Today the connection with my amazing daughter Natassa – Anastasía is her full name – is good and clear, so I want to make use of it to give you a message as well. I am Natassa’s dad and I asked her to write this in English again, while I speak Greek to her. I speak French but no English and she is an amazing translator, who speaks seven languages very well and another six I think.
Folks, my father also speaks Turkish, he is both a technical engineer and a Law professor, plays bouzouki and oud (Greek lute, see above) and is 80 years old, but looks like 20. Now I will let him do the talking:
Natassa has no idea what I want to say to you, people in the Netherlands and elsewhere who read her awesome news website. I am amazed by what she is capable to do, having had so many different professions because she was hunted down by that horrible cult and had to change her address and profession many times. She thinks I am going to rant against you – isn’t that what you call it when somebody gets angry? Rant … in our days we used to say “he became a Turk” when someone got mad and started shouting.
No, I am going to talk to you about the place where our family is from. My daughter told you so proudly she is an Asian Greek and that is indeed what we are: Greeks from Asia Minor or Anatolia and we have a slightly different culture from the western Greeks, as we call the Greeks from the country that you know today as Greece. That is not even half of our country and of what we are as a nation. Our family is from Ikonio – today Konya – a city that used to thrive under Greek rule. There were almost no poor people, because everyone had the chance to climb up the social ladder and become something good in life. We did a lot of trade there in silk from China, tea from India, China, Taiwan and Sri Lanka, glass also from China and many delicacies that we sold to the western parts of Greece and further away to European buyers. Or African buyers.
If you know the Greeks, you will probably know they don’t drink tea. Only coffee and whiskey! In the nineties the Greeks drank so much whiskey that the Scottish couldn’t produce enough for our needs. But we in Anatolia had very exquisite and different tea tables with different sorts of tea and for each tea special sweets. Some teas were sweetened with honey, others with sugar or not at all. Jasmine tea. Oolong tea, Darjeeling, green tea with mint like the Moroccans still drink today or black tea with cinnamon. Young and older tea sorts, we had it all and they all had their purpose. We knew exactly which tea table to serve for which visitors and in which situations. The Kurds also had these customs, but today we all forgot about them. That is why I want to tell you about our beautiful culture in the East. So we won’t forget.
Don’t forget to support my daughter’s work! We can’t do it, even if we have more than enough money and assets to help her and the boys as she calls our grandchildren. We are very sad about that, but we must leave her and the kids in your hands.
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We also had our music in the east. We played bouzouki as you know from Greece, but also this beautiful instrument that we call outi, an eastern lute. The Arabs call it ‘oud, the Turks ut. And we had many sorts of flutes, like ney, mey, klarino – a traditional klarinetto – and of course violins and alt violins. Many of those instruments aren’t used anymore today, which is a pity and sad. We made great music, much better than the modern music and also lots better than that awful rebetica you may have heard of. Rebetica is sailor’s music about drugs and alcohol and it’s not of a high standard at all. Our traditional music is a lot better and I will help Natassa find something interesting, so you will know Greeks don’t just play syrtaki.
In our family everyone has an academic education, but Natassa asks me how it was with technicians and other people with more “normal” professions in the old time in Anatolia. Well, young people who wanted to get a more practical schooling like blacksmith, trader or hairdresser went to school most of the time until 12 years old. We had schools much before the Europeans. Then they would find a master to learn the job from, just like in the medieval times in Europe. They would also learn foreign languages, because in Anatolia there were many different cultures and languages: Greek of course, but also Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew and Turkish. Some people also learned English, French or Russian. There were even traders there who spoke Chinese or Persian. So you see that not only teachers, doctors and lawyers had a good education in the old times, but everyone did.
It is also not true that the Turks were the absolute rulers there. Anatolia was a most of all Greek place where the Ottoman Turks did’t have a lot to say. It was an amazing place, this Anatolia and I long back for it very much. The Turks became the unrightful owners only after the British ordered them to kill as many Greeks as possible and burn all our cities down in 1921. Then the British gave the whole place to them and we had to flee to western Greece, while the Kurds didn’t get any land for themselves. Don’t believe it if you hear or read the Ottoman Empire was so powerful. It wasn’t. Only in western (today’s) Greece and in Constantinople, our capital, they were absolute rulers. For the rest our country was just normally Greece until the center of what you know as “Turkey” today. That wasn’t Turkey at all until a century ago, neither were the Kurdish regions.
It is propaganda by the Americans and Europeans who don’t have an idea of what Anatolia and Greece are. Even Natassa didn’t know this until now, I see her surprise. There aren’t even enough Turks to keep such an enormous region from Romania and Slovenia until Greece, Anatolia, Kurdistan, Syria, Israel, Egypt and North Africa until eastern Algeria all under their control. When the Greeks owned these regions, they were asked to by the people who lived there, because it was safer to have one great and stable government in the whole Mediterranean. That way everyone could trade safely and the society thrived under the Byzantine Greeks. They called themselves “Romans”, but that was just another word for “Greek” in those times. The Greeks have never really been occupied by the Romans, who had enormous respect for our culture and knowledge. They learned everything from us, how come?
Greece has always in history been a huge and very important country and the Turks or Ottomans if you like, were never close to being as powerful as they are said to be today. They learned everything from us, Greeks, Kurds and other people in the Balkan, the east and North Africa. The Turks were nomads before they invaded our country and had absolutely no cuisine, didn’t know how to build palaces and houses because they used to live in caravans and didn’t know how to create clothes, stuff for in the house and everything. They learned the whole life from us and then spread it, with Turkish names. And now everybody thinks the Turks had this exquisite culture and civilisation. No, they didn’t and they were never able to rule us without having the slightest idea about our way of living.
Just watch some Turkish movies or series. Look well at the actors and you will see there isn’t even one real Turk among them. They are all Kurdish and Greek and “their” music is also Kurdish (with saz or tambour) and Greek (with bouzouki or violin and canon). In Lausanne they were given the power over this enormous piece of land from the Aegean sea until Iran and they forced their language and religion upon everyone. They forced everyone to go to live in the middle of the country and there they had to work so hard for a simple living, that they forgot who they were. They forgot because they were controlled if they didn’t speak their own language, didn’t practice their own religion and more such things. And now they all tell you they are “Turks”, but they aren’t. There are about 20 to 25 million Ottoman Turks in Turkey, not more. Because they hold the power, they seem more however. They aren’t.
Natassa again here: I could listen another ten hours to my father’s stories, but the connection was broken. Now I can’t find you the music he meant, because I don’t know it and neither does Costas. I remember he would tell me the fairy-tales from the east when I was there as a 3 and 4-year old kid, before being kidnapped yet again and this time forever. Now that you have a very little idea of who my family is and who I am myself as well, maybe you can have a bit more respect for my journalistic work as well. Imagine how much power this horror cult has that they could kidnap me five times from such an influential and good family! Now I want you to support my work by liking, subscribing to my newsletter and YouTube/Rumble/Odysee, to spread the news, to react and to donate!
My statistiscs are also tempered with and that way I can’t get paid by Google AdSense, since my visitors aren’t counted. My husband says there are about 600-700 people on my site every day (still a shame for this so good site!!!), but the statistics say less than a 100. The statistics meters (I have 3 that all indicate a completely different number of visitors) just stop counting at moments when there is traffic. A 100 measured visitors is not enough to monetise my website! In a year’s time I have only “earned” 25 euros according to AdSense and you need at least €70 to get paid in the first place. My family hasn’t been able to fix the statistics yet. Everything is a mystery how the DOJ, the Dutch Ministry of Justice, does it and don’t think they will ever stop harassing me on their own. So support!!!! You can also organise a fundraising for me, e.g. on Whydonate or elsewhere.
