The moon put on a rare cosmic show Wednesday: a red blue moon, super big and super bright. #SuperBlueBloodMoon: image via AP Images @AP_Images, 31 January 2018

A super blue blood moon rises behind the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple on the Acropolis of Athens, Greece, on Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2018. #Greece #Parthenon #temple #SuperBlueBloodMoon @AP @AP_Images /@PGiannakouris: image via Petros Giannakouris @PGiannakouris, 31 January 2018

A 'SuperBloodBlueMoon' is seen during an eclipse at a temple in Bangkok, Thailand Photo @AthitP: image via Reuters Pictures @reuterspictures, 31 January 2018

A rare 'super blood blue moon' occurs as a total lunar eclipse takes place during a blue moon and supermoon: image via Reuters Pictures @reuterspictures, 31 January 2018

#USA Rare 'super blood blue moon' visible on Jan 31 #AFP Photo @Robyn_Beck: image via AFP Photo @Afpphoto, 31 January 2018

A rare 'super blood blue moon' occurs as a total lunar eclipse takes place during a blue moon and supermoon: image via Reuters Pictures @reuterspictures, 31 January 2018

Untitled | by Yuro73

Untitled: photo by Yuro De Iullis, 30 January 2018

daily life [south India]: photo by Gokulnath, 5 August 2017

Untitled [Mumbai]: photo by Suresh Naganathan, 15 January 2018

SYRIA - A Kurdish girl cries at Afrin hospital as her wounded relatives receive treatment after they were reportedly injured by Turkish rocket fire on a neighbourhood in the city according to medical sources. Photo @Delilsouleman #AFP: image via AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 31 January 2018

A Turkish backed Syrian rebel fighter is seen carrying his weapon inside a vehicle in the Tall Malid area north of the Syrian city of Aleppo on January 30, 2018. #afpphoto #Syria #Turkey #Afrin #Conflict #Photojournalism #AfrinOperasyonu #ZeytinDalHarekati #OliveBranchOperation: image via Nazeer Al-Khatib @NazeerAlk, 30 January 2018

TURKEY - A 17-year-old girl was killed in the Turkish border town of Hatay by rockets launched from Syria: official Photo @ozannkosee #AFP #OliveBranchOperation: image via AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 31 January 2018

A picture taken on January 29, 2018 shows destruction at the ancient temple of Ain Dara, near Afrin, after it was damaged in Turkish air strikes according to Syria's antiquities department and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights: photo by Delil Souleman/AFP, 29 January 2018

Blown to bits, famed Syria temple falls victim to Turkey assault: Delil Souleman, AFP News, 31 January 2018

For 3,000 years, the lion sculptures of Syria's Ain Dara stood as testaments to the Iron Age. But as Turkish bombardment pounds the region, they have little left but their paws.

Syrian and Kurdish authorities have blamed the damage squarely on Ankara's nearly two-week offensive on Afrin, a Kurdish-controlled pocket of northwest Syria that borders Turkey.

Perched on a hilltop in northern Syria, the neo-Hittite temple of Ain Dara dates back to the Aramaic era from around 1,300 to 700 BC, and is named after a village located in Afrin.

The identify of the deity worshipped there has not been officially determined, but one theory is that it is Ishtar, the goddess of love.

Until last week, the temple stood as "one of the most important monuments built by the Aramaeans in Syria during the first millennium BC", according to Syria's department of antiquities.

But on January 26, Turkish bombardment battered Ain Dara.

Today, visitors can barely make out the dark, engraved steps that once led into the temple but are now covered with rocks and debris.

And the frescoes of imposing winged animals carved in black basalt stone have been reduced to indistinguishable piles of rubble.

Only the temple's rear section was spared, including a basalt sculpture of a lion standing guard, overlooking the green hills of Afrin.

Artefacts 'scattered'

"I was sitting right there," said Ahmed Saleh, pointing to the steps of his home in the adjacent village of Ain Dara.

The elderly villager's home directly faces the heritage site.

"The strike was so fierce that we were really shaken up. Then, the smoke began to rise up from the hill," said Saleh, his head wrapped in the ubiquitous red-and-white checkered scarf of local residents.

Between 40 to 50 percent of the site was damaged, estimated Salah el-Din Senno, an archaeologist and member of Afrin's local antiquities council.

Senno pointed to old photographs of the temple hung around the walls of his office.

"The damage began from the entrance and extended to the interior -- the legendary animal statues, guardians of the temple, and other sculptures representing the gods were scattered" by the force of the blast, he said.

"Stone slabs were thrown a distance of 100 metres (yards)," he told AFP.

Turkey and allied Syrian rebel groups launched operation Olive Branch on January 20 against the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which controls the Afrin region.

Ankara considers the YPG a "terrorist" organisation and has pledged to oust them from the area.

The Turkish military has insisted that "religious and cultural buildings, historical sites, archaeological ruins and public facilities are absolutely not among the targets of Turkish Armed Forces".

A picture shows destruction at the ancient temple of Ain Dara, near Afrin, after it was damaged in Turkish air strikes according to Syria's antiquities department and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights: photo by Delil Souleman/AFP, 29 January 2018

'Catastrophe'

But government authorities in Damascus, Kurdish officials in Afrin and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group have all accused Ankara of damaging Ain Dara.

Condemning "Turkish attacks against Afrin's archaeological sites," Syria's directorate of antiquities and museums condemned "the destruction of the Ain Dara temple".

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a UNESCO official told AFP the Ain Dara temple had been special.

"The temple is an important example of Syro-Hittite religious architecture and the most extensively excavated structure of its kind in Syria," said the official.

The bombardment caused "heavy damage to the central and southeastern portions of the building" and some features "have been blasted into fragments", the official said.

Syria has been rocked for nearly seven years by a ferocious conflict that has killed more than 340,000 people and displaced millions.

UNESCO-listed heritage sites around the country have also been ravaged, including Aleppo's celebrated Umayyad mosque and the desert city of Palmyra.

Islamic State group fighters deliberately destroyed the famed tower tombs in Palmyra, its statue of the Lion of Athena and the main Temple of Bel.

"Destroying the Ain Dara temple is the same level of atrocity as destroying the Temple of Bel," said Syria's former antiquities chief Maamun Abdulkarim.

"It is a catastrophe in all meanings of the word. Three thousand years of civilisation destroyed in an air strike," Abdulkarim told AFP.

He also voiced concern for 40 old villages in Afrin, dubbed the "Ancient Villages of Northern Syria".

According to the UNESCO, the villages date from the 1st to the 7th centuries and feature the remains of homes, pagan temples, churches and bathhouses.

Un convoy militar lleva a la frontera sirio-turca a rebeldes sirios apoyados por el ejército de Turquía dentro de la operación Rama de Olivo @ozannkosee #AFP: image via Agence France-Presse @AFPespanol, 30 January 2018

#Syria A Syrian Kurdish child flashes the sign for victory outside the United Nations office in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil during a demonstration opposing a military operation by the Turkish army against the Kurdish YPG forces in Syria's Afrin. Photo @safinphoto #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 31 January 2018

SYRIA - Cooking for the 'resistance': Kurds make meals for the front Photo Diyar Mustefa #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 31 January 2018

It’s a dirty old war. The city of Afrin, supposedly threatened with cataclysmic assault by the Turkish army, is open as usual, its shops doing apparently good business, its restaurants welcoming customers, its taxis lined up for customers, its Kurdish fighters manning the occasional checkpoint with weary obedience.

As for the Russians who, we have been told by news agencies and many others, have left – well, they are still here, at least during the day. I myself watched a Russian armoured personnel carrier – marked “military police” in Russian and Arabic but with the two-headed Russian eagle on the front – negotiate the checkpoint from the Syrian military line on the edge of Aleppo province into the Kurdish controlled Syrian province of Afrin.

Now you see them, now you don’t. “They pulled out of their big base when they said they did,” a YPG official – the YPG is the people’s “protection force” without much means to protect anyone, or so it would seem – told me rather slyly. “But they pay us visits during the day.”

You bet they do. The Russians are as keen to monitor on the ground (as they are in the air) just how far Turkey’s army really intends to go in its much proclaimed invasion of northern Syria. So far – and such Churchillian phrases should be used sparingly – the Turks appear to be sheep in sheep’s clothing. Only a few tanks have actually been seen by the Kurdish fighters north of Afrin and almost nothing at all of the Free Syrian Army militia which – famous in fantasy and fiction from David Cameron’s woeful “70,000 strong” force of parliamentary history – does not appear to play any role at all in this latest Syrian adventure.

The reality, whatever you may believe from the great and the good of political life, is that Afrin city has itself not been bombed once, and is totally undamaged. Not so, of course, the villages to the west and north. A few miles from the southern entrance of Afrin city, they are digging new graves for the latest “martyrs” – mostly Kurdish military, but also civilians whose families wish their relatives to be interred alongside the dead of the latest Kurdish war – and new earthworks are being readied beyond the plastic-flowered graves for the next to fall on the field of battle. But there are no grieving families yet to shed their tears upon this cold, marble-walled place.

The Kurdish ‘martyrs’ cemetery outside Afrin. Many of the dead in the marble graves were killed fighting Isis during the Syrian war.: photo by The Independent, 30 January 2018

Indeed, there is something curiously barren about the whole war in Afrin. A YPG official – as much military as political – agreed with me when I said that if the Turkish President really threw his entire army, along with their largely mythical “Syrian” FSA militia, into the province of Afrin, they would have got into the city in half an hour. Always supposing they have enough officers still unarrested for anti-Erdogan subversion. We Westerners, of course, like to see the YPG and its associated chums in neighbouring bits of which should have been Kurdistan – if the Americans had not ratted out of their League of Nations commitments after the First World War – as heroic and turbaned warriors.

I was thus a little shaken in one small village to see a pick-up load of black-uniformed gentlemen, all holding automatic weapons and with black bandanas around their faces – the words “no photos” were uttered immediately – driving at speed towards the Kurdish-Turkish front line. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have the right to fight Turkish aggression. They just weren’t the kind of chaps you are used to seeing in friendly television reports. So, too, the “wallpaper”, if that is how we must call the graffiti of war.

For the very moment you cross from the Syrian army’s last checkpoint – red, white and black flags and a poster of Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher, Hezbollah leader Hassan al-Nasrallah and prominent army colonel “Tiger” Suheil (please note the latter), you find yourself amid blue-and-white-coloured concrete ramps, the “star” banner of “Kurdistan” (which, like “Palestine”, does not exist) and a gigantic picture of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) leader with whom the YPG has absolutely no connection whatsoever. Or so they tell you.

The YPG, squeaky clean in all things PKK-ish, will tell you that they admire some of Ocalan’s views – even quite a lot of his opinions, and one cannot but fall for the non-sectarian, secular “ethos” of the guy – but are not part of the PKK. It’s a bit like hearing that Nigel Farage didn’t really mislead the UK about Brexit or that membership of the Nazi party didn’t imply that party members loved the Führer. In the Afrin hospital, the coloured portrait of Abdullah Ocalan is so massive (moustache a bit overdone, I thought) – and so high – above the reception desk, that you could get a severely strained neck if you spent too much time looking at it.

And there is the point. Listen long enough to the ramblings of Mr Erdogan – I keep having to tell the Kurds to pronounce the “g” of Erdogan correctly as a “w” – and you might start believing that the YPG really is a “terrorist” group threatening the sovereignty of Turkey. Who funds this little Ruritania, after all, not to mention the hospitals? (The locals, I am told, in taxes, and private payments if they are patients). So while the Kurds try to persuade you of their potential loyalty (still) to Syria and disclaim any connection to the rest of Kurdish Syria (east of Qamishli) and the Iraqi Kurds – clearly a lie – they have to proclaim their belief (quite correctly) in their own form of self-government.

But there is a smell of “control” about this place – a point to which I shall return – and a feeling that all is not as it seems. The Kurds here – not publicly, of course – maintain their good contacts with the Russians, including those smartly dressed Russian military policemen with their red, white and blue shoulder flashes who pop into Afrin for their daily visits. The Russians, needless to say, are quite right to keep an eye on events in Afrin, just in case Erdogan goes a bit too far. Or in case the Kurds do the same.

Un templo antiguo de Afrin, víctima colateral de los combates en Siria #AFP por @Delilsouleman: image via Agence France-Presse @AFPespanol, 31 January 2018

WEST BANK - Palestinians run for cover from tear gas during clashes with Israeli soldiers in Mugheer following the funeral of a young boy reportedly killed by Israeli forces the previous night. Photo @Abbasmomani #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 31 January 2018

#Philippines A farmer keeps his buffalo under heavy rains in a rice field at the foot of the Mayon volcano in Guinobata. Photo Ted Aljibe #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 31 January 2018

The mistery of Nazca Lines | by elparison

The mistery of Nazca Lines [Nazca desert, Peru]: photo by elparison, 1 October 2017

Conductor estropea las líneas milenarias de #Nazca en #Peru: image via La Neta Noticias @LaNetaNoticias, 31 January 2018

Lineas de Nazca | Perú: photo by Bruno Vanbesien, 24 July 2004

The mistery of Nazca Lines [Nazca desert, Peru]: photo by elparison, 1 October 2017

Authorities in Peru detained a truck driver accused of damaging part of the world-renowned Nazca lines, a group of pre-Columbian geoglyphs in the Nazca desert. | Photo @RodrigoAbd: Image via AP Images @AP_Images, 31 January 2018

Officials: Trucker damaged part of Peru’s prized Nazca lines: AP, 31 January 2018

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Authorities in Peru have detained a truck driver accused of damaging part of the world-renowned Nazca lines.

The nation’s Ministry of Culture says Jainer Flores drove into an unauthorized section of the U.N. World Heritage site on Saturday, leaving tracks and damaging part of three lines.

The Nazca lines are huge etchings depicting imaginary figures, creatures and plants that were scratched on the surface of a coastal desert between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.

They are believed to have had ritual astronomical purposes.

Greenpeace activists damaged the lines by leaving footprints in the adjacent desert during an event in 2014.

Peru's 2,000-year-old Nazca Lines were damaged on the weekend when a truck driver drove onto the site, leaving deep tire tracks.: image via DW - Culture @dwculture, 31 January 2018

blurred lines in the desert (the second temple was not like the first)

Times change, and anything we may ever have thought we did to get down to the truth of things

was just scratching the surface, and water and wind and a million unanticipated

other things are going to come along soon enough anyway and bury

all that dedicated effort, all that

sincere work and so if somebody wants

to save a buck or two on tolls

by driving a monster truck over all of it

they are welcome, because waiting

all this busy time, all these furious years

for your last breath to say all that effort, all that trouble

it doesn't matter any more

takes longer than anyone could have known, as a terrifying future speeds over the vast desert

profaning the antiquities
reminding you the second temple was not like the first
ruining the great work of time unseen
roaring blindly through the large superblood red once in a blue moon night toward you

Nazca [Peru]: photo by Nicolas Nova, 29 July 2008

Driver Plows Truck into 2,000-Year-Old #Nazca Lines Causing Irreversible #Damage: image via ancient-origin @ancientorigins, 31 January 2018

Nazca - Peru: photo by quentin Vial, 20 June 2016

En Lastwagen ist über die berühmten Nazca-Linien in Peru gefahren und hat sie beschädigt. Die 2000 Jahre alten Tier - und Pflanzendarstellungen sind nur aus der Luft zu erkennen und gehören zum Weltkulturerbe.: image via Kullturzeit @kulturzeit, 3 January 2018

#Peru El conductor de un camión pasó por encima de las Líneas de #Nazca, dañando a tres figuras. La Fiscalía peruana pide nueve meses de cárcel para el chofer. ¿Una pena justa? #Peru #Lineas de Nazca: image via DW (Español) @dw_espanol, 31 December 2018

Nazca - Peru: photo by quentin Vial, 20 June 2016

According to @MinCulturaPe, a driver entered the #archeological zone (#Nazca lines in #Peru) as he was trying to pay a highway toll. He ignored warning signs and drove into the fragile pre-Inca remains on 27 January. parts of three straight-lined geoglyphs were damaged: image via Tamer Yazar @tameryazar, 31 January 2017

#NAZCA-Linien in Peru beschädigt Lkw überfährt Weltkulturerbe: image via Saralinchen @Safischerxx, 31 January 2018

Nazca - Peru: photo by quentin Vial, 20 June 2016

Nazca - Peru: photo by quentin Vial, 20 June 2016

#NAZCA-Linien in Peru beschädigt Lkw überfährt Weltkulturerbe: image via Saralinchen @Safischerxx, 31 January 2018

Lineas de Nazca | Perú: photo by Bruno Vanbesien, 23 July 2004

The Enigmatic #Nazca Lines of Peru: image via ancient-origin @ancientorigins, 25 January 2018

rIMG_0619 [Nazca / Peru]: photo by OTEIN, 27 December 2017

5 comments:

TC said...: THE FALL _ VILLETTE SONIQUE 2011; 1 February 2018 at 02:03
kent said...: TC,

Stunning pics, brilliant poems,
how does he do it
one after another not at a snail's pace
they all ask
like a request show whose answers
you never quite questioned
a wild ride 'cross tracks
bearing bloody witness
to this moment's violations
of our very own flesh
and those that come from
before we even noticed
we had skin in the game.

Tomorrow will see if I go back in my hole.

k; 1 February 2018 at 11:47
TC said...: kent,

The six or make that 5 today feral cats stranded by squatters on the grounds of the abandoned house next door say pretty much that same thing every single morning, when they arrive on our front porch hungry, and then, after gobbling up the food provided in the pre-dawn dark by the extremely kindly Madame Beyond, whose services are now keeping them alive here in the fraught freeway feeder kill zone, furtively make their way back down the crumbling Ed Gorey staircase (they now nap up here in wee fur pots, handed down by the fur generations) and past the marauding raccoon army back to the original briar patch scene of abandonment.

There's a bit of sun over there once it comes up, whereas over here, all falls under the permanent north facing shade of Sequoia sempervirens, The Mighty. So it could be said that these feral cats actually are not homeless, but have two sort-of-homes, one for day, one for night.... until the inevitable realtors and house-staging makeover "producers" show up, anyhow.

So why do they seem scared to death 100% of the time?

I think it may mean things are a bit frayed around the edges right now, all over, but life keeps on somehow. Until it doesn't.

BTW in respect to this issue of maintenance and the continuum, yours truly is in virtually the same situation as the feral kitty pack, except that the kitties, for all their several ailments and physical defects (eyes swollen shut & c.), are able to run off after being fed.

Something tells me the nutty whole arrangement might be even more precarious if attempted in your wintry locale, but then... at least in only about 5-6 months you'll be having lilacs.; 1 February 2018 at 14:38
kent said...: TC,

Sooner than that my noble poet. But we'll be in a new location by May just west of Royal Oak in Berkley (yes, we's spells it so), just out-of-sight of Father Coughlin's ferocious Jesus in-the-sky cathedral. Ya know, both Tom Hayden and Glen Frey spent time in the confines of that parish. Pressure, diamonds, etc. et al. Meanwhile, shadow time tomorrow...k; 1 February 2018 at 17:26
TC said...: Last time I saw TH he was standing atop a stone bench in the Diag debating Fulton Lewis Jr while the college girls from Grand Rapids insouciantly strolled past sporting that plaid skirt with oversize fake gold safety pin and kneesocks look which was so big then.; 3 February 2018 at 13:43

TOM CLARK

Thursday, 1 February 2018

blurred lines in the desert (the second temple was not like the first)

Officials: Trucker damaged part of Peru’s prized Nazca lines: AP, 31 January 2018

5 comments:

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