Imagine a text about the notes for a text that was never written.
I recall a trip in the 2000s to Mesopotamia, to Mardin and Midyat, together with my mother and in the company of a journalist and family friend who had written two reports -- one about Yazidis, the other about Assyrians. I remember that he travelled to Sweden for the Assyrians. He had written both pieces as a young journalist in the 1980s, at a time when a large wave of Assyrians emigrated from their northern Mesopotamian homeland in Turkey to Sweden, Germany and the US, and had published these pieces in a slim book, which he gave me thirty years later during that trip. I take it out now: Yezidiler ve Süryanileri [i] by Murat Öztemir -- a tall man, whose eyes, always half-closed due to a sensitivity in his eyelids, never miss a thing. That's how I remember him. And that he smiles impishly, even when recounting something painful. His report on the Assyrians begins with a journey to Sweden, because this is where a fragment of Mesopotamia had found its way. What has become of this fragment nearly half a century later?
In the case of Per Olov Enquist, there was another author at the start of the process of fragmentation: his name was Geijerstam. According to Enquist, he is forgotten today because he failed to capture the great Swedish narrative that could have been told from the perspective of the emigrants. Instead, he left behind little more than tables and statistics. Later, Enquist himself would write about these emigrated people, when that generation had grown old or already passed away.
Enquist writes this in his essay "Meteorsplitter" (Meteor Fragments), which was published in the volume The Cartographers -- Fragile Utopias in 1992 by Norstedts Förlag, Stockholm, under the original title Kartritarna. In the early 1970s, he recalls wanting to write about Swedish emigrants who had established a colony on the Argentina-Brazil border between 1909 and 1912.
I travelled there to visit the people born from the emigrant utopia, as if a fragment had been flung from a planet amidst the convulsions of its formation. -- Per Olov Enquist ii
A piece of Sweden, detached at a certain moment and flung somewhere far away: a fragment of a meteor that can be sought out and studied.
Crystals, coal remains, structures -- everything might still be there, bearing witness to the unknown life of the exploding planet. -- Per Olov Enquistiii
Enquist saw a meteor fragment as a metaphor for a life context at a specific moment, preserved by its detachment from its changing place of origin. Enquist never writes this book about the meteor fragments. Instead, he composes an essay about the notes for a project, years later.
My motivation is the opposite of Enquist's search: I do not intend to find the origins of a utopia in crystals, coal remains or structures. My interest lies not in what has been preserved in stone, but in how the topography is drawn today. A memory map created from readings, encounters, notes and memories of the notes and earlier readings and of memories of fragments of conversations; the quotes from the encounters stem from memory, they emerge in my language. I call the young journalist, who is now an old man. I hear his smile through the phone. He connects me with the Assyrian and Kurdish diaspora in Sweden.
On my journey, I take with me Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) by Peter Weiss -- that three-volume novel, over a thousand pages long, which Weiss himself called his magnum opus. Written mostly in Stockholm, where he and his family sought refuge during the Nazi era and where he would remain until he died, the work brings to life in language the figures of the Altar of Zeus, carried from what is today Bergama in western Turkey to Berlin. Now it lies open on my lap, and from it I pick words to ponder or images -- a calf muscle tensed in battle -- sometimes his long sentences tremble within me, and I glide over their narrative arcs that can span millennia and branch into history, into memories, perceptions, before culminating, as if at the end of a life, in a single point, bringing me back to the hum of the airplane engines. This hum is now rhythmised by the language of The Aesthetics of Resistance, a hum I hear in the collective memory not only of my own time, but of many eras and places -- or rather feel as the vibration of countless meteor fragments grows audible and finally begins to quake. Suddenly, I know that my journey to Stockholm and Södertälje will continue on to Bergama, where the Zeus Altar once stood, now archived in the language of this novel.
Shortly before landing in Stockholm, I write: beneath me, a patchwork quilt -- sparse green, endless lowland, fields, lakes, wind turbines, a little industry. I fly over tiny islands off the Swedish coast, scattered like breadcrumbs on a blue plate. Here, endless forests interrupted by blue patches multiply towards the horizon, disappearing beneath the layer of cloud in an explosion of bright turquoise-blue light. -- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [iv]
Community and territory. Community without territory. Territory in the mind. Mesopotamia lies in Europe. Europe is Afro-European.[v] The modern era is over. The European promise fulfils itself. With the modern era came the nation. The nation brought persecuted minorities. The minorities sought Europe because of the European promise. What caused their persecution was what should have offered them peace. But the journey took a hundred years. Upon arrival, the promised land had disappeared. Upon arrival, the promised land was a museum.
Collectively, the following notes produce mind maps that are, by nature, associative, fragmentary and incomplete; they can therefore be reduced in number or expanded infinitely. In their totality (or in parts), they constitute an invisible map of memory that cannot be fixed or made static. At every moment, memories, perceptions and ideas -- in brief, thoughts -- are added, and the map remains forever in flux. This is how I understand my map-making.
Recording a European reality in memory. Not Europe as measured in mountains, valleys, seas, cities, streets or houses. But Europe as it can be imagined. A memory cartography. The equator (0°) in this memory cartography is the lived reality, the everyday. The south is myth. The north utopia. The prime meridian (0°) the present. The west memory. The east is the future.
In mythology, Europa is a Phoenician king's daughter. Her language is ancient and related to the Aramaic of the Assyrians. Her land has produced the oldest harbours in human history. Drawn by his shining hide, she approaches the bull. She touches him, must hold on, clutches his neck or horns with all her might as the bull charges off. Soon they arrive in Crete, where she sees the bull transform into a god, into Zeus. She listens, perhaps with a shudder, as he confesses his love for her.
Beckmann's 1933 watercolour The Rape of Europa depicts her as oriental, signified by the golden bracelet on her arm, sprawled half-naked across the back of the monstrous bull: she lies prone over the animal's torso, her face contorted in pain, as if violated. By contrast, Dürer's depiction shows Europa seated atop the bull. In both works, whether abducted or fleeing, Europa appears as a figure arriving from the East.
Zeus was once challenged by the Giants, who sought to overthrow him. In The Aesthetics of Resistance, I am interested in the Zeus Altar from Pergamon, whose stone frieze depicts the Gigantomachy, the battle of the Giants against the Olympian gods, symbolising the attempt to restore the old order of the Titans. The gods are vulnerable to the Giants because only a mortal hero can defeat them; without him, the gods would fall. I listen in on the conversations of the three friends -- Heilmann, Coppi and the first-person narrator -- as they discuss the frieze in Berlin's Pergamon Museum in 1937. What moves them most is what is left unshown -- the figure of the mortal who rushed to save the gods, Heracles. Heilmann interprets this blank space in the frieze as the place for utopia, a space imagined as a moment of relief.
Any fear of authority, any submissiveness, any blind performance of work would, he said, give way to a sigh of relief (...) This society (...) where everyone could continue his education according to his own needs, was certain to be characterized by self-confidence, by pride and pleasure. -- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [vi]
At Stockholm Airport, I talk to no one. I was also alone on the plane -- unlike Murat Öztemir in his report. At the departure airport in Istanbul in the early 1980s, he struck up conversations with several Assyrians who want to leave Turkey and are on the same flight. At the start of the journey, he already has nearly all the information he needs. In his report, he also integrates historical references into his conversations with the emigrants, summarizing the terminological debate about whether to identify as Aramean, Assyrian, or Syriac Orthodox (in this text, Assyrian always refers to Süryani): the Assyrians are Mesopotamia's oldest still existing people, one of the first peoples to adopt Christianity. After the fall of the Assyrian Empire in 612 BC (612°M), they survive in the various states that emerge in Mesopotamia. Only 20th century nationalism changes that. In Istanbul, the journalist witnesses the last major wave of emigration among Assyrians -- and he travels with them to Sweden. He is on a research trip to describe a movement that is happening at this moment. What I observe is the eternal repetition of the movement in memory. And since I -- like Enquist -- will only write down what I experience on my journey months later, what I record becomes the memory of the memory. In Sweden, I meet people and ghosts.
From the airport in Stockholm, I go straight to the university. I have an appointment with an historian. I am not meeting him because of his subject area, however -- he specialises in the Cold War -- I am meeting him because he is an Assyrian. The wrong reason. I fear he must feel the same way. I roll my suitcase into Café Bullar & Bröd (I just checked the name again in our chat) -- a spacious room with a glass front, dark stone floor, large white tables and worn wooden chairs resembling old seminar room furniture. The air is filled with the aroma of coffee and freshly baked cake. I roll the case behind a table and turn around to keep the door, and windows, in sight. The room, and I with it, vanish into a dazzling light.
A man in his early forties approaches me. He smiles; the three-day stubble shimmers grey on his cheeks. We can speak German, he says. We stand at the counter. He orders coffee and a cinnamon bun. Aryo Makko, who came here as a visiting student and stayed because he liked it, is now a professor at the university in Stockholm and the father of two children. So, I have come to Sweden and am meeting a German. I know: there is a large Assyrian community in Germany, too. One should not imagine the bull Zeus being tied to a particular place. He is everywhere at once. He carries Europa on his strong back.
We sit down at the table where my suitcase stands. I try to remain in the shadow cast by Aryo's body. He tells me that in his early twenties, he considered it important that he did not forget the Assyrian heritage. Today, other things matter more to him. For young Assyrians, for his cousins, he is undoubtedly not radical enough. For them, failure to preserve the heritage is to complete the genocide, the Sayfo; Mardin 1915. When Aryo thinks about "home", it is simpler, more specific, he says. For him, home is a space where he can exist naturally without having to explain himself or ask questions. For him, it is Augsburg. The place is specific. The nation is not. A city, a street, a neighbourhood -- the region is specific. The football club is specific. Aryo was a coach at Assyrians of Mesopotamia Football Club Augsburg. In The Aesthetics of Resistance, there is also a football.
While it was imperative that Heilmann's parents learn nothing about their son's plans, and we visited him simply as buddies from the Eichkamp Sports Club, with the soccer ball in the net bag, Coppi's family, like mine earlier, participated in all discussions on the dubious aspects of political life. -- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [vii]
Floating islands in the water -- towards the horizon, light. Scattered people. Far from their home. Meteor fragments. Embedded in foreign soil.
I had been warned about windowless hotel rooms. I am staying in an attic room. The windows, set into the slanted walls near the ceiling, open upwards towards the sky. The one on the straight wall, with a horizontal view, faces a blank wall. So, I have windows, but I see nothing of the city. I cannot fully darken the room either. The windows are utterly useless to me. I lie awake at night. But I am not alone. Books are ghosts. I read Peter Weiss -- All around us the bodies rose out of the stone. A fallen meteorite is also stone. Several times a week, I walk past a mineral shop in Berlin that sells necklaces made of fragments of meteorites for 80 euros.
Aryo offers an anarchistic response to the collapse of 20th-century systems in the 21st century, a starting point for a utopia: the negation of the nation as a category of identity. Only the concrete fosters identity, freed from its incorporation within overarching structures. Naturally, the place where football is played belongs to a jurisdiction -- in Ayro's case, in Augsburg, under Bavarian and German authority. The club is state-registered and part of German civil society -- but what shapes identity is the game and the friends. Ayro recounts how he didn't sing the national anthem before international matches. This is not a political boycott; it's simply that a national anthem is abstract. The football in Ayro's net is not a disguise to conceal political resistance, as it was for Coppi, Heilmann and the narrator in Peter Weiss. For Aryo, the football net becomes symbolic: it represents the here and now, the joy of playing, an activity that shapes identity. It embodies a hierarchisation of the concrete, a defiant side-effect of the enjoyment of the concrete lived experience.
The air conditioning squeaks like the mice in Raskolnikov's attic room in Södermalm. I am still awake. In Stockholm -- where Peter Weiss carried into literature the Zeus Altar of Pergamon, now absent from Bergama on the Aegean. Even in Berlin, where the altar has stood for almost a century, it cannot be visited for at least a decade due to ongoing renovations. Those who have been to the Pergamon Museum can draw on their memory or on The Aesthetics of Resistance. In Bergama, a tree now grows where the altar once stood. Berlin is a construction site. According to anthropologist Banu Karaca, who works on restitution, Germans at the end of the 19th century described what archaeologist Carl Humann first secretly -- and later, through diplomatic pressure on Ottoman ruler Abdülhamit -- shipped from Turkey as "a pile of worthless stones", using this as their official justification for bringing it to Berlin. Piles of worthless stones -- fragments from the gods. I recall giants with serpent bodies as legs on the altar's frieze. Is it a coincidence that one of Anatolia's most important mythological figures, Şahmaran, is depicted as half-serpent, half-human -- or is she connected to the earthly giants? A pile of worthless stones, articulated in language, returns home to meaning in the memory of the time.
Should we not, as The Aesthetics of Resistance asks, take the side of those who carelessly used the stones from the ancient city as building material for a cultural heritage?
One night in Stockholm, the urge to return the altar to Bergama grows stronger in me. I carry it with me as words in Peter Weiss' book. This mobility of things in memory, their emancipation from time and territory, moves me profoundly. It is not the stones themselves that matter, but the spirit that dwells within them.
All around us -- the figures, giants locked in battle. The frieze of the altar, stones brought to life in mind and text the bodies rose out of the stone (...) intertwined, or shattered into fragments (...), brittle fragments from which the whole could be gleaned. The Giants rose from the womb of the earth to restore the old order. The new gods were powerless against this ancient force. Only a mortal could lead the resistance. Yet, Heracles was absent. On the frieze, only faint traces remain of the mortal who defended the new gods against the old powers.
An omen ... that we now had to create our own image of this advocate of action. -- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [viii]
Heracles, and Hercules, too. I remember that my father, also from Mesopotamia, loved him -- on Saturdays and Sundays, when old films were shown on German television. Heracles was born in Thebes, the city of seven gates. Thebes itself had been founded by Cadmus, who searched in vain for his sister Europa after she had been carried off by the bull. In his grief, he built Thebes, weeping for Europa.
Meteorites (0° present, 5000° myth). Shattered into fragments, brittle pieces from which the whole can be discerned. Again and again. Differently every time.
During the day, I meet Keya Izol near Centralen in Norrmalm. Keya is a slender man, of medium height, with a calm demeanour. His forehead is broad, his chin pointed, his head slightly trapezoidal. His hair is grey, once black; he is seventy. We drink coffee. On my cup is an illustration of a bull. He asks what I am trying to achieve with my questions. I immediately tell him I am not aiming to recount the story of the Kurdish or Assyrian diaspora, but rather to understand something about Europe through the diasporic lens. By Europe, I do not mean a union of states. I am searching for fragments of truth that remain when all utopias have died.
Keya came to Sweden fifty years ago. He describes his arrival in his memoirs: "From Siverek to Stockholm -- Memories of a Missionary of the Kurdish." He was a young student at the time. A fellow passenger on the plane warned him to stay away from Kurdish activists, especially in Sweden. But when Keya arrived in 1974, there were hardly any Kurds in the country. His uncle must have recognised something that was still a mystery to young Keya -- especially since the friend to whom the uncle entrusted his nephew was none other than Necmettin Büyükkaya -- or Neco -- a well-known Kurdish activist who, a few years earlier, had co-founded one of the first major Kurdish associations in Turkey with a strong leftist educational mission -- and who had then been forced into exile. After returning to Turkey, following the 1980 coup, he was tortured to death in Diyarbakır. On his first day in Uppsala, Keya -- who was not yet called Keya, but Emin -- was introduced to this man, whose aura seemed visible, like a beam of light. Necmettin Büyükkaya sat calmly in the middle of the cafeteria, full of young Kurdish students. Keya was so nervous that he stumbled -- according to Keya's memoir -- when he approached Neco. Is something wrong with your foot? Neco asked. My foot is fine, I said. Good. Listen -- from today, your name is Keya. Don't forget that. You'll tell them that at the immigration office. You'll tell them the truth: that our country is under siege, our people are oppressed, alienated from their own culture. - Keya Izol [ix]
With his departure from Turkey, Keya left behind his former identity for one that did not yet exist -- one that would only emerge in Sweden. Emin Izol, who spoke broken Kurdish, became Keya Izol, Kurdish teacher in Stockholm and political advocate for the idea of a free Kurdish life. Kurdistan in Sweden: emancipation from the notion that community and territory must be one? Utopia in the literal sense -- ou-topos, a place that does not exist, yet is powerful, groundbreaking, lived.
The white March light flooding Medborgarplatsen consolidates at a single point into the shimmering, long, silver-white hair of the writer Firat Cewarî. Then, his full figure, with shirt and shoulder bag, emerges from the light. We stroll down Götgatan towards the old town while he tells me how the diaspora in Sweden has achieved remarkable things for the Kurdish language and literature. The writers Mahmut Baksi and Mehmed Uzun once lived on this street, he says. Uzun is perhaps the best-known Kurdish-language writer in Turkey -- some even consider him the creator of a distinct Kurdish literary language. Here on Götgatan, Kurdish writers consolidated their language. It is a beautiful street, closed to downhill traffic, at the end, the view opens onto the island of Stadsholmen and the medieval rooftops of Gamla Stan.
From the 1980s, Cewarî translated Yaşar Kemal, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Astrid Lindgren and Henning Mankell into Kurdish. It was in the library in Uppsala that he discovered the journal Hawar through the work of the scholar Stig Wikander. Wikander, a comparatist, Iranologist and historian with an interest in Kurdish studies, whose last known work explored encounters between Vikings and Arabs, must have come across this Kurdish literary journal during his research, ensuring that it was added to the library collection in Uppsala. Hawar -- the Kurdish word for "help" -- was the name of the journal that was published in Damascus between 1932 and 1943. Its editor was Celadet Ali Bedrihan, a Kurdish aristocrat, who was born in Istanbul in 1893. In the old black-and-white photographs I find of him online, with his moustache and suit, he resembles Rilke. The use of the Latin alphabet as Kurdish script dates back to this journal. Cewarî, the young Kurdish writer and translator, recognised the significance of Hawar for Kurdish literature and modern cultural history -- and republished all fifty-seven issues.
Later, I visit Stockholm's Kurdish Library. Its director, Newzad Hirar, is a slim, kindly-looking man who speaks softly and squints slightly behind large spectacle lenses. He has managed the library for over twenty years. It was founded by a man named Nedim Dağdelen, whose portrait now hangs above the display case containing the library's most valuable books. The shelves are organised according to language. The smallest section contains books in Zazaki, the largest in Turkish. I ask him about Hawar. He immediately knows where to find it: I hold the original issue in my hands -- Damascus, May 1932.
I talk on the phone with Vildan Tanrıkulu, a teacher of Kurdish and Turkish as mother languages, and an old friend of Murat Öztemir. His thin lips curve inward, giving him an air of fragility and kindliness. He says he doesn't have much time because of his grandchildren, but that he would be happy if I came to the Newroz celebration of a newly founded party -- we could talk there. The gathering takes place in a hall somewhere in an industrial area. A man plays the keyboard and sings. Members of the audience stand up, take the microphone and join in the singing for a while. Many of the women wear colourful, flowing dresses: violet, green, golden yellow. Between two songs, an older man gives a speech in Kurdish. Friends or acquaintances of Vildan keep coming by and embracing him. The same happens at other tables. A man joins us; he tells us he is a journalist and writes for a number of newspapers. He and Vildan get involved in a friendly argument. It's about the arbitrary arrest of Istanbul's mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu. The journalist says they shouldn't be concerned about Turkish politics -- Kurdish culture is flourishing in the diaspora. Vildan replies: We have our values, and we must stand by them now. We take the side of the law, because the law is our principle -- that is to say, it is on our own side.
Vildan and I step outside for some fresh air. Standing beneath high concrete blocks connected over our heads by bridges, he places a cigarette between his inward-curving lips. A woman comes out of the hall to join us. Vildan introduces her as the poet Nesrîn Rojkan. She writes in Kurdish and is the chair of the Kurdish Writers' Association in Sweden. The woman says they will be eternally grateful to Vildan and the teachers of his generation. They have saved our language. Because Vildan's lips curl inwards, he smiles with his eyes, which turn moist. As he lights his next cigarette, I ask: Why Sweden? His answer is clear, just as Keya's had been: Sweden was a utopia. Of course, there had been an intellectual, ambitious Kurdish scene here, he says, but all of it -- the renewal of an entire people -- would never have been possible without Sweden's social, educational and migration policies of the 1970s and 1980s. The state had immediately set up language courses for all immigrants, both in their native languages and in Swedish. For Kurdish, a suppressed language, there had previously been no teaching materials. All of that was created here: we created our own dictionaries. And the state supported it. Not just financially, but ideologically.
I do not mention that the writer and librarian Şermin Bozarslan has told me their funding is going to be cut. They fear they might lose the library. They are experiencing less acceptance.
The assassination of Olof Palme in 1986 was a turning point, says Keya. At the time, the PKK was accused of killing the Swedish prime minister. I read about it in Per Olov Enquist. In Kartritarna, the chapter "Meteor Fragments" is immediately followed by the chapter "A Winter Murder". In it, Enquist cites the testimony of a private investigator, who claimed that Syria, Iran and the PKK had agreed to execute Olof Palme at a secret meeting in Damascus in 1985. Enquist comments: Many had theories. It was irrelevant whether the secret meeting actually took place or not; it could not be temporally linked to the murder. Keya says that while it is clear that no Kurds were involved in Palme's assassination, the consequences for Kurds were devastating. They were scrutinised; Kurdish children were shouted at: You murdered our prime minister.
It was the time of the newly discovered Swedish legal corruption. It was hot and humid, and everything seemed to converge as proof: the image of the hypocrisy of the so-called idyll. / What could one actually see, yes, the true face of utopia, riddled with repulsive little holes. -- Per Olov Enquist [x]
Enquist writes about Sweden. What he means is Europe as a whole, even if it -- the porous face of utopia -- becomes apparent to him in what appears to be an idyll. We are all social democrats. We are lovers of humanity, yet we can hate in a friendly way. We need a culprit in order to be innocent ourselves. For we are innocent and responsible. The old stories, retold again and again. You killed our prime minister.
***
Now the Giants, born from the blood of the primordial god Uranus that fell to the earth Gaia when Cronus, the Titan, castrated him, push the stones aside and rise to overthrow the Olympian gods, to destroy Zeus' order and reclaim the rule of the Titans. The Zeus Altar celebrates the victory over the Giants, who represent a reactionary old power that could not be completely replaced by the new Olympian order. A pattern that has recurred throughout history: forces deemed defeated gather in the dark, in thoughts, in hearts and ultimately in action. Applied to Europe today, the Giants could represent nationalistic, archaic quests for power that want nothing to do with universalist values. And no one remains to defend the new order against the old. Where is Heracles? He is even missing from the frieze of the Pergamon Altar.
Perhaps the new order -- of human rights and reason -- had never fully taken hold, remaining instead a utopia? Forced to maintain its self-image as a lived reality, Europe necessarily became a hypocrisy.
Sweden was so calm, democracy was intact, the nation-state was never in question, the dream of constant growth still deep and serene. We had no problem with our self-understanding. We had not been consumed; everything was in balance. And why should we have believed even for a single second that a shot would be fired, a first small sign that an era had started to come to an end? -- Per Olov Enquist
A few weeks before my trip to Sweden, on 4 February 2025, a man shoots and kills eleven people at an adult education centre in Örebro. The victims are from Syria, Iran, Eritrea and Somalia.
The victory over France, the crowning of the Prussian king as emperor, and the founding of the German Empire, and then the smashing of the peril to the French capital, the Commune, were followed by a period of industrial expansion, of control over continents, and the German capital, the seat of the court, demanded treasures for emphasizing the artistic sensibilities of the monarch and colonial lord. That was why the digging on Pergamum's mountain went on, undisturbed by the war that had broken out between Turkey and Russia. -- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [xi]
After the Paris Commune -- the first workers' council -- was crushed, the new order came to mean industry and control. The significance of the altar for Germany was bound up with the rise of its own nationalism.
The creation of order can tip so easily. During his trip in the early 1970s, Per Olov Enquist encounters a German couple at a bus station -- "colonialists of the third generation". German meteor fragments, much like the Swedish ones Enquist had actually come to visit. They speak an old biblical German. The man insists on one thing: There is order here now. Enquist takes him for a poor man -- his shoes are worn, teeth are missing. But the man is a farmer; he owns a tractor and employs "peónes" -- underpaid labourers who are not free to dispose of their own time, a system that would today be considered modern slavery. The "order" the German speaks of is a "political order"; all that matters to him is that the communists disappear.
I should have seen in his face that he (...) was one of those who defended order against those who tried to disturb it.-- Per Olov Enquist [xii]
When the three friends in The Aesthetics of Resistance are later separated, the narrator receives a letter from Heilmann, who distances himself from Heracles. He mentions the blank space on the frieze into which -- thinking of Heracles, the mortal -- they had wanted to project their utopia. Just below this blank space, the head of a man struck down by Zeus' lightning is visible. Perhaps Heracles was about to raise his club to crush that very head. No, Heilmann does not want to abandon him entirely, nor be persuaded by the representations of those in power. But now he is beginning to have doubts: Who was Heracles actually fighting for?
And yet something that is cruel can never contain beauty, said Coppi's mother. -- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [xiii]
Hesiod described the reign of Cronus, which would have been restored had the Giants triumphed, as an age of peace among humans, where no laws were needed, scarcity did not exist, the days were bright and death was like sleep.
So, were the Giants fighting not for the established powers, but for a freedom from an order they had never wanted? They, the children of the earth, the children of the sky, those close to nature. And was Heracles, the mortal, not too vainglorious to reject the world of the gods, and too unworthy to remain on the side of mortals? He accepted his place in Olympus. What, then, of the miners he had once gathered behind him? Choosing a hero is not resistance. The aesthetics of resistance is a process of searching, of learning in dialogue with friends, of questioning all representations, for they always reflect the perspective of those in power. Engaging with mythology is not about creating allegories for the present, but about revealing origins of violence and the possibilities of resisting it. Myths are not external -- they grow within people. Understanding them is essential to develop the strategies needed to resist oppression. The constant changes of time cannot stop the ongoing search. Not a search for a champion, but a search for a language.
I am sitting in a café, a large, dimly lit hall on Drottninggatan. Diagonally opposite me, on the other side of the room, a young woman writes in a notebook. On my side of the hall, I write in mine. I have come to this street because it is said to be the site of Alma Scheding's boarding house, where Peter Weiss first lodged when he arrived in Stockholm. He was born near Potsdam, but spent part of his childhood in an industrial area in Bremen an der Weser. When he was thirteen, he moved to Berlin with his family. He was seventeen when his beloved sister Margit died. Like Cadmus searching for his sister Europa, he spent his entire life seeking her -- in his pictures and texts. By the time he turned nineteen, his life in Germany ended: he had never been a German citizen, remaining Czech through his father, forever. He would never again live in a place where his mother tongue was spoken. His father was denied German citizenship due to his Jewish heritage, and the family emigrated to England in 1935. After a brief attempt to live in Warnsdorf, Czechoslovakia -- until Hitler's annexation ambitions became all too clear -- the family finally migrated to Sweden in 1937. Peter Weiss was twenty-one. He probably spoke German only with his parents, with whom he had a distant relationship. He searches for forms of expression, aiming primarily to become a painter, but finds little recognition in Sweden. He writes, producing his first published texts in Swedish.
I had spoken little German, had completely turned away from the German language and everything connected with Germany (...). The German language then had nothing whatsoever to do with my German background: 'my' German had become nothing more than a foreign language, which I had to painstakingly reclaim. -- Peter Weiss [xiv]
The Kurdish writers on Götgatan Street had reclaimed a language for the literature of the 20th century by writing novels in their native Kurdish, a language long rejected and banned in their home country. They rescued Kurdish as a medium for written storytelling and poetry. But first, they had to save the language for themselves to be able to write -- just as Peter Weiss reclaimed his own language. Although his Swedish texts received praise, he insisted that "those were not my means of expression". He reverted to German, which had become alien to him. Yet, he returned only to the language itself, to his means of expression -- not to Germany as a nation, not to the "German background". The Kurdish writers, in contrast, first created the background with which they wanted to engage. Tezer Özlü [xv]
Tezer Özlü. She published in Turkish, but often wrote and thought in German -- which she learned from the authoritarian nuns at the Catholic high school in Istanbul: her German. She had to write in Turkish, not because of any "background" (she rejected all backgrounds), but so that her innermost self would not collapse. She admired Peter Weiss. You know, as a young man I began to create exactly what I felt within me, drawing solely on my own experiences, without asking where it would fit or whether anyone at all would be interested. (...) A picture is a self-contained entity, and I myself was so torn apart by the whole situation that a single, unified image no longer sufficed for me. -- Peter Weiss [xvi]
I took The Aesthetics of Resistance with me to Sweden because I wanted to write variations on Peter Weiss -- inspired by Tezer Özlü, who once did something similar with Cesare Pavese: travelling physically to the writer's city; travelling mentally into the words. But for me, his words became places, and I walked through his sentences as though through the streets of Stockholm. And everywhere, accompanying me, carried by his words, were the figures from the Pergamon frieze. Viewing the stone figures critically means seeing them again and again in different ways, understanding them, bringing them to life: Heracles, a hero who frees miners and slaves. Or Heracles, the brutal one, concerned only with his own glory. The gods of Olympus -- symbols of a just order or of capitalism. The Giants: forces of liberation or of destruction?
I consider the frieze in my imagination from another perspective: Gaia, Mother of the Earth, calls the Giants to rise against a Zeus who has become tyrannical, like his ancestors. He is the porous face of utopia. Viewed this way, it is not the fascist old forces, once repressed, that rise from the earth. Violence lies at the heart of the new order, stirring mortal forces -- wounded in their pride -- towards destruction.
In 1982, Tezer Özlü and Peter Weiss meet in Bremen, where Weiss has just been awarded the city's prize for literature. She speaks to him about the difficult narrative style of The Aesthetics of Resistance -- because defying the conventional rules of storytelling was exactly what she attempted in her first novel, Die kalten Nächte der Kindheit (Cold Nights of Childhood), published two years earlier.
Difficult, perhaps, but not impossible to understand. I assume that every human being is created in such a way that they can comprehend everything. (...) This novel is my own development. It is important to begin anew. Not just in terms of content. The form, too, must begin anew. -- Peter Weiss in discussion with Tezer Özlü [xvii]
The new emerges through language.
Once, we had furiously refused to admit that reading a book, going to an art gallery, a concert hall, a theater would require extra sweat and racking of the mind. Meanwhile our attempts to escape speechlessness were among the functions of our lives, the things we thereby found were first articulations, they were basic patterns for overcoming muteness.-- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [xviii]
What was reading like? In Turoyo: Toxu Qorena. Turoyo is the Aramaic language of the Tur Abdin region near Mardin. In Södertälje, not far from Stockholm, immigrants developed a Latin-script writing system for their Aramaic dialect so their children could learn the language of their ancestors. The self-authored textbook, printed in 1983 for mother-tongue instruction, is called Toxu Qorena. As with Özlü, Weiss and the Kurdish authors, language here is also the path to emancipation.
On the way to Södertälje: birches. Sometimes rocks.
I have been communicating for several days via voice message with a man called Ilhami Çelebioğlu. He speaks an older, very polite Turkish, the kind I am familiar with from 1960s films. Formally polite in address, yet warmly familiar. Mr Deniz, if you are able, please take the 2:02 train from Stockholm Central to Södertälje. However, caution! Do not go all the way to the final stop, but be so kind as to alight at the penultimate station, Södertälje Syd. I will meet you there. Hoping to find you in good health and peaceful spirits.
I follow Ilhami Çelebioğlu's directions until I reach the car park in front of the station, where he is already standing next to the car, waiting for me. He is tall and slim, has a dyed black beard, wears sunglasses, his bald head gleams in the sunlight; he smiles. We get into the car. I am excited to be in Södertälje. Some people call this city, as I once read in Murat Öztemir, the Midyat of Europe. Midyat is a small town in the province of Mardin. There, as in Mardin itself, the houses are built from yellow limestone, and people sleep on their rooftops in summer. The name of the town, it is said, goes back to the ancient Assyrian word Matiate -- the city of caves. Some time ago, archaeologists discovered another Matiate beneath Midyat, a cave city from the 3rd or 4th century, big enough for a population of seventy thousand. It is said that Christians withdrew into the caves to escape Roman rule. Şahmaran, the serpent queen, also fled underground with her people of snakes, pursued by humans seeking eternal life -- for she alone knew the remedy. Underground, the people of snakes lived safely hidden for centuries in a paradisiacal garden.
There is nothing to be seen of the city Södertälje. All around us is open countryside. Conifers in the distance, yellow grasses. Ilhami Çelebioğlu turns from one country road onto another. Finally, a square structure appears in the landscape, a retail store. We drive into the car park and pull up in front of it. We're here, says Ilhami Çelebioğlu. Biltema is a Swedish retail chain that sells car accessories, tools and household goods. It is considered especially cheap because of its business concept of buying directly from manufacturers. The logo consists of the name in blue capital letters. We're here? I ask.
We enter the store. Opposite us are numerous checkouts, standing parallel to each other. Behind them, aisles of product shelves stretch as far as the eye can see. The ceiling: five metres high, possibly higher. We do not go to the checkouts, but to the cafeteria on the right, past the counter with the plastic-wrapped shrimp salad, slices of cake and coffee machine, to the tables, which are separated by crates where trays are returned after eating. The windows look out onto the car park and road, with fields, trees and grassland beyond. Ten men are sitting at two tables. They are drinking coffee. None have taken off their jackets. They are expecting us.
The men are old. Their voices deep. They speak the oldest language in the world. We greet each other, and then I sit in silence, listening to their voices. They have been talking to each other for five thousand years. At some point, borders are drawn, and they continue to talk, sitting in front of the church in Matiate, in Midyat, in their realm, later in the Ottoman Empire, they continue to talk. They are persecuted, expelled, killed, and they continue to talk. As labourers, they move to Germany, Sweden and all over the world, continuing their conversations in the cafeteria of a branch of the retail chain Biltema, which sells car parts and household goods. Even for us, Jesus is not God, but human. What are you saying? Don't you start the prayer on Sundays in church in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost? Ah, I haven't seen him in church for a long time. Now let me finish what I was saying. The Trinity in its unbroken form has only existed since the Council of Nicaea in 325. And our friends, the Nestorians -- what about them? They still insist the Holy Mother gave birth to a human being. Oh, stop it, it's been the same old story for 1,700 years.
Most of the time they speak Assyrian or Arabic, and Ilhami translates for me. When they switch to Turkish, I do not need a translation. I ask which language they speak at home. Usually Arabic, says one. Assyrian, of course, says another. I speak Turkish on holiday, says a third; his face is lined with the soft shadows of age, he has a white beard, speaks with a deep, rounded baritone -- the voice of an opera singer, but one never used for singing, only for conversations with friends. And in the past? I ask. Oh, there wasn't any Turkish back then, someone says. What do you mean, there wasn't Turkish back then? What's that supposed to mean? You can't just claim something like that without explaining it, another snaps at him. But he stays calm and answers: -- Since when has Turkish existed? Forty, fifty years? Do you mean Atatürk's language reform? That was a hundred years ago. But Turkish has existed for over a thousand years, at least as far as I know. A hundred years, a thousand years -- that's nothing. Oh, that's what you meant -- why didn't you say so in the first place?
Some of the men bid their farewells. As he stands up, one of them turns to me and says we know each other. He asks if I visited the church in Ainwardo near Midyat with my mother twenty years ago. I had indeed been there with my mother and the journalist whose connections have now brought me here, to Södertälje, to this table. The man nods at me with a smile, conspiratorially. Then he turns around and quickly leaves the cafeteria, passing the cash registers.
The man with the baritone voice stays behind. He reminds me of my paternal uncles, and I feel a warmth in my heart when he speaks. He studied in Ankara, at the Middle Eastern Technical University. I know the campus. My mother and I visited a number of times with my aunt, who as an alumni had access and was allowed to take us there. The man's name is Aydın Aydoğan. He is Ilhami Çelebioğlu's brother-in-law and one of the authors of the book Toxu Qorena. In 1982, there was a demand for teachers in Sweden, at least in Södertälje. When he showed the high school principal, Siv Nordell, his diploma in mathematics, she immediately hired him as a teacher. It was she who said to Aydın: The children need instruction in their native language. But there are no classes in their native language. There will be from now on. Aydın Aydoğan and a few others subsequently developed teaching materials and began giving lessons in their mother tongue. Aydın Aydoğan's laughter is like a briefly struck, rounded E minor chord. The church was not very happy about it. They didn't want us to use a written language or teach a dialect that diverged from the liturgy. But I said, we don't speak the way we pray. And why should we make life difficult for children with a complicated, ancient written language?
I find an obituary for Siv Nordell on the internet: We remember Mama as a modern and unconventional woman with an insatiable thirst for knowledge that lasted her entire life. [xix]
Dr Edward Tanrıverdi -- Edward dayı, as Aydın Aydoğan calls him -- was shot dead in front of his house in Midyat on 18 December 1994. He was believed to be the last Christian medical doctor in the region. The murder was never solved. Various theories circulate in Assyrian online forums -- from Islamist Kurdish groups to the Turkish state. In a 600-page doctoral thesis titled Hostages in the Homeland, Orphans in the the Diaspora [xx], it is stated that the murder led to the emigration of more Assyrians from their homeland and to mutual recriminations between those who stayed and those who left: Why did you stay there? How could you leave us behind?
Ilhami drives me through Södertälje. We pass huge warehouses and vast parking facilities filled with thousands of cars. Ilhami says he works here now too, at Scania, where many from the old homeland have spent their lives. His true passion is music. He doesn't play an instrument, but he ran Midyat's first music store: Magnolia. Lovers commissioned him to make mixtapes, introduced by his voice with words for the beloved. Ilhami beams. That was a long time ago.
At my request, he shows me the the church in his parish. High halls, painted ceilings, children learning the catechism. In front of the church, a monument commemorates the Sayfo. Its inscription reads: Never forget, always honour / 100th anniversary of the Sayfo / The Year of the Sword 1915 / In memory of / the Syrian (Aramaic) victims / over 500,000 of whom / lost their lives during / the genocide / in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. [xxi]
Ilhami drives me back to Stockholm, where I am meeting Keya at the official Newroz festival to bid my farewell. Along the way, Ilhami tells me he lives alone. His children have left home. He and his wife divorced but remain on good terms. Concepts that are hard to convey in his circles: divorce, friendship after divorce. But for him, he says, it's really about us being there for each other during the time we are given on this Earth. We embrace as we part. Come back soon, he says.
The celebration of the Kurdish New Year, Newroz, takes place at the Historiska Museet. I see Cewerî there, with his silvery hair. I shake hands with politicians. Second and third generation Kurds who have been elected to the Swedish parliament. Older men in traditional clothing, said to have been heroes in the fight for liberation. Then, in Stockholm's historical museum, guests dance the Halay. I wonder what it means that Kurdish customs are being practiced in a museum. Are they part of contemporary Swedish society's past? Or are they part of a newly emerging Swedish society's present? What are the coordinates of the Kurdish New Year celebration in Stockholm in the cartography of memory? 5000 degrees of myth (5000°M) or 100 degrees of utopia (100°U)?
Wearily, I walk back to my Raskolnikovian attic room in Södermalm. I make a note: a contemporary cartography abandons the compulsion to align culture (language), people and territory. Cartography is not ethnography. The map-maker of our time is a poet. He records stories. The stories dwell in people and in books. -- Per Olov Enquist [xxii]
Quotes, memories, stories (of encounters and landscapes). The European: the random or meaningfully coincidental place of stories, memories, quotes.
Towards morning, I walked into the slanting sun. -- Per Olov Enquist [xxiii]
I walk through the streets of Stockholm -- all day long.
On Götgatan, I am caught by surprise: at the top of the hill, looking downwards towards the horizon where all the streets converge, the setting sun -- pink, glowing and radiant -- turns an enormous white, round building, bulging into the sky -- at first I think it's an hallucination and rub my eyes -- into a white chocolate-coated praline of unreal proportions. It is as if someone has rejected the phallic symbols so common as city landmarks and chosen instead to erect a breast, on which the sunset casts a red glow, so that it appears to be topped by a candied cherry. The rising evening wind whips around our heads, us tiny passersby.
In 1947, an 18-year-old woman worked at the bookstore on Götgatan. All the boys who went there for their schoolbooks fell in love with her. One of these boys wrote her poems. The young bookseller didn't keep the verses; she didn't take them seriously. The boy continued to write. Many years later, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His name is Thomas Tranströmer. I buy a volume of his poems. And a novel by Balsam Karam, translated from Swedish into English -- The Singularity.
There is no tectonic boundary dividing Europe and Asia; both are part of the Eurasian continental plate. This makes the border between Europe and Asia fictional. The original supercontinent was called Pangaea, from which the continental plates broke away. After hundreds of millions of years, they are now returning, in the cartography of memory, to their unity as Pangaea. It is not the stones that return. Humans carry myths and utopias across all continents with their bodies -- spiritual seams, each person a needle, their past the thread, sewing the continents together into a unified whole, a memory-Pangaea.
During our childhood, incessant efforts had been made to establish the United Front; then, for half a decade, all the way into the open power of fascism, those endeavors had bogged down, been blocked, but were now once again pressing for a solution, for a way of overcoming earlier mistakes.-- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [xxiv]
The wall divides the city near the canal into East and West. In some sections on the West side, a narrow alley opens between the wall and decaying old buildings -- this is where Turkish people live. Thus, the city encompasses not only East and West, but also the Third World. -- Tezer Özlü, Die kalten Nächte der Kindheit [xxv]
The term "Third World" is perplexing today. All the more pertinent, then, is the observation that dividing the Earth into separate cultural and identity regions fails, cartographically, to reflect the lived realities of people in our time.
Mesopotamia exists in Sweden.
A pre-national connection exists between territory and community. Paradoxically, this connection was loosened by the formation of nation states and ultimately broken up by the nationalism that followed after the First World War. What had been concrete for centuries -- the daily life of people in a place, such as the Assyrians in Tur Abdin -- lost its significance, giving way to abstract notions of belonging. Territory and community were torn apart by persecution, displacement, genocide and later by the workings of multinational corporations. Today, territory exists in the imagination: Södertälje is the Midyat of Europe. Kurdistan an idea. Yet these reflections remain incomplete.
Thus, the city encompasses not only East and West, but also the Third World. I adapt Tezer Özlü's statement to the coordinate system of memory cartography: thus, the city encompasses not only East and West, but also the Third Space.
I meet Patricia Fjellgren, an Indigenous author from Sweden, at Medborgarplatsen, where I have been waiting for her outside the metro station. As a Sámi, she is part of the Truth Commission that is examining colonial oppression in Sweden. Her high cheekbones lift every time she smiles; she glows. Although we are meeting for the first time, we recognise each other instantly, like old acquaintances. We start walking as if along our shared route to school: purposeful, brisk.
She says that separating mind and territory is inconceivable. The territory is the mind. We must think in layers of time. We can exist in multiple times simultaneously. The territory is always present. Even if it is destroyed, that destruction occurs only within a single layer of infinity.
We search for light in every street.
Until the 1960s, Sámi people concealed their Indigenous heritage. Yet, as part of political measures accompanying the first wave of migration, they had begun to acquire certain rights -- for instance, instruction in their native language. But the decisive force, Patricia emphasises, was Sámi resistance. She speaks of the Sámi awakening through the opposition to the Alta Dam in Norway. While unable to stop the dam's construction, they did build networks -- among themselves and internationally -- and emerged as a force of resistance.
Interactions between diasporic and Indigenous communities in Sweden have so far been limited. There has been one literary project: the Sámi literary centre Tjállegoahte and the Kurdish literary house in Diyarbakir, Wêjegeh Amed, which brought together ten Sámi and Kurdish writers, who wrote texts for each other about belonging and language.
The suppressed stories remained the dirt of the language, Patricia says.
...the dirt of the language -- Patricia Fjellgren
On the day of my departure, the detained mayor of Istanbul is taken into custody. The streets of Istanbul are filled with millions of protestors.
Months later, I am in Istanbul myself. I am pursuing the idea that came to me on the plane to Stockholm: to carry the Zeus Altar back to Bergama.
***
Instead of travelling via Izmir, which is closer to Bergama, we spend a few days in Istanbul. The old name of the neighbourhood where we stay is Tatavla. Since the great fire of 13 April 1929, it has been known as Kurtuluş. This was almost exclusively the home of Armenians and Greek Orthodox. Few have remained.
The Cathedral dello Spirito -- Saint Esprit Kilisesi -- still stands, a hundred metres as the crow flies from the apartment where we are staying. The apartment is in one of many buildings on a hill. In the valley, about forty meters below me, runs a street, Dolapdere Caddesi, where, in front of a shop, car tyres are stacked metres high. Beyond it, the hill across from us is covered with countless houses. Most have pointed roofs and are often narrow buildings, providing just enough space for a single room per floor. Many are falling into ruin. Once, they were built of wood or stone with bay windows and ornaments of the kind now rarely seen. Although most of the buildings I see from this window were built in the 1960s or 1970s, their dimensions likely correspond to the destroyed homes of the Armenian and Greek Orthodox population -- at least in width, if not height. Perhaps because the old cadastral maps still applied. Traces of the past linger in the city's memory.
None of those who had the power wanted to preserve the old. And yet the old form carries forward into the new. A shadow city inhabits the city of houses and streets. Something remains indestructible: in the memory of certain people, in their longings and anecdotes -- that is, in the content -- and in the arrangement and dimensions of the houses -- that is, in the form.
Even the new names, that were meant to erase the old, point back to what once was and never fully disappears: Kurtuluş (liberation, referring to the liberation of Turkey), Talat Paşa Caddesi, Kuvai Milli Okulu. An attempt was made to replace the Greek names with Republican-nationalist ones. But this very decision shows that every name here is a response to the erased names. And so, what was meant to vanish remains stronger than what it replaced.
The people were the absent signs. -- Per Olov Enquist [xxvi]
We set out for Bergama to carry the altar back to Pergamon. The young man working in the bus -- he has a well-trained body with strong arms -- leans across my seat and tells me he's reading a thick book, like the one I'm holding. He gets it out to show me. He's reading The Brothers Karamazov in Turkish. In it, it says: Europe is a most precious graveyard.
At sunset, the land on the horizon takes on a rough texture, shaped by the many spiky tops of black pine trees. Above their dark silhouette, the sky wears the skin of a glowing, ripe peach.
Between Enquist's Kartritarna and this notebook lie thirty-three years. When Enquist published his essays, Olof Palme had been dead for six years and socialism had collapsed three years earlier. In Germany, the homes of migrant people were burning. In Yugoslavia, civil war raged. In Turkey, the Turkish armed forces clashed with the PKK. Utopias disintegrated.
When something collapses, something new emerges. That does not hold true for utopias.
What is never written about often remains, as a fragment. -- Per Olov Enquist [xxvii]
The road takes us past olive groves. Gentle mountains rise in the distance. We descend into a valley. Ahead, the puffy tops of low olive trees. At the end of the valley, the lilac-coloured blossoms of man-high oleander bushes lining the road catch the light. Beyond the olive valley lies a sea of umbrella pines -- tall and strong, yet friendly -- like enormous green mushrooms. An orchestra of crickets louder than the wind or engine.
As we enter, we see on the left, atop the hill, part of the castle. We drive into Bergama, lose ourselves in the small streets. House walls display foreign stones, with different colours and different shapes. Monolithic columns stand before a doorway. We leave the town again and find the road leading up to the castle on the hill.
We learn that ancient Pergamon once wanted to rival Athens; that it was once home to fifty thousand people, and that the city had been famous for its parchment. Today's Bergama is built atop the old city of Pergamon. The new Bergama is like a thick layer of parchment paper laid over the old Pergamon; some ancient columns and stones pierce through the paper.
Immediately to the left of the entrance to the Acropolis lies the foundation of the Zeus Altar. Since the altar no longer stands here and cannot be visited in Berlin, this most significant surviving artwork of Greek antiquity, with its Gigantomachy frieze, has effectively vanished.
Heilmann indicated the dimensions and location of the temple, as the temple, still undamaged by sandstorms or earthquakes, pillage or plunder, had shown itself on a protruding platform, on the terraced hill of the residence, above the city known today as Bergama, sixty-five miles north of Smyrna, between the narrow, usually dried-out rivers Keteios and Selinos, gazing westward, across the plain of Caicus, toward the ocean and the isle of Lesbos, a structure with an almost square ground plan, one hundred twenty by one hundred thirteen feet, and with a perron sixty-five feet wide, the whole thing dedicated by Eumenes II, to thank the gods for helping him in his war -- the construction having begun one hundred eighty years before our era and lasting for twenty years, the buildings visible from far away, included among the wonders of the world by Lucius Ampelius in his Book of Memorabilia, second century A.D., before the temple sank into the rubble of a millennium. -- Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands [xxviii]
In front of the foundation of the altar, I turn my gaze westwards. The parchment city fills the wide valley almost to the mountains on the horizon. I shift my eyes north, where the white columns of Athena's altar still rise into the blue sky. Below them, the amphitheatre, rounded and carved into the bedrock. I turn east, now standing among the grasses growing from the foundations. Where the altar once stood -- the one described in the Gospel of John as the throne of Satan -- the fenced-off stones of the foundation remain, with an Aleppo pine growing there, its green branches spreading loosely like a canopy.
I take The Aesthetics of Resistance from my backpack. The altar returns -- not as stone, but as the spirit of stone. I slide the book through the fence surrounding the wild garden Zeus still inhabits. Dry yellow grass now occupies the area where the altar once stood. I place the book on a tuft of grass, in front of the grey stones of the foundation. Immediately, the wind flips through the pages. I have carried it back: the altar, as a word.
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