Venice, Built on Tree Trunks in a Lagoon

Romantic Venice was a city built on a lagoon. It was first a refuge for Romans to flee from barbarian invaders such as the Huns and Germanic tribes in Northern Italy during the decline of the Roman Empire which fell in 476 A.D.

The early Venetian settlers made homes from reed, wood, and clay on the marshy islands of the Venetian Lagoon, on patches of dry land. Because their first church, San Giacomo di Rialto, was consecrated on March 25, 421 A.D., the traditional date of Venice’s founding was 421 A.D. Its first Dodge (leader) was elected in 697 A.D.

To build more and heavier structures, millions of tree trunks from ancient forests, alder wood, oak, and larch, were driven into the soft lagoon mud. These trunks were petrified when exposed to salty, oxygen-free water, and formed a base of stony pillars. On top, horizontal planks and Istrian stone were laid to make it even stronger.

It is alleged that 100k alder tree trunks support the San Marco’s Campanile or Bell Tower. It collapsed in July 1902 due to structural failure after 1,000 years of existence and was rebuilt and rededicated in 1912.

There are sixty-two easily accessible islands by boat, water taxi, and water bus but, depending on who you ask, there are more than 120 islands, some of which cannot be easily accessed or not at all. One is an actual cemetery, and another is a place where the black plague victims were housed.

 

Vindolanda

An interesting example of democracy is found in the Roman Middle Republic when soldiers elected their own Centurions. It was quite common to see a 22-year-old Centurion serving on his second or third campaign. Who were the Centurions? Like the soldiers they commanded, Centurions were part-time militiamen. We know about this election from Polybius who described the process.

An interesting example of nepotism and friends in high places comes from Roman times. 

The Vindolanda tablets discovered south of Hadrian’s wall provide an insight into life on the Roman frontier in Britannia.

The posting for a soldier in this particular garrison was difficult.

Tablet number 891 which was discovered in 2017 refers to the earliest period in the fort’s occupation between 85 and 92 A.D.

The tablets survived because they were thrown away into the fort’s ditch, among many discarded military pieces that are now archaeological treasures.

In this letter, the writer asks for lighter military duties for a friend named Crispus. The writer uses flattery to appeal to the officer Verecundus’ “justice and kindness.”

Another interesting find among the tablets of Vindolanda is a diploma from Cheshire issued in the reign of Trajan to a Spanish DECURION by which he is granted Roman citizenship and the right of legal marriage with a present or future wife.

A DECURION was the leader of 10 Roman cavalry legionnaires.

When the Cows Come Home

This idiomatic expression in English refers humorously to an argument without a conclusion, something that will last not just an extended period but potentially forever.

The same phrase has a concrete meaning in Romanian and brings to mind a childhood experience from long ago and a shepherd named Nae whom everyone called Nea Nae, a form of respect, like an uncle.

Nea Nae was the village drunk in my maternal grandparents’ village. He was also the cows’ shepherd. The village had about 10,000 inhabitants with a population density of 215 people per square kilometer. Homes were clustered close to each other with enough yards for an outhouse and a garden.

The village, now called a ‘commune’ (interesting choice of words), was surrounded by pastures and co-operative plots of land, owned by the Communist Party government, and a few individual parcels on which villagers planted crops and shared the harvest with the state (not willingly).

Most homes had a milking cow, chicken, rabbits, ducks, and a pig, with a menagerie of outdoor cats to keep rodents under control. And this is where Nea Nae came into play. The villagers hired him to take care of the cows, sort of.

Every morning, Nea Nae followed the large herd of cows coming out one by one from each yard to the grazing pasture outside of the village, rotating the pastures in various ends to keep the grass growing. Before the sun set, he followed them back to the village, and one by one, the cows entered their respective yards, knowing exactly where their homes were. So much for the bad publicity that cows are dumb. They were smart enough to follow Nea Nae’s directions to the pastures and back home to the right yard. Each home was separated for privacy by tall wood fences, but the gates were opened by the owners, and the cows miraculously knew which yard was theirs.

‘When the cows came home’ was a real spectacle to watch. Sitting on my bench perch facing the unpaved road, I witnessed the cows return home from my grandparents “ulita” (road) many evenings. The cows never fell in the deep ditches dug up for irrigation and rain drainage on the side of the road. They slowly moved on to their destinations. The cow patties left behind were like land mines to avoid at all costs when we played.

Nea Nae, a kind and gentle soul with a well-tanned and ruddy complexion, was already tipsy by then. He went home to eat and then to the “circiuma” in the middle of the village to finish off drinking with his friends. They drowned their sorrows with him daily.

The villagers drank the cheap alcohol religiously provided by the state to keep the masses compliant and working menial and difficult jobs for subsistence level pay.

Nea Nae used to say that he was never going to die in his own bed because he was seldom in it. He slept on the floor partly under the bed most of the time, after he fell off from the very narrow twin bed he owned.

He used to be married in his younger years, but his wife had left him on account of his alcoholism. They passed each other in the village like strangers who only say hello. His only child, a daughter, checked on him from time to time. But the village did a much better job of keeping up with Nea Nae because he was their cows’ caretaker and cows were important for survival.

On the few times when he ran out of money and was temporarily sober, I listened in awe to the petite Nea Nae spinning tales to his neighbors who listened to him mesmerized as well even though they knew none of them actually happened. He was such a gifted storyteller who had missed his calling. The sad thing was that he could not read. 

Under Nea Nae's watch, the cows always came home to their barns.  

Globalism Is The New Communism

I spent my first twenty years of life in my parents’ apartment. They had a hard time being approved for this apartment because they were not communist party members and the waiting list for the unprivileged proletariat was quite long. Communists, their paid informers, and activists had first dibs.

The tiny cubicle of reinforced concrete was divided into five spaces: bath, kitchen, living room, one-bedroom, small pantry, and one hallway. The entire place was about 650 square feet of space barely big enough for one person, about the size of an average hotel room today.

The bathroom was equipped with a small tub, a sink, a commode with a pull chain from the ceiling water tank, and a tiny window with exterior slats of concrete, and a lovely view of the world through prison-like bars. They were so heavy that, when we had a strong earthquake in 1977, one of the concrete bars broke and was dangling from the reinforced wires like a loose tooth. Last time I visited in 2015, the bar was still there, dangling loose.

The police state we lived under charged the “classless” society lower prices than the true cost to keep the proletariat happy and especially the country folks whose farms and modest homes were confiscated by the forced party cooperatives.

If some renters were behind their water, electric, rent, and gas bills, the total was divided by the number of apartments and everyone paid equal shares. The rest also paid for those who were behind. Eventually they were made to pay it back from their paychecks. Nobody was on welfare. No matter how much electricity, gas, or water each apartment consumed, the total was calculated and equally divided for each apartment.

You had to work if you wanted to eat. The food was of low quality, sold in endless lines, and with rationing coupons. Each family was only allowed so much meat, sugar, flour, butter, cooking oil, and rice per month.

My mom and dad’s apartment was an improvement from living in the same tiny apartment with another family of four who stole our food. Prior to that, mom and dad rented a bedroom from an old lady who lived at the edge of town, so far out that the party had not decided to demolish her little place yet in their haste for modernization.

Dad hated the communists and was not shy about making his feelings and thoughts known about all the parasitical propagandists employed in each factory by the dozen. They also hated my dad with so much passion and often hired goons to beat him up to silence him. One such beating caused him massive health issues and he died paralyzed, helpless, and untreated in one of Ceausescu’s horrible “free“ hospitals. He died on May 13, 1989, a few months short of seeing the demise of his foe, Ceausescu, on Christmas 1989.

My Dad worked hard every day for 43 years in one refinery after another since he was eighteen and left his home in the beautiful hills of Valea Dulce (Sweet Valley), leaving behind eight brothers and sisters, who were raised primarily by my grandmother, after my grandpa passed away at a young age. He now rests on the hill overlooking the green valley below, gently swept by the changing winds.

I spent many summers with my grandma and my cousins, playing by the nearby river and valley when they tended their sheep. The village was too hilly for co-operative farms to exist, so the communists left it alone. People raised grapes and fruit trees on the slopes with rich soil.

As early as I can remember, dad cursed Ceausescu out loud and hoped vociferously to see him dead someday.  Sadly, my dad died seven months before the dictator and his wife were executed after a brief kangaroo trial. 

I had hoped that the revolutionary front would give the Ceausescu dictator and his wife a fair trial but, since his ousting was a coup, not really a revolution as it was presented in the media, the coup organizers were eager to get rid of him so that nobody would find out the truth about the so-called “revolution.”

The young protesters present in huge crowds all over the city were shot as collateral damage by the Securitate men and their mercenaries. Curiously, the TASS agency, the Soviet news outlet, were present in the town of Timisoara, two days before the so-called “revolution” began there.

Dad would have been so disgusted when, on the first free election after 45 years of Ceausescu’s reign of communist terror, 83 percent of the population voted again for a communist government ruled by Iliescu, Ceausescu’s good friend and confidant who participated in the coup d’etat. Three months of revolution and freedom was not enough to erase 45 years of communist dependence.

Allegedly, more than 10,000 innocent civilians who came out to protest Ceausescu’s regime were killed by Army and Securitate agents who, although had been collaborating since 1984 to depose Ceausescu, opened fire on demonstrators in Timisoara and Bucharest while claiming that the sharp shooters were foreign mercenaries.

Thirty-six years since the “revolution,” the neo-communists are still in power today with each new parliamentary government that comes and goes. The children and grandchildren of the “revolutionaries” are communists themselves, thanks to the socialist indoctrination in schools. And the old people are nostalgic about the crumbs that Ceausescu gave them once a month to keep them in line. Dad would have been so disappointed that people were so easily indoctrinated and bought!

And then things got worse. It took only 36 years since the “fall” of communism in Europe for the leftist activists to repackage communism as globalism with money from the many NGOs funded by George Soros.

American leftists got busy immediately destroying the capitalism that made them well-off economically and replacing it with socialism, the steppingstone to communism. They gave it a new name, Globalism, and they called themselves Democrat Socialists.

The march to global communism continues in the west with not much opposition from people who love their countries. They think that it will never happen to them.