from the library of congress

A footnote (and I loves me some footnotes, almost as much as I love overusing parenthetical comments)in “To Know Where He Lies” led me to “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War“, and this grim (although not surprising) statistic: some 40% of Union, and a far higher percentage of Confederate soldiers died anonymously. With chances high that if a soldier died, he would be buried in an unknown grave; I wanted to look at some ways the identification of the dead took place during the Civil War.

Dog Tags and other forms of systematic identification did not occur until the World War I, but some soldiers did have their own primitive forms of identification. One 19 year old who died at Gettysburg had a small silver shield in his pocket, engraved  with his name, company and regiment. While badges were available more readily in the North, both Union and Confederate soldiers relied on more informal methods: the family Bible, an addressed envelope, etc.

Of particular poignancy, the soldiers who either before entering a battle they expected to be especially bloody, or even after being wounded themselves, scribbled their names of pieces of paper and pinned the notes to their uniforms. After being shot an Antietam, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote on a slip of paper “I am Capt. O.W. Homes 20th Mass. V Son of Oliver Wendell Homes, M.D. Boston.” Doctors and nurses were instrumental in identification of the dead and notification of the next of kin. One Union nurse, similar to the soldiers themselves, pinned the name and regiment on the clothing of wounded soldiers, so that if they should take a turn for the worse, they could still be identified.

The new technology of the day, the photograph, also aided in a roundabout way, the identification of the dead. A Union soldier, killed at Gettysburg was successfully identified after newspapers published accounts of him dying holding a photo of his three young children.

By the end of the Civil War there had occurred a profound shift in accounting for the dead. In July 1864, the U.S. Congress enacted a new measure for handling casualties, including a special graves registration unit. At the battle of Fort Stevens, this new unit identified every Union body and every grave. However, in the final operations of the war, men could not be spared to serve in registration unit-and the effort abandoned.

“The Mutsinzi Report on the Rwandan Genocide“-(an overview)-New Yorker

“Art Crops up in Sarajevo’s Shuttered Shops“-NYT

“The Terrible Predictability of It All.”-Microkhan

“Between Moscow and Istanbul” (Turkmenistan’s alphabet change)-New Eurasia

“The 2nd Way to Ruin a Cake“-Cakewrecks

Through a random google search (having nothing to do with dormouse by the way, I’m not that desperate for blogging topics ); I found this report on the ethnological history of dormouse hunting in Slovenia. Which detailed, among other factoids, the economic, medical and fashion use of the dormouse post-mortem.

“Since its meat is used as well as its grease and fur, the dormouse is, in an economic sense, fully exploited.

In the 19th century dormouse meat was a very important supplement in the nutrition of country people. Dormice were cooked, baked and roasted. They were eaten together with cabbage, carrot, turnip, rice and hard-boiled corn mush (DOLENC, 1921). In the 17th, 18th, 19th and sometimes in the 20th century dormouse meat was also preserved by being salted and put in pots and barrels (HEINKO, 1824). Besides that, until the second world war they smoked dormouse like ham (SUMRADA, 1977). KORDESH (1839) said that the liver of the dormouse is a real delicacy. Today we still find dormouse meat delicious in soups with rice, noodles, dumplings or more traditionally with potato or buckwheat hard-boiled corn mush. Rice is good with young dormice caught in the first week of October (SUMRADA, 1977). Goulash and stew are very tasty. Today, dormouse meat is considered to be a speciality.”

“Dormouse fat has been used for medical purposes since the 16th century, not only for people but also for cattle (MISIC, 1939). Dormouse fat is semi liquid, even at -36 C (SUMRADA, 1977). It has a confirmed healing effect in some diseases, yet its actual medicinal qualities remain largely unknown. About 10 fat dormice are needed to get half a liter of fat (MRKUN, 1939). Today, very few dormouse trappers render fat. Sales are common only in the tourist industry.

From the 17th to the 20th century dormouse trappers made quite good profits by selling the hides, because the prices were high and the export ran to most European countries (MRKUN, 1939). Since 1970 (SUMRADA, 1977) it has,become difficult to sell the hides, so today people tan the skins just for their personal needs.”

The culinary uses though, only scratches the surface of the importance of the dormouse in Slovenian culture and. Throughout the the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries there existed the myth of the dormouse shepherd as a devil. According to the legend, the dormouse shepherd would click, whistle and make a “hullaboo”-their words, not mine while chasing the dormouse.

While I doubt there is anyone today who will, in public at least, admit to believing the legend of the dormouse devil, modern fans of the dormouse could get their fix at the Dormouse Hunting Museum in Sneznik. Unfortunately, per the first comment, the museum has apparently shut down in 2007.

In 1985 Vernon Wayne Howell visited to Israel, where according to him, recieved a vision that he was a modern day Cyrus, and hence changed his name to David Koresh (Koresh being the Hebrew version of Cyrus).  The trip to Israel is usually described as the turning point in Koresh’s leadership of the Branch Davidians of Texas, a saga that would ultimately end in the tragic 1993 standoff and fire in Waco.

Koresh was not the first person who traveled to the Holy Land and believed that he was endowed with special messianic gifts (hence the entire Jerusalem syndrome  phenomenon), nor was he the first Branch Davidian who made the  pilgrimage to Israel. In 1958, Benjamin and Lois Roden (whom Koresh would succeed as leader of the group), and other Seventh Day Adventists (whom the Branch Davidians are an off-shoot of), were the first organized Christian group to be recognized as an immigrant group in Israel. The Rodens and their followers settled 3 villages, two which were loss due to lack of inhabitants, but they had far greater success with Amirim.

Today a vegetarian resort village  near the Golan Heights, in 1958 the Rodens and others settled Amirim as the first vegetarian village and co-op in Israel.  On the International Vegetarian Union website, there is an article about the village’s founding (although no mention of the Rodens):

NO PILLS. NO INJECTIONS IN VEGETARIAN VILLAGE
Extract from “The Jerusalem Post,” Dec. 11th, 1958:

 ”SAFAD – Israel’s first vegetarian-naturist settlement, called Amirim – was inaugurated on Tuesday with a modest but impressive ceremony in which members of the vegetarian-naturist movement from all over the country participated.

 The secretary of the new ‘moshav shitufi,’ Mr. Mordecai Tarnari, said in his opening speech that to settle at Amirim was not only a physical act but also a spiritual one. ‘The return to nature will bring man back to the state he enjoyed in the Garden of Eden, to a comprehension of the great harmony of nature and the liberation from extremist theories,’ he said.

Mrs. Gila Gun, wife of the chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee, said that the purpose of the settlement was to create a healthy, sensible and, above all, happy type of man. She claimed that, because of proper nutrition, there would be no cases of polio in this settlement, fevers would not be reduced artificially, by pills, and there would be no inoculations or injections.”

But as the book “The Branch Davidians of Waco” explains, Amirim was not exactly a utopian experience for the Rodens. Strict keepers of the Sabbath, the Rodens didn’t realize that as part of the co-op community, they would be collective owners of orchards and equipment utilized on the Sabbath. With their refusal to participate, tensions grew between them and the other settlers-eventually the Rodens moved to Jerusalem and eventually back to Texas.

The day I arrived in Turkey funeral services were held for a Mr. Ertugrul Osman in Istanbul. Had history taken a different course, Mr. Osman would have been Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Instead Osman, who spent his childhood romping around Dolmabahce Palace became an all too typical figure of 20th century-the stateless exile. He returned to Turkey for the first time in 1992, and on one trip he revisited the Palace, which he insisted on seeing with a tour group just like everyone else. 

 Although the quiet spoken Mr. Osman never spoke of any desire to restore the Ottoman dynasty (or the caliphate for that matter), for years he traveled the world not with a passport of any country (he had lived in New York since 1933), but with a certificate provided by his lawyer-because he still viewed himself as a citizen of the Ottoman Empire. In 2004 he asked for and was granted a passport from the Republic of Turkey.