Empires of the Sea en espanol!

Much of Empires of the Sea is to do with the history of Spain - so it's really nice, and a little daunting, to see a Spanish version.
 

Fill up the car while you get married?

This is the photo that caught my attention this week. A warm Greek night. The golden lights of the petrol station glowing in the dark. On the right, just visible, the illuminated suspension bridge that spans the gulf of Corinth, joining the Peloponnese to mainland Greece. And on the forecourt, between the manhole covers, people are dancing. The woman in white with her back to the camera is the bride. Welcome to a Greek austerity wedding.

There's something incredibly moving about this image. A sense of solidarity, of tradition, of the ability to celebrate in adversity. And Greek hospitality. The Belgian photographer passing by who took this picture was welcomed into the circle of light, plied with drinks and stayed until three in the morning.

Uncle Joe's holiday hide-away

As it happens I had no time to see Suleiman the Magnificent (see blog entry of 2 September), when I was in Istanbul – I was at the start of a fortnight’s lecturing on Zegrahm Expedition’s circumnavigation of the Black Sea – a great two-week trip round the coast of Turkey, Georgia, Russia, the Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Instead of Suleiman’s tomb I got to see Stalin’s get-away from the toils of oppressing the Russian people: his dacha outside Sochi.

Set in fir woods on the airy hills above Russia’s ‘Mediterranean’ coast – it was a fascinating insight into the man – a mixture of domesticity and paranoia in equal measures. A long low series of buildings around a verdant courtyard, protected by four concentric rings of security and painted green for camouflage – Stalin was taking no chances.

 

 

On the mountain above he ordered the erection of a tall look-out tower; in his working room he had a bizarre bullet proof sofa – the very last resort one would have thought and only of any use if being shot from behind – and concealed alcoves outside rooms for burly guards.



Stalin 'at the helm' in his work room. The telephone has no dialling features. It went straight through to just one destination - the Kremlin. His day bed is behind and is extremely short - he was tiny, only 5 foot 3.



And yet the place also felt deeply pleasant. Unpretentious but beautiful wooden walls and ceilings, spacious verandas looking out into the forest where Joe and his family would while away afternoons around the samovar, a billiard table and chess board – I wonder who won all the games – an indoor swimming pool. A sense of deep tranquillity in the Russian woods. When it all got too much the family man and epic mass murderer would come here for up to three months at a time. To forget.

 

 

The luxury pool

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A meal in the ogre's lair?

The next day we went Yalta and stared at the huge round table where Stalin fooled Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta conference in 1945.

The man who saved the world

The early hours of 12 September 1983.  Stanislav Petrov, a civilian in a military system, is on duty monitoring the USSR’s nuclear war early-warning system. The computer registers an incoming US missile strike. The siren howls. His screen lights up and flashes the peremptory order ‘Launch it’. Petrov is under default order to press the button. He has to act. What should he do?

Searching for the sultan's heart

In September 1566, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent was bogged down before the walls of Szigetvar, an insignificant Hungarian fortress. He was seventy two years old. It was his eleventh campaign. Suleiman had spent years in the saddle, extending the reach of the Ottoman empire. He had shattered the Hungarian before, at Mohacs in 1526; the skulls of the defeated still whitened the plains, but the wars went on, were never ending. Frustrated by the resistance of this military pimple disturbing the projects of the 'The Shadow of God on Earth' he seemed to have become enveloped in gloom. His long and brilliant reign had been dogged by tragedy, revolt, disillusionment. The sultan had become reclusive, pious and grave. 'This chimney is still burning, and the great drum roll of conquest has yet to be heard', he wrote from his magnificently embroidered tent. A few hours later he was dead.

 

The elderly Suleiman, haggard with the cares of office.

The body was embalmed secretly, packed into a chest and trundled back to Istanbul, whilst a body double, seated in his imperial carriage behind a curtain, preserved the illusion that he still lived - until the time was right to proclaim his successor and only surviving son - Selim. All the others had died or been executed for fear of insurrection.

His heart, though, was apparently buried at Szigetvar, which was totally destroyed in the final collapse of a heroic defence. And now a team of Hungarian researchers are looking for it.

The Ottomans are big in the modern Turkish imagination. A fantastically popular TV costume drama has ignited interest in the greatest sultan as Turkey seems to be propelling itself forward in a new era of Ottoman-inspired influence. They'd love the heart to be found. And the Hungarians would love to find it - fantastic for the tourist trade! Read the BBC story here.

I'm off to Istanbul on Wednesday to take part in a cruise round the Black Sea. Maybe I'll find time to tip my turban at the great man's tomb - even if he is lacking a heart, so to speak.

The machine gun inventor who vanished

An absolutely fascinating story on the BBC website today. The mystery of William Cantelo. The sounds of rapid gunfire from the basement in a house in Southampton in the 1880s – an inventor called William Cantelo tells his sons that he has invented a new type of gun that will fire bullets in rapid succession. He packs it away and sets off – presumably to sell it. He vanishes into thin air.

A couple of decades later, another inventor, Sir William Maxim, is getting rich from an invention of his own – the Maxim gun, mowing down thousands of men in the First World War.

 But Maxim and Cantelo look uncannily alike. And Cantelo’s sons put a private detective on the case. They spot ‘Maxim’ at Waterloo Station and shout "Father"…but the elusive figure gets away. And money disappears from Cantelo’s account after he vanishes. Maxim meanwhile has a reputation for ‘brain-sucking’ – stealing people’s ideas. Were Maxim and Cantelo the same man? Did Maxim somehow steal Cantelo’s invention? Who knows? A murky Victorian melodrama? Read it here.

The Dark Lady comes to light

I admit to having a slightly nerdy interest in Shakespeare. We know so little about him. His personality, his biography, his relationships - these are almost a blank. Yet we think we know so much through the rich, complex, evocative worlds that are the plays. It's so tempting to make connections between the man and the work, as it is for any writer. The plays and their inhabitants are so vivid, yet, as Shakespeare suggests, they’re all just unstable illusions, magnificent cloud structures conjured out of words. They die when the players depart the stage, leaving the master puppeteer invisible in the darkness beyond.


So from the fragmentary information that we do have, I'm absolutely fascinated when someone is able to find new hard data about his life. In today’s Guardian Saul Frampton makes a hugely convincing case based upon linguistic analysis, close study of contemporary writers and scrutiny of English parish records for having identified the Dark Lady, one of the addressees of his sonnets (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’). It's a tale of sexual jealousy and literary revenge on Shakespeare by a man called John Florio that concerns his wife AD, Avis Danyell, baptised February 8 1556, died of the plague sometime around the end of the century. Absolutely fascinating. The wonder of dogged scholarship. If you're interested in the step by step process of patient deduction you can read it here.


That still leaves unresolved the equally fascinating issue of Shakespeare's relationship with a young man, Henry Wriothesley, and a possible love triangle...