Category Archives: religion

by | 21 October 2026 · 4:17 am

Serbian Dynastic Change, 1903

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 3-4:

Shortly after two o’clock on the morning of 11 June 1903, twenty-eight officers of the Serbian army approached the main entrance of the royal palace in Belgrade.* After an exchange of fire, the sentries standing guard before the building were arrested and disarmed. With keys taken from the duty captain, the conspirators broke into the reception hall and made for the royal bedchamber, hurrying up stairways and along corridors. Finding the king’s apartments barred by a pair of heavy oaken doors, the conspirators blew them open with a carton of dynamite. The charge was so strong that the doors were torn from their hinges and thrown across the antechamber inside, killing the royal adjutant behind them. The blast also fused the palace electrics, so that the building was plunged into darkness. Unperturbed, the intruders discovered some candles in a nearby room and entered the royal apartment. By the time they reached the bedroom, King Alexandar and Queen Draga were no longer to be found. But the queen’s French novel was splayed face-down on the bedside table. Someone touched the sheets and felt that the bed was still warm – it seemed they had only recently left. Having searched the bedchamber in vain, the intruders combed through the palace with candles and drawn revolvers.

While the officers strode from room to room, firing at cabinets, tapestries, sofas and other potential hiding places, King Alexandar and Queen Draga huddled upstairs in a tiny annexe adjoining the bedchamber where the queen’s maids usually ironed and darned her clothes. For nearly two hours, the search continued. The king took advantage of this interlude to dress as quietly as he could in a pair of trousers and a red silk shirt; he had no wish to be found naked by his enemies. The queen managed to cover herself in a petticoat, white silk stays and a single yellow stocking.

…

The events of 11 June 1903 marked a new departure in Serbian political history. The Obrenović dynasty that had ruled Serbia throughout most of the country’s brief life as a modern independent state was no more. Within hours of the assassination, the conspirators announced the termination of the Obrenović line and the succession to the throne of Petar Karadjordjević, currently living in Swiss exile.

Why was there such a brutal reckoning with the Obrenović dynasty? Monarchy had never established a stable institutional existence in Serbia. The root of the problem lay partly in the coexistence of rival dynastic families. Two great clans, the Obrenović and the Karadjordjević, had distinguished themselves in the struggle to liberate Serbia from Ottoman control. The swarthy former cattleherd ‘Black George’ (Serbian: ‘Kara Djordje’) Petrović, founder of the Karadjordjević line, led an uprising in 1804 that succeeded for some years in driving the Ottomans out of Serbia, but fled into Austrian exile in 1813 when the Ottomans mounted a counter-offensive. Two years later, a second uprising unfolded under the leadership of Miloš Obrenović, a supple political operator who succeeded in negotiating the recognition of a Serbian Principality with the Ottoman authorities. When Karadjordjević returned to Serbia from exile, he was assassinated on the orders of Obrenović and with the connivance of the Ottomans. Having dispatched his main political rival, Obrenović was granted the title of Prince of Serbia. Members of the Obrenović clan ruled Serbia during most of its existence as a principality within the Ottoman Empire (1817–78).

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by | 19 October 2026 · 5:21 am

When Serbia Forsook Austria for France

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 28-30:

In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia, for its part, agreed not to undermine the monarchy’s position in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Article II stated that Serbia ‘would not permit any political, religious or other intrigue to be directed from her territory against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar’. Milan reinforced these agreements with a personal engagement in writing not to enter into ‘any kind of treaty’ with a third state without first consulting Vienna.

These agreements were, to be sure, a fragile foundation for good Austro-Serbian relations: they had no anchorage in the sentimental life of the Serbian public, which was deeply anti-Austrian; they symbolized a relationship of economic dependency which was increasingly unacceptable to Serbian nationalist opinion; and they depended on the cooperation of an erratic and increasingly unpopular Serbian monarch. But as long as Milan Obrenović remained on the throne, they at least ensured that Serbia would not side with Russia against Austria, and that the sharp end of Belgrade’s foreign policy would stay pointed in the direction of Macedonia and the coming contest with Bulgaria, rather than at Bosnia and Herzegovina. A new trade treaty was signed in 1892 and the Secret Convention was renewed for ten years in 1889; it was allowed to expire thereafter, though it continued to be the operative platform for Serbian policy vis-à-vis Vienna.

The change of dynasty in 1903 signalled a major realignment. Austria was quick to recognize the Karadjordjević coup, partly because Petar had assured the Austrians beforehand that it was his intention to keep Serbia on an Austrophile course. But it was soon evident that Serbia’s new leaders planned to push towards greater economic and political independence. During 1905–6, a crisis unfolded in which trade policy, armaments orders, high finance and geopolitics were closely intertwined. Vienna pursued a threefold objective: to secure a commercial treaty with Serbia, to ensure that Serbian armaments orders would continue to be placed with Austrian firms, and to contract a major loan to Belgrade.

The failure to achieve agreement on any of these questions produced a drastic cooling of relations between the two neighbours, and the outcome was an unmitigated disaster for Vienna. The Serbian armaments orders went to the French firm Schneider-Creusot instead of to the Austrian rival, Škoda of Bohemia. The Austrians reacted by closing the border to Serbian pork, triggering a customs conflict that came to be known as the ‘pig war’ (1906–9). But this was a counter-productive measure, since Serbia quickly found other export markets (especially in Germany, France and Belgium) and at last began to build slaughterhouses on a substantial scale, thus emancipating itself from its long-standing dependence on Austro-Hungarian processing facilities. Finally, Belgrade secured a major loan again not from Vienna, but from Paris (offered in return for the placement of armaments orders with French firms).

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the larger significance of this French loan. Like all the emergent Balkan states, Serbia was an inveterate borrower, totally dependent on international credit, most of which was used to finance military expansion and infrastructural projects. Throughout the reign of King Milan, the Austrians remained willing lenders to Belgrade. But since these loans outran the debtor state’s financial resources, they had to be hypothecated against various pledges: for each loan some definite revenue was pledged, or some railway property mortgaged. It was agreed that pledged revenues from railways, stamp and liquor taxes should be paid into a special treasury controlled jointly by the representatives of the Serbian government and the bondholders. This arrangement kept the Serbian state afloat during the 1880s and 90s, but did nothing to restrain the financial profligacy of the Belgrade government, which had managed to accumulate an indebtedness of over 350 million francs by 1895. With bankruptcy looming, Belgrade negotiated a new loan through which almost all of the old debts were consolidated at a lower rate of interest. The pledged revenues were placed under a separate administration run partly by the representatives of the creditors.

In other words, fragile debtors like Serbia (the same applied to the other Balkan states and to the Ottoman Empire) could secure loans on reasonable terms only if they agreed to concessions of fiscal control that amounted to the partial hypothecation of sovereign state functions. For this reason among others, international loans were a political issue of the highest importance, inextricably wound up with diplomacy and power politics. French international lending in particular was highly politicized. Paris vetoed loans to governments whose policies were deemed unfriendly to French interests; it facilitated loans in return for economic or political concessions; on occasion it reluctantly conceded a loan to unreliable but strategically important clients in order to prevent them from seeking relief elsewhere. It pursued potential clients aggressively – in Serbia’s case the government were given to understand in the summer of 1905 that if they did not give France first refusal on the loan, the Paris money markets would be closed altogether to Serbia. Acknowledging this nexus between strategy and finance, the French foreign ministry merged its commercial and political divisions in 1907.

Seen against this background, the Serbian loan of 1906 was an important turning point. French financial relations with Belgrade became, in the words of an early American analyst of pre-war high finance, ‘more intimate and dominant’.66 The French came to own more than three quarters of all Serbian debt. These were vast commitments for the Serbian state – repayment schedules extended forwards to 1967 (in fact Belgrade defaulted on the greater part of its obligations after 1918). The lion’s share of this money went into military purchases (especially fast-firing artillery), most of which were transacted in France, much to the annoyance not just of Austrian, but also of British diplomats and armaments suppliers. The loan of 1906 also enabled Serbia to resist Vienna’s commercial pressure and to wage a protracted tariff war. ‘The undoubtedly successful issue of [Prime Minister] Mr Pašić’s resistance to [Austrian] demands,’ the British envoy in Belgrade reported in 1906, ‘marks a distinct step in the economic and political emancipation of Servia.’

These successes in the field of high finance should not distract us from the parlous condition of the Serbian economy as a whole. This had much less to do with Austrian tariff policy than with a process of economic decline that was deeply rooted in the country’s history and agrarian structure. The emergence and subsequent expansion of Serbia were accompanied by a process of drastic de-urbanization, as the mainly Muslim towns were depopulated through decades of harassment and deportations. What replaced the relatively urbanized and cosmopolitan imperial structures of the Ottoman periphery was a society and an economy entirely dominated by smallholding Christian peasants, a consequence in part of the absence of a home-grown Serbian aristocracy and in part of the ruling dynasty’s efforts to prevent the emergence of such a ruling class by blocking the consolidation of latifundial estates. While the cities shrank, the population grew at an awesome rate; hundreds of thousands of hectares of marginal land were opened up for exploitation by young families, loosening social constraints on marriage and fertility. But this rampant growth in the production of people did nothing to reverse the cycle of underperformance and decline that gripped the Serbian economy between the middle of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Per capita output in farming fell by 27.5 per cent between the early 1870s and 1910–12, partly because the expansion of arable land led to large-scale deforestation and thus to a decline in the pasture lands needed to sustain large-scale pig-husbandry, traditionally the most profitable and efficient arm of Serbian agricultural production. By the 1880s, the beautiful forested wilderness of the Šumadija – perfect pasture land for swine – had all but disappeared.

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by | 13 October 2026 · 6:41 am

PM Tojo & FM Togo, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 299-300:

Upon leaving the palace, Tojo directed his car first to the Meiji Shrine, then to the Togo Shrine (built in honor of the Russo-Japanese War hero Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who defeated the czar’s Baltic Fleet), and finally to the Yasukuni Shrine (where the souls of soldiers who died in the empire’s past wars were enshrined). After an hour or so of hopping between shrines in central Tokyo, Tojo returned to the army minister’s official residence. The news of his appointment had already reached the members of his staff, who congratulated him. But Japan’s new prime minister was in no mood to celebrate. He realized the enormity of the task he now faced. That evening, in his absurdly principled way, he ordered that no one from the army should enter his office, which he now declared to be purely civilian territory. He made telephone calls in an effort to fill ministerial positions. He appointed himself army minister and home minister. Then he tapped Togo Shigenori, the veteran diplomat who had served as the ambassador to the Soviet Union, to be his foreign minister.

Togo, a sixty-year-old dandy with copious graying hair, was married to a German woman and had once wished to become a German literature scholar. He was averse to Nazism; his brief tenure as an ambassador to Germany from 1937 to 1938 was terminated partly because of his frosty relationship with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Neither pro-Anglo-American nor pro-Axis, Togo was a genuine Japanese patriot. He wore his patriotism on his sleeve perhaps because he felt that no matter how successful he was in his professional career, he was vulnerable to being labeled an outsider. Born as Park [= Boku] Shigenori in Kagoshima, a southwestern city on the southern island of Kyushu, he came from a long line of Korean potters who were forcibly brought to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century and had remarkably preserved their language and culture over many generations. His father, a successful businessman, bought the Japanese family name Togo when Shigenori was five. (Contrary to popular belief, Togo was no relation to Admiral Togo, the Nelson of the East.)

On the whole, Togo was a much more reasonable and sensible choice than [Admiral] Toyoda, the departing foreign minister, had been. He was an experienced diplomat whose skills could be put to good use. Togo had his reservations. Before midnight, he went to see Tojo and asked whether the would-be premier was ready to make difficult concessions to avoid war. The stiff army man responded to the suave diplomat that things were very different now. “I do not have any problem reexamining the issue once again,” Tojo said. The reexamination implied extracting concessions from the army, including the withdrawal of already mobilized troops, in order to give the new foreign minister more room for diplomatic maneuver with the United States. Upon this pledge of honor, the unlikely Tojo-Togo team was born.

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Filed under Germany, Japan, Korea, military, nationalism, religion, U.S., USSR, war

by | 30 September 2026 · 6:21 am

Melanesian Obsidian in Micronesia

From Waka Kuaka | The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 131, no. 4 (2022):

OBSIDIAN POINT DISCOVERED ON KAPINGAMARANGI ATOLL, MICRONESIA:
IMPLICATIONS FOR POST-SETTLEMENT REGIONAL INTERACTIONS

TAKUYA NAGAOKA. Pasifika Renaissance
PETER J. SHEPPARD, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland
CALLAN ROSS-SHEPPARD, McGill University
NINA KONONENKO, University of Sydney, Australian Museum

ABSTRACT: An obsidian point was discovered by chance by local people on Kapingamarangi Atoll, a Polynesian Outlier in Micronesia. In addition to use-wear and residue analysis to identify its use, pXRF analysis conducted on it demonstrated that it was brought from the Admiralty Islands in Papua New Guinea over about 900 km. The information on other Admiralty obsidian artefacts found in western Oceania and other associated phenomena suggest that those artefacts were brought from the source through an interaction network between Micronesia and Melanesia during the first half of the second millennium AD. They had significant social value as prestige goods in the peripheral areas of the Admiralty obsidian circulation, serving as chiefly heirlooms and grave goods. In addition to skilful Caroline Islands seafarers, Polynesian Outlier populations had an important role in the interregional interactions during this dynamic period in the western Pacific, which was possibly activated by Polynesian intrusion into the region related to a larger Polynesian expansion into eastern Polynesia circa AD 1000. Further, we argue that the Saudeleur dynasty of Pohnpei, which achieved the development of a famous megalithic politico-religious centre, Nan Madol, was influential in the interaction sphere during its height in AD 1000–1500. Thus, by using archaeological, linguistic, historical, ethnological, oral traditional and DNA data, the interdisciplinary analysis of this rare obsidian artefact has deepened our understanding of post-settlement interaction in the region.

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by | 29 September 2026 · 5:53 am

Some Polish Nobles on the Grand Tour

This week’s edition of Culture.pl has an interesting historical article by Jakub Zarzycki, titled The Grand Tour, or the ‘Great Journey’ Through Europe, first published in 2023 and translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar. Here are some more excerpts.

Grand Tour of a Polish Nobleman

Such a trip was in Polish sometimes referred to as a peregrination (peregrynacja) or a voyage (wojaż), and its participants were called peregrines or voyagers (peregrynanci and wojażerowie, respectively). German terms were also used, such as Kavalierstour (for ‘bachelor tour’) or Kavaliersreise.

It is worth noting geographic and social differences between nations. The English, being mostly Protestants, came to the continent, which involved a physical crossing of the English Channel and a stay in countries with a different – that is, Roman Catholic – religion (such as France and particularly Italy). Meanwhile, for Poles, among whom Catholics predominated, it was a trip to lands not so religiously different from theirs.

Such a trip was to happen only once, because later the young nobleman entered adult life. Initially, the peregrines were therefore between the ages of 16 and 20; later, from the 18th century, older people went. It happened that brothers of similar age traveled together. Jan (later king) and Marek Sobieski, departing in 1646, were 17 and 18, respectively. Janusz Antoni and Michał Serwacy Wiśniowiecki, starting their journey in 1695, were 17 and 15 years old. Later, they held high offices, as Janusz became the castellan of Kraków, while Michał became the voivode of Vilnius and the great hetman of Lithuania.

The journey (sometimes combined with study) could last from one to four years, sometimes longer. Both the young Sobieskis and the Wiśniowieckis left Poland for a total of two years. The grand tour of the brothers Jan Stanisław and Aleksander Jan Jabłonowski, sons of Stanisław Jan, the grand crown hetman and the commander of the Polish hussars during the Battle of Vienna, lasted longer – they stayed abroad for over five years – from September 1682 to January 1688.

As a side note, it can be remarked that their father also spent part of his youth abroad – the period of his studies in Prague and the Grand Tour, spent primarily in France, were in the years 1648 to 1650.

The time spent in each city was not divided equally. It was assumed that one could spend up to a year in Paris (combining this stay with studies), and only a few weeks would be left for Madrid. This is what the Jabłonowskis, for example, did. The Sobieskis also spent most of their trip in the French capital, while the Wiśniowieckis lived there for almost a year.

The trips were, of course, carefully planned, and the most important element of preparation was the choice of a guardian. Young people did not leave alone but under the supervision of a preceptor, also called a mentor, governor or tutor. As Antonii Mączak, the precursor of research on travel in modern times, wrote in the book Everyday Life in Traveling Around Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Życie Codzienne w Podróżach po Europie w XVI i XVII Wieku) that this guardian had to be

a thoroughly competent person who knows the countries he visits, speaks languages and treats the care provided during a foreign trip as a profession. Such a tutor was valuable, as he ensured the young man used his experience and made it possible to trust that he would avoid unnecessary risks. Such specialists were passed on by fathers through letters of recommendation. They would often become authors of widely read and useful guides.

One such professional preceptor was Lassels, the author of the term Grand Tour, who traveled in this manner five times in total. The young Jabłonowskis had two tutors – Jan Michał Kossowicz and Szymon Ignacy Gutowski. The Wiśniowieckis were looked after by Jan Kamocki, and the Sobieskis by Sebastian Gawarecki. During such trips, preceptors could complete their own studies and, of course, visit previously unknown places with the young peregrines.

The task of the preceptor was primarily to make sure that the whole trip proceeded in accordance with the parents’ instructions, i.e. that the young men learned, made appropriate contacts, and also engaged in sightseeing. It was the preceptor who had the money allocated for the trip and regularly informed the parents in letters about what was happening to their sons. Mentors would also write diaries if the peregrines were too young. Gawarecki wrote one for the Sobieskis, and Kossowicz for the Jabłonowskis.

In addition to the guardians, servants were also taken along, which was so obvious that they were not even mentioned in the travel accounts unless they became the protagonists of some particular story.

Itineraries, Diaries & Manuals

Our knowledge about Polish voyagers and their experiences comes from the few remaining travelers’ records  of a specific type. Most of them were not published (their authors did not intend to do so), and they circulated among the relatives and friends of the diarist only in the form of manuscripts, helping in the preparation of subsequent trips.

The first type of such a document was the itinerary. As Adam Kucharski noted:

[it was] simply a list of visited cities, arranged in the chronological order of their visit. Thence originated  the specific type of itineraries, such as the Old Polish ones, that constituted a kind of guide for travelers. They provided an outline of the road separating the destination points, specifying the distance between the start and the finish of the peregrination. The distance was given in various units of length (usually miles as measured in a given country). Possible obstacles on the way, such as rivers or mountains, were also specified.

The second type was a diary, i.e. an account of the expedition; their authors were referred to as diarists. It was a travel journal in chronological order, with the author’s opinions and impressions about the places he visited. It contained comments on history, geography, politics but also descriptions of the sights and observations on the customs prevailing in each given country. It also included practical information. Diaries are the most valuable documents for us today, because on their basis not only can we reconstruct the routes of the journeys but we can also get to know the impressions and opinions of the peregrines. Particularly interesting are those fragments in which the authors describe not so much something typical but rather something that deviated from the norm they were accustomed to.

Yet another document was parental instructions – guidelines in which fathers (more often) and mothers (less often) wrote down their instructions: what and how peregrines were to study, how to behave, what to avoid. These were often based on the earlier experiences of fathers-voyagers. Moral admonitions and practical advice also appeared in the texts themselves. Such an instruction was written, for example, by Jakub Sobieski for his sons, Jan and Marek.

Places Visited

France – including Paris and Versailles – was undoubtedly a special place for the participants of the Grand Tour, often being its main destination. As we read in Stanisław Wierzbowski, who took his ‘bachelor tour’ in the 1680s:

I do not describe Paris, because there are so many volumes written about it. I only add that the city is full of all delicacies. Want to be a saint? You can, because you will find so many opportunities and people whose example of holiness you can follow. There are so many temples of the Lord, pious monasteries, school libraries. The Sorbonne itself gives you a doctorate. Want to be bad? There also you will more likely find the type of company to corrupt your soul and body. Do you want to delight your eyes? You have beautiful people, palaces, gardens, haberdashery, exquisite paintings, splendid and delicate works, and a subtlety of comedies and operas – especially operas and the Versailles garden – these two seduce a man’s memory.

As was already mentioned, Italy was also a permanent destination for the expeditions. Italy aroused interest due to the accumulation of works of art and the role of Rome as the capital of the Christian world. In addition, the universities in Bologna and Padua were highly esteemed. Venice was visited especially keenly during Carnival. The Apennine Peninsula was often the last stage of the Grand Tour – after that, one headed north towards the borders of the Republic of Poland.

The countries of the Reich (particularly Vienna) were also visited for political reasons – after all, a pro- or anti-Habsburg orientation was one of the vectors of Polish foreign policy at that time. Prague, then part of the Reich, was a popular choice as a place of study. Other countries were also traveled to, such as England, the Netherlands and Spain, but their importance or the time devoted to visiting them could not compare to France or Italy.

Typical Activities of a Polish Peregrine

What the young man was supposed to do during the Grand Tour was already planned by his parents in the aforementioned instructions. Peregrines combined sightseeing with studies – for example, the Jabłonowskis studied in Prague and Paris, in the latter city the subject being philosophy at the Jesuit college.

The Sobieskis, while in Paris, even had their typical days planned by their father (Jakub Sobieski). As Joanna Orzeł writes in the text The Grand Tour of Marek and Jan Sobieski (Grand Tour Marka i Jana Sobieskich), it was:

five hours of study a day: an hour in the morning, stylistic exercises in Latin; the next half hour, their correction under the supervision of a professor; an hour-long lecture by the professor, reading with a commentary on Roman history; half an hour, individual reading (a total of three hours in the morning); in the afternoon, two hours of learning French combined with French history. Paris was also where they studied fencing. Their father additionally recommended riding lessons and playing ball (on their days off). In addition, young men could decide on their own to learn to dance and play instruments.

It is worth noting that studies were perceived slightly differently than today – they did not have to be complete, regular semesters spent in one place and ending with exams, but rather listening to lectures by the most eminent professors and participating in disputes. Students often studied for several months, moving between specific academic centers.

Practical studies related to the military were an important element, which was particularly essential for the subsequent career of a young nobleman in the First Polish Republic. Anna Markiewicz, in the text Hercules Gallicus: The Educational Journey of Jerzy Stanisław Dzieduszycki (Hercules Gallicus: Podróż Edukacyjna Jerzego Stanisława Dzieduszyckiego), explained why the young man, who was traveling in the early 1790s, left Paris for the Netherlands:

The attractiveness of the country was usually associated with the possibility of convenient observation of many fortifications and territorial reinforcements located in this area, making it easier for the young nobility to acquire practical skills in the field of military art. The convenience of observing military maneuvers during numerous clashes that took place there was a practical supplement to reading and theoretical classes held at prestigious Parisian academies.

Military interests weren’t exceptional – for example, the already mentioned Wiśniowieckis pursued them. Learning foreign languages ​​was also indispensable. For example, Jabłonowski, the father, put emphasis on this, so his sons wrote letters to him from Paris in Latin and French, which was supposed to showcase their progress in mastering these languages.

Of value apart from studying was establishing contacts, i.e. audiences at royal courts and getting to know other young people from noble and aristocratic families. In May 1685, the Jabłonowskis were introduced to Louis XIV in Versailles. They also observed the audience granted by the King of France to the Doge of Genoa, or the solemn entry of the Muscovite envoy.

On the other hand, liaising with other Polish noblemen in the specific conditions provided by staying abroad and the young age of the people getting to know each other created bonds between them, which were maintained and paid off later in life. The common experience of youth, e.g. studying in the same place, often brought strangers closer together.

These trips were also connected with … shopping. In addition to souvenirs, the newest books were purchased but also works by classical authors, which later enriched magnate libraries. In Italy, especially in the 18th century, works of art were bought, both antique and contemporary. Cityscapes depicting Italian cities, so-called vedutas, are worth mentioning here. The popularity of this genre developed especially in Venice, where these were eagerly bought by English visitors to the city. They treated them as a special souvenir – these works, after returning to London, for example, were to be a reminder of the Grand Tour taken to Italy back in their day.

Grand Tour – What For?

Preceptors’ letters to parents often contained polite requests to send money; fathers, writing to their children’s guardians, in turn pointed out that the costs of the expedition were constantly rising. We may wonder – why send young people on such expensive expeditions? The educational aspect was undoubtedly important, but the peregrine was supposed to watch, experience and gain an understanding of something – and these are very intangible experiences.

As the popularity of the Grand Tour phenomenon among the Polish elites of the 17th and 18th centuries shows, this journey was indispensable and considered worth its price. Its main assumptions have survived, in changed forms of course, to this day.

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by | 25 September 2026 · 4:45 am

Berlin’s Full Mobilization, 1944

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 279-280:

But [Heinrich] George did not have to worry. He was one of the very few to be put on a special list of national geniuses (Gottbegnadetenliste), along with Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Heinz Rühmann, who were exempt from wartime mobilization.

Women, too, were ordered to take on the jobs of absent men. Sabine Alenfeld, whose Jewish husband, Erich, was becoming a nervous wreck, worked from 6:45 p.m. till 4:45 in the morning, sewing military uniforms. She was terrified that things would get worse. She heard rumors that parents in mixed marriages would be separated from their children and put into camps. This didn’t happen. Mischlinge and Jewish husbands were forced instead to labor in the most dangerous construction jobs, or clear out the rubble after bombings. Sixty hours a week was the norm. Sabine wrote to her sister on November 13, “Our lives are turning more and more into a race, a race against…well, what. A race against death, of course, but also against the possibility of living.”

The words fanatisch, used in an entirely positive sense, and Volksgemeinschaft dominated the newspaper headlines. Such words were uttered, often without making any sense. The Völkischer Beobachter on September 25: “Fanatically we will stand together. Leadership that is harder than fate will always win in the end.” On October 16, Hitler announced that all able-bodied men between sixteen and sixty in every province (Gau) of the Great German Reich had to join the people’s militia (Volkssturm). Sabine Alenfeld was terrified that her frail husband would be called up. But Mischlinge and Jews were exempted. They were given a “certificate of exclusion.” How could they possibly be included in this great fanatical enterprise?

The Volkssturm army would “defend the Heimat soil with every suitable weapon.” Many of the men were not able-bodied, but fragile and sometimes even invalids. Since suitable weapons for fighting a modern war were now in short supply, the old men and young boys, some in ragged civilian clothes, some in Hitler Youth uniforms, and some in their everyday clothes, were handed primitive weapons, occasionally dating to the last war, and given minimal instruction how to use them. The main weapon was the Panzerfaust, a portable grenade launcher to fire at tanks at close range. Many of the instructors were elderly veterans, whose knowledge of modern warfare was limited. But that didn’t matter. It was the fighting spirit of the Volksgemeinschaft that would surely be enough to defeat Germany’s enemies.

Goebbels wrote in his diary how pleased he was with the enthusiasm of Berliners who signed up willingly: “I will pay special attention to the Volkssturm and make sure that in this respect, too, Berlin will outdo every other Gau.” The hope was to raise an army of millions. The papers reported that long lines of men waited patiently to file into the recruiting centers, decorated with swastikas and busts of Hitler, their eyes shining with the requisite fanaticism.

That many people were perhaps less than keen might be gathered from a joke that did the rounds at the time: “Why is the Volkssturm Germany’s most precious resource? Because its members have silver in their hair, gold in their mouths, and lead in their bones.”

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Filed under Germany, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, religion, war

by | 22 September 2026 · 5:44 am

German ‘Workforce Turnover’, 1942

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 155-57, 181, 191:

If things were bad in Berlin, they were far worse on the eastern front, where many soldiers were freezing to death. The people back home caught glimpses of the Russian campaign on the Wochenschau [weekly newsreels]: horse-drawn carriages and tanks bogged down in knee-high snow; soldiers in white camouflage outfits, rather like hooded bathrobes, skiing or plowing their way through the ruins of Russian villages that were “utterly destroyed by the mighty arms of our heroic shock troops”; German planes dropping food parcels for the soldiers marching in the glacial steppes. Letters home spoke of frostbite and amputated limbs. There were images of “Bolshevik corpses” littered around the icy Russian plains, but never of German soldiers, for that would be too upsetting.

One of the main items on the Wochenschau in January celebrated a domestic campaign that had been ordered by the Führer in December 1941: to donate socks, pullovers, scarves, ski boots, furs, fleeces, blankets, or anything else to keep the troops warm on the front lines….

What was not reported on the Wochenschau, or anywhere else, was an event that occurred at much the same time, on the western shore of the Wannsee, in a grand Italianate villa that once belonged to a rich industrialist and now served as a guesthouse and conference center for SS officers. Houses around the lovely Wannsee were sought after by the wealthiest Berliners. Before 1933, Jews lived in some of the finest homes. After the Nazis came to power, these were confiscated by senior figures in the regime. Goebbels owned a house on the lake, at Schwanenwerder. Walther Funk, the minister of economics, resided in a grand house that had once belonged to a Jewish family, now decorated with swastika tiles. Albert Speer lived nearby, as did Heinz Rühmann, the movie star.

…

Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), invited fourteen senior figures in the Nazi regime to a secret meeting followed by breakfast on January 20 at the SS guest house on the Wannsee. They included top bureaucrats from various ministries, as well as Roland Freisler, the notorious judge on the People’s Court who sentenced more than five thousand people to death between 1942 and 1945. Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for managing Jewish deportations, was asked to take the minutes. What needed to be discussed on that chilly morning, alleviated by a steady supply of fine brandy, were some practical aspects of the extermination of the Jews.

That the Jews were to be eradicated was no longer a matter of dispute. Just one week before the Wannsee Conference, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The Führer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no sentimental squeamishness about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them.” Mass killings had already been taking place in Poland since 1939. Jews who were not murdered on the spot were to be worked to death. But two questions still needed to be cleared up. How to administer the genocide in an orderly and efficient manner? And how to define who was Jewish? Should Mischlinge be included in the killing program? Heydrich believed that they should. Others wanted to postpone the decision until after the war. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Heydrich settled for that. The logistical issues were cleared up pretty quickly to everyone’s satisfaction, so the gentlemen could enjoy a leisurely glass of cognac in front of the fireplace.

…

The first sign that deportations were imminent was a questionnaire sent through the mail to be filled out meticulously: financial assets, family history, personal details, and so forth. After some days, or sometimes weeks, the Gestapo would come beating on the door. There was no way back after that. In 1942, sixteen transports, each with loads of roughly one thousand people, left the Berlin railway stations. The trains carrying their human freight were mostly bound for the ghettos of Warsaw or Riga, or the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor, where those not deemed fit to be worked to death were immediately gassed. In the summer of 1942, the killing of Jews had reached a bloody peak. Millions had already been shot or murdered by other means before the gas chambers of Auschwitz were employed day and night. The General Gouvernment had become a giant killing field, presided over by Governor General Hans Frank.

…

There were now more than three million foreign workers in Germany. Many were French POWs. A number of men from occupied countries in Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Scandinavian countries, had volunteered for work. Then there were male and female workers from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other parts of the Soviet Union. Some had come willingly, many had not. The Russians and Eastern Europeans, called Ostarbeiter, often mere teenagers, were treated appallingly. Cooped up in dismal work camps, they were so underfed that many died, or had to be shipped home in horrible conditions. One description of these transports: “There were dead passengers on the returning train. Women on that train gave birth to children that were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick from tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach. The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown onto the embankment.” Treatment of Jewish slave workers in concentration camps, such as Sachsenhausen, was of course even worse.

And yet, a semblance of normalcy for most Berliners continued despite the griping, the bad news from different battlefronts, the horrors endemic in a murderous police state, and “Berlin pessimism.” The soccer competition carried on as always. BSB from Berlin Mitte beat Minerva from Schmargendorf. Tasmania was too strong for Tennis Borussia. And FC Wacker from Reinickendorf lost to Blau-Weiss 90.

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by | 21 September 2026 · 5:44 am

Mischlings and the Dreaded Star

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 138-139:

The introduction of the star brought back the life-and-death question of who counted as a Jew. Some mixed families, temporarily protected by a “privileged” status, lived peculiar double lives. Marlene Herzfeld was five when the war began. I spoke to her in her house in Steglitz where she was bedridden. She was still living at home but was facing an operation—“my last chance, perhaps.” Hers was a story of great bitterness. “It would have been better for my mother if I hadn’t been born,” she said, in the firm tone of one who had learned to live with pain. Her mother had converted to her husband’s Jewish faith, and Marlene was classified as Jewish. But after divorcing her husband in 1937, her mother rejoined the Evangelical Christian church, and Marlene was baptized. She had to learn how to behave like a Christian: “I looked at a picture of Jesus, and I said, ‘That is our Führer.’ The pastor said, ‘Yes, indeed he is.’ ” It didn’t help. Marlene was still compelled to go to a Jewish kindergarten. Her mother’s family wanted nothing to do with them. They were spat at in the streets, kicked out of their apartment by the Nazi owner, and Marlene survived the war in an orphanage. Whenever there was a raid by Gestapo officers looking for Jews, she and a little boy with water on the brain had to hide until night in the woods. Marlene had a mournful look in her light blue eyes, as she spoke. “I was lucky that I was blonde,” she added.

The Mischling children of Erich and Sabine Alenfeld were treated as Aryans. Young Justus, ten years old in 1941, was a member of the Nazi youth organization the Jungvolk before he could join the Hitler Youth. The slang name for these boys was Pimpf, meaning “little rascal.” Justus was delighted to be a Pimpf. Sabine wrote to her husband, “Today [Justus] is doing his duty on the Reich Sporting Field…. He was head of his squad three times. Such pride!…Yesterday I handed him his official Hitler Youth dagger. God, was he proud, the little fellow.”

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by | 17 September 2026 · 6:23 am

Berlin’s Busybodies, 1939-45

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 23-24:

Kennan, as an American diplomat, was vastly more comfortable than most Berliners, especially when winter set in. In Kennan’s description: “Canals were frozen. Fuel was short. Whole blocks of huge apartment houses could not be heated at all and had to be evacuated in zero weather.” (Jews were deprived of coal, and left to freeze in their “Jew houses.”) People also lived in constant fear of busybodies who could have a person arrested for breaking any petty regulation. The lowest-level busybody was the block warden (Blockwart), usually a little local fanatic, who would make sure that any untoward remarks or behavior observed on his street would be instantly reported to the relevant Nazi authorities. One such man is described by the German British Christabel Bielenberg. Herr Neisse was perhaps no better or worse than most minor Nazi officials. In daily life, he was a friendly gardener, who greeted Christabel politely as Frau Doctor Bielenberg whenever they crossed paths, and was a handy man with the pruning shears when her vine leaves needed pruning. A war veteran, he had come to Berlin from a small village in Saxony, and had had his fair share of problems. Like millions of other working men, Herr Neisse had suffered from inflation, unemployment, and poverty in the big city. And like millions of others, he had come to understand whom to blame for his own and his country’s misfortunes. His Führer had made that very clear. “ ‘Oh, no, Frau Dr., you must not get me wrong,’ ” he hastened to say, “ ‘not one particular Jew…. No, no, International Jewry…. You understand, Frau Dr., International Jewry.’ ”

Before Hitler came to power, Herr Neisse had already attended party meetings, where the men wearing brown storm trooper uniforms under their raincoats arrived in halls that reeked of sweat and beer. There they could freely fling up their arms and sing their favorite songs: “Clear the streets for the brown battalion / clear the streets for the storm division man!” In 1933, the humble, polite, diffident gardener became a somebody, a figure of authority, someone to be feared, “resplendent,” in Christabel’s words, “in brown uniform with shining boots and pill box hat, his mustache trimmed to a neat rectangle, his left thumb hitched into his Sam Browne belt and his right arm raised rigid in salute.” He was “resurgent Germany.” On a visit to Berlin in 1946, after she had moved back to England, Christabel was curious to know what had happened to Herr Neisse. She was told that he had been hanged from a lamppost after the Russian troops fought their way into the city in May 1945. Perhaps the Russians did it. Perhaps someone took revenge on a minor Nazi. Or, most plausibly, Herr Neisse had lost his faith in the Führer as the Reich collapsed around him and he had voiced doubts about Germany’s final victory. That was all it took in those last days of the war to be hanged by a mob of zealous SS men, roaming the streets in search of “defeatists.”

From Christabel’s description of Herr Neisse, he was not a particularly bad man, not motivated by malice, but he and people like him could get anyone into serious trouble if they caught them insufficiently blacking out their windows, or God forbid, listening to the BBC on their radio. After passing through the Alex, such offenses could result in forced labor, time in a concentration camp, or even death. Imposing petty rules was also another way to bully Jews in Berlin. A non-Jew caught jaywalking or cutting diagonally across a street would be let off with a warning. Jews would be taken to police stations, where they were often abused by bored cops just for sport.

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by | 11 September 2026 · 5:27 am

Polish Baby Names

Last week’s compilation from Culture.pl includes an article about Polish naming conventions by Aleksandra Jagielska. (Public transport vehicles in Poland that show the current date and time to their passengers also typically show the Christian saint names for those days, one male and one female.) Here are excerpts from the article.

There are 1,063,756 women called Anna in Poland, more people than live in Kraków. Last year, eight boys were named Dobromir. Somewhere between those two numbers sits the story of how Poland has named its children – Slavic wishes, Christian saints, Enlightenment novels, and a 2014 law that finally let you call your daughter Jessica.

Traditional, international or original? After your ancestors, literary heroes or maybe after a patron saint to put your child under their protection? One name, two or more? Let’s check what sort of changes have been happening in the fashions for names in the Polish language.

Even though we don’t choose our own names, they stay with us from birth for our whole lives as an important part of our identity. That right is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, under which ‘a child from the moment it is born will have the right to a name’. Because although its basic function is identification for formal and social reasons, having a name says something about our dignity.

Names are given to children the moment their birth certificate is drawn up in the Civil Registry Office. According to the Civil Status Records Act from November 2014, you can pick one or two names, but no more. This is mostly to ensure the need for clarity in identity documents (i.e. to simplify them for processing by Poland’s bureaucratic apparatus) and ignores the wishes of any parents hoping to name their son after all four Beatles or anything else equally creative.

Names also have to be separate and cannot be hyphenated – no Mary-Sues allowed in Poland. They cannot be diminutives (so William would be fine, but not Bill), ‘ridiculous’ or inappropriate (Lucifer, VAT or Courtesan would all be disallowed). The Polish Language Council also recommends avoiding country names and geographical terms (no Monaco or Pacific, thank you).

Before 2014, the rules were even stricter. If both parents were Poles, they had to choose names rooted in Polish linguistic tradition. You’d have to call your son Jan instead of John, and your daughter Zdzisława instead of Jessica. You also had to choose names that clearly indicated the sex of the child, i.e. all girls’ names had to end in ‘a’. But once the law changed in 2014, you were finally allowed to name your child something foreign regardless of the parents’ citizenship, and able to pick a name that didn’t grammatically indicate the sex but was generally understood as assigned to one, eg. Nikol.

Sometimes, in a hasty rush to fill in all the paperwork, parents don’t always like the name they so quickly put to paper and start to regret their choice. Luckily, there is a six-month window in which a newborn’s name can be changed to something else. This late administrative change needs to be accompanied by serious justification though, like proving it’s a ‘ridiculous’ name or that the baby has continually been called something else. Should we really take our time and want to change the name of a child who’s already past its 13th birthday, then the child themselves also has to agree.

Despite all the laws listed above, there is no official list of banned names – the Polish Language Council and other linguistic advisors can offer their opinion, but the final decision, like so many in Poland, belongs to the civil servants processing the application. If the name does not fulfil the requirements (say it’s diminutive, ridiculous or inappropriate), then the civil servant has the right – nay, the duty – to throw it out. They even get to pick a new name themselves, a commonly-used one, and the parents have just two weeks to appeal the decision.

If you’re wondering how many people in Poland have the same name as you, or are wondering if rarer names really are that rare, you can check the freely available database provided by the Ministry of Digitisation at dane.gov.pl. There you’ll find information about given names across different years, according to all the names accumulated in Poland’s PESEL registry (the country’s centralised identity database).

The latest figures posted in January 2026 say the most common boys’ names are Piotr (682,516 people), Krzysztof (631,898) and Tomasz (533,217), while for girls the clear leader is Anna (1,063,756) followed by Katarzyna (602,474) and Małgorzata (572,067). The top tens also include Andrzej, Paweł, Michał, Jan, Marcin, Jakub, Adam, and Maria, Agnieszka, Ewa, Barbara, Magdalena, Elżbieta and Joanna.

But when it comes to newborns, the lists are completely different. In 2025, the most popular names given to baby boys were Nikodem, Antoni, Leon, Jan and Aleksander, and for girls it was Zofia, Zuzanna, Maja, Laura and Hanna.

Trends take time to change. The most popular names in 2024 were Nikodem and Maja. And in 2023 it was back to Nikodem and Zofia again. In 2022, it was Antoni and Zofia, and before that, for 2021, 2020 and 2019, it was Antoni and Zuzanna.

So yes, with one stubborn exception in 2024, a girl born in Poland since 2019 has stood a very good chance of being landed with a name starting with Z.

But let’s go back to the statistics from the start of the century. In the years 2001 to 2012, the top names were Jakub and Julia – yes, for over a decade, it was the same names over and over again. It was only in 2013 that the name Lena dethroned Julia. Jakub was dethroned as late as 2016 by a name you’ve already seen: Antoni.

So those are the most popular names, but what about the rarest? In 2025, among the rarest names given to a boy in Poland were Zbyszko, Teodozjusz, Światosław, Gromisław and Gaweł. There were also a few non-typical Polish names like Riczard and Rajan. When it comes to girls, names that were given to only a handful of children included Wincentyna, Leonora, Laurencja, Henryka, Delfina and Afrodyta.

…

Slavic names carried a wish inside their etymology: Bronisław means ‘to defend fame’ – ‘(may he) defend fame’; Kochan, ‘may he be loved’; Świętopełk, ‘holy regiment’ or ‘strong band’ – ‘(may he have) a strong band behind him’. A name that stays with a person for life was meant to work like a shield, a declaration of good fortune for whoever carried it. Bequeathing a name, writes the onomastician Maria Malec, was an anthropological act of a sacral character, by which the child acquired the status of a human being.

Protective names existed across the Slavic world too – decoys used in place of the ‘real’ name to hide it from evil forces when a child’s life seemed at risk. You can spot them by the negation built in: Niedan, Niemir, Niemój (‘Not-given’, ‘Not-peace’, ‘Not-mine’). A child saddled with one of these was supposed to slip past the attention of demons.

When Poland accepted Christianity in 966 CE, it entered the orbit of Christian culture. Much like in the rest of Christian Europe, the cults celebrating individual saints became popular in Poland, and with them the custom of naming children after martyrs and other saints, as well as Biblical names from the Old and New Testaments. The act of giving a name was associated with organising a christening and, much like how the native names contained wishes, the names from Christian culture were linked to patrons who were to protect their namesakes.

For several centuries, Slavic and Christian names appeared in fairly even numbers. In the 15th century however, the latter became significantly more popular, and in the century after that they had all but driven the native ones out entirely. This followed the recommendations of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which held that names given at baptism should belong to Christian saints. The exceptions were Old Polish names that had acquired patron saints of their own – Kazimierz, Wojciech, Stanisław, Władysław. To this day, Christian names remain the backbone of the Polish go-to stock of names.

Among the names that never really took off in Polish culture were those drawn from ancient and medieval literature – Achilles, Paris, Hector, Roland, Tristan, Isolde – which may well have gone the way of several native Old Polish names after the Council of Trent. A run of Old Testament names failed to catch on too: Abraham, Ezekiel and Isaac were rejected in the 16th century by Protestants.

Meanwhile the Polish name vault gained newly minted saints such as Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier and Teresa of Ávila. Protestants were also the first to start calling their daughters Maria – for centuries considered an affront to the reverence owed to the Mother of God, with Marianna used as the respectful workaround. This may explain the lopsided statistics mentioned earlier. Centuries of treating Maria as too holy for daily use pushed it into the middle slot, where it could sit quietly doing its devotional work without anyone having to shout it across a courtyard. The taboo may have dissolved a long time ago, but the custom didn’t.

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Old Polish names started to return to fashion after Poland lost its independence in the late 1700s. The revival in patriotism and efforts to maintain a national identity led to people reaching for forgotten Slavic names. In 1827, an entire calendar of Slavic names appeared in a supplement to the Przewodnik Warszawski newspaper, prepared by Tadeusz Wojewódzki.

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Although Old Polish names linked to the centuries-old veneration of saints are not that popular today, they still pop up now and then. In 2025, 376 baby boys were named Mieszko, 49 Zbigniew and 8 Dobromir, while 27 girls were called Dobrawa, 18 Mirosława and 17 Bogumiła.

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