On the road to Troy (Troia)

Deniz, Deniz!

There was a choice this morning, final moment in a long process.

And then after a lot of climbing, I saw the sea, the Aegean Sea! (perhaps Thracian)

The men were sitting

the men were sitting

the men were sitting

with tea

and cigarettes

all day long.

Where are the women?

and what are they doing?

(Drinking coffee (dry) on a rainy journey, and passing many such places along the way, only men, ever.

I must say i am rather fascinated by the dogs and cats here. They roam around freely, sometimes alone, sometimes in little groups. Mostly just alongside humans without much interaction and sometimes in a brawl with each other. Some of them like to bark at and chase cars. This also happens to me as a bicyclist and is not that funny when it happens. Having 5, 6 dogs following you barking and some snarling and one was going to bite one time and then my voice, or was it something else, suddenly stopped him before he bit my ankle.

All in all it is fascinating to see this life among humans, no leashes to ‘possess’ an animal. It is like this in Serbia, Bulgaria and now Turkey.

I think it is their intelligence that fascinates me. The way they know about traffic and navigate it, for instance. And their independence, just roaming around freely. And not really bothering people asking for food or anything. Although of course they must live off the spills and probably some people feed them a bit i suppose.

Anyway, it’s rainbow day

“Stop the hawk squawk”, Mikhail Gorbachev, quoted by Dmitri Muratov in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture today https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/muratov/lecture/

Muratov: “I am now presenting an initiative of setting up an international tribunal against torture, which will have the task to gather information on torture in different parts of the world and different countries, and to identify the executioners and the authorities involved in such crimes.”

“Of course, we understand that the award today goes to the entire community of investigative journalists.”

Maria Ressa https://mobile.twitter.com/mariaressa asks “What will you sacrifice for Truth?” In her Nobel Peace Prize Lecture https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/ressa/lecture/ it is worth every while to listen to her important beautiful speech here, starting at 57 minutes and 25 seconds https://www.nobelprize.org

First exploratory walk in Uzunköprü ‘long bridge’. Colourful market. The bridge is closed for repair.

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In Edirne the guide i met, worked at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) https://www.iom.int/iom-history. There are many people involuntarily migrating in the world. In support of the very valuable work by the IOM, here is their latest annual report https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/wmr-2022-interactive/

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A beautiful rendition of a poem about the importance of living of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet https://mobile.twitter.com/melikedonertas/status/1460284461367672835 Thanks to professor Sabina Knight, Melike Dönertaş and Zoe Marmara

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nPYwsjlof20 here with the subtitles on

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CHAPTER ONE

Fundamentals

I beg to urge you, everyone:

life-and-death is a grave matter,

all things pass quickly away;

each of you must be completely alert:

never neglectful, never indulgent.

This is the evening message of sesshin (the Zen retreat), called out by a senior member of the assembly just before lights-out. It expresses three concerns of the Zen student: first, being alive is an important responsibility; second, we have little time to fulfill that responsibility; and third, rigorous practice is neces­sary for fulfillment.

Evening Message, Daily Zen Sutras, Diamond Sangha, Honolulu and Haiku, Hawaii.

From Taking the Path of Zen, Robert Aitken, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1982 Copyright ©️ 1982 by Diamond Sangha.

Today along a road with once in a while a car and multiple encounters with shepherds and their flocks of sheep.

Once again, delving into origins:

Etymology

Map from Kashgari‘s Diwan (11th century), showing the distribution of Turkic tribes.

The first known mention of the term Turk (Old Turkic: 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰰 Türük or 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰰:𐰜𐰇𐰛 Kök Türük, Chinese: 突厥, Pinyin: Tūjué < Middle Chinese *tɦut-kyat < *dwət-kuɑt, Old Tibetan: drugu)^{[42][43][44][45]} applied to only one Turkic group, namely, the Göktürks,^[46]who were also mentioned, as türüg ~ török, in the 6th-century Khüis Tolgoi inscription, most likely not later than 587 AD.^[47][48][49] A letter by Ishbara Qaghan to Emperor Wen of Sui in 585 described him as “the Great Turk Khan”.^[50][51] The Bugut (584 CE) and Orkhon inscriptions (735 CE) use the terms Türküt, Türk and Türük.^[52]

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_peoples#