personification of the Kartlians! He just has the title of Georgia and so represents the nation on the international level (and also the domestic level depending on the situation).

Start (~5th century BC)

I pinpoint his “birth” to be around when several Anatolian tribes settled in Eastern Georgia and merged with the local tribes. He had a couple caretakers who were like siblings or sibling-parents.

Kingdom of Iberia (Kingdom of Kartli) (302 BC–580 AD)

In this period he gets baptized, starts loving God and Jesus (becoming the second nation in the world to adopt Christianity) and says no to paganism (but lowkey-highkey pagan practices were kept up for a long time).

Also, Iberia is the Greco-Roman name that is used for the area. When you see Iberia, know that it’s Kartli.

Principality of Iberia (588–888)

He is just trying to live his life but the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Iran are ruining everything by fighting over the area. He also continues to love God and Jesus.

Kingdom of the Iberians (888–1008)

Lots of politics. Honestly, I hate it here.

Kingdom of Georgia (1008–1490)

The Battle of Didgori happens during this period and it was the best moment of his life. He has several amazing rulers including King Tamar. Lots of wars against the Byzantine Empire, various Turkic states and more. Eventually, the kingdom breaks up.

Kingdom of Kartli (1478–1762)

Here he gets fucked over by Safavid Iran multiple times and also works as a weird slave soldier too so life is great.

Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti (1762–1801)

He has a short marriage to Kakheti that ends after he gets completely fucked over by Russia and then forcibly annexed into the Russian Empire.

Georgia Governorate (apart of the Russian Empire) (1801–1917)

There were actually several governorates in this period but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to list it as that one.

I have a small write up about the time here.

Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (1918)

The Caucasus splits off from Russia. Giorgi represents Georgia and the TDFR (Armenia and Azerbaijan are also there as co-representatives of the TDFR). The Entente will later say they need to stick together but they forget one crucial detail:

Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918–1921)

Georgia splits off from the TDFR. Time to create a republic with a socialist government! Amazing! Too bad he’s the wrong kind of socialist according to the Bolsheviks and gets brutally stomped by the Red Army in 1921! 

All his neighbours want to fight in this period as well. The Entente also won’t commit to helping Georgia until it’s too late because they were suspicious of him after he had been forced to ask the German Empire for protection in 1918.

Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (1921–1991)

Listen, the USSR was terrible, but at least Georgia was actually one of the nicer Soviet republics because he won the geographic lottery. He even got stereotyped as being the rich republic.

We just aren’t allowed to talk about Russification or the purges or the discrimination or the fact they would only print Georgia’s most iconic piece of literature in Russian.

(Oh, it’s also my headcanon that until 1936 he shared the title of USSR with the other republics.)

Georgia (1991–present)

1990s sucked. 2000s sucked. 2010s sucked. 2020 sucks.

Summary:

NOTABLE RELATIONS

Ukraine

Best friend. Best girl. His Suliko. He loves her.

(I also have way too many dumb AUs for them 😭)

Lithuania

Other best friend. They call each other by their proper names because fuck Russian names. Also, this video is them (Giorgi is the wrestler).

Kakheti

They were married at one point in time. He is closest to her out of all the other Kartvelian regions (it’s the Eastern Georgian solidarity).

Armenia

He is like a brother but they only really acknowledge that when they’re in a good mood or when one wants something from the other. It’s a love-hate relationship that has gone on for centuries.

Russia

Azerbaijan

They are... okay. They go from tolerating to disliking each other pretty quickly. He hates when he hangs out with her and Turkey and they only speak Turkish to each other so he ends up being a third wheel that didn’t want to be here in the first place but his economic situation means he has to show up.

Iran

They had major issues but things are fine now, I guess.

Okay, Giorgi actually still has some issues, but Iran just wants to come over for a vacation sometimes.

EU and NATO

BUT YEAH UM... that’s Giorgi. This is all mostly surface level stuff so again, if you want me to expand on anything just ask. Thank you for the ask and ily. ❤️

[cincinnatusvirtue]

The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842):  Britain’s Great Game ends up meeting a dead end...

 The region of Afghanistan has a long and varied history, one that is rugged like its topography of many mountain ranges, valleys and deserts.  Its mix of barren wastes, snowy caps and forested patches of oasis.  Its history has placed it at the crossroads of the geopolitical focus over the centuries.  The focus of empires and of trade, often trying to assert its own path in history but so often a focal point of foreign ambition.  As always to appreciate the modern we need to go back to earlier times.

Early History:

-Afghanistan is a patchwork of peoples, a testament to its status as a crossroads of empires over the ages.  Primarily it sits in the eastern end of the ethnolinguistic region of Iranian peoples, a mix of ethno linguistically related but diverse groups of peoples from Persians (Farsi), Kurds, Ossetians, Baloch to Pashtun and Tajik among others.  The latter two being the primary groups found in Afghanistan today, along with smaller Iranian groups like the Hazara & Baloch.  Others include the Turkic Uzbek and Turkmens and a small number of Arabs.  

-In ancient times Afghanistan was home to Iranian groups known as Bactrians & Sogdians who inhabited portions of the country.  These peoples were incorporated into their fellow Iranians sphere of influence, the first Persian or Achaemenid Empire.  This empire stretched from the Indus Valley in the East (modern Pakistan/India) to Greece and the Balkans in the West.  Members of these groups served in the Persian Empire’s army but maintained their own traditions too.  It is widely believed that the religion of the Persian Empire and of most Iranians in this time was Zoroastrianism, founded by Zoroaster in the region of Balkh in North Central Afghanistan.  This religion would serve in some ways as an influence on the monotheistic Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity & Islam later on history.

-During Alexander the Great’s march to conquer the Persian Empire, having defeated the Persians in three major battles and taken the western half of their empire, he sought to conquer the eastern half too which took him into the modern region of Afghanistan.  The Macedonian armies under Alexander founded new cities here and brought forth Greek culture which began to merge with the local religion and culture.  This Hellenistic culture spread as far as India as with Greek paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism all mixing in the same cities as times.  In the wake of Alexander’s death, his empire which essentially replaced the Persian Empire had no set structure of succession and quickly dissolved into portions going to his various generals.  The largest expanse of which was the Seleucid Empire which spanned the whole of the Iranian plateau to India and to the Levant, this included Afghanistan.  The region underwent many changes with portions being given to the Indian superpower of the day, the Mauryan Empire and later a successful uprising against the Seleucids, forming the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom which found itself at war with the Parthian Empire, a resurgent Iranian Empire which swept away the remnants of Seleucid Greek rule.  These wars left Afghanistan open to nomadic invasions, namely from the nomadic branch of Iranians from the Eurasian steppe, coming in different waves.  The Yuezhi and Scythians, the Scythians would later establish a kingdom that controlled portions of the region, the Indo-Scythian Kingdom as did the Yuezhi which became the Kushan Empire.  Eventually this gave way to the second Persian Empire or Sassanid Empire which took over the region.

-All the while this region sat along the Silk Road spanning from the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire in the West to the Han Chinese in the East.  Goods and peoples of different backgrounds travelled through the region, most just passing through but they all shared their influence, establishing Afghanistan as an important crossroads of commerce and not just conquest.  Additionally, ancient sources attest to portions of Afghanistan, namely the region around the city of Herat being a major source of grain due to fertile farmlands in Central Asia as well as supplying vineyards of grapes for winemaking in the Persian world.

-In terms of religion, Afghanistan reflected the many changes of its many ruling peoples religions remaining a hub of Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism along with lingering elements of Greek culture.  This would change with the eventual downfall of the Sassanids in the 7th Century AD to the Islamic Caliphates and their gradual expansion over the Iranian plateau.  Overtime Islam began to gradually take hold as the religion over the area but it was still set side by side with numerous other faiths and lived in relative tolerance to the other faiths.  Eventually the Ghaznavid and Ghurid & Khwarazmian dynasties ruled over the area, a mix of Iranian and Turkic peoples who gradually made Islam the unifying religion of the region by the Middle Ages.  

-The Mongols would invade and devastate the region in the 13th century.  The devastation was so complete that the many settled cities were ruined, forcing the peoples of Afghanistan back into rural agrarian societies, something which has not been fully removed from the majority of Afghan society today.  Overtime the peoples of Afghanistan, a region long noted for its literary, especially Islamic poetic contributions and had been a hotbed crossroads of cultural interfacing, was now reverted to an mostly tribal agrarian society once more.  With some centers of learning gone forever  Its peoples divided along ethnolinguistic grounds and into clans from there. 

-There was somewhat a renaissance in the ages with the Turco-Mongol ruler, Timur and his empire ruled with new additions to architecture and culture contributed to the region but this was short lived.  Meanwhile, a descendant of Timur named Babur would base himself in Afghanistan before launching an invasion of India and upon overtaking the Sultanate of Delhi, became the founder and ruler of the new Mughal Empire, the Islamic superpower that was to overrun much of India and dominate the subcontinent and beyond in the coming two centuries.

-Meanwhile, Afghanistan once more found itself on the fringe of an Iranian power, half the country at max was under the control of the Safavid Empire, a Kurdish dynasty that took power in Persia and expanded to reclaim historical “Persian” lands.  Indeed the Persian (Farsi) language was regarded as the lingua franca of the region for centuries and was the language of the learned and most educated in the Islamic world as a whole, whereas Arabic was for mostly religious celebration.  Persian was the language of government and the arts.

-Safavid rule was tenuous at best and their primary focus was facing the Turkish Ottomans to the west, leaving much of Afghanistan to de-facto local rule.  Here the tribal societies that have dominated Afghanistan to the modern era, in part a result of the resumption of rural life after the Mongol destruction of the major cities held sway, with tribal leaders functioning as more or less warlords among the Pashtun and Tajik peoples and their various clans among others ruled over certain sections of the country.  Only Islam united them in their differences.  Much time was spent raiding and fighting each other, along with the few travelers who ventured into this increasingly isolated and remote portion of the world.

-The Hotak dynasty of Pashtuns had a hand in the downfall of the Safavids which was increasingly corrupted and weakened by intrigue at the royal court.  In the wake of this, a Turco-Persianate ruler named Nader Shah took the reins in Persia and put down the Hotaks before setting up his own short lived Persian Empire, known as the Afsharid dynasty which pillaged the Mughals in India and defeated the Ottomans several times before Nader Shah was killed and his successors failed to maintain control.  In Afghanistan, another Pashtun dynasty, the Durrani took power in the middle 18th century.

-The Durrani would for the first time in the modern age have a local Afghan power base that expanded beyond the borders of Afghanistan with any longer lasting impact.  These mostly Pashtun peoples supported by some Persians invaded and controlled portions of India, defeating the Hindu superpower, the Maratha Empire at the peak of their powers at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761.  However the Durrani dynasty and its Emirate of Afghanistan, was weakened through ongoing external and internal pressures, military defeats from the Qajar dynasty in Persia and the new Sikh Empire in the Indian Punjab put closed in their borders.  Eventually, internal conflict led to the fall of the Durrani dynasty with one its Emirs (leader), Shuja Shah going into exile in India hoping to return to rule.  By 1823 the country had fractured into many smaller entities with civil war taking place until by 1837 Dost Mohammed Khan, founder of the Barakzai dynasty took power as Emir and reunited the country...

The Great Game:  

-The exile of Shuja Shah and rise of the Barakzai dynasty in Afghanistan after much civil war by the end of the 1830′s was the state into which Afghanistan again entered wider geopolitics.  Namely amidst the geopolitical struggle between the British and Russian Empires.  Called the Great Game by the British as Tournament of Shadows by the Russians, this rivalry for geopolitical and economic influence was a likened to a game of chess whereby each power vied for influence, mostly through proxies, a precursor to the Cold War of the 20th Century between the US and USSR.  Afghanistan it was hoped by both Empires would be one of those proxies.

-The British since the 16th and 17th centuries had pushed to become a naval power as well and felt that international commerce was the way to expand their economic and political power.  Along with the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch they all took an interest in naval power and setting up colonies in other parts of the world.  In Asia, the Indian subcontinent became their primary focus.  It was rich in resources such as tradable goods like cotton, silks, spices, jewels, salt, opium, various minerals and other commodities.  It was also a vital link in the idea of a global empire in protecting commerce links on the way to Indonesia and China.  Denying their main rival, France, influence in India was of high importance and by the mid 18th century, they became the unrivalled European power defeating the French at the Battle of Plassey during the Seven Years War.  India was not united in any meaningful fashion at the time locally with various empires, kingdoms and principalities fighting locally over this vast area.  They were divided by various ethnicities, religions and the usual drives of personal power and wealth.  Due to this division, the Europeans who first established small trading factories gradually could expand their power to the interior of India and through mutual alliances of convenience between them and their local Indian trading partners they could compete with other Europeans.  For some Indians, the European powers were initially more to their benefit, their presence was small but their weapons and military advantages were far superior giving them a strategic advantage over their opponents.  In time, this power dynamic changed as the Indians had to continually grant the Europeans more power, namely the British who routinely defeated the Indians and began ceding more territory to them.  Also the British’s vast wealth could now employ Indians against other Indian powers.  Especially after France’s defeat at Plassey, no other Europeans seriously threatened the British interests.  Britain’s East India Company, a joint-stock venture given great autonomy in the name of the British Crown had its own military, its own military officers school and total monopolies over half the world’s trade at one point.

-The British East India Company’ army had British officers, mostly Indian rank and file soldiers called sepoys and occasional regular British army regiments to complement it in its venture to conquer the whole of India by any means necessary.  The East India Company also known as the Company had since the 17th century established a number of trading posts, most importantly Calcutta which was the capital of Bengal in the eastern portion of the country.  This was decisively established after defeating the French and remnants of the crumbling Mughal Empire which they supported and which had declined since the 18th century due to the rising power of the Maratha Empire, India’s last great Hindu superpower before the British era.  

-Britain focused their efforts of conquest on south India, first defeating after much initial difficulty the Kingdom of Mysore, run by Tipu Sultan.  Later, battling the Maratha Empire which had piqued by the mid 18th century.  Following their defeat by the Afghan Durrani Empire at the Third Battle of Panipat, the Maratha started a gradual decentralization that led to civil war, the Company got involved trying to place their preferred candidates in power in the Maratha hierarchy.  The first war saw a British defeat but by the early 19th century, the British with Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, fought a second war, defeating the Marathas at Assaye from which they gained territory.  They finished off the Marathas in 1818 and had by then essentially absorbed the whole of India with exception of the Punjab where the Sikh Empire had arisen under Maharaja Ranjit Singh at the end of the 18th century and grew in power in the first decades of the 19th century.  The Sikhs had thrown off the last remnants of the Mughals in their realm and then pushed out the Afghans on their borders too.

-The Sikh Empire like many Indian powers used foreign mercenaries and officers from Europe & America to join their ranks, supply them with European and American style military training doctrine and supply them with the latest in military technology which far surpassed anything made in India at the time.  The Sikh army was quite strong and had French officers providing most of the training,  the Company’s default position was to make an alliance with them.  The Sikh’s had troubles with Afghanistan, namely over the city of Peshawar and the Khyber Pass.  

-The Russians for their part had expanded from Russia over the whole of Siberia towards the Pacific, this process had begun in the late 1500’s and was completed by the end of the 17th century.  Leading to Russian exploration and colonization in Alaska and elsewhere in the Pacific during the 18th century.

-Russian expansion into Central Asia was in part a result of their off and on conflicts with the Ottomans and Persians in the past.  By the second decade of the 19th century with the threat of Napoleonic France gone, their attention turned to maintaining a balance of power in Europe and a free rein in Central Asia.  The threat to their influence as they saw it was Britain, which Russian tsars, namely Nicholas I, viewed with suspicion as far too “liberal” for their belief in absolute monarchy and conservative values.  The British in turn were suspicious of Russian threats to their geopolitical spheres, namely gaining too much power at the expense of the Ottoman Empire or more directly to British India which was after the American Revolution to become the crown jewel in their global empire.  

-The Russians gradually defeated the various Islamic emirates in Central Asia, taking over modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.  The process was drawn out over several decades but through military conquest by the late 19th century would be achieved.  It was as this Russian encroachment neared Afghanistan, that alarm amongst the British in India began to be raised…

The British Misinterpret Everything:

-Britain’s government and the East India Company misinterpreted the Russian view of events.  It is true Russia sought to expand its influence but the British interpreted the expansion into Central Asia as meaning only one thing, eventual invasion and conquest of British India.  Only Tsar Paul I in 1800 seriously pressed for an invasion of British India but he was assassinated and the plans for invasion never thought of as a practical reality by most in Russia’s military were cancelled.  The Russians did want increased political influence in the area but even the most conservative of Russian tsars always believed a reproach with Britain could be obtained.  

-The British also saw civil war in Afghanistan as well as the strength of the Sikh Empire as threats to their border and greater sphere of influence in India.  The conflict between the Sikhs and Afghans meant they had to choose sides, they couldn’t be an alliance with both.  Precisely, because of this conflict and the greater specter of Russian influence did Britain find itself on a course for war.

-In Afghanistan, the British and Russians had spies and intelligence agents acting as emissaries.  The British had Scotsman Alexander Burnes, who joined the British East India Company.  Burnes was stationed in Kabul and in turn his presence spurred the Russians to counter with their own envoy, the Polish-Lithuanian born Jan Prosper Witkiewicz.  Both British and Russian envoys hoped to make an alliance with Afghanistan’s emir, Dost Mohammad Khan against the other.  The emir for his part sought to regain Peshawar, recently lost to the Sikhs.  This, however put the British in an awkward position, Company controlled India bordered the Sikh Empire and both sides had a mutual if tense respect for one another.  The Sikh Empire was the last major independent kingdom of India outside of British rule and while Britain sought to eventually neutralize it, now was not the time.  Furthermore, the Sikhs had a large standing army, with European doctrine, modern weapons and European officers who could pose a threat to British India, a threat they saw as greater than Afghanistan.  Afghanistan had no formal army, only tribal men with tribal loyalties but nominally served their overlord the emir in times of national defense.  

-Dost Mohammed Khan wasn’t enthused about the Russians to begin with but he believed the entertaining of an alliance might force the British to offer their alliance.  Instead, given the British calculations of realizing they couldn’t support the Afghans over the more powerful Sikhs but also couldn’t abide the possibility of s Russian allied Afghanistan, moved closer to a casus belli for war.  

-Burnes was apparently distraught at the arrival of the Russian envoy in 1836-1837, he wrote panicked reports.  The Russians in turn reported on British maneuvers in Kabul.  The British governor-general of India, Lord Auckland sent what amounted to a cease and desist letter to Dost Mohammed Khan.  The letter was very demanding of Khan, ordering him to not negotiate with the Russians or even receive them as envoys.  Khan was angered by this but wanted to avoid war.  He had his own advisor, an American named Josiah Harlan talk to Burnes.  Burnes argued he could only report on matters not make policy directly himself, Harlan saw this as merely stalling on his part and on his advice Khan expelled the British mission.

-Lord Auckland was now determined to force Afghanistan to submit to British demands.  Furthemore, Russia and Afghanistan couldn’t come to a deal and their mission too broke down.  Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s major western city, Herat was besieged by Qajar Persia with Russian material support.  Fearful the Russians might use this as a pretext to invade Afghanistan proper, Auckland would in turn use it as a pretext to restore “order” in Afghanistan.

-Auckland reached a reproach with Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Maharaja.  His goal was to fend off the Persians and their Russian support.  He would also depose Dost Mohammed Khan as emir, seeing him as too unfriendly to British interests by his earlier negotiations with the Russians, as well his conflict with the Sikhs, who the British treated as a nominal ally at the time.  His plan included placing the former Durrani emir, Shuja Shah on the throne once more.  Shah had lived in exile in British india since 1818 and had been deposed in 1809.  In the three decades since he last reigned, he was hardly remembered by anyone, aside from those who remembered his cruelty that had led to his deposition in the first place.  Shah had been given a Company pension and comfortable living in exile, considered a useful pawn in British geopolitics, he in turn was willing to ally with anyone who would support his restoration to the throne.  Auckland was led to believe that Shah was actually popular and that the instability in Afghanistan meant Khan was unpopular himself, the inverse turned out to be the case...

The First-Anglo-Afghan War:

-By October 1838, Auckland sent the so called Simla Declaration which resolved the British and the Sikhs to march in Afghanistan and restore Shuja Shah to the throne on the grounds that Dost Mohammed Khan was unpopular, had lead to instability within the country, was a threat to the Sikhs and British by extension and given rise to the prospect of foreign (Russian) interference.

-In Punjab, Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh held a grand parade of the so-called Grand Army of the Indus which would march in Afghanistan jointly to bring “order”.  Two things happened in the interim.  The Persian siege of Herat was called off and the Russian tsar had recalled his envoy altogether.  The British pretexts for war ended before war began.  Auckland and others heading the Company’s policy in India however were deadset to commit to a military operation, believing Afghanistan essentially needed to be put in its place, meaning it needed a British backed ruler who would amount to a puppet and could put British interests in the region first.

-December 1838 saw the British East India Company’s 21,000 strong army set out for Afghanistan. Composed of British and Indian troops (mostly rank and file Indians and British officers) along with nearly 40,000 Indian camp followers, Indian servants, families and even prostitutes following too.  Ranjit Singh in the end backed out of the plan, not sending any troops to aid in Afghanistan.

-The British trek took months to cross the snowy Hindu Kush mountains.  Finally they reached the area near Kandahar in April 1839.  From there they waited two months until better conditions in the summer to march to Kabul.  The British found themselves having to besiege the fortress-city of Ghazni in July.  Eventually upon destroying a weakened gate, they breached the city and after much fighting captured the city.

-Khan upon hearing of Ghazni’s fall, offered a surrender to the British, he was replied with removal of his position on the throne to a life of exile in India, this was unacceptable, so the march to Kabul continued, though Ghazni remained occupied.

-A battle took place outside of Kabul which forced Dost Mohammed Khan to flee the city, the British entered and Shuja Shah was placed on the throne.  The war was seemingly at end, the main objective achieved, Khan’s removal and Shah placed on the throne.  Most of the British Indian force returned to India, leaving some 8,000 to occupy Afghanistan in various places from Kandahar to Kabul.

-The initial invasion was successful but the occupation and continued support of Shuja Shah was costly in terms of public relations for the British.  Shah resumed his cruelty, he punished and executed those who he considered traitors from decades before.  By his own admission, his people were dogs in need of “obedience” and corrective punishment.  He raised taxes which hurt the already impoverished economy.  This hurt his limited popularity along with his essentially martial rule, upheld by the British.  Now, a guerilla war phase was being instituted by various Afghan groups, some loyal to Khan and some just offended by the presence of foreign invaders.

-The British for their part did not help matters.  Many officers imported their families from India into Kabul, where they took residence in a cooler mountain valley climate, they created gardens and set up English country gentrified life in the Afghan capital.  Some English customs weren’t especially troublesome to the Afghans, tea drinking socials, cricket and polo, even ice skating on frozen ponds in the winter which actually amazed the Afghans having never before seen such a thing.

-However, the more the British lingered, the sense they'd never leave crept in, their presence in the daily markets brought raised prices which coupled with higher taxes meant they were linked with such economic hardship.  The British also drank alcohol and had wine cellars fully stocked, in a devout Muslim country this was offensive given Islamic prohibitions on alcohol.  However, most trying for the Afghan populace was the sexual relations between the occupiers and Afghan women.  British men soon found themselves acquiring the services of willing Afghan women for prostitution.  Afghanistan was quite poor to begin with and coupled with hardships brought on by the invasion a number of Afghan women, married or unmarried found themselves becoming prostitutes to the British.  Afghan women realized even the lowest paid British soldier was more wealthy than Afghan men, so their turns to prostitution were not unsurprising.  Others willingly entered into romantic relationships with the British and indeed some British officers did marry Afghan women, including daughters of tribal leaders.  This development offended the Afghan men, particularly the Pashtun who had a sense of society that revolved around honor to manhood, any slight real or imagined could be responded to with justified violence in their code of honor.  The Pashtun men could enact honor killings on women who fraternized with the British, on the grounds that these women brought shame to the men in their family for engaging in immoral behavior and for sleeping with infidel Christians.

-The guerilla war that developed in reaction to the British also spurred their sense of prolonging their stay.  Shuja Shah knew more British was the only way to ensure his continued reign.  Isolated British outposts or patrols could be attacked in ambush due to fighters whose entire fighting style relied less on technical skill or discipline beyond waging ambushes and raids.  Most Afghan warriors would have been armed with little more than an old matchlock musket or possibly a dagger or sword.

-The British nevertheless were negotiating with Shuja Shah to develop a standing army and do away with the tribal levy system.  He argued there was not enough infrastructure or more succinctly, funding to maintain a standing army.  So the British occupation dragged on.  

-Dost Mohammed Khan was eventually taken prisoner and exiled to India.  However, his sons continued to wage the war on their dynasty’s behalf.

- By 1841, George Elphinstone was in charge of the British forces in Kabul, most of his time was spent bed ridden with gout and other ailments.  

-Early November, saw in motion a planned uprising.  For months through Shuja, tribal chieftains had their loyalty earned by bribes of money.  The British used this as a way to pacify the resistance with some success but it was a tenuous development.  The spark for the uprising in Kabul came from British agent, Alexander Burnes.  Burnes had been particularly well known for his sexual relations and womanizing of Afghan women and was viewed as largely a focal point of the resentment Afghans had towards the British.  The final straw came when a slave girl from Kashmir who belonged to a Pashtun chieftain escaped to Burnes home.  At first the chieftain sent retainers to retrieve the girl, only to find Burnes in the act of sleeping with her himself, Burnes own guards then beat the retainers and sent them on their way.  The chieftain, having his code of honor offended along with other chieftains, proclaimed jihad.  The next morning a large riot broke out at Burnes residence in Old Kabul, away from the British camp which had moved to the outside of town.  Burnes, his brother and others were hacked to death by the angry mob, their beheaded skulls placed on pikes for display.  Shuja Shah sent a single British regiment to put down the events, it suffered casualties and was forced to return.  Shuja realized the people were rebelling against him and the British and he was effectively overthrown.

-Elphinstone was gripped with indecision on how to deal with the matter, he wrote to the Company Civil Administrator, William Macnaughten. Macnaughten tried to negotiate with Akbar Khan, son of Dost Mohammed, with an eye towards making him vizier, in exchange for extending the British stay.  Macnaughten also negotiated with other tribal leaders to assassinate Akbar Khan.  The news of these two faced dealings led to Macnaughten being captured and killed by Khan’s men, his body dragged through the streets of Kabul.

-Elphinstone realized it was time to withdraw, the British presence no longer tenable.  The Afghans had not attacked the encampment directly due to the concentrated British strength but these appeared to be only a matter of time.  He made the decision to withdraw the garrison, 4,500 strong with 12,000 camp followers including family and mostly Indian servants and some Afghan women who preferred life with their British lovers as opposed to facing the wrath of their angered families who would kill them for shaming them.

-January 1842 saw Elphinstone’s withdrawal in a massive column through snowy passes.  The retreat dragged out for weeks with little food, bad weather and repeated attacks from Pashtun guerillas who attacked and killed as many as they could.  Repeatedly, Elphinstone met with Akbar Khan to call off the attacks, Khan allowed the English women and children to return to Kabul to be ransomed later, but the Indian camp followers were not spared, they were forced to freeze to death in the snowy passes.  Meanwhile as Elphinstone and the army marched on, the attacks continued with Khan playing Elphinstone for a fool.  Eventually, he treated Elphinstone to a good meal before taking him prisoner, Elphinstone would die as a hostage some months later.  The 44th Foot, the only all British regiment made a famous last stand fending off many Afghan charges before being overrun.  The British column was mostly starved, frozen or hacked to death in the passes, most of the victims being Indian sepoys or their families and camp followers (servants) of the British officers. Some British women and children remained in Afghan captivity for a time, with some being ransomed and released, most being well treated.  Some women were forced to marry their captors and others as children were adopted into Afghan families, some living into the early 20th century in Afghanistan.  Only one British doctor and some scattered sepoys survived the ordeal at all.  Much of this episode was detailed by Lady Florentia Sale in a diary, later published to great acclaim.  She would spend nine months in captivity before her and her daughter were rescued by the British.

-The Afghans stormed the other British garrisons but all these attacks were repelled, in turn British reinforcements were arriving from India.  These reinforcements subsequently beat Akbar Khan in a pitched battle.  Plans were underway for a retaking of Kabul with a new larger force but Lord Auckland suffered a stroke and was replaced by Lord Ellenborough as Governor-General of India.  Plus, elections in Britain’s parliament brought a new government with orders to change policy, withdraw from Afghanistan, which found itself in a military stalemate.  A last battle took place in which Akbar Khan who was routinely defeated in pitched battles was beaten again with huge casualties at Kabul.  However, the measure was merely punitive for the deaths of Elphinstone’s column. The Company at government orders withdrew all British troops from Afghanistan, having inflicted numerous deaths on the Afghan side and destroyed more forts of theirs but politically been unable to change the situation.

-Dost Mohammaed Khan was allowed to return where he co-ruled with his son Akbar who eventually died in 1845, possibly poisoned on orders from his father, who is rumored to have misgivings about his ambition.  Dost Mohhamed Khan’s primary goal was to restore Peshawar from the Sikhs all along, during the Anglo-Sikh Wars that followed in the decade ((1845-1846 & 1848-1849), he was nominally neutral albeit he somewhat supported his old rivals the Sikhs with an Afghan mercenary force, still hoping to negotiate Peshawar.  These wars resulted in British victory over the Sikhs, the last of Indian independent kingdoms fell and India was more or less completely in Company hands, the Afghan border nor directly bordered British India in the Punjab.  The British never returned Peshawar despite their own promises to do so, but Dost having faced his own temporary overthrow and captivity realized, the British were far too powerful to resist in the long run and so he maintained quiet on his part, staying neutral during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, ruling until his death in 1863.

-The British for their part were defeated in the first Anglo-Afghan War, though their military generally held the upper hand in pitched battles and their initial invasion for all its hubris and motivations was successful.  It was the occupation that proved too much of an expense than originally endeavored.  British arrogance and ignorance of local custom also worsened reception of their plans.  In the end, it was British paranoia, belief in imperial prestige and jingoism that had led to a war that while a limited military success was a political failure, having achieved none of their goals, which seemed to shift as the situation shifted.  It was a confused war, brought on by people on all sides misreading the events surrounding them and made worse by their stubborn commitment to short-sighted policy goals and ego.  Britain would avoid venturing into Afghanistan for nearly forty years when similar disputes over diplomacy led to a second war...