Tea at Trianon: Ernest Hemingway and the Greek Genocide

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 17, 2021

Ernest Hemingway and the Greek Genocide

From The Greek Reporter:

Ernest Hemingway witnessed at first hand, as a young journalist, the displacement of the Greek population from their ancestral homelands in Pontus, Thrace and Asia Minor. His restless spirit of adventure took him to many places, where he so often received the inspiration to write his timeless books. He went to Spain during their civil war, he lived in Paris and spent time in Cuba. However, early on in his adult life, he spent two years in Constantinople and was introduced to Greek culture during a tragic time for Hellenism.
Little is known about the writer’s beginnings as a journalist and his writings on the war between Greece and Turkey, which took place between 1920 to 1922. Hemingway was only 23 years of age when, on September 30, 1922, he arrived in Constantinople as a war correspondent to cover the Greco-Turkish War for the Toronto Star. (Read more.)