#byzantine — Public Fediverse posts

On the road between Çavuşin and Zelve🇹🇷, we stop at Paşabağ, also called "Monks Valley". Here the landscape displays the amazing multi-headed mushroom rock formations, some 15-20m high into which monks carved cells in the #Byzantine period to live a solitary life.

#Travel #VirtualTravel #Cappadocia

Fuori dal tempo, decisamente nello spazio. Ora ho gli occhi pieni 🥹
#ravenna #mosaics #sanvitale #church #byzantine #roman #empire #architecture #history #unesco #minitrip

Phenomenal Ravenna ! 😃

The small yet magnificent Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, a late Roman empress. Ironically, she’s never been buried in.

#holiday #holidays #trip #holidaytrip #ravenna #ravenne #italia #italie #mausoleum #mausoleumgallaplacidia #mosaic #byzantine #byzance #byzantium #gallaplacidia #pixelwar #pattern

Allegedly, #Prighozhin’s march on #Moscow has ended in a deal brokered by #Lukashenko, in which #Wagner Group forces will head to #Belarus and … become Lukashenko’s #Varangian Guard, or something? Assuming of course #Putin doesn’t wait for them to get strung out on the road and bomb them all to bits.

I can’t help but be struck by how antiquated all this feels. The Varangian Guard reference above is deliberate—the whole thing is #Byzantine in both the original and modern senses of that word. Shades of #Belisarius and #Justinian. Yes, I know I’m mixing up periods, and the analogy is inexact in all kinds of ways: history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

#Kings and #emperors and shifting personal loyalties, not cold-blooded calculation of national interests. It’s not the way #modern states make #war—even though #Ukraine may well be the first modern war of the twenty-first century, through future eyes. Something older, more visceral, rising from ancient slumber.

Hell of a time to be alive. I suppose that’s always true.