My Log 496 Jan 6 2015: Journey through Dalmatia --- 3: Piran, a delightful little town in the northern Adriatic, untrammelled by mass tourism

Overview of Piran, Slovenia from its town-walls (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A typical street in Piran taken looking out from the street our guest house was in. A small town, made up of streets like this.

In our effort to escape from Christmas, we took refuge in a small town, Piran, on the tiny piece of the Adriatic coast that has been allocated to Slovenia. To tell the truth, the disposition of this area of Istria --- which itself is a sort of undefined region at present divided between three countries, the third being Italy ---  is still undecided, for it is under an extremely detailed and heavily argued arbitration between Slovenia and Croatia.

However, they did celebrate Christmas in Piran, but not very vigorously, for even on Christmas day itself stalls were set up in the central square for a few modest artisans to offer their wares. This square was overhung temporarily by an enormous electrically-lighted violin, in honour of the town’s number one ancestor, Guiseppe Tartini, after whom the central square, and many other places in Piran,  is named. Tartini was born in Piran in 1692, died in Padua in 1770, a composer and one of the greatest violinists of the eighteenth century,  celebrated also for having  owned one of the original Stradivarius violins.

As part of their seasonal celebrations, the residents of Piran erected the large violin shown here overhanging the statue on Tartini Square in honour of their favorite son, Guiseppe Tartini, regarded as one of the premier European violin soloists of the eighteenth century. The violin is dimly visible in this daylight photo, but at night, lit up, it made a very striking image. 
Below: Another  shot showing the extremely tight-packed nature of Piran's streets and buildings. The little sculptured head on the building on the right is typical of much Italianate architecture, and testifies to Piran's Italian heritage.

Leading into Tartini square are a multiplicity of narrow streets, inaccessible to motor vehicles, which are forced to use only the broader roadways that surround the town, built on a small peninsula which it entirely fills. Even these roadways carry as many pedestrians as vehicles, so there is about the town an irrevocably  leisurely air that seemed to pervade everything that happened there during our five days of residence.

I had booked far in advance --- I first read about the town in a travel article in the Globe and Mail  of Toronto --- and the accommodation that had caught my eye was called the Pacha Mama (meaning Mother Earth in an indigenous language of Latin America) Guest House Pleasant Stay, to give it its full name. It turned out to be hidden away, only a few yards from the central square in an old building which, inside, had been totally revamped by its Swedish owner. We arrived after dark at the end of a long bus ride from Zagreb, and our first contact with the little town  was extremely agreeable. Walking along the harbour front, I asked a passing man if he could direct me to the street in which the guest house was located. He indicated it roughly enough, and we set out to find it. A few minutes later the man I  had asked came running back to join us, carrying his GPS and insisting on accompanying us to the very door, where an agreeable young man called Luka was awaiting our arrival.

Luka told us that, since we had booked for five nights, and there were no other guests, they had decided to offer us a larger room on the fourth floor, if that did not inconvenience us.  Four or five years ago, we would have jumped at the chance, but those five years have taken their toll of us so that the prospect of lugging our cases up four flights of stairs daunted us, and we rejected the offer.  Cheerfully enough, Luka installed us in our booked room on the first floor, but it was very small, and we decided to take their offer. So up we went to find a  much larger room under the eaves, and with all the modern technology Sweden could provide. For example, the bathroom floor was heated by a mysterious apparatus on the wall, which I never did succeed in figuring out. Below that was an even more daunting set of buttons regulating the room heat. It said the ambient heat was 29 degrees C, far too high for overnight comfort, and it never varied although we did get an accompanying button down to 17 degrees without making any discernible difference to the temperature. Even the lighting held its mysteries: maybe simple for the Swedish mind, but a bit much for a couple of old codgers from an earlier generation. Another unusual aspect of the place was that although Luka turned up for three hours the following morning, at noon he disappeared, and for the rest of our time there we virtually had the whole building to ourselves. After all it was the out-of-season holidays, and it was enjoyable to know that whatever noise we made did not discommode any other guests.

Although it is difficult to recall exactly what we did while in Piran, the little town never did start to pall on us, and I have no hesitation in recommending it for anyone looking for a relaxing and quiet holiday.  It was delightful walking along its interconnecting narrow streets, although one had to be careful, because the cobblestones are extremely ancient, and irregular, and could be classed as traps for the unwary elder. While the architecture wasn’t remarkably beautiful, its coherence was always pleasing, and one could tell that a serious effort had been made to preserve in good condition the inheritance from their long past.

As I remarked in an earlier piece, one is never far from the past in this area of Europe.  Istria, of which the Piran peninsula is part, was originally inhabited by tribes called the Histri, made up of farmers, hunters and fishermen, who were regarded by the Romans as fierce pirates, whom they took a long time to conquer.

They became part of the Roman empire in 177 BC, and were so ruled most of the time in the next thousand years, although modified from time to time by Byzantine control, and incursions of Franks and Slavs. I discovered from the tourist books that both Slovene and Italian are recognized official languages in this part of the country, which is a recognition of the varying ethnic make-up of Istria --- sometimes with Italian majorities, later with Slovene, and always with a good healthy mix of ethnicities. In 1945 91 per cent of the town’s people were Italian-speaking, but this changed radically after 1947, when the Independent Territory of Trieste as it was called, was incorporated into Italy and the southern part was granted to Yugoslavia, leading to an exodus of Italians.

Slovenia is a small country of almost  2,000,000 inhabitants, and a number of locals indicated to us that they could hardly expect to win the long-running argument about the borders in the Bay of Piran with the more aggressive and larger country of Croatia, although they were living in hope.

Piran is said to be one of Slovenia’s primary tourist attractions, but the many piles of fishing nets on the wharves indicated that this is one small town that has not gone overboard for tourism unlike its neighbour two or three miles along the way, Portoroz, which appears to have attracted all the expected horrors that one can expect with mass tourism (including four casinos, probably the kiss of death).

These three pictures show Piran's busy little fishing port, with their boats carrying the black marker flags to indicate their nets, and the piles of nets ready for action

Action shot of me eating a Figaro.
a struggle I valiantly bore to a successful conclusion 

I should mention they have several excellent restaurants: we had one amusing experience when we entered a small coffee house late at night and asked for a coffee, indicating also what looked like a chocolate bar. “It is very hard,” he said, indicating the chocolate bar.Never mind, I said, I will have it. “It’s very hard,” he said, shaking his head, almost insisting we not buy it. I persisted, confidently bit into it, and made as little impression on it as if it had been a stone. As he said, it was very hard. Eventually I did manage to make an impression on it, but the danger of cracking one of my few remaining teeth was always evident. Still, I managed to get it eaten, and asked the young man what it was called “Figaro,” he said, grinning from ear to ear, “hard, very hard.” A chocolate bar called Figaro?
Finally, we kept returning to the same restaurant called Ivo, on the waterfront, one of the pleasantest and best restaurants we had struck in quite a long time. There we were served by an absolutely delightful waiter, an older person, a lifelong waiter, who took care of a large room, never made a note of the dishes ordered, never made a mistake, and even remembered the next day what he had served you the night before. I asked him his name. “Marino,” he said, “Sam Marino,” and laughed.  Later, I thought about it: I am almost sure he said San, not Sam, Marino, indicating the small country, one of the smallest in the world, which exists almost opposite Istria on the Italian side of the Adriatic, and which could almost be said to be a competitor with Piran for the tourist dollar.  Just the kind of joke the old guy would make
.

My Log 494 Dec 27 2015: Journey through Dalmatia --- 1; “Europe’s borders are a bother for them”: a voice from the past revived by experience of travelling through Europe

My Log 494 Dec 27 2015: Journey through Dalmatia --- 1; “Europe’s borders are a bother for them”: a voice from the past revived by experience of travelling through Europe

Schengen Agreement (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The cover design used for all treaties of the European Union. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I  remember that half a century ago I covered a British by-election in which a dear old squire of the shires, Sir Piers Debenham, memorably opposed British entry into the European Common Market, as it was then called, by waving above his head a copy of the Treaty of Rome, and crying, “The Europeans are bothered by their frontiers. We are not. We do not need this treaty, and we have to resist this old silly who governs us with his foolish policies.” The “old silly” in question was Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, who was more than slightly irritated when Sir Piers’s opposition ensured the election of the local Labour Party candidate, and the defeat of the pro-European candidate.

The current news from Europe fifty years later, as they desperately try to deal with the immense numbers of displaced people from Middle Eastern wars who are struggling to reach safety in continental Europe, indicates that their borders still are a trouble to them. In 1985 the three members of the Benelux treaty --- Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland --- meeting at a town called Schengen in Luxembourg, signed with France and Germany a treaty that today guarantees free movement between 26 of the 28 members of the European Union, putting into the pages of history the many centuries of warfare and discord that had riven Europe since time immemorial.

How could anyone not support such a movement, showing the best of statesmanship, and the best intentions of humanity? The Treaty of Schengen has developed until today it is no longer something that can be accepted or rejected by candidate members of the European Union, but has become one of the requirements that must be undertaken by any nation that wants to join the Union.

That it is now under enormous pressure is known to anyone who has been following the news, as refugees in unheard of numbers have simply poured across the oceans and the frontiers of Europe’s outlying countries in an effort to find a place where they can re-establish a decent human life. Germany has accepted a million refugees, while the United Kingdom, not a member of the Schengen area, has staunchly resisted taking anything like what might be considered a fair share of these desperate people. Greece and Italy have perforce made heroic efforts to accept people, most of whom they hope will be in transit to Germany or France. But outlying countries such as Rumania and Bulgaria have become nervous as Hungary and Poland, and new-member Croatia have chosen to close their borders to any more refugees, in the process erecting highly symbolic barbed wire barricades designed to stop people in their tracks. Meantime, the nations closest to Syria, from which most of the refuges have originated, countries like Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, most of them with fragile overstretched economies already, have discovered so many newcomers among them that they have begun to wonder if they can preserve their own individual habits and customs.

For some years now I have been making almost yearly visits to Croatia to stay with a friend, and have always been struck by the irony that while most of the nations of Europe have agreed to abolish their borders, in the Balkans the people have recently fought wars designed to re-establish borders that had been all but forgotten for half a century or more.  One cannot travel far in Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, even Slovenia, without coming across a newly-minted border post, whose attendants seem basically indifferent to the passports that pass through their hands every day, and appear to have little interest in determining the motivations of the average traveller.

Whereas, in the old, Communist days of Yugoslavia, barriers between Croatia and Bosnia did not exist, now, a 30-mile ride out of Dubrovnik brings one to a border post, usually so vaguely delineated that you are never sure whether you are quitting one country, or entering the next. A couple of days ago I travelled from Zagreb, in the centre of Croatia, and its capital, towards Trieste, the Italian city, whose fate was determined after the Second World War when it was granted to Italy, while its close neighbour Fiume, now called Rijeka, was given to Yugoslavia, and is now in Croatia.  Since Croatia and Slovenia, former republics of the socialist state of Yugoslavia, are both now members of the European Union, one might have expected the bus to take the direct route north through Slovenia to its capital Ljubljana and then towards Italy. To my surprise, however, the bus skirted south of Slovenia all the way, moving across to Rijeka before striking north to a border crossing into Slovenia.

I am currently visiting a small town on this Slovenian coastline, Piran, situated in a piece of land just 46 kilometres wide, that is currently under arbitration between Slovenia and Croatia. So the fate of this little outlier to the coast is still up in the air.

My next move is to go on the one-hour bus ride to Trieste, but again I have been surprised to find that my expectation that buses would be plying the route every half hour or so was far from fulfilled. Only one bus goes in the morning, leaving at 6.45 am; and another in the late afternoon.  Are these small indications that the border problems between the nations of Europe are still not totally solved?

As a friend of mine says, having briefly introduced a subject: I will keep you informed.

My Log 495 January 5 2016: Journey through Dalmatia --- 2: Zagreb. Through a bleak landscape of karst topography to emerge in a civilized, beautiful old city, capital of a hopeful new state with ancient roots

Above, left:  Overview of a small market  in Zagreb, leading up to what they call the Old Town. 

Above, right: Only a few steps away, Croatian warrior hero  Ban Josip Jelacic (1801-1859) sits on his horse. The statue was erected in 1849, but was removed by Tito in 1947, and restored to its dominant place in 1990. Today Jelacic is regarded as a rebel in Austria, a traitor in Hungary, but a hero in Croatia.

  On Dec 21, four days before Christmas, I left Dubrovnik, where I am currently staying  for three         months, to travel by bus on a trip through an area that can be roughly called Dalmatia. My objective was to avoid being the grumpy old, Christmas-hating man sitting in the corner of a happy celebration with lots of yelling small children. Let them have it, I would be elsewhere.

I decided to go alone but my partner Sheila, a woman who moved to Tito’s Yugoslavia in the 1970s because, among other reasons, she wanted the schools to teach her children Marxism, rather than Christianity, decided to come along. And so we set off on an eight-hour trip of roughly 600 kilometres to Zagreb, the national capital, that we expected to take eight hours.

We also expected the bus to be crowded at that time of year, but in fact there were only eight or ten passengers, so we had plenty of room to stretch ourselves, which made the journey that much more comfortable. We had to travel north along the narrow strip of land by which Croatia manages to hug the coast, which gives that small country the majority of seaward-facing areas that have been bones of contention between various great powers for century after century. Probably 100 miles or so along the way we began to travel through what is known as karst country, a sort of landscape that covers much of Croatia, on which only low-lying bushes have managed to secure the means of life, its bleakness making one wonder how any humans have ever been able to scrape a living from their lands. The wonder of it was that the motorway on which we travelled through this bleak landscape was of super-modern construction, with dozens of well-constructed tunnels ---  a road that could only have been built at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet one that seemed, for mile after mile, to be serving no discernible population.

Anyway, eventually, we came to the national capital, a city of which I once read that one of the old-time travellers from the Middle East remarked that upon hitting Zagreb, one was at last aware of being in Europe.

Sheila, of course, had a friend in Zagreb whom she had known in the old days. When Vicko Krampus had arrived in London in the 1970s he was a wide-eyed student from Yugoslavia, agog at the freedoms and carefree attitudes he found in London. And when we met him, now a professor at a Zagreb university, he was anxious to show us the glories of the city he loves. He took us through the seven central squares  --- generically known locally from their shape as the Green Horseshoe --- around which are based the centres of political power. He took us into a hotel, the Esplanade, which was as ornate and beautiful as any hotel I have ever seen, and which had been built especially to serve the old Orient Express, the train  across Western Europe to Istanbul that was patronized by the gentry in the old days. Evidently, to judge by the atmosphere inside the hotel, much the same rules apply today, for as we entered we were confronted by a formally-dressed personage sitting at a seat ready to interrogate everyone who passed his way. Because our guide was known to him, we were allowed to wander through its great public rooms but I felt sure we would never have passed the reception area without our guide. The high rooms were dominated by enormous mirrors that enhanced the feeling of ornate magnificence, but for all this, there were some fairly cozy areas where people were sitting taking their coffee. And outside we stepped on to an enormous terrace --- this right in the middle of a busy city: how had it ever preserved so much space in so crowded an environment? --- on which one could image in the summer, crowds of customers listening to orchestras and relaxing with friends.

Later, he took us also into a museum where rests the oldest example of writing ever discovered in Croatia, from pre-Christian times, the details of whose message, unfortunately, I have forgotten. Later we wandered alone through a colourful market, with its multi-coloured fruits and vegetables, kitchen implements and clothing. It was, in fact, not unlike the Jean Talon market in Montreal, equally large and colourful.

But what Montreal lacks is this effortless timelessness, for only steps away from the market is the central square with a dramatic statue of Josip Jelacic (1801-1859), on a horse, a statesman, diplomat and soldier who defended Croatia and the Croatian language, while trying to maintain his independence in the peculiar circumstances of the nineteenth century with its Austro-Hungarian empire falling into decline, and coming to an end in the First World War. Originally Jelacic's sword pointed to Hungary, in recognition of his having fought Hungarian authority, but when it was restored the statue was turned around, so that now the sword points southwards (to nothing in particular).  I have never been more aware than I was on this trip of the presence of the ancient past, echoes of which seemed to pop up wherever we went, although I am prepared to entertain the idea that this is all in my head, because the recent Yugoslav wars were fought according to the tensions, hatreds, and loyalties handed down from history to their present-day combatants.

In fact, when I first wrote this piece I had been told the statue was of another earlier Croatian hero, namely Nicola Subic Zrinski,  a warrior who also fought what might be called the occupying powers, but three centuries earlier. In 1566 his 2,300 soldiers battled the Ottoman force of 102,000 under Suleiman the Magnificent. Zrinski died nobly on the battlefield a few days after the Sultan himself died of a cerebral haemorrhage. (This Sultan is the one I have referred to in an earlier post, number 493, of Dec 15, mentioned by Dr. Amanda Foreman in her magnificent BBC series on the ascent of women. He entered this story because, although Sultans were forbidden to marry, he nevertheless married a girl called Roxelan from his harem, who turned out to be one of the great feminists of all history, transforming the situation of women in the lands under Suleimen’s rule.)

A curiosity in Zagreb is the funicular railway, which takes one only on a four minute ride that could as easily be walked in 10 minutes. But people seem to use it, tribute, I guess, to the innate laziness of most people. Up there after the ride one comes upon another aspect of the city, lots of handsome old buildings, quite a few streets, the odd church, and so on. We walked down, back into the central city and that night Visko took us to an excellent restaurant just above the market, a place that is used by agencies to dine their visiting tourists, but one that looked like it had always existed, and where the standards were kept as high as possible. We tried two restaurants in Zagreb, the other called Vinodolo, and both were excellent.

These two buildings, of medium height and elegantly designed, seem to be typical of  many European cities  in the modern world. These two are in the upper reaches of Old Town Zagreb, but I saw others elsewhere, especially in Trieste, Italy, whose downtown is full of such rows of buildings.

My Log 497 Dec 28 2015: Journey through Dalmatia --- 4: Trieste, whose beauty and serenity I fall for like a ton of bricks: leaving another glorious European city, I hope to return some day

Tram in Trieste (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Trieste, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Central square, Trieste, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday I promised to keep you informed about Europe’s border problems, so far as they have affected me. Today I can report that in travelling this morning from Slovenia into Italy, no border intervened, no one asked for our passports, and everything went smoothly.

Since apparently only two buses were running during the day from the small town of Piran in Slovenia, where I have spent the last five days --- in an effort to escape the accursed family Christmas celebrations, but that is another story --- and since Piran historically has been under a huge Italian influence, and was at one time predominantly Italian in population --- I expected the traffic to Trieste, just across the border, would be brisk.  Therefore, expecting a long queue for the bus, I struggled out of bed at just after 5 am in order to make sure I got a seat in the bus, which was to leave at 6.45 am. Of course, there was no one else there except my partner and myself, and for the better part of an hour I had to run up to every bus that turned in, to be told it was not the bus to Trieste.

Eventually the correct bus came, on time, and we took off, slightly groggy from the rather hectic takeoff, and in just over an hour we were in Trieste.

I had no particular expectations of this city. But I was disappointed when our bus entered the city through what looked like a working class district, of hillsides covered with medium-rise low-income-looking apartment houses of indiscriminate colour and shape. Not to worry. After being put off in the back end of the bus depot, we eventually managed to attract the interest of a taxi --- it was 8 am, building up to the rush-hour, I guess, and taxis were few and far between. However, this guy took us to our hotel, an ordinary, comfortable place, where they agreed to allow us to eat breakfast, even though we were not able to formally check in until 2 o’clock.

After a short rest we headed off, in the general direction of the main town square. Along the way, my mind was blown, as one might say. In one street after another pedestrians were king, cars forbidden, and the vistas that opened up astonished me. Vast spaces, broad boulevards, superbly decorated, coherently-composed buildings surrounding elegant, leisurely squares, lined with chairs for sitting and having coffee or whatever you felt like. I was back in Europe with a vengeance. It had been many years since I had first experienced the delights of the better European cities, their beauty, self-confidence, and immense cachet, and I immediately felt myself to be in one of these wonderful places again. At last.

I thought of Ilya Ehrenberg’s dictum (formulated in the very depths of the utilitarian Soviet Union) that every man has two homes, his own, and Paris. You could extend that to any of the better European cities, with their facility through their human scale for making people feel that they really matter.

It has never been my way to be a tourist wherever I have gone. Rather, I like to settle into a new place, then mooch around its streets, finding companionable places to investigate, comforting and warm places to sit over a glass of wine, getting a sort of feel for the place. So I have to confess that my knowledge of Trieste and its history is rather perfunctory, although I have gathered that it was once one of the four premier cities of Europe, is now a medium size place of just over 200,000 with a long maritime and industrial history, and has always been, distinctly from other Italian cities, a polyglot sort of place that has always attracted foreigners speaking their own languages. All this is enough to recommend any city to me.

But how, along with all this activity, all the trauma of being at the centre between the Eastern world and the Western world, all the continuous drama around its identity  (there is still an ornamented building blazoning the inscription right across of Free Territory of Trieste), how has it managed to have the serenity to create such beautiful streets as I have experienced this morning just strolling around. There is the city centre, with its massive, ornamental public buildings; melding so effortlessly into the square blocks of privately owned places, but not far away an even more remarkable area, the streets of the Old City, slightly rundown in appearance, at least on the outside, tucked in beside the remains of a Roman amphitheatre. Here one finds remarkable bookshops, crowded with tens of thousands of books (and only two, if that, in English); and restaurants of such individuality as almost to defy description. I have probably never been happier than a few hours ago sitting in one of these inimitable restaurants into which one almost has to fight one’s way past the ranks of bottles, the shouts of the proprietor from behind the bar in conversation with one of the locals, through past the place where it is right to have a glass of wine, into the tiny eating place itself, with only seven tables, where I enjoyed a light lunch of mozzarella and cheese, finished off with the most delicious tiramisu I have ever tasted.

Trieste, I am leaving you tomorrow, but I’m already in love with you, and I really hope to return some day.

My Log 493 Dec 15 2015: Something to be said for mid-Atlantic intellectuals: two who have recently come to my attention, Alan Furst and Amanda Foreman

In the last two or three weeks I have been mightily impressed by the work of two artists, the one a novelist, the other an historian, who could reasonably be called mid-Atlantic intellectuals. Both Alan Furst, the novelist, and Amanda Foreman, the historian, have solid links through either birth, education or residence with Europe and the United States and both seem to have benefitted personally and professionally from these links.

I have recently read two of Furst’s 14 novels about what he calls “near history”, the period from the access to power of Hitler in 1933, to the end of the Second World War in 1945. In both of them, his main character was a journalist, who became a spy, and the setting in both was the slightly murky world in which, in those days, political activists who opposed the powers animating the onrush of war were forced to live. Furst calls himself an “historical spy novelist”, but many reviewers, amazed by the seeming fidelity of his descriptions of the atmosphere of the time, have rather considered he should be listed as a pure novelist. In each of the books I read, Paris, a city Furst has described as “the heart of civilization,” plays a prominent role as the place to escape to from the oncoming terrors of Fascism and Communism.  Before he began to write novels, Furst moved to France, where he taught for some time at the University of Montpellier, and he later lived in Paris for many years, an experience that has clearly marked him and that has probably given rise to the engaging and sometimes terrifying way he has portrayed the world that was overcome by Nazism.

Dr. Amanda Foremen, who is the animator and author of a BBC series called The Ascent of Woman has an even more markedly mid-Atlantic background than Furst. She is the daughter of the famous Hollywood screenwriter Carl Foreman, who was halfway through working on the movie he wrote, High Noon, when he was called before the Un-American Activities Committee of the US Congress where he admitted to having been, in his youth a member of the Communist Party but to whom he refused to name any members of the party. Thus he was declared an uncooperative witness, subject to a boycott by the major studios, and he took off for England, where, eventually Amanda was born in 1968. She was educated in England, then at University in the United States, and finally at Oxford University. When she was 30 she turned her doctoral thesis on Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire into a book which became an international bestseller in hardback, paperback and on re-issue nine years later.  Her next book was A World On Fire, a history of the American civil war from the British point of view, of which one reviewer said “it resembles nothing so much as War and Peace”; and the Wall Street Journal reviewer offered the opinion that she was such an engaging writer that readers might find even her 958 page volume too short.

Just as Alan Furst’s experiences in Europe must have added to his sure touch in his drawing up the political and social atmosphere in his novel The Foreign Correspondent (2006) about an anti-Fascist who got a job in Paris with Reuters and was simultaneously editing a dissident journal distributed inside Italy, and in Dark Star (1991) whose hero is a Pravda correspondent stationed in Paris who gets mixed up in the baleful atmosphere of Nazi-run Berlin, and is trapped by the German invasion of Poland, so too Dr. Foreman’s extensive experience in Britain must be attributed to her sure touch, as exhibited in her series on the BBC. I confess I have seen only one of the four programmes, but it was done with such authority, with such a sense of commitment to the cause of women, and revealed such fascinating information about early women writers and historical figures who would be called feminists in today’s world, as to be completely captivating. Indeed, it was exciting o watch a programme carried off with such aplomb and surety. She did not bother us with any of the standard feminist arguments that might put off some members of her audience: she simply went straight to describing what her subjects had done, against what terrific odds they had succeeded, and to what extend even women today should honour them for having played their significant role in the liberation of women from the severe strictures they were under before, during and after the Renaissance (and as she made clear by including a devastating brief argument by a striking Turkish woman writer) they still are.

This was what I call ideal TV in that it was educational, compelling and left one reeling with a sense of all the things one should have known, but never had. Who, for instance, had ever heard of the Empress Theodora, who began life as a prostitute and street performer, gained the acquaintance of the heir to the throne, and when he succeeded to his title, married him, and succeeded in having legislation adopted gaining protections for women. This in the sixth century!

I had never heard of Hildegaard, a nun, an advocate so powerful that the Pope was forced to allow her to form her own monastery, from which, in her writings, she went so far as to describe the female orgasm. Dr. Foreman, with an engaging smile,  put this freedom about sexuality to a present-day nun, a very comfortable-looking middle-aged woman, who said that sexuality was part of human life, and therefore had to be taken into Benedictine life, and “has to be dealt with by natural means.” (I took this to be the closest we are ever likely to come to hearing a nun confess to masturbating.) All this in the twelfth century!

Similarly a woman called Roxelan, who began as a sexual slave kidnapped from the Ukraine, and became a member of the Sultan’s harem. In those days the Sultan was not permitted to marry: the practice was that each of his favourite women could give birth to one child, and then fade into the background, creating a sort of competition among them to produce the heir to the throne. Roxalan fell for Sulieman the Magnificent, and he for her, and she so shattered the prevailing rules that she married him, and bore him five sons and a daughter. Thereafter she ensured that one of her sons succeeded to the throne by killing one of his half-brothers, also the Sultan’s vizier, and a couple of others. On her death in 1558, the succeeding years have become known as the Sultanate of Women.

Carl Foreman did write some fine films (Guns of Navarone, Home of the Brave, Champion, Cyrano de Bergerac, Bridge on the River Kwai), but I would venture to say that his finest production of all was this superb historian, writer, communicator and artist, his daughter Amanda.

Readers should look out for her next book, to be published next year, The World Made by Women: A History of Women from the Dawn of Civilization. And Alan Furst’s new book is to be called A Hero In France, also to be published next year. I would say both would reward readers.

Link of the day: Dec 7 2015: Primer on American use of innuendo to damn political opponents, when trying to bring about regime change

A fascinating insight provided by Mark Weisbrot 

Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research, of Washington, D.C. in an article entitled Hillary Clinton and a Venezuelan Murder Mystery: Who Killed Luis Manuel Díaz? has been published recently by Huffington Post. The most remarkable revelation in this article is the reluctance of the English-language media to publish the now-accepted version that this Opposition leader was on trial for implication in a previous murder, and was  killed in a gangland killing connected to that murder. That Hillary Clinton made an instant judgment insinuating that the government was responsible for the killing immediately became the version accepted around the world. Read the article here.