Late in November 1927, an elderly Greek man sat in his mansion in Paris and tended a fire. Every time it flickered and threatened to die, he reached to one side and tossed another bundle of papers or a leather-bound book into the grate. For two days the old man fed the flames, at one [...]
Archive for the ‘Ottoman Empire’ Category
The mysterious Mr. Zedzed, the wickedest man in the world
Posted: 16 February 2012 in Britain, C19th, C20th, Crime, Economic history, Greece, Historians and historiography, Inventions, Ottoman Empire, Sources, United States, War12
The war seemed a very long way away to the citizens of Broken Hill that January 1. It was the height of the southern summer, and the Australian silver-mining town baked in the outback desert heat, 720 miles from Sydney and half a world away from the mud and blood of the Western Front. The [...]
Truth, beauty and Pancho Villa
Posted: 30 November 2010 in C19th, C20th, Greece, Historians and historiography, Hoaxes and frauds, Mexico, Ottoman Empire, SourcesThe first casualty of war is truth, they say, and nowhere was that sage old aphorism more true than in Mexico during the revolutionary period between 1910 and 1920. In all the blood and chaos that followed the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, who had been dictator of Mexico ever since 1876, what was left of [...]
A matter of life and death
Posted: 6 November 2010 in C16th, C17th, C19th, Curiosities, Ottoman EmpireOttoman executioners were never noted for their mercy; just ask the teenage Sultan Osman II, who in May 1622 suffered an excruciating death, “by compression of the testicles,” at the hands of a wrestler-cum-assassin by the name of Pehlivan. There was reason for this ruthlessness, however; for much of its history (the most successful bit, [...]
