Reading The Historian
I often have Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
From The Historian:
We had reached a clearing in the woods, and it was, astoundingly, full of men. They stood two rings deep around a bright bonfire, facing it and chanting. One, apparently their leader, stood near the fire, and whenever their chant rose to a crescendo each of them lifted a stiff arm in a salute, putting his other hand on the shoulder of the next man. Their faces, weirdly orange in the firelight, were stiff and unsmiling, and their eyes glittered. They wore a uniform of some sort, dark jackets over green shirts and black ties. “What is this?” I murmured to Georgescu. “What are they saying?”
“All for the Fatherland!” he hissed in my ear. “Stay very quiet or we are dead. I think this is the Legion of the Archangel Michael.”
“What is that?”
Oh yes. Legion of the Archangel Michael. Oh yes, of course. THOSE guys. Hmmm, I have read about them before. Where is that passage …
From Balkan Ghosts, by Robert Kaplan:
It was 10:30 a.m., November 30, 1940. Snow was beginning to fall in Bucharest. Inside the Church of Ilie Gorgani, built in the seventeenth century to honor a Romanian general who fought the Turks, hundreds of candles illumined the red-robed Christ in the dome. Coffins, draped in green flags with gold embroidery, lined the sides of the nave. Altar boys carried in trays of coliva (colored sugar bread) for the dead. Fourteen members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael – the fascist “Iron Guard” – including the organization’s leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreaunu, were about to be buried and canonized as “national saints” by priests of the Romanian Orthodox Church, who had been chanting and swinging censers all night.
Two years earlier, in 1938, King Carol II’s police had strangled the fourteen men, stripped the bodies naked, and doused them with sulfuric acid in a common ditch to hasten their decomposition. But in late 1940, Carol fled and Romania fell under an Iron Guard regime. The victims’ remains, little more than heaps of earth, were dug up and placed in fourteen coffins for reburial. At the end of the funeral service, the worshipers heard a voice recording of the dead Legionnaire leader, Codreanu. “You must await the day to avenge our martyrs,” he shrieked.
A few weeks later, revenge was taken. On the night of January 22, 1941, the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael – after singing Orthodox hymns, putting packets of Romanian soil around their necks, drinking each other’s blood, and anointing themselves with holy water – abducted 200 men, women, and children from their homes. The Legionnaires packed the victims into trucks and drove them to the municipal slaughterhouse, a group of red brick buildings in the southern part of Bucharest near the Dimbovitsa River. They made the victims, all Jews, strip naked in the freezing dark and get down on all fours on the conveyor ramp. Whining in terror, the Jews were driven through all the automated stages of slaughter. Blood gushing from decapitated and limbless torsos, the Legionnaires thrust each on a hook and stamped it: “fit for human consumption.” The trunk of a five-year-old girl they hung upside down, “smeared with blood … like a calf,” according to an eyewitness the next morning.
Good times, good times. Those Legionnaires sound like a barrel of laughs, huh?
Hmm, back to The Historian, although I am still pondering the Legion … and I read:
“Who are they?”
He tossed his match into the fire. “Criminals,” he said shortly. “They are also called the Iron Guard. They are sweeping through the villages in this part of the country, picking up young men and coverting them to hatred. They hate the Jews, in particular, and want to rid the world of them.” He drew fiercely on his pipe. “We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered, too. And then a lot of other people, usually.”
I described the strange figure I’d seen outside the circle.
“Oh, to be sure,” Georgescu muttered. “They attract all kinds of strange admirers. It won’t be long till every shepherd in the mountains is deciding to join them.”
I need to know more.
I knew there was more in my book. I dug through Balkan Ghosts. Found what I was looking for.
In 1938, Carol had abolished all political parties and declared a royal dictatorship. After bankrolling the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael for years, that anti-Semitic organization turned against him on account of his liaison with the Jewish Lupescu. So Carol had the Legionnaire leaders murdered. This angered Hitler, whom Carol for a time ignored. But after the Nazi conquest of France, Carol formed his own fascist party, which passed a series of anti-Semitic laws, forcing Romania’s 800,000 Jews to live virtually an underground existence. When Stalin, in the summer of 1940, demanded that Carol cede him Bessarabia, Carol appealed to Hitler for help. Hitler answered Carol by forcing him to yield the northern part of Transylvania to the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary.
The population felt these territorial losses like hammer blows. Roars of “abdica [abdicate]” rose from the crowds assembled in the square by the Athenee Palace. Carol “had been too clever,” in his dealings with Hitler and Stalin, writes Manning in The Balkan Trilogy. “He had played a double game and lost.”
Carol and Lupescu left Romania in the dead of night in late 1940, in a nine-car railway train filled with the country’s gold and art treasures. The fascist Legion got wind of the couple’s departure and tried stopping the train, but to no avail.
Carol II. What a guy.
But I knew there was more on the Legion itself. So I found it, with a distinct feeling of “A-ha … here it is …”
In 1927, the twenty-eight-year-old [Corneliu Zelea] Codreanu heard the voice of God calling him from an icon of the Archangel Michael, a fighting saint that Balkan peasants associated with the struggle against the Muslim Turks. Codreanu, an educated peasant influenced by the anti-Semitic teachings of his university professors in Jassy, heeded this voice and formed the Legion of the Archangel Michael, whose military wing would later by known as the Iron Guard. In Codreanu’s view, the Legion was “a religious order” uniting all Romanians “dedicated to a heroic existence”: those alive, those not yet born, and those already dead. He organized the Legion around cuibs (“nests”) of thirteen members each. To join a cuib, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest, and then write an oath in his own blood, vowing to commit murder whenever ordered to do so. Before setting out to kill, each man had to let an ounch of his blood flow into a common goblet, out of which all would drink, thus uniting the entire nest in death. Members were also obliged to wear crosses and packets of Romanian soil around their necks. Romanian fascism, like Romanian Communism, was by no means standard-issue.
Tall and handsome, Codreanu had riveting eyes and the chiseled features of a Roman statue. His followers called him Capitanul (“the Captain”). He liked to dress completely in white and ride a white horse through the Carpathian villages. There, he was worshiped as a peasant-god – the Archangel Michael’s envoy on earth. When Codreaunu married, 90,000 people formed a bridal procession.
King Carol II saw Cordreanu as a dangerous rival, especially after Hitler told Carol to his face, during a 1938 meeting in Berchtesgarten, that he preferred Codreanu to the ‘dictator of Romania”. Carol, perhaps because of his overweaning arrogance, was no coward. He answered the Fuhrer by having Codreanu and thirteen other Legionnaires strangled to death in November, 1938, and then spread rumors that Codreaunu had “sold out to the Jews” (exactly what Codreanu had accused Carol of doing, on account of the King’s liaison with Lupescu).
But the Romanians could never believe that their “Captain” had sold out to the Jews. To the peasant masses, Codreanu was still very much alive: “a tribune who stood in the imagination of the Rumanians as both martyr and prophet,” writes Countess Waldeck. Many peasants claimed that they had seen “the Captain” riding his white horse through the forests at night, in the weeks and months following his supposed execution. Later, the Romanian Orthodox Church proclaimed Codreanu a “national saint”.
God told you to chop up 5 year old Jewish girls, “Captain”? Rot in hell.
And of course, there is MUCH more on the Legion in my books … horrible stories, all of ’em, I mean – they’re all horrible – Carol is horrible, eveyrone is horrible – but that was the bit I had been looking for. To provide a little bit more depth, a little bit of the history, the context, if you will … and then back to the novel.
More on Codreanu and his murderous Iron Guard here.
I have been reading the entire book in this back-and-forth manner. Which is why it is taking me forever, by the way.
One of these days I’ll get to The Historian…one of these days!
It’s a rollicking good read. I’ll be glad to be done with it, frankly – it’s a long book – but it’s a blast.
I just cannot do that. If I know there is a reference somewhere else or if the characters appear in other stories, I cannot put down the book I’m currently reading, go look it up somewhere else and then pick the first book back up.
I HAVE TO finish all the way through, go read the other books, references, etc all the way through and THEN come back to the original to read all the way through again. My mind will only accept it this way. It’s not that it won’t go through or that I am incapable of doing it your way, it’s that my mind finds it all highly unpleasant to interrupt but MOST pleasant to read them from start to finish no matter how long that might take.
serenity – ha!! I wish I could do it your way, I really do. This book is taking me 3 times longer to get thru than it should!! :)
Amazon delivered The Historian to me on the day it was released (6/21/2005). I kinda did like the way it was written (Kinda like Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Stiff, but enthralling). I tore through it even though I was tempted to go online or to my bookshelf every time I ran across something familiar, which was just about every other page. If that book had been footnoted, I think I might be on Page 14 by now. More to say but I’ll wait until you’re finished.
Oh man, Rob – can you imagine if there were footnotes?? That would be fascinating, actually – almost like a House of Leaves thing (did you ever read that??) The footnotes giving a whiff of reality to the entire book.
I guess I’m used to reading books where it’s more than just its plot. This book IS its plot. Nothing wrong with that – it’s just I keep waiting for more. But I agree – it is very much like Bran Stoker’s Dracula – and actually, I think the style is appropriate for the subject matter. It’s just not normally the kind of thing I read.
But yeah – it’s addictive. Can’t put it down. Even writing out this comment on my own blog is taking too much time away from my reading. :)
Oh, and Rob just so you get a sense of where I am in the book:
Helen and Paul have just gone to Bulgaria from Istanbul – and they are now hanging out with Stoichev – the Bulgarian historian – and they are being dogged by Ranov, the Communist handler/”guide”.
I’ve never read House of Leaves and if Wikipedia’s description is at all accurate, it’s probably not for me.
What part about the description tells you you wouldn’t like it? Not being defensive – I’m truly asking. Just curious.
You have to turn the book upside down to read it at times. Ha. You also have to hold the book up to a damn mirror to read some of it because it’s backwards. Some of it is written in code – and you have to sit down and work out the code in order to read it.
It’s not a gimmick though. It’s one of the scariest freakin’ books I’ve ever read. Only one other thing I’ve ever read actually gave me nightmares – and that was Stephen King’s The Mist.
Oh, and about the footnotes – yeah, in House of Leaves – the footnotes actually start TALKING to each other. It’s hysterical – but also really creepy. Like there’s one footnote – and then 2 sentences later there’s another one, that rebuts what the former footnote says – and then there are footnotes to footnotes …
It’s fucking nuts. ha!!!
OK, about where you are: At this point, I seriously identify with Paul and am only just starting to trust Helen. Every time they meet someone new, I start wondering if this is a person I can trust.
Rob – I feel the same way!! I love Helen – but I’m always seeing her thru Paul’s eyes. She’s mysterious – she’s got depths, man – I have no idea what is really going on there. Hopefully, by the end of the book I will.
And I’m still not sure about Turgat Bora. Now he’s already revealed about how he “works for the sultan” … and that whole secret society he has going on … but I love that character … i so want him to turn out to be good!! (Don’t tell me if he;’s not – I don’t think I can bear it!)
Scholarly text mostly makes me crazy, red. Footnotes and annotations distract me although I can’t say I’ve ever seen satirical, battling footnotes. Making fun of it sounds like great fun but doing so by being even more ridiculous than your target sounds like a lot of work for the reader. I’m not a hard working reader. I don’t mind working at a book but I’ll put it down if I have to work too hard at it.
Yeah, House of Leaves is pretty much the definition of a “high maintenance book”. :)
It was funny – I was sitting in a bar, waiting for some guy I was dating, and I was reading it – and I was turning it upside down, sideways, up, down, holding up my makeup mirror to the pages … I must have looked like a freakin’ lunatic!!!
I think a better definition of a “high maintenance book” is this: If you look “like a freakin’ lunatic ” while reading it, you’ve got a high maintenance book. :)
I am convinced that I ALWAYS look like a freakin’ lunatic. :(
But back to The Historian!! I am quite amazed at the layers she is able to get into this – the letters, and then the scholarly papers, and also the letters within letters … and I never feel lost or like: wait, who is talking?? She (Kostova) is always completely in charge.
I am kind of eager to “get back” to the present-day story – with the daughter and Barley trying to track down the father … as of now, they just were let into his hotel room in Perpignan – and it looks as though the father (Paul) has left in a rush. It is a mystery as to why.
however, I am realizing that there is no “getting back” to the prsent-day story – that the main story is the story of Paul and Helen and that that is the point. Rather artfully done, i think. We are reading letters for almost the whole of the book – she is able to sustain that. Pretty incredible.
One of your earlier comments, “I’ll be glad to be done with it, frankly”:
I thought that, too, but seeing someone else’s thoughts on it makes me consider picking it up again. Incredibly, you’re the only person I know of who has read or is reading this bestseller.
Actually, that’s funny – me too. It’s a bestseller but I don’t know anyone who’s reading it.
She sure hit the jackpot her first time out of the gate huh? (To mix a metaphor …)
She also took subject matter (Anne Rice, anyone?) that I was rather bored with and made it interesting.
AbsoLUTEly. She brings the history into it. Which much of it I have never even considered. I knew about Vlad the Impaler but never really considered him historically. It’s a great way to tell the story.
Also, I just have to say – from my own personal interests … the fact that the Cold War and the Soviets play so much into this story … it’s just such an “in” for me. The Balkans in the Cold War? Count me in, please.
Vlad is one of my favorite historical figures. Everyone has a favorite historical person that they’d like to meet. Vlad is the one you DON’T want to meet.
For me, it’s the mountains, the monks, the poor villages, and the castles.
Someday I’ll get to that area of the world. And the Carpathians – how I would love to see the Carpathians.
Carol II was Marie of Romania’s son, right? And therefore great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Her offspring sure were and are a motley bunch.
Marie was downright heroic during WWI. I don’t know what happens to people.
Yes – Carol was Marie’s son. Carol I (her husband, father of Carol II) was another piece of work.
gawd, sheila, stop making me homesick for my own father! i swear, from what i’ve read about your dad, if you take him and make him a german lutheran instead of an irish catholic, that’s MY dad.
[also, you’re making me homesick for my shelves and shelves of books that couldn’t come with me to college, such that i have to do alternative reference methods…]
finally, i may have to get this book sometime. it’s going on the list, in any case.
The HIstorian just arrived at our house. Not sure when I’ll get to it. I am currently re-reading (again) the Anne books. You know what I want? The freaking Pringle family tree.
Oooh, those Pringles. What a clan. Scary – a monolith. Until finally Anne broke them down. But man … they certainly acted as one, didn’t they???
And there are just so many of them. Especially when she learns about the dead ones in the ceremony. But I do love how she breaks them by finding the diaries where seemingly one of them was a cannibal! But can you imagine if we did actually draw that tree?
And those little old ladies come blustering over to Windy Poplars – thinking that Anne was trying to blackmail them! Ha!! And they are so upset!! Isn’t there something about how one of the ladies is so flustered that her hat is on crooked, or she’s wearing a sleeping bonnet or something? Poor Anne, trying to tell them that she wasn’t trying to blackmail them with the cannibal tales … she thought they might be INTERESTED in them because the cannibal was, after all, a Pringle.
In that amazing Balkan library of yours, do you have “The Bridge on the Drina” by Ivo Andric?
Earth Girl – I don’t! Tell me about it – do you recommend it?
I absolutely recommend it. It’s hard to put down. It’s a novel ranging over about 300 years and I guess the bridge is the main character! It was interesting to see how Christians, Jews and Islams lived together peacefully for years until outside influences changed it. I discovered the book when it was assigned to my husband’s advanced Balkan History class. (He’s studying to be an elem educ teacher and this was his elective selection. Too bad there are no jobs in social sciences.) The prof, an expert in Balkan history, thought the book was accurate enough to use as a text book.
Wow – sounds fantastic. I’m actually going to a bookstore later today – I’ll see if i can find it.