I Muri Hanno Orecchi, Ma Aqua in Bocca

 

 

“It is like building a cyclopean wall. Large stones are not always at the base – just like major attractions are not what you build upon when meeting a person.”

… Cyclopean walls. In Greece and Italy I have walked along these walls. They are said to be built by Titans. It is from ancient Mycenae that comes the belief that Cyclopes built the walls of large boulders. The Titans were inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes named after the sun god Helios.

“It does not matter who built the walls. There is a colossus in all of us. There is a dormant Titan that makes us curious about the what and why we do things. Small and large.”

… Perched in the Alps, Trento surrounds you with a medieval tempo. And with megalithic walls, and pristine lakes. It is still a little bit Austrian, but the joie de vivre is all Italian. 

“We build cathedrals like we build stony walls. It is sometimes for protection, a glorious shield. Often, we protect ourselves from ourselves hoping to keep the titan in us asleep. Moving large megalith or boulders across vast spaces is easy compared to moving a feeling to the open. Suddenly a stone becomes a menhir, for all to see”

…  It was all about stones and walls that morning. It was all about metaphors.

“We place stones on graves to remember; we write on boulders a name for others to wonder about.”

“And we put a stone upon our hearts to forget. Not the person who left and left us alone, but the pain of continuing. Love is like a cyclopean wall – large and small stones should co-exist to keep that wall standing. But love should exist without using mortar -- the stones should fit perfectly.”

… And she looked at Lago Di Caldonazzo.

“Ma, l’aqua cheta la butta giú I ponti” – our best bridges can be destroyed by calm waters.

 

PS/ The photo of the cathedral is of the Armenian cathedral of Gregory The Illuminator, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It has an angle of view I have not seen in other photos of the cathedral since I took it from my car.

April 23, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

Sambuca and the Art of History Telling

 

I first tasted Sambuca in the 1970s. I was in Bari, on the boot heel of Italy where I stayed for more than a month. On that August day, I met a friend of my father, an older Armenian who had lived in Italy since he was a teenager. He was a historian and a musician, and invited me to lunch in an all’apperto restaurant overlooking the bluest sea.

“Should we have Sambuca to clean our palate?” he asked while rolling a cigarette.

I had tasted Lebanese Arak and Greek Ouzo, but not Sambuca.

“The fragrance of Anise is the same, but Sambuca has more history behind it” he replied.

When the dink arrived, there were five coffee beans floating in it.

“We call it ghiaccio e mosche” he explained. “meaning ice and flies. You can have 3 or 5 coffee beans in it, and these are the flies. Never an even number – it is bad luck.”

After his first sip and a deep inhale from the cigarette, he started:

“You know, sambuca was the name of a Roman war machine. In fact the sambucae were ships made for attacking a sieged city from the sea. They were invented by Heracleides and in Ancient Greek they were called σαμβύκη.  You will be interested in knowing that Heracleides was a physician and the first one to write a treatise on the Hippocratic Corpus.”

At this point the sambuca had made me relaxed, and while chewing on a coffee bean, I wondered why a physician had designed a ship-borne siege engine.

“Well, in ancient times, a physician was also a philosopher, a scientist and often a musician. A learned man cannot understand disease without understanding the man and his history.”

I often recalled his statement when I first read “Man, the Unknown” by Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize Winner and father of organ transplant surgery.

“And the Romans took this Greek invention and tried it during the siege of Syracuse in 213 BC. But Marcus Claudius Marcellus was unsuccessful in bringing the city to its knees with sambucae because the Greeks had long-range stone–throwing artillery and catapults designed by Archimedes that prevented the sambucae to reach the shore and extend the ladders to climb the fortified city walls.”

“Do you like the Sambuca? Better than the Lebanese Arak? I know it is better than Ouzo” he added with a twinkle in his eyes.

“And now, let’s have frutti di mare con orzo perlato to celebrate our getting together.”

 

… It was a meeting that has remained in my memory as an Italian moment. I have often recalled a few lines from this historian through my past 50 years of experience with life.

Today I thought about him again because when I was researching the origin of the Kamancha, a string instrument used by Sayat Nova, a 1700s famous Armenian poet, and I came across the history of a historical musical instrument called a sambuca. Consulting Wikipedia, here is what I found:

The original sambuca is generally supposed to have been a small triangular ancient Greek harp of shrill tone, probably identical with thePhoenician  sabecha and the Aramaic   sabb^ekā. The sambuca has been compared to the siege engine of the same name by some classical writers;Polybius likens it to a rope ladder; others describe it as boat-shaped.

It was the last line of the above description that took me back half a century, to an open-air Italian eatery in Bari, and the company of an Armenian-Italian philosopher who introduced me to Sambuca.

 

April 16, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambuca_(instrument)

She Once Held her Beloved Parrot (thinking of my mother)

 

 

 

Soon the mourning doves

Will return to their nest

Under the roof

By her window

 

She waits

Holding the teddy bear

That lost its glass eyes

A Saturday, decades ago

 

Dissociated, tasting old ashes

She sits at the window

Next to her narrow bed

Gazing carefree, waiting

 

Soon the mourning doves

Will mourn 

 

 

April 11, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023