Nicholas Roerich, Russian Easter

[porphyry]

I stumbled across this in the course of my researches tonight:





There is something about Slavism that is becoming increasingly attractive to me.

Comments

[bricology.livejournal.com]

What a coincidence! I was just getting ready to do a post on Roerich's paintings. Some fascinating images.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I'll be glad to see them.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Orthodox christianity is becoming increasingly revolting to me; not helped by my visit to Muslim-hating, Bosnian-war-criminal-loving Greece.

[sombersigh.livejournal.com]

This is gorgeous - a Dream.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mean Orthodox Christianity, but some rustic quality of Slav tradition (pure Romantic fantasy, of course).

(http://picasaweb.google.com/Anebo10/Varia/photo#5131582052976095330)

(http://picasaweb.google.com/Anebo10/Varia/photo#5131582065860997234)

I always imagined that Modern Greece must be a horrible little place, for some reason.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Is it true that the Greeks have destroyed Greece?

Oh, you needn't worry about Malkhos ever becoming interested in Christianity except in an academic fashion; this is the person who refers to Jesus as "some hippie holy man wandering around the desert along with so many others doing the same" and also, as if that weren't bad enough, refers to St. Paul as a "lunatic suffering from psychotic delusions." I'll leave my Catholic (Roman, not Orthodox) comments to myself, except to look at him skeptically when he assures me he'll be among the noble pagans at the end of time, while smirking at me.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Paul was obsviously too high functioning (as they say) to have been schizophrenic. But what he claims is that his psyche (he meant nous probably), that is to say the inner-most core of his consciousness, had been transformed into Jesus. If one of your patients told you he had Jesus living inside his body, what you think?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Oh, now he's going to start defending his blasphemy! Even Plato didn't dismiss the idea of divine inspiration.

Roerich picture

[calizen.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous! Gorgeous! It really speaks to me deep inside.

[bibermx.livejournal.com]

Oh boy! Those blues! Magnificent.Reminds me of Tarkovski.

O.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Well, that's being a little hard on the Greeks, haha. Economic and population growth inavoidably destroys landscape and generates traffic and rubbish. I've never met any Greek who didn't regard Athens as some sort of hell-hole of noise and air pollution. We visited the northern industrial city of Thessalonika, which is not a common tourist destination and was largely destroyed by fire in the 1900s. It reminded me a lot of 1970s Hong Kong. Lots of small family-run clothing and hardware shops. Mostly modern high-rise buildings but interspersed with some large Roman ruins and Byzantine churches. Our Greek friends also took us out to the Chalkidiki peninsula which was very pretty, with clear blue water teaming with fish (which we caught and barbecued). We could see Mount Olympus poking up in the far distance. Not a great deal in the way of historic landscape or buildings though, compared to England or France. Everything is new and the Greeks seem proud of this. The country has a recent history of grinding poverty which they are eager to put behind them. That part of Greece also underwent the infamous 'population exchange' in the 1920s; an ethnic cleansing in which the whole Muslim population was expelled and a whole new population of Christian refugees had to be absorbed from Turkey. Many of the villages were founded at that time and bear the names of the Turkish towns they left behind, prefixed with the word 'Neos' (new). So, this event very much erased any sense of social historical continuity in the region.

The Greeks are keen to embrace the European Union and English is happily accepted as a second language, including on all the road signs. They are proud of their record of exporting people, especially to the USA, and the international aspect this lends to their culture. NOW, this is where I started to get a bit confused and disappointed. My Greek friends gleefully told me how many millions of their countrymen live in Chicago (or wherever)and then, almost in the same breath switched to the topic of Albanian immigrants and started bemoaning the fact that all these terrible foreigners were coming over the border and (oh the horror) becoming legal immigrants with voting rights. It was then that I understood that I was in a BALKAN country, and there is nothing Balkan people hate more than other Balkan peoples and, of course, the Turks. Whenever conversation turned to the Turks my liberal, educated Greek friends suddenly turned into medieval peasants. They seemed to regard it as almost obscene that I was curious to see some fragments of Islamic architecture in Thessaloniki. The city itself seems to treat the entire Ottoman period as if it didn't happen. There is a museum of ancient treasure, a museum of the liberation (from the Turks), a museum of Byzantine art, but the Ottoman period has been erased. As for the recent history of the population exchange...hoho, a bit more recent than I realised, I soon discovered. They treat it as if it happened yesterday. They speak of Istanbul as if it was only taken by the Turks last week, rather than in 1453. They want revenge....still!

So, a place of contradictions. On the one hand sophisticated, outward looking and liberal; on the other hand poisoned by primitive religious hatred and nationalism. Interesting though.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

That second picture looks like something out of an Asterix book.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I would be very intersted to see a study comaparing a representative sample of modern Greek DNA to Slav and Turkish DNA, but I don't think the Greek government is going to finance one any time soon.

I must confess I want some revenge against the Turks too. The day before Constantinople fell, there probably existed mss. of the complete works of Sappho and Sophoclese, of the Dialogoues of Aristotle and other such triffles (to say nothing of books I'd actually like to work with such as Eubulus' allegeorical exposition of the symbolism of the cult of Mithras or Greek magical books free of Egyptian influence), but the day after they did not.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about the books :-)

But really, the Greeks and Bulgarians and other orthodox balkans had an easy ride by the standards of the era. Their languages, religion and most of their religious buildings were left alone by the Ottoman Empire, which was an ethnically diverse, culturally rich entity, if politically backward. Compare this with the genocide and forced conversions of Jews and Muslims that took place in Spain. This is all lost on the present-day balkan nationalists, of course, who see themselves as the historical victims of Islam.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I do wonder what will become of nationalism once genetic analysis becomes cheap and quick. It may destroy it in some quarters and reinforce it in others.

BTW, I've added some pics I took in Greece to my LJ.

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