Aristocracy · The East · Mores · People
Not all the Bagration-Mukhranskys were overtaken by the avenging hand of the Bolsheviks. Why Maria Georgievna Bagration-Mukhranskaya did not go into emigration after her father and sister one can only guess. Georgy Bagration-Mukhransky, contrary to the logic of the repressive machine, was let out of the country
NB! · Archive · The East · Society · People
The Mongolian Stalin, Khorloogiin Choibalsan (1895-1952), took a matronymic because he was the illegitimate son of a shepherdess named Khorloo. In the photograph from the parade marking the 26th anniversary of the October Revolution he stands at the microphone
In the Press · The East · Mores · Ethnography
In Ancient Rome, the tears of hired mourners were collected in vessels of grief, and the filled vessels were carried to the tomb as a kind of tribute to the deceased. The Victorian era, too, had its fashion for gathering tears: grieving women used special tear bottles, small flasks that
The East · Books · Observations · Humour
Military literature is, of course, a world entirely apart. Let me quote one witty passage about Skobelev. Having gathered the non-commissioned officers in his tent, he proposed that they creep by night into a Turkish trench and frighten the Turks away from the Russian camp: "Get to the
NB! · The East · Art
NB! · Archive · The East · Books
For comparison: a Kurdish socialist poem in Latin script, from a publication of the same years. Here is Oktyabr, the soap of the proletariat, no less!
NB! · Archive · The East · Books · Observations · Education
On the Latinisation of the Turkic languages: a page from a Kurdish children's book published in Armenia in the 1930s. I have no idea what it means, but it reminded me of the Captain Second Rank in "Ivan Denisovich".
Archive · The East · Books · Observations · People
The book about the intelligence officer Ruth Werner contains an episode on the exposure of Comintern agents in China. In 1931 the exposures of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern began. Arrested were the "director of internal communications" of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
NB! · The East · Art · Monarchies · Observations
Madhav Rao II, head of the Hindu Maratha state, who would take his own life at twenty-one, and his moustachioed minister Nana Phadnavis, who stood against the English. Good jewellery for the eighteenth century, especially the earrings
The East · Books · Nature · Humour
Strafokamil: strafo (bird) + kamil (camel) = strangely enough, an ostrich. The word was introduced by the hierodeacon Iona, who travelled through Egypt in the seventeenth century: "The bird is like a camel and very large, its hoof has two toes."
Archive · The East · Museums · Observations · Heritage
Returning to the skull of Sultan Kenesary Kasymov himself, the story of its wanderings through the back rooms of Russian museums has long interested many researchers. The popular opinion is that the head is kept in the Kunstkamera or in the Hermitage itself. It is said that an ashtray was
NB! · The East · Books · Humour