2024 Georgia

 

Kvetera fortress church

Sitting inside the Kvetera fortress church.  What an astonishing masterpiece.  Its form, with the four main apses linked by smaller infills.  The shocking blue of the tiled roof.  And inside, the porous, almost edible stone makes the whole surface alive.  

The stone of Kvetera fortress church

The columns have wonderful capitals – with square elements in the upper corners, and semicircles in the lower parts.  Amazingly original, you wonder what the architect/stonemason was thinking when they came up with it…

Inside Kvetera fortress church

A recent trip to Georgia, mostly spent in the wine-making region of Kakheti.  Surrounded by the Caucasus, and bordered by Chechnya and Dagestan, it is home to some amazing churches and much more. With photos...

Hello Hayeren OS

One part of the world that has always fascianted me is Armenia. It's an ancient civilisation, but one that today finds itself in a pretty parlous state, not least economically. This makes open source a perfect resource, so it's good to see an all-Armenian distro appearing:

The author of the Hrat GNU/Linux project is Vardan Gevorgyan, who manages a small group of volunteers. The project is open, interested may join. More, we think that the success of the project and the power of considered system mostly relays on the compatriot's support.

And if you want to see what the Armenian page for it looks like, here it is.

Hrant Dink's Memorial

Surprisingly, there is tiny consolation to be found in the murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish Armenian shot dead outside his newspaper's office last week.

The killer presumably hoped to silence Dink from speaking his wise, calm words about the genocide of over a million Armenians at the hands of the Young Turks in 1915, and of the need for reconciliation, not recrimination.

And yet Dink's death has probably done more to highlight that genocide than any of his words. A casual search for "armenian genocide" on Google News turns up well over a thousand hits over the last few days. At least in the age of the Internet, the truth about such things, once exposed, is not so easily hidden.

This is Dink's memorial.

Is Germany Really Losing It?

I have a great deal of respect for the German nation. More than anyone else, I think, they have come to terms with their recent history - specifically with the Nazi period - and emerged stronger, wiser and more admirable (compare, for example, Turkey's rather sad denial that a genocide of over a million Armenians lies festering in its past). But recently, I've noticed some signs that German society - or at least its politicans, which I concede is not quite the same thing - are really out of touch with reality.

I wrote yesterday about its daft plans to monitor PCs while connected to the Internet - blithely ignoring the near-impossibility of this idea. Now we have something else equally stupid: the criminalisation of violent video games. According to Der Spiegel - probably the best news magazine in the world - the Bavarian minister for internal affairs wants to make the "production, sale and purchase of such games punishable by up to one year's imprisonment."

This is so obviously a knee-jerk reaction by frightened old politicians, unable to deal with the technological changes that are happening around them. What makes it particularly sickening is that it concerns itself with virtual violence, and blithely ignores the rather more pressing issue of all the violence present in this world - as practised, for example, by the US Government in its various torture camps around the world. Get real, people.

Open Source, Armenia and Duduks

Why did nobody tell me about this? I mean, they probably had open duduks, too.

Spectrum's White Space as a Commons

If you've ever wondered how spare electromagnetic spectrum can be used to form a commons, here's a good explanation of the issues in the US. It even mentions Armenia's greatest contribution to the field. (Via OnTheCommons.org.)