Links..

Oh by the way, links to the Mariner's Museum:


http://www.marinersmuseum.org


.. and my Youtube video of Gettysburg reenactment, 2013.

http://youtu.be/013jkvs47Q4

The Mariner's Museum, Newport News, Virginia (visit)

Maybe I'm saying this because a friend of mine works here, but this is a fabulous museum. It would take many hours to see everything. The museum is about life at sea from time immemorial to the present time.

But the most spectacular display is the USS Monitor, one of the first ever ironclad warships built during the US Civil War in the 1860s. Most famously, a duel between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia/Merrimack, the first ever fight between ironclads that was fought as a result of the Confederate States's attempt to break the Union blockade that was slowly strangulating the South. (The Battle of Hampton Road, March 9, 1862)

The fight ended with a draw: both ships were so heavily armoured, neither ship could sink the other. Still, it was a strategic win for the Union, as the Rebel ironclad could no longer sink Union ships with impunity. On the previous day of the battle, before the Monitor showed up, that's what happened.

Anyway, some months after the battle, both the ironclads sunk due to bad weather or accident. Recently, the Monitor was finally located. The Monitor at the bottom of the sea was slowly but surely decaying due to corrosion. So it was a race against time to preserve something of this sunken ship. They show a film about the effort to raise the turret of the ship in one of the theatres in the museum.

Just outside the main building of the museum, you'd find a mock up of the Monitor, giving you a good idea about the scale of the ship. We are so used to looking at 10,000 ton destroyers or even 100,000 ton cruise liners these days; so this ship might look tiny. And yet, this small vessel is no joke. She is a full blooded warship, designed purely from the point of functionality. In a way, both the Monitor and the Merrimack resemble today's stealth warships. The Merrimack's sloping armour made her very difficult to inflict any damage, as shells simply bounced off of it. The Monitor, with such a low silhouette, almost that of a submerged ship, could not easily be targeted. That the Merrimack managed to knock out the pilot house at all is incredible.

The Monitor mock-up. To uninitiated eyes, this ship might look boring, but she was meant to impress people solely by her fighting capabilities...

The above is a model showing what the turret from the USS Monitor was like when found. The real turret that was raised is preserved in a water tank at the back of the museum. I shd have taken a pic...

Another fabulous section was that of model warships by August and Winifred Crabtree. Meticulously built, they are a class of their own. Here is an ancient Egyptian ship I liked.

Gettysburg 150

I was lucky enough to be able to visit Gettysburg on July 4th and 5th, 2013 to witness the 150th anniversary reenactment. Some pictures from the vantage point of grand stand...

 Scenes from the Union camp...

The first day of the battle: Reynold's infantry arrive..

 The cavalry

The climax of the first day.

This should be more like a tweet, but

When I was a kid, my parents annoyed me. As a young man, it was other people. Now that I'm getting old, it is my brain that is really, really annoying me.

Turkey again!

Well, I had a narrow escape! Only two months after I visited Turkey, this nation wide protests flares up.  And the protests are about the plan to demolish a park right next to the hotel I stayed, and to build a shopping mall. As a tourist, a shopping mall next to a hotel would be very handy, but a park should not be sacrificed.

Anyway, as a historian specialised in history of the Roman Empire in the Byzantine period, right up to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople/Istanbul, this is a sad moment. Now, the whole of the Roman Empire has erupted in recent years. First Tunisia, then Egypt. Syria, always the most troublesome Roman province has sunk into the nastiest civil war in decades. Almost as bad or even worse than Yugoslavia. Greece, in the meantime, was also in shambles. Now Turkey. The heart of imperial territories has now plunged into chaos.

The Turkish republic began 90 years ago, when Kemal Ataturk abolished the Ottoman Empire and started a secular state called Turkey. Instead of Ottoman imperial system controlling various people with different backgrounds, the new Turkish Republic was a nationalistic and in a way intolerant. They expelled Greeks who were still refusing to become Turks. Under Ottoman rule, they could exist either as Romans or Greeks. Now, be a Turk or go. The protesters are saying that the PM, R. Erdogan is too autocratic and Islamophiliac, but, maybe the Turkish Republic isn't a very tolerant and flexible regime to begin with.

Just a thought...

Turkey visit (part 2): Çanakkale

One thing I am a little embarrassed about is that I didn't know anything about Çanakkale, in Turkey, until I actually visited the place. 'Çanakkale' means 'Channel', as in Dardanelles Channel. My knowledge of modern history is so Eurocentric, I had not even wondered how the Gallipoli campaign is viewed and remembered in Turkey today!

For the Turks, Gallipoli was indeed a rare victory in the Twentieth Century when the Ottoman Empire was suffering defeat after defeat. Although Turkey lost WW1 and the Ottoman Empire fell as a direct consequence of it, Gallipoli gave the Turks not just some measure of dignity but a new hope and a new national-ethnic identity.

The Ottoman Empire was a very international empire, ruling over not just Turkish peoples but also the Greeks, the Romans, the Slavs, the Armenians and a myriad of ethnic groups of the Balkans and Asia Minor, not to mention subjects of Near Eastern (sorry about using another Eurocentric terminology!) provinces, especially Egypt and Syria-Mesopotamia.

The Empire used to create such powerful force of arms out of this amalgam of ethnicities, but, by the nineteenth century, their military was falling apart. In face of European nationalism, it completely lost its edge. The Empire was called the sick man of Europe. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was merely a question of when by the turn of the twentieth century. Being Ottoman was no longer cool or desirable.

Gallipoli is a place where a new sense of Turkishness, instead of Ottoman-ness, was forged. Or so it is believed, apparently. I found a new film, about which the rest of the world seems to be totally oblivious, titled 'Çanakkale 1915'. (It does make me suspicious that young Turkish people don't know much about this history either - that's why they added '1915' to the title?) In this movie, the Turks are underdogs, desperately fighting off Imperial powers of the West. Through their struggle and victory, they regained confidence - but at the same time, since the Ottoman Empire lost WW1 despite their win at Gallipoli, they finally decided to let the empire go extinct and to let a new nation, whose spirit was first manifested at Gallipoli, be born.

Gallipoli is not a sort of battle that can easily be translated into a movie script or action sequences. The front was mostly static, as the Anglo-French forces failed to evict the Turks from Gallipoli peninsula. The campaign was conceived as a mobile sea-land joint warfare with the ultimate aim of quickly taking the capital Constantinople; unfortunately, due to sluggishness of amphibious operations on the part of the Anglo-French allies and strength of Turkish shore naval defence and a determined opposition by army troops under command of Kemal Pasha, it was quickly degenerated into a Western-front style trench warfare. At least the weather was better than in France, but the warmer climate also meant an even more unhygienic environment for soldiers, to put it mildly.

There has been, as far as I know, only one major attempt to make a war movie out of Gallipoli in the west, titled, well, Gallipoli, starring Mel Gibson. Inevitably, it is about ANZAC soldiers who had to endure hardships of war in far away place, fighting people they had no quarrel with. It is about awakening of Australia as a modern nation, rather as a British colony.

This film is a Turkish response, perhaps. The Turks indeed think that they inspired Australians to become an independent nation. While the Australians brought back their dislike of the idea of fighting for the British Empire, the modern Turkish Republic was also born in the dirt and mire of Gallipoli. The Australians and the Turks at Gallipoli are almost brothers-in-arms!!

Anyway, so, actions are rather second-rate by western standard, as military history is not the point in this film. Some scenes are downright cheesy (like a guy carrying a 245kilo shell in the midst of a half-destoryed gun emplacement); CGI used for naval battle scenes is OK if this was a computer game but not really up to it by today's standard for action movie special effects. So, for us non-Turks, this is not an entertaining movie, but useful to learn how history is understood by the Turks today.


More info on IMDB website:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2415964/

Also apparently the full movie is available on Youtube?


As for the town of Çanakkale itself, it is a scenic coastal town with strong military presence. For many foreign visitors, the reason to visit here is to see the excavation site of Troy, about 45 minutes drive from the town.

Actually, Schliemann took most of the best stuff from the site, so all you see is stone bases of ancient buildings from the end of Bronze Age.

In the middle of town, there is a real-size wooden horse of Troy they used in the movie 'Troy'. The one with Brad Pitt.

I was there on March 17th. Missed the big celebration of Gallipoli victory, which was scheduled for the next day. But I can see several warships sailing down the channel towards the Aegean, obviously as a part of its preparation.

Feel like I will have to go back to the place in 2015 for their centenary celebration....

Turkey

My recent Turkey trip!

Turkey is where Christianity was born. Geographically speaking, of course. St. Paul of Tarsus mainly travelled in the Aegean coastal regions of Turkey and Greece, supporting local communities and preaching. It was not our intention to retrace Paul's footstep or anything and yet we visited many ancient Ionian Greek communities.

Here is just a peek into my trip ... This is a short trailer movie I made using iMovie software.

My visits included ancient Greek cities of Didim, Pergamon and Ephesus. They are just ruins of typically Greek temples, theatres and public buildings. All you have to do, though, is to walk slowly and try to notice some details. Even after archaeologists and scholars have removed most juicy bits from these sites (the most prominent case is Pergamon, as the whole temple was shipped to Berlin!), as you would see signs that these Greek cities were inhabited by vibrant communities of Romano-Greeks who were the first Christians.

Ephesus

What remains of Ephesus is the most robust parts of public buildings in city centre. You can see what you would expect from Classical Greek city: theatres, agora, educational institutions, etc. When you don't see any church, you might think, of course, this is pre-Christian civilization. Well, actually, Ephesus was a functioning city of commerce well into late antiquity, when the Roman world was transforming itself into a Christian one. It is not very prominent, but these signs are there:

The temple of Apollo at Didim, south of Izmir (Smyrna), near the Aegean coast:

Our guide informed us that they never completed the temple. He then just said that the settlement went into decline, but, you can see that perhaps the place survived into the Christian era:

Some signs are rather crude.. make me wonder if these are genuinely from late antiquity. But then again, who would carve these symbols with an intent of misleading those who visit these sites later? Local Turkish farmers, who were bored with pastoral life? Nineteenth century archaeologists who did not care much about fidelity of their findings? Or are they some kind of markings done by builders or something?

Well, it is quite fun to visit these places and think about possibilities when visiting these Greek ruins. 

I wish to visit Nicaea and Chalcedon, where our Creed was decided, next time!