[HN Gopher] Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks
___________________________________________________________________
Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks
Author : slater
Score : 84 points
Date : 2021-06-22 18:39 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| diminish wrote:
| Very fun to read how the assumption to aristocratic power in 19th
| century comes from ancient kingdoms, celestial objects and
| religious figures.
|
| - ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper
| and Lower Egypt;
|
| - brother of the sun and moon;
|
| - son of Muhammad; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus
| Christ; grandson and viceroy of God, trustee chosen by God
| Himself;
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The interest in classical antiquity was not just a European
| phenomenon. And the Ottomans were very well positioned to lay
| claim to that past, controlling the right land and also running
| a multi-ethnic empire in the "Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Roman"
| tradition.
| 0xbkt wrote:
| Here's another one from Suleiman the Magnificent's letter to
| Francis I of France who was then in conflict with Holy Roman
| Emperor Charles V and asking for Suleiman's help:
| I who am the Sultan of Sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns,
| the dispenser of crowns to the monarchs on the face of the
| earth, the shadow of the God on Earth, the Sultan and sovereign
| lord of the Mediterranean Sea and of the Black Sea, of Rumelia
| and of Anatolia, of Karamania, of the land of Romans, of
| Dhulkadria, of Diyarbakir, of Kurdistan, of Azerbaijan, of
| Persia, of Damascus, of Aleppo, of Cairo, of Mecca, of Medina,
| of Jerusalem, of all Arabia, of Yemen and of many other lands
| which my noble fore-fathers and my glorious ancestors (may God
| light up their tombs!) conquered by the force of their arms and
| which my August Majesty has made subject to my flamboyant sword
| and my victorious blade, I, Sultan Suleiman Khan, son of Sultan
| Selim Khan, son of Sultan Bayezid Khan...
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946989 - May 2019 (13
| comments)
| trhway wrote:
| to visualize the characters - depiction of the Zaporozhian
| Cossacks from not that bad a movie "With Fire and Sword" about
| the rebellion https://youtu.be/4j4AYK8KGKU?t=7
| jakub_g wrote:
| In Polish language slang, 'kozak' (Polish spelling of cossack)
| got cemented as a word for someone brave and fearless.
|
| Basically, someone writing that kind of letter :) or someone
| Chuck Norris-like.
| growup12345 wrote:
| Lol. FYI it's the same in any slavic/Balkan language.
| tptacek wrote:
| AskHistorians seems to believe pretty strongly that this letter
| never happened, which may be obvious to people familiar with the
| story, but I'm hearing it for the first time in the context of
| this HN post. :)
|
| A good thread on the history of, uh, stern Russian responses to
| threats:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e1qciu/in_re...
| zaporozhets wrote:
| *Ukrainian
|
| Edit: misread context- kneejerk Ukrainian > Russian correction.
| Although I'd still want it clear that this is Ukrainian history
| more than Russian.
| kozak wrote:
| Looks like we have perfect nicknames for commenting under
| this post.
| ggm wrote:
| So how about 'le mot de cambronne' or the reply from the
| battle of the bulge? ("nuts")
| owenversteeg wrote:
| Hmm, I'm not terribly convinced by those comments that the
| letter never happened. The justification that it's "not
| historical" comes from someone saying it wasn't mentioned in a
| summary of Ottoman-Cossack diplomatic relations, but there were
| many letters between the two sides during that time. It simply
| wasn't mentioned in the summary, not explicitly mentioned as
| fake. Absence of evidence and all that. Furthermore, there's
| not a huge gap between the time of the incident in 1676 and the
| earliest version of the letter we've found so far, in the early
| 1800s. 100-some years sounds like a lot of time, but things
| happened slower back then; it took 11 years just to paint the
| painting.
|
| Finally, even if this particular letter is "not historical", we
| do have other, substantiated letters from the Zaporozhians to
| the Ottomans with various insults, and the painting was created
| with the help of historians, so the painting is fairly accurate
| even if the exact letter may have been a slight exaggeration of
| other contemporary letters.
| tptacek wrote:
| It doesn't seem like there's major doubt that the Cossacks
| sent a rude retort to a surrender demand, but rather that
| these responses have become folkloric and are embellished
| over the generations to the point where there's little truth
| left in the actual words.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Does the exact content really matter that much though?
| There was a letter, it was rude, they had a lot of fun
| writing it...
| owenversteeg wrote:
| >It doesn't seem like there's major doubt that the Cossacks
| sent a rude retort to a surrender demand
|
| There's no doubt that they did that. We have multiple
| documented responses, some of which are quite witty I'll
| add. (If you remove the old-fashioned tone of voice from
| the translations and speak them as someone would today,
| even the drier ones can be fairly amusing.)
|
| There are also embellished or fabricated responses even in
| modern times.
|
| The question is - which of those is this letter? I don't
| think we can rule out any possibility based on the
| information we have available. We simply have a gap of a
| hundred-odd years in which we can find no surviving written
| evidence that people talked about it. I don't think that's
| evidence enough that it didn't exist.
| jameshart wrote:
| The issue here might be the fact that the Wikipedia
| article is about the painting, but includes a purported
| text of 'the letter' - presumably of the letter in the
| painting - but there's no citation given for where that
| particular text is sourced or it's translation.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| No, that's not the issue here. There are various texts
| for the letter going back to the 1800s. The issue is that
| there is no record of the letter between 1676 and the
| 1800s, causing some Redditors to believe it was a
| fabrication of that time.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I 'm not terribly convinced by those comments that the
| letter never happened._
|
| Agreed. There's a lot of unwarranted skepticism by both real,
| and wannabe history experts these days. Even events from last
| century that were heavily documented in books and scholarly
| texts are sometimes called fake by people on the internet
| because there isn't a web link to the material.
|
| It makes me sad when I see the library throwing out reference
| books, knowing that most of that information will be gone
| forever, and the people who know its contents will never be
| believed.
| incrudible wrote:
| Can we get Dan Carlin to narrate this one?
| ajcp wrote:
| "...SEE what you have to understannnnnnd...about the Zaporozian
| Cossackssss...is that EVEN THOUGH the Ottoman Sultan was the
| ruler of the largestempireintheworld, with the
| largestarmyintheworld...who had so many times before crushed
| all...that stood in its way...the Zaporozian Cossackssss...were
| a people of their own time...were a proud people with their own
| martial traditionssssss..."
| pepperonipizza wrote:
| With time I cringe a bit when he takes this voice, still love
| his work.
| ajcp wrote:
| I call it his "Context Voice". Drives me up the wall
| because it slows down the story momentum he builds so well,
| but yeah, love his work.
| ericol wrote:
| When I was ~14 yo, my father used to get his friends over most
| nights.
|
| They were usually 1 or 2, and they would stay for dinner.
|
| One of those nights my younger brother brought some sort of
| survey from school, regarding the family and related assorted
| questions.
|
| I think it's important to note that every night my father and his
| friends would down a couple bottles of cheap wine.
|
| So, my father got to the task of filling the survey, with the
| assistance of his friends.
|
| Eventually he got to a question where he had to fill his current
| occupation.
|
| !Malviviente!* yelled my father, and he and friends burst out in
| drunken laughter.
|
| He filled the question with such answer.
|
| He - and my mother - were promptly summoned by the school to
| explain that answer. Rest assured my mom was not pleased at all.
|
| * This word can be roughly translated to thug, but taken
| literally can mean "One that does not live well".
| reaperducer wrote:
| Related, but less interesting: When my wife gets annoyed
| filling out forms for places that don't need to know her
| occupation (doctor, pharmacy, etc.), she puts down "art thief."
| Nobody's said boo to her yet about it.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| One of my favorite paintings! The canvas seems alive, I feel like
| I'm there just looking at it.
|
| It's been here once before:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946989
| danielodievich wrote:
| Interesting tidbit, this painting was one of the required
| pieces of Soviet school in late USSR, I think in grade 4 or 5
| in the Russian language curriculum. We were assigned this
| painting - and a few others over the school year - as a topic
| of essay, where you had to describe what was depicted and its
| meaning to you and your country. The minimal accepted size of
| essay was 3 pages, I believe.
|
| I remember doing a very careful study of all the fine details
| on the jackets and various arms that cossacks had in the
| painting reproduction that I happened to have in some nicer
| book, the schoolbook picture was too tiny to really appreciate.
|
| Another Ilya Repin picture that was assigned as that kind of
| essay target was Barge Haulers on the Volga
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga)
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Interesting history, but I prefer the laconic reply: "If."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
| smogcutter wrote:
| With the ironic epilogue that Philip proceeded to kick their
| asses:
|
| https://twitter.com/bretdevereaux/status/1346686713838653440...
|
| And a followup about the evidence (contra Wikipedia):
| https://twitter.com/garglfluz/status/1350835754335924225?s=2...
| kasey_junk wrote:
| "Having come, take them."
|
| "Sounds good".
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| And, more recently: "NUTS!".
|
| https://www.army.mil/article/92856/the_story_of_the_nuts_rep...
| olegp wrote:
| It's on display in Helsinki at the moment. Highly recommend
| checking the exhibition out if you happen to be in town:
| https://ateneum.fi/en/exhibitions/repin/
|
| I personally liked the portrait of the last tsar the most:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_II_of_Russia...
|
| It got me thinking that things could have turned out very
| different for Russia had his personality been different.
| lehi wrote:
| I prefer Repin's Ivan the Terrible:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_Son_...
| robin_reala wrote:
| The model for the son was the author Garshin, whom are pin also
| painted an amazing portrait of:
| https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437442
|
| (If you're interested in Garshin, I collected his translated
| works for Standard Ebooks:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/vsevolod-garshin/short-
| fic...)
| ajcp wrote:
| I agree. Absolutely haunting.
| kozak wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQTlT8-qYUk
| glangdale wrote:
| In the Good Soldier Sveijk, Hasek recounts (via a character) that
| famous, if apocryphal tale of the French commander Pierre
| Cambronne, who when asked to surrender, supposedly said "Merde!
| The guard dies, but does not yield!".
|
| I think Victor Hugo made this up, but it's still a good story.
| Smithalicious wrote:
| For some reason I read " _Zoroastrian_ cossacks "... And did not
| even question it until much later.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-22 23:00 UTC)