Uncategorized – Page 5 – wanderwarbler

October 20, 2018

South Africa: Come Back, Mama Africa

A dress with Miriam Makeba’s famous Drum cover at Neighbourgoods Market Johannesburg

Ten Years ago, on November 7th 2008, the South African Singer and human rights activist Miriam Makeba collapsed after a performance. She was immediately taken to a hospital, but died from cardiac arrest. Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, issued a statement, saying that the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation. She was the mother of our struggle.”

Nelson Mandela smiles on his Rainbow nation on a mural in central Johannesburg

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was a fearless emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system. She was a symbol of integrity and pan-Africanism, singing in any language from her own Xhosa to Swahili, from Portuguese to Yiddish. Her love songs and lullabies, party songs and calls for unity spoke of a joyful tenacity, of a will to survive: a deep cultural memory. She stood not only against South African apartheid, but for a worldwide movement against racism. She was Mama Africa.

In 1967, Miriam Makeba was also the first black woman to have a Top-ten world hit: Pata Pata. She had produced the song in the USA, as she was exiled from her native South Africa and her music banned. But in her heart South Africa lived on. “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”

Pata Pata is a Xhosa word, her native language, and means Touch, Touch. In the 1950ies, when Zenzile Miriam was young, an aspiring singer, it was a popular dance in the shebeens of Sophiatown.

Apartheid had just been installed in South Africa, but the Johannesburg suburb of Sophiatown was still spared segregation. Africans of all tribes lived door by door with Indians, Chinese, Jews, and Mulattos. Mansions and quaint cottages stood next to rusty wood-and-iron shacks ignoring race or class structures. There were gangs in Sophiatown, the Tsotsi – modelled themselves after the American Zootsuits, and Miriam was a gang member, too. She performed as a singer in the shebeens – illegal drinking dens.

Bhanzi, a dancer and performer from the Johannesburg township of Tembisa in Tsotsi style.

Music thrived in Sophiatown – giving birth to its own South African Jazz, Marabi, a mixture of American Bebop and African traditional grooves, with Hugh Masakela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Kippie Moeketsi and Dolly Rathebe starting their careers. Black intellectuals flocked to Sophiatown to talk, listen and dance to recordings of the newest jazz. And Drum Magazine, the only black magazine, covered this bubbling scene, with photographers Bob Gusani and Ernest Cole, and artist Gerard Sekoto.

Fra Stompie has been playing in the old days in Sophiatown, and does so again.

“For Africans it was the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, the home of writers, artists, doctors and lawyers. It was both bohemian and conventional, lively and sedate.” Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography. He too, a young lawyer, had come to Sophiatown. For music and political resistance went hand in hand in South Africa. That’s how Miriam and Nelson met.

In 1955, the governing National Party (NP), sent two thousand policemen armed with guns and rifles. Influential musicians, writers or activists were exiled or imprisoned, 60 000 inhabitants removed. Sophiatown was flattened by bulldozers.

Nowadays, long after the fall of Apartheid, and a cultural organization is trying to preserve the legacy and memory of the once vibrant suburb, and revive its grooves by organizing jazz workshops and concerts.

For her last concert, Miriam Makeba had come to Naples to participate in a charity held in solidarity with the writer Roberto Saviano, whom the Camorra threatened with death. Her last song was Pata Pata.

The real Pata Pata Dance

October 1, 2018October 10, 2018

Montenegro: The Price of Salt

When by September the last tourists have left and the little Adriatic republic of Montenegro has fallen into peaceful slumber again, another kind of yearly visitor arrives. Thousands of migrating birds on their way to the African sun stop-over at the country’s lakes and rocky shores, but most importantly at the Ulcinj Saltpans, a lagoon at Montenegro’s Southern tip, bordering Albania.

Salt pans are an ideal nesting and resting spot for birds. They offer a unique salty fauna, plus amphibians and reptiles, to their avian guests: a win-win situation for local economy and ecology; or, in other words: the ideal cohabitation of humans and birds. For without the pumps and machines, not enough salt water would reach the lagoon and therefore the bird habitat.

Samphire – the salty flower of the saltpans – has risen to fame since Jamie Oliver recently introduced it into his modern cuisine.

The Ulcinj salt pans, created in 1934 for salt production, have since attracted millions of birds. Today, however the pumps stand still. The dried pans are left in dire need to be flooded with sea water, but the machines and salt-factories dilapidated and forgotten, a but a surreal setting for the flamingos, the Dalmatian Pelicans, spoonbills and many other waders – whose future is as uncertain as that of the salt factory.

Problems began when the salt pans were sold to a private company with the permission to turn the land into a hotel and golf resort. However, following protests by wildlife NGOs, the young state of Montenegro declared the saltpans an environmentally protected area in 2012, thereby thwarting any hotel plans. As a result, the private owner declared bankruptcy in 2013, stopped salt production, and sued the young Republic of Montenegro for breach of contract. A coincidence or probably not, the saltpans have also fallen prey to various acts of vandalism, pumps and flamingo nests were destroyed, water ways clogged.

While the situation still seems unclear today, as bankruptcy proceedings are apparently not settled, the saltpans have been turned into an open-air museum for birding tourists in 2014 – with three hides and educational signs at the path surrounding the pan. Not unlike the factories, though, the signs stand forgotten and bleached by the Mediterranean sun.

But there is hope. Nature and birds are resilient, and despite their run down state, the pans dazzle the visitor’s eyes with a sparkling display of colors and birds. Within the past years, awareness among the locals has risen, and with the support of various NGOs, efforts have taken place to reinstall salt production.

The price of salt doesn’t seem so high in Montenegro. For salt comes with the birds, which makes it all the more worth it.

September 18, 2018September 18, 2018

Montenegro: Paradise (Almost) Lost at Lake Skadar

Millions of years ago, tectonic shifts cut off a portion of the Adriatic sea and formed a basin, later named Skadar by the Montenegrinians, or Shkodar by the Albanians, who nowadays share this charming lake, one of the largest in Europe, with no one but a bunch of birds.

While the birds have nested in the high reeds and floating carpets of sea lilies ever since, humans only settled at the lake’s shores about a thousand years ago – and engaged in battle right away: the Slavs against the Turks, the Montenegrins against the Ottomans, back and forth through times and ages, Tito’s partisans even sank a steamboat in the lake, while the storks and herons, the egrets and ibises, kingfishers, turns, stilts, dived and sailed through waves and skies.

Pygmy cormorants rise with the morning sun.

Today, in times of peace and with the help of the EU, which invests heavily in Montenegro, the lake is of dreamy tranquility and breathtaking wilderness, glittering in the Mediterranean sun. For birders it is nothing short of a paradise.

Lake Skadar was declared a National Park in 1983 and two globally endangered species, the Dalmatian Pelican and the Pygmy Cormorant, are found at the lake in abundance.

Unlike humans, the Pelicans and Cormorants have teamed up, breading in vicinity and sharing the chores of hunting and babysitting. While the regal, imposing pelicans are surprisingly elegant gliders, the cormorants excel at fishing, diving meters deep into the waters and bringing with them fish too large for themselves to swallow, but just the right size for the big beaked pelicans.

Lake Skadar could be a paradise for the birds – if it weren’t for the humans. Despite its status as a natural park, Lake Skadar has a litter problem, the occasional plastic bottle drifting like flotsam in the undulating waves, getting caught in the reeds, and clogging the freshwater springs that feed the lake.

a channel through the water lilies for the fishing boat

But worst are the left over fishing nets. Once expensive and made of biodegradable fabric, they are nowadays made of plastic and extremely cheap, to the effect that fishermen don’t bother to retrieve them but leave them swaying in the water .

For the cormorants, those masterful divers, they are a deathly trap, in which they get entangled and drown. Their dead bodies can be seen floating with the empty canisters, tins and beer bottles. But if the cormorants can’t dive up the fish, not only the pelicans will go hungry.

June 8, 2018July 30, 2018

Rome: A Woman’s Place Is In The Kitchen

For over thousand years, from around 700 BC to 400AD, the Vestal Virgins tended to the eternal flame in the Forum Romanum. The Vestal Virgins were emancipated women, meaning, they did not belong to a man – a father or husband – like their female contemporaries, but were devoted to the Goddess of Hearth, Vesta, who unlike other deities of their time, was not represented by statues, but by fire.

remains of the Vestal temple at the Forum Romanum

The Vestal Virgins enjoyed most of the honors and privileges of Roman citizens, and were allowed to handle their own property. Yet – this came at a price: Chosen at a very young age from Patrician families, the girls had to take a vow of chastity for thirty years. They were to live like nuns in the house of Vestales, which was basically a kitchen with adjacent living quarters, next to the Vestal temple, where the fire was burning.

Besides tending to the fire, an important and responsible task in a densely populated city, their duties were most importantly the preparation of the mola salsa, the holy cakes used for state sacrifices, and the holding of the Vestalia Festival around the Summer solstice each year. During these festivities their home quarters were opened to other women for visits. As priestesses of Vesta, the Vestal Virgins were also considered guardians of luck and could intervene on behalf of those in trouble.

Everything in Rome, it seems, depended on the everlasting burning flame, and the Vestales’ virginity. Their purity promised to create a magic bond for the community. As long as their virginity remained intact – Rome would remain safe.

Punishment was brutal and merciless, should a Virgin fail in her duties. If the fire went out – which meant that the Vestal was impure and the health and safety of the Romans therefore under threat – the Virgin was whipped to death. If the virgin committed the worst of all crimes, lose her virginity, she was to be buried alive. She then was led to an underground chamber at the Campus Sceleratus, where a bed, food and even a lamp was provided. After she entered, the entrance was locked and covered with dirt. It was a clearly defined ritual. Control and administration of these punishments fell to the one man who had initially chosen them for the job: the Pontifex Maximus. If a Virgin finished the 30 years alive, she was free to do as she pleases. Only a few married.

The most famous Vestal to have broken the vow of chastity, was Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city of Rome. It is believed that Rhea Silvia was raped by an unknown man, but after discovering her unwanted pregnancy, she claimed immaculate conception and named Mars, the God of warfare, as the father. For fear of Mars’ wrath, Rhea Silvia was spared death, but the twin babies were to die – not by sword, but by the elements. Let fate decide! They were abandoned. The rest is history.

May 20, 2018July 30, 2018

Austria: Family Business

What a frenzy in the air! With flying colors, the gregarious bee-eaters have returned from their Southern African winter domiciles and are busy setting up shop in Austria. Using their beaks for digging and legs for kicking, they carve tunnels of up to two meter length in the soft sandstone near lake Neusiedl.

A bee-eater leaving home for the hunt. The bigger holes are bird’s nesting chambers, the smaller ones bees’. What neighborhood…

Bee-eaters are fast flyers. Spotting their insect prey from a distance of up to 60m they shoot like bullets through the air for the kill. Bees might be their preferred diet, but bee-eaters will do with any flying insect. They will however never eat from the floor. They have manners after all. They are social creatures.

The divorce rate among bee-eaters is low. Once a bee-eater found their mate, they will most likely stay together for years to come. Traditionally courtship ends with the presentation of a gift – not surprisingly a bee, or even a dragonfly – and then the bride leaves her family to move in with her in-laws. This is when all the trouble begins.

Prey is presented as a gift – or robbed- some individuals speialize in kleptoparasitism.

In-laws rarely have an interest in grandchildren. Rather, they want to have more children themselves and – since hunting is so demanding a business – they are in need of baby sitters, not grandkids. The in-laws will harass the newly weds and keep them from procreating mainly by blocking them access to their nesting chamber. To keep the peace, the young couple often obeys, delaying their own egg-laying for a few years.

The bride however, will feel short-changed. She left her own family for the groom after all. So she comes up with a scheme: She sneaks in with a completely different family, trespassing territory lines, and demands intercourse with a male. Upon return, she secretly lays her own eggs into her mother-in-law’s nesting chamber. She’s not scrupulous – without a flinch she will discard of already laid eggs. Yet, she must time her actions well – if her off-spring hatches too early or too late, they are doomed as well. The mother in law will know no mercy. Family – can’t choose them.

October 28, 2017October 29, 2017

Rome On Ecstasy

This month 500 years ago, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther published his 95 theses and thereby started the Protestant Reformation. He called for purification of the church, who in the run of the centuries had turned into a self-serving system of greed, nepotism and decadence. Christians should have faith in God and the Bible alone, Luther declared, and not in the army of angels and Saints, nor “immaculate” Mother Mary and least of all the Pope.

An angel fighting off vice – or killing a Protestant. Interior Chiesa San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome

The Catholic Church stroke back: in arms (the bloodthirsty Thirty Year War broke loose) and arts. In a meticulously planned propaganda campaign (conspired at the Council of Trent 1543-63) they called for artists to flock to the eternal city and create buildings, paintings and sculptures that were so formidable and awe-inspiring they’d resurrect faith in Angels and Saints and Mother Mary, and most of all the Pope. But above all, they should instill fear of hell and punishment into an illiterate people. And so Baroque was born. Mesmerizing to this day.

Ceiling Fresco inside Villa Borghese, built around 1600 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an admirer, collector and protector of Caravaggio

The world’s biggest church was built, St. Peter’s Basilica, in honor of the first Pope. Michelango was bullied into adorning the ceiling with formidable depictions of God’s grandezza. Michelangelo grumbled – he was a sculptor, not a painter, after all – but gave in.

Caravaggio self portrait as decapitated Goliath. ( David and Goliath Vienna KHM)

By the end of the 16th century, the Church found another Michelangelo, whose realistic and detailed depictions of beheadings and other pains very much satisfied their need for intimidation. On the downside, the guy was unpredictable and prone to outbursts of violence. Worse, he was a murderer. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, but he went by the name of Caravaggio.

St. John the Baptist hugs a ram. Caravaggio 1602, at Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome

Caravaggio first rose to fame through extremely realistic depictions of delicious fruit baskets and boys. The Cardinals, whose predilection for youth was well known and documented (The insider account Il puttanismo Romano was published anonymously) went crazy for both the painter and his canvases. Caravaggio himself, however, was also leaning towards women. While he complied with the church’s demand to glorify Mother Mary, he did so by using full-busted, sensual courtesans as models, and not thin pale nuns. It was a problem with him – women in the Catholic Church of course had to be chaste. Raped, if anything, but not lascivious. Finally, they had him paint old men as dying Saints, paintings they could display in their chapels. The martyrs of St. Mathew and St. Peter were immediate block busters: The contrasts of light and dark, the depth of field, the intensity, the drama were breathtaking, and still are, 400 years later.

A busted Mother Mary steps on a snake – the model was a well known courtesan, the painting, despite commissioned by the Vatican, was finally not accepted.

The council of Trent had outlawed any worldly pleasure. Dances and carnivals were forbidden, books banned and priests were asked to spy on their parishioners. (Easy, they had to confess anyway.)

Art became a surrogate for bodily desires and should channel them into spirituality. Saints and martyrs were shown in the moment of rapture, in the throngs of ecstasy. Ex Stasis meant the experience of being taken outside of oneself, to where one catches a preview of heaven, the moment when one is united with the beloved, with God. A little Death, as it was later called. Or: orgasm.

The church enlisted architects to turn the city into the shape of a star and sculptors Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona to beautify it with sculptures, fountains and staricases.

Pope Innocent X commissioned Bernini, whose sculptures were ummatched in expression and elegance, to design the famous Fountain of the four Rivers at Piazza Navona. The four rivers represented Rome also a colonial world power. Innocent X himself went down in history for his greediness – and for his even greedier sister-in-law and lover Pimpaccia. Pimpaccia was said to pull the strings behind Innocent. Their residence, Palazzo Doria Pamhilj, by coincidence at the Piazza Navona, is a vestige of their insatiable greed.

Detail of Fountain 4 Fiumini at Piazza Navona, Rome

The fountain was of course constructed on public expense – during the great famine of 1646-48 – and not surprisingly it was not met with much enthusiasm by the starving people. Riots lay in the air. Under cover of the night, protesters stuck posters on the stone blocks, so called Pasquinades:
“We do not want obelisks and fountains. It is bread that we want. Bread, Bread, Bread!”
In a spirit of Christian compassion, Pope Innocent X had the protesters spied out and arrested.
The fountain was built, but Pope Innocent X met a terrible end. While he lay on his death bed in Palazzo Dori Pamphilj, Pimpaccia robbed all his money and fled the city. His agony lasted three days, three days of ecstasy for Innocent X, 200 years for Rome. Then, the era of Baroque was over.

Splendor and Passion: Bernini’s sculptures attract tourists from around the world. At Galleria Borghese

October 10, 2017

Rome: Watching the Sky

In ancient Rome, augury was the major kind of divination. This included watching the sky, thunder and lightning, but most importantly the auspices, watching the birds. Eagles and vultures were Jupiter’s most important messengers.

Nothing was decided without consulting an augur, a priest who could interpret the flight, the song and dance of birds. Most notoriously, Romulus and Remus settled their dispute on where to found the city of Rome by an augury. Romulus, of course, had the better auspices. He spotted more vultures than his brother Remus, which also granted the former the right to fratricide.

The she-wolf that raised Remus and Romulus against a purple, thunderous Roman sky on the Capitoline Hill, where Romulus founded Rome.

The auspices was restricted to certain species, which are hard to come across in the busy city nowadays. Like in any other coastal city, giant gulls and pigeons seem to outnumber the rest of Rome’s avian population.

A giant gull over-looking his city from the Palletino, the power center of ancient Rome.

Since the Roman Empire extended over a vast part of Northern Africa, tropical birds were imported as sought-after pets. Emperor Nero famously owned an African Gray parrot, Pontius Pilatus’ wife, Claudia, kept lovebirds in a cage, who looked not unlike the Monaco Parakeet.

A Parrocco Monaco sneaking from behind a tree in the beautiful Borghese gardens.

Today’s most flamboyant Roman bird, the gregarious Monaco Parakeet, only arrived in Rome in the early 1970ies. The striking, green parrots have since seamlessly integrated into Italian lifestyle, not causing any harm to local Wildlife, according to the Italian Wildlife Fund. These bright flying jewels color the ancient buildings, which, when built, where not as marble-white, but painted in manifold colors.

Pigeons at the Tiber at sunset, Ponte Vittorio Emanuele in the back.

July 7, 2017July 12, 2017

Prague: Mother Tongue

For the short period of 55 years, from 1884 when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to 1939 when the Nazis invaded, Prague was a home to a flourishing coffee shop literature, that brought about writers of lasting literary significance.

Café Slavia was the setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s first stories, published in Prague in 1899. It was also there that Franz Kafka famously could not stop laughing when he read the first draft of his Trial to his literary friends. At Café Arko Kafka crossed plumes with the likes of Franz Werfel and Max Brod. They and many other coffee shop literates had little in common as writers, were it not for the fact that they all wrote in German. Prague German, to be precise.

vestige of the Belle Epoque style of the turn of the century under the Habsurg Monarchy

It is largely forgotten that until 1945, German and Czech were equally spoken in Prague, albeit in two distinct parallel societies. Czech was the language of the working class. Prague German was spoken by the Upper class, the wealthy, intellectuals, the writers and actors. While the German-speaking literates nursed their coffees in the pompous inner-cities coffee shops, Jaroslav Hasek, who wrote the “Good Soldier Svejk” in his native Czech, downed his beers in the pubs of working class neighborhoods like Žižkov.

A beergarden in the working class neighborhood Žižkov

The Good Soldier Švejk, a down-to earth Czech, had to join the unloved Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI. A job he famously failed at, and a war the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy lost.

The book in its Czech original version at display in a Prague bookstore.

Rilke, himself born into a wealthy German speaking family, made the jarring gap and adversity between the German upper class and Czech working class the subject of his Prague Stories, written in Prague German of course. He also seemed to have been inspired to his later transcendental poetry by La Fée verte at Café Slavia. That’s what the highly alcoholic, and back then legal, green beverage Absinth was dubbed.

Café Slavia offered a view of the Vlatava and servings of Absinthe to the literates.

German was also the language of the Jews of Prague, or at least of the progressive liberals wanting to emancipate from the rigid orthodoxy of the Shtetl. In the Habsburg Empire, Jewish schools were forced by law teach in German, a means to suppress Jewish culture and language, the Eastern European Yiddish. Eventually German became the mother tongue of the educated. Most, but not all of the coffee shop literates were Jewish. Kafka was.

“What do I have in common with the Jews?” he asked, “I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”

Besides Prague German, it was a feeling of alienation the coffee shop literates shared.

“We are not born into our home. Rather it seems to me as if everything great is born in the desire to find a home somewhere, an open-armed home, waiting for our return,”

Rilke wrote before he left the city at 22.

Kafkaesque or unbearably light? A Czech street scene.

Kafka obviously did not feel too homely in Prague either, even though he never left.
“Prague won’t let you go, the little mother has claws,” he said.

“His own forehead obstructs his way.” (Kafka) Czech artist David Cerny built this revolving sculpture of Franz Kafka, It de- and reconstructs itself by whirling, an eternal search. The installation is set in front of a commercial restaurant in the city center.

Things were different for Franz Werfel. Born to progressive, German speaking Jews, he was raised and emotionally most attached to his Czech speaking, catholic Nanny Barbara. First drafted into WWI, like Švejk, then driven into exile by the Nazis, he died in the USA a successful and acclaimed writer. He outlived Kafka, Rilke and Hasek by over twenty years. But Prague never let go of him either. At the end of his life, in the 1940ies, he still wrote lovingly of Barbara, and of his native city in his “Ballad to Prague.”

Paddleboats floating in the Vlatava, Charlesbridge in the background.

June 15, 2017June 16, 2017

Cappadocia: Sunrise, Fairies and the Gods Of The Underworld

Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey, owes its name to the Old Greek word for Sunrise: the country where the sun rises, at least from a Hellenistic view point. Yet, its central region, a white limestone landscape named Cappadocia, has more of a lunar feeling: wind and rain have sculptured the powdery volcanic soil into bizarre rock formations, so called fairy chimneys. The Cappadocians themselves have through-out their history displayed a certain affinity to the Underworld.

The ancient people of the Hittites, who reigned in Cappadocia from the 17th to the 12th century BC, carved their dwellings into theses fairy chimneys and hillsides. They also dug deep into the soft earth and built a network of underground tunnels for their trickery warfare, and caves multiple stories deep for the storage of perishable produce. The underground offered favorably cool thirteen degrees Celsius through the hot summers and the freezing winters.

The Hittites venerated twelve Gods of the Underworld, gods they depicted with curly hair and conical hats. Much later, under the Persian Empire, these conical hats reappeared on the heads of Sufis, the mystics of Islam, although they were meant to symbolize the Islamic tombstones then.

In medieval times, and after the Hittites had long vanished, Cappadocia served as a refuge for the early Christians. Byzantine Christian monks took over the old underground dwellings, and refurbished them into colorful orthodox churches. The remains of these beautiful frescos are still vibrant today – owing to the conserving climate of the caves – even though the depicted saints’ faces have been erased, hundreds of years ago, by hostile attackers.

While the Byzantine Christians lived in the caves, they mirrored their cave-cities in the underworld by building underground cities, up to 60 meters deep, fully equipped with apartments, kitchens, baths, storage rooms and even prisons. When under threat, the Byzantines retreated into the Underworld and thanks to their sophisticated ventilation and intricate system of hallways, remained there for months on end – undetected by their attackers. The Byzantines disappeared from the Earth’s surface – and resurrected.

Tourism discovered Cappadocia only recently. Despite its underground history, most visitors like to see Cappadocia from far above. Hot balloons rise every sunrise – and shower the poor Anatolian region with foreign money.

The caves have turned into luxury hotels – but Cappadocia remains poor.

A couple of years ago, the Turkish have re-discovered the wisdom of the Hittites. The vast underground cities are used as storage space again. Produce is transported from all over Anatolia into Cappadocia.

Mashalla for the Gods of the Underworld.

June 7, 2017June 16, 2017

Crossing the Bosphorus

Istanbul straddles two continents. The city is divided by the Strait of Bosphorus, which connects the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, but separates Europe from Asia. The Istanbulites have built three bridges from stone, and many more through their music and poetry.

I woke up one morning.
The sun came up in me.
I turned into birds and leaves
which glittered in the springtime breeze.
I turned into birds and leaves.
My arms and legs were rioting.
I turned into birds and leaves,
birds
and leaves.

For migratory birds, the Bosphorus is the most important route on their way to their Northern breeding grounds. An estimated million of birds cross the Bosphorus annually. Big-winged soaring birds, like storks and predatory birds, depending on thermal convection and therefore avoiding sea crossings, have turned the city into a birding hot spot, benefiting from Turkey’s scenery of high mountains, marshlands and and humid forests. Camlika Hill, a favorite birding view point on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, was during the Ottoman empire a training ground for birds of prey, like falcons and hawks.

I listen to Istanbul, my eyes closed:
Now the birds are passing
In high clamoring flocks,
Nets are pulled in at the fisheries,
A woman’s feet graze the water;
I listen to Istanbul, my eyes closed.

Migration starts with a promise to return. Yet, many birds do not survive the trip to the distant shores. Feeding grounds are dwindling. And many more dangers lurk on their way: The stork was deemed holy by the Ancient Greeks – who punished the killing of a stork with death penalty – and the followers of Islam – they likened its migration to their pilgrimage to Mecca. It is considered a delicacy in Egypt, where it is trapped with nets and limesticks, and killed by the thousands. Little migratory songbirds, who feature on Mediterranean menus as pulenta a osei (Polenta with little birds) in Italy or ambelopoulia in Malta, are illegally trapped and hunted all over the Mediterranean.
Formerly common birds are on the verge of extinction.

When you’re travelling,
the stars speak to you.
What they say
is often sad.