Long shadows of Kenya coffee gardens
Long shadows of Kenyan coffee gardens
While translating Karen Blixen's "Out of Africa" and "Shadows on the Grass," I certainly noticed, that many references there were to historical or literary aspects of the book's context. The search for information about one of the heroes of these links surprised me a lot, because it turned out to be connected with both Ukraine and coffee. Of course, in Karen Blixen life everything was connected with coffee, because she was a coffee farmer in Kenya and her books and her whole life have been inextricably linked to coffee. But there is very little to do with Ukraine.
Looking for someone to compare the character and behavior of her servant, the Somali Farah - she finds both his and Somali character in general similar to the character of her ancient ancestors, the Scandinavian Vikings. Here is what she writes about some of them:
"On the African plains, I recalled the image of Einar Tambeskyalve, an unsurpassed young archer, a friend of King Olav Triggwesson, who was with the King at the naval battle of Swolder in 1002. When Einar's bowstring broke loudly in battle, the King shouted through the roar of battle: "What thundered so loudly?" and heard in reply: "This Kingdom of Norway has fallen out of hand, King Olav!" That warlike young man with a wild look, standing at the stern of the ship, apparently felt with pleasure that he had achieved what he should have achieved. And we who now read about him can agree with this, because to this day few people remember who won or lost the battle of the Swolder, and what were its consequences, while the great words of Einar Tambeskjalve they remember in a thousand years. "
Going in search of Wikipedias and Google Books, I was surprised to learn that this same King Olav spent some time in Rus, that is, in Ukraine. He was in the guard of King Volodymyr (the Baptist), so he was probably in Kyiv. His life was turbulent. Like Volodymyr in Ukraine, Olav became a Baptist in Norway. Moreover, he baptised quite democratically. When he offered to be baptized in a village or town, there were usually those who did not want to or doubted. For such cases, Olav's sermon was very simple - he offered those who did not want to be baptized to enter into a duel with him, so to speak, "one on one". Whoever wins the fight will stay with his faith. And the Christian faith thus spread, because there were few who wanted to fight with Olav. It is said that among those who then decided not to fight him - was the well-known Eric Rudy, the same one who later carried the Word of God to Iceland, Greenland and America. And so he would have fought foolishly - and who would have discovered America then? When his army had one last ship left, Olav sank in the sea. But someone from the ship still probably survived, because he told this story and on it the Scandinavian poets composed sagas, ie songs.
But perhaps the most famous of these sagas, which speaks of Ukraine, was composed by one of Olava's descendants, Harold Zigurson. Even Olav's adventures fade in comparison with the adventures of this Ukrainian Scandinavian guy.
Where he just wasn't, what he just didn't see !!! As a teenager in the first battles for the Norwegian crown in the Baltic, he lost and barely survived, fled to Novgorod and Kyiv, where he served in guard of the Rus ruler, Yaroslav the Wise. From there he sailed to Constantinople, fought in Sicily, captured the Athene port of Piraeus, prayed in Jerusalem, stood near the throne of the Byzantine Emperor and was there in prison, where he escaped, and on the way to freedom one of his ships broke the chain that blocked the exit from the bay of Golden Horn, and on another ship returned to Kyiv. There, after many years of separation, he married a Ukrainian girl Elizabeth (one of the daughters of King Yaroslav the Wise), about whose love was his song, which has reached us in many translations and which was translated into Ukrainian by Ivan Franko himself. Haven't heard? “Pristine Russian” bard Rosenbaum about this "не поёт"? Here it is:
A song about a girl from the Rus country
The land of Sicily is far away
Our ship flew by,
In lush outfits we are on deposit
They acted as they should.
Our nose boat ran alive,
Proud that the heroes wore ...
Hey, who doesn't have a courageous soul,
Would not dare to swim there,
And yet a girl from a Rus country,
What shines in the crown [1] does not accept me.
As we met the trands,
There were more of them, like us,
Hey, that's fierce and persistent
The fight has begun!
Our young king fell in battle, -
I fought him away [2] ...
Hey, who doesn't have a courageous soul,
I would not resist in battle.
And yet a girl from a Rus country,
What shines in the crown does not accept me.
Once, girl, sixteen of us
Of the four breaks at once
They had to draw sea water -
The waves of rage roared,
They flooded our boat to the sides, -
But we did not give up!
Hey, who doesn't have a courageous soul,
Would not dare to swim there!
And yet a girl from a Rus country,
What shines in the crown does not accept me.
I know eight pieces: I can
Vowels compose,
Rides a horse as fast as a snake,
Swim in foam shafts
And on skis on snow slip,
Throw a spear at a deer,
Row like an experienced rower,
To fight with a sword and a bow.
And yet a girl from a Rus country,
What shines in the crown does not accept me.
There is no woman or girl in the south
Do not hide, but confess,
That we are in the morning in the southern city then
They fell like beasts into a tackle.
There was a bang coming from our weapons!
There was blood pouring from the bodies!
That's where I wrote my name
On the testimony of their deeds [3].
And yet a girl from a Rus country,
What shines in the crown does not accept me.
I was born in Upland, where people
Glorious bows tighten,
And now, hated by claps,
My boats are free
Then they moor to the shore,
Then they go into the sea like seagulls,
As we push them from the shore,
Water waves cover.
And yet a girl from a Rus country,
What shines in the crown does not accept me.
You can read more about this saga and the notes of Franko and other researchers here:
http://edda.in.ua/teksti/inshi-sai-ta-pasma/pisnia-pro-divchinu-z-ruskoyi-krayini
Harold later became King of Norway. It was he who founded the current capital of this country, the city of Oslo. He died at the age of about 50, when in 1066 he tried to conquer the Kingdom of England. In the battle at Stamford Bridge, some English “Robin Hood” shot an arrow straight into Harold's throat, unprotected by the chain-armor. And on the same day the Mary, one of his and Elizabeth's daughters, died also. This is another plot for a sad Ukrainian song that has not been written yet.
Even in those days, and even much earlier in Ukrainian songs, and even worse, in the Ukrainian reality appears such a theme as slavery, or captivity. Captured people were sold and their fate is not to be envied. Although some of them in captivity, so to speak, "stood out in the people." This is how everyone knows the Ukrainian Roksolana, the Turkish sultana. There were probably Ukrainians by origin and among the famous Mamluks, rulers of Egypt, the most powerful rulers of the East. For centuries, only former slaves became rulers there. There was no other way - first you had to be sold, and only then, after many years of humiliation and slavery, you could become the main slave-owner. And there was the not so well-known Ukrainian Cossack Yakiv Malik, who became the vizier (that is, the ruler, something like the prime minister) of the Indian state of Gujarat, quite large, to put it mildly, with a population somewhere around 50 million people. It is a pity that neither Roxolana's nor Malik's memoirs have reached us. How many interesting things they could tell. But there was one such slave, though not Ukrainian, but he was in Ukraine, who wrote memoirs. It was the German knight Johann Schiltberger. He was captured by the Turks at the Battle of Nikopol in 1396. In total, Schiltberger spent 32 years in captivity. In slavery he was a warrior. After joining the army of Turkish Sultan Bayezid I, he spent 6 years in wars for various cities and lands of present-day Turkey and Syria. In 1402, Bayazid's army was defeated by the army of the famous Emir Tamerlan. Johann forced to serve Timur. He spent another 6 years in this service. During this time he took part in the capture of Babylon, Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, many cities in Iran and Armenia, was on a campaign in India. After Timur's death, which occurred after a failed campaign in China - Johann served for Timur's son and grandson and during this service fought in Armenia, Kurdistan, Turkey, Iran. Then Timur's grandson handed him over to one of the Tatar khans and Johann visited the Volga, Central Asia and Siberia, he was in the Crimea, in Kafa (now Theodosia), where he saw one of the largest slave bazaars of the time. From there, with one of the khans, he traveled to the wedding of the daughter of the Sultan of Egypt. After many years of such adventures, he managed to escape. And Johann got home through Ukraine. He visited Kylia, Ackerman (Belgorod-Dniestrovskiy), Bendery and Lviv. After lying sick in Lviv for three months, he still moved on and in 1428 got home to Bavaria.
Since then, a lot of interesting things have happened in Ukraine and many travelers and adventurers have visited our region. And one of the most famous among them was the Englishman John Smith. Yes, this is the same Smith who became the founder of Virginia, one of the first English colonies in North America (now the United States), and is considered the founder of American literature.
It was he who wrote the famous story of Pocahontas and it is in his books mentioned the first Ukrainian to come to America, Ivan Bohdan, from Kolomyia. But before meeting Pocahontas and Ivan Bogdan, John Smith's life was no less interesting. Sometime around 1600, when he was 20 years old, John entered the Austrian army to fight against the Turks. He probably fought well, because in two years he had the rank of captain and headed the appropriate unit. But during the fighting in Wallachia (ie in Moldavia), he was wounded, and Turks captured him, and sold to slavery. The Turkish master gifted him to his concubine, who lived in the Crimea, and she sent John to her brother hacienda, somewhere near Azov, on the Don. This was in 1603. At the hacienda, John was chained to an iron collar with the owner's name on it and put to work - reaping, threshing, etc. In addition to him, there were many other Christian slaves, supervised by about a hundred guards, Moors, Tatars and Turks, for whom Smith was the most pathetic of the slaves, living there, he said, worse than a dog.
From the beginning, Smith discussed with other slaves how to escape. But such a large guard and the Tatar hordes around made the prospect of escape unrealistic. Still, Smith was lucky. Once he was set to thresh grain. It was in a premice, like a beak, standing in a field, a few kilometers from the "hacienda". And so, when Smith was threshing there, a master named Timur came to the hut on horseback to check the work. Timur began to insult Smith, beat him, but did not appreciate the situation and "relaxed". Smith beat the Turk on the head and he died. Smith took the Turk's clothes, hid the body under the straw, put the grain in a bag, got on Timur's horse and rode away. As he writes, "towards all adventures." And the adventures were really not a joke. For two days he drove without knowing where, and on the third day he went to the main road, where there were road signs, with something like "icons". One of the signs was a cross, which probably pointed to Christian countries. He went there and in a few weeks got to a town on the Don, where his "superiors" asked him about everything, Smith's collar was removed, they even sent to him a "Lady Kallamata" for an overseas guest, who "fulfilled all his wishes." Then the "governor" gave Smith a "registered letter," with which he went on, already in Christian countries, where slavery was almost no threat to him. His way was to the west, he passed many settlements, but it was difficult for the Englishman to remember their correct names, it was difficult to understand something in them, especially those on the Dnipro Left Bank. Among those that are clear are Donets, a fortress in present-day Kharkiv, then Novgorod (Siversky), and across the Dnieper he moved to Richitsa. Then came the more familiar names - Korosten, Ostrog, Dubno, Drohobych. So he got to Transylvania, to the Austrian prince Sigismund, in whose army he served before captivity. Prince Smith "did not dine" - he paid him "for the inconvenience" a rather substantial amount of 15 hundred gold ducats. Then the journey was more comfortable and Smith returned to England, where in 1606 he went to America, to Virginia, with the Ukrainian Ivan Bohdan to new adventures, to the Indians, Pocahontas, etc.
I read all these details from the original Smith's book. And then I accidentally came across a Russian translation of it, and I looked at it to find out what the "Matskovsky historians" thought of Smith's journey. According to their interpretation, Smith went from Azov to Drohobych via Kaluga. As they believe, it is almost "straightforward". That is, it is similar to what usually happens in the so-called "history" in the Moscow interpretation, where there is much like pulling teeth through the ass. Well, everyone knows that the fastest way to get from Rostov to Bucharest is through Sheremetyevo :). Smith was certainly an adventurer, but probably not so much. Although, if he knew the language, the times were quite interesting, he could then (to make the memoirs even brighter) a couple of years and "hang out" in Moscow - this time in Moscow history is called "troubled times". False Dmitry with the Cossacks and Poles were already somewhere near Putivl, preparing for a campaign in Moscow. Maybe Dmitry and Smith crossed somewhere near Romny? And so the picture arises: "Agent of the West John Smith feeds the cookies to Ukrainian “Fascist” False Dmitry (Yarosh), planning the Maidan in Matskva and the overthrow of the legitimate Tsar Boris."
It is also interesting how Smith describes Ukrainians. He writes about their attitude to himself that in all his life he was rarely met with greater respect, joy and pleasure. The governors of all the cities through which he passed gifted him something. In general, as Smith writes, the country was devastated, traveling between cities could only be large caravans, or accompanied by an armed convoy. Smith describes in detail the fortifications that were set up in the cities and villages against the attacks of the Tatars. People even work in the field with weapons to be ready to repel the onslaught of enemies. According to him, local lords, captains (military) and governors are very well dressed, have good weapons and horses, but even if he is a local lord, even if he is a peasant, he must be ready to repel the invaders. Although… Already in our time in Ukraine I know modern "lords", well dressed and on beautiful "horses", in the trunk of which is at least a machine gun…
And if you are so patient that you have read all the way here, then you probably want to tell me that the blog is about coffee, and I said only a little about it at the beginning. And I can say that coffee is the beginning and the end of all things. So, what do you think was the beginning of Smith's conflict with the Turk Timur, which for Timur turned into the end, that is, a fatal blow with a club into the head, and for Smith - the coveted freedom? The conflict began with the Turks eating pilaf and drinking coffee. And Smith got pilaf only in the remains on the walls of the cauldron, and coffee did not get at all. Here, you can see it yourself:
And by the way, from this quote you can be sure first hand that even the Turks in 1603 called coffee the correct word "cava". And in general, someone, and that Timur would definitely confirm to you that life is too short to drink bad coffee;)
