Happy New 2007!

And Id Mubarak / Iyi bayramlar - for those of you who celebrate the feast starting today!

The supreme joys of Antep

Baklava! Antep has reportedly the best in Turkey and in the older parts of the town almost every third shop is a baklava-shop! We tried some and it was delicious!

Antep kale

After the previous tit-bits (and a computer change with has kept me from blogging for a few days) I can now start to show our recent trip more chronologically. This is the fortress of Gaziantep, probably used for the last time during the independence fighting against the French around 1920, giving the city the honorific "gazi" after being plain Antep (Ottoman Aintab). The fortress was closed but looked a lot like the Aleppo one from the outside, if somewhat smaller. The similarity to Aleppo is probably no coincidence, as the city belonged to the Aleppo province before a Turkish-Syrian border was drawn between the two.

Rumkale

This is Rumkale, a medieval fortress used for centuries to guarantee security on the Euphrates. The first mention of the site was Hittite and it existed under the Romans also. The current remains are medieval, it belonged to the Crusader principality of Edessa (Urfa) and was sold to the Syriac church, who kept it as a bishops-seat for a time.

The setting, high above the river (now the dam, which has not touched the fortress) is magnificent! It is only possible to reach by boat, though.

Father Firat!

Euphrates! Here shown first as the Roman god of the River, as depicted in the Zeugma mosaics in the Gaziantep museum and then below, the river itself, taken from high up on the gorge, at Rumkale on the dam. Roman rule and influence stretched firmly as far as the river in Antiquity and the thought of a special river god shows how firmly rooted in Roman culture Anatolia was. See hos the river flows from his waterpot. The river Euphrates was at the time in a sense the divider between East and West, Roman and Persian.

Time for reading?

For those of you who may have some extra time over the holidays and who still haven't read it, I will here provide you with links to this months talkie - the Baker-Hamilton/Iraq Study Group Report on Iraq. And here to ICG:s subsequent report on "what to do now". And some media commentary in Swedish.

I hope that the holiday spirit includes some willingness to take action for making the world a safer place for all its citizens in 2007.

Excavation signature

We have seen the Roman mosaics in the Gaziantep museum, rescued in excavations from Zeugma on the Euphrates, before the building of the latest dam. This lady has become the symbol of the collection, which is beautifully displayed - the exhibition producer is excellent! Look at her eyes and marvel!

Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas to all those of you who do celebrate - and may the wishes for a peaceful holiday extend also to all others. This is our temporary companion for the holiday period, resting - we are hoping he finds our company as congenial as we find his!

Arab Human Development Report 2005

In addition to the global Human Development Report which I previously wrote a posting about, an Arab Human Development Report (data covering 2005 - executive summary here & release material in Swedish here) has been recently launched, for the 4th time. As usual the report is authored by Arab researchers and adresses development challenges specific to the region. This year's edition focuses on the situation of women in the Arab world, which is still highly unequal. Thus countries fail to fully utilize the potential of half of the society in a way as to forward the needs of society as a whole and break with poverty, segregation and lack of rights and access to even basic services for it's citizens. Some progress may be noted however, also - credit should be given when due!, even if some changes are still in the cosmetic range of i e political participation.

Another interesting feature of this year's edition is the update on the impact of the previous reports, covering issues such as knowledge and governance - which have been given large attention and seen as partly very controversial.

Human Rights Day

I realize yesterday held another important event, apart from the Nobel celebrations. It was also International Human Rights Day, which of course deserves attention.

In this context, the recent prizes posthumously awarded to Martin Adler and Anna Politkovskaja by the Swedish section of Reporters without Borders also warrants a mention. The motivation for the shared prize between the two deceased journalists, who also happened to have been born the same year, is how they "with curiosity, tenacity and courage reported from places where freedom of expression is at its most threatened, and paid for this with their lives".

Award ceremony

Today, December 10th, the Nobel prizes have been awarded and the lavish celebratory banquet is taking place tonight at the Stockholm City Hall. I would again like to draw your attention to the Literature laureate, the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, and give my congratulations - for a magnificent authorship that I hope will last for many years to come.

Ihlara landscape views

Cave city

These are one of Kapadokya's underground cities, whose earliest history reportedly dates to the Hittites. In later ages they are supposed to have been used by local Christian communities in times of war and need. These may have taken place both during Roman persecution during the early Empire and later due to Muslim raiders to Anatolia. Whether they have been continuously known and used is obscure to me, though. They are dug out in porous stone and could be easily expanded - this one was 7-8 floors deep. I couldn't take a picture up the airshaft, unfortunately - the dark and the angle made it too great a challenge, but craning your head into it and looking up from the lowest level was breathtaking! I am slightly claustrophobic though and think one visit down is quite enough for me, but it was a real experience!