The Rivers of Childhood

Snake River, Wyoming / © I.A. Daglis

The next day I went away on the train. A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it. It forgets the cornlands of Illinois, the rivers of childhood, the bridges, the lakes, the valleys, the cottages, the hurts and the joys. It spreads them out behind and they drop back of a horizon.

The Lake (in Dark Carnival, 1947) - Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange in 1936

Born 117 years ago (on May 26, 1895) Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work. Lange's best-known picture is "Migrant Mother".

Counting sheep

Sheep on Tymfi Mountain, Epirus / I.A. Daglis

Counting lambs, counting sheep
we will fall into sleep
and we awake to a new day of living
and loving you so.

Ian Anderson [Inside, in Benefit, 1970]

Jethro Tull - Inside

Pontic Genocide

Article stating "Turks Slaughter Christian Greeks", on October 19th, 1917 published by the Lincoln Daily star

Greek genocide also known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1923). It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Other sources put the number at around 2 million. Some of the survivors and refugees, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. After the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks remaining in the Ottoman Empire were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.
The systematic massacre and deportation of Greeks in Asia Minor, a program which had come into effect in 1914, was a precursor to the atrocities perpetrated by both the Greek and Turkish armies during the Greco-Turkish War, a conflict which followed the Greek landing at Smyrna in May 1919 and continued until the retaking of Smyrna by the Turks and the Great Fire of Smyrna in September 1922.

Hellenism in Near East during and after the World War I, showing the areas (Western Anatolia and Eastern Thrace) where the majority of the Greek population was concentrated.

Solitude

                                                                                                       Solitude / © I.A. Daglis

"Comment vous deféndez-vous contre la solitude?"
"Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même."
Laurence Durrell [The Alexandria Quartet – Justine, 1957] 
Thanks to EL