If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right? Just because they spoke Greek doesn't make them Greeks. Or had they been taken from Greece to Constantinopole before being looted in the crusades?
To my mind, calling them Greek is a bit like calling people in, say, Belize "English". If I brought a vase from Belize and said "I brought you an English vase", would you not find that odd?
Just because someone speaks a related language (and I'm pretty sure the Greek of Constantinople was different from the Greek of Athens at the time), doesn't mean that they are the same people. The Byzantines had hundreds of years as a distinct culture from the Greek islands and peninsula, with a major Roman influence.
> To my mind, calling them Greek is a bit like calling people in, say, Belize "English".
Those situations are nothing alike. The Byzantines lived in Greece. Byzantium was founded by Greeks. Others in Europe called them "the Greeks". They were the genuine continuation of Hellenic culture for over 10 centuries.
It's either that or Greeks ceased to exist between Roman conquest and Ottoman independence - at which point they were ruled by a German and, presumably by your logic, were actually Turks anyway, not Greeks.
If you know much about Hellenic history, you know it's been a culture in flux since prehistory. I'd assert there has never been a group that you would call "true Greeks"... except maybe the Graecoi - Hellenic colonists in Italy. Even the post-Classical period of pan-Hellenism was driven and ruled by Macedonians, who a century prior were not considered Hellenes.
> If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right?
I mean, define 'Greek'. Byzantium was a Greek city before the Romans got there, Greek was always its major language, and so on. It's not within modern Greece, granted, but nor are a lot of classical Greek cities.
Well, I think we could define it by what the people living there considered themselves to be. And generally, from what I know (but I'm not well read on this subject, so I'm happy to be corrected), the inhabitants of the area would have called themselves Romans, at least by the time the city came to be known as Constantinople.
Also, the culture of Athens or Sparta or Crete or any of the other places that would have called themselves, or at least accepted the term, Greeks (well, Hellenes) was quite different from the culture of Constantinople, at least, again, by the time the city came to be known by that name.
>>> TIL that in 1912 when the island of Lemnos was occupied by Greece, some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked. "At Hellenes," the children replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" a soldier
retorted. "No, we are Romans."
It's a common misconception that the crusades were a crime of white christians versus non-white non-christians. In reality crusades were just as well a crime against other white christians as against non-white christians, white non-christians, non-white non-christians, an excuse would be found for any of these targets
Oh yes that was surely a motivator for some but also an excuse for others.
The political landscape of that time was truly complicated and chaotic in a way that is hard to truly capture in the image we have of that time period brought through general education, mostly because of lack of time to explain it all properly
There is a theory he was from the Greek island of Chios.
"In 1982, Ruth Durlacher hypothesised that Chios was Christopher Columbus's birthplace.[64] Columbus himself said he was from the Republic of Genoa, which included the island of Chios at the time. Columbus was friendly with a number of Chian Genoese families, referenced Chios in his writings and used the Greek language for some of his notes.[65] 'Columbus' remains a common surname on Chios. Other common Greek spellings are: Kouloumbis and Couloumbis."
"A New Theory Clarifying the Identity OF Christopher Columbus: A Byzantine Prince from Chios, Greece. by Ruth G Durlacher-Wolper 1982(Published by The New World Museum, San Salvador, Bahamas"
I had to re-read several paragraphs to make sure my eyes weren't failing me. It seems either AI generated or needlessly extended, to the point where reading has become a chore. I gave up halfway through without understanding much of *how* they are able to return if the fisheries are still closed.
There was a time not so long ago that people thought the Sun's heat came from burning a vast amout of coal and did not understand the concept of nuclear energy... today we know better. So by exploring the unknown we may unravel a mystery or discover something that improves the lives of mankind.
> is impossible that the sun should constantly be giving out heat, without either losing heat or being supplied with new fuel. Assuming that the heat of the sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it…
Neat article, they were asking all the right questions. Calculating how long a coal body could burn, and a mechanism/quantity required to refuel it based on the mass of the solar system
Well, you don't need to persuade me. I love science and hanging out at a science museum or curling up on the couch with some new papers is my idea of a good time. But there are people that just don't get it.
A year or two back I was at a lecture about hummingbirds and the shockingly weird ways they fly and during the Q&A some lady kept asking 'but what's the point of this? Why does it matter?' leaving the lecturer (and everyone else) deeply confused.
