The "Romaioi" designation in the Aegean Sea certainly lasted a long time. Yet, as late as the second half of the 20th Century, Nicholas Taleb was officially identified as a "Rum" on his Lebanese documents:
All this reminds me of the first paragraph of GM Young's wonderful 'Portrait of an Age':
A boy born in 1810, in time to have seen the rejoicings after Waterloo and the canal boats carrying the wounded to hospital, to remember the crowds cheering for Queen Caroline, and to have felt the light had gone out of the world when Byron died, entered manhood with the ground rocking under his feet as it had rocked in 1789. Paris had risen against the Bourbons; Bologna against the Pope; Poland against Russia; the Belgians against the Dutch. Even in well-drilled Germany little dynasts were shaking on their thrones, and Niebuhr, who had seen one world revolution, sickened and died from fear of another. At home, forty years of Tory domination were ending in panic and dismay; Ireland, unappeased by Catholic Emancipation, was smouldering with rebellion; from Kent to Dorset the skies were alight with burning ricks.
One I left out was Anglo-Irish aristocrat Katherine Plunket was included in the first ever Guinness Book of World Records in 1955 as the then oldest ever person in Ireland. Born in 1820, she met Walter Scott (1771-1832) as a child when he stayed in her grandparents’ house and, by the time she died in 1932, well, everything in Ireland had changed.
Salvador Dali died in 1989, meaning that he could have listened to, and enjoyed, “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley.
Somewhat related, but the song “Fields of Athenry” is one of those songs that sounds like it has been passed down the generations since the 1840s, but it was only written in 1979, making in younger than disco.
Love this series. Another goodie not sure if featured yet: Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1833), librettist for Mozart's greatest operas. Ended up as a language professor at Columbia University, NYC and founding the city's first opera house, forerunner of the Met.
It particularly impresses me when an individual is an active participant in events so widely separated that they seem different eras, rather than they 'lived long enough to see' the later one.
For example the four most senior commanders of the British armed forces during the Falklands War were all combat veterans of WWII:
Chief of the Defence Staff -Terence Lewin
Chief of the General Staff - Edwin Bramall
Chief of the Air Staff - Michael Beetham
First Sea Lord - Henry Leach
This info is maybe not so impressive to younger people as The Falklands War is now nearer to The Battle of Britain than it is to the present.
Well, my father was a US GI in WWII and was still alive and kicking in 1981.Because of his war stories WWII always seemed more real and immediate to me than Vietnam with which my family had no direct connection.
Mrs Thatcher remembered WWII. Michael Foot co-wrote the polemic “The Guilty Men” in 1940. My ex-mother in law flew Spitfires - From one UK airfield to another, but even so!
I have a friend who is part Greek, though he never met his Greek father until he was in his teens (don't ask). Finally visiting him on the Aegean island where he lives, my friend, who was a very good looking youngster, was told by the islanders he looked like a good and proper Roman.
Unlike Tom Cruise, Jimmy Stewart actually flew in combat (he flew B-24s in the war and turns up as an interviewee in The World At War).
David Lynch was a Scout at JFK's inauguration. He saw Einsenhower and Kennedy go past together in their limo, followed by their Vice Presidents, Johnson and Nixon. Years later he realised that within a few seconds, he'd seen four consecutive Presidents go past.
John Peel was at the Dallas Police Station when Lee Harvey Oswald was being interviewed by the press after being arrested.
My dad was working in Charing Cross Hospital in the 70s. Dad goes across the road to buy somthing. As he is leaving he recognises the man in the shop from somewhere
Up the road Dad realises it was Jimmy Stewart buying milk
Haast's Eagle- is an extinct eagle from New Zealand Haast's eagle like all aves is a Dinosaur. So Dinosaurs ate children in New Zealand after the Magna Charta was signed.
The acceleration of living conditions is much greater for those shifting from the country to the city in any period, even now for the billions who still live without electricity or sanitation. As a surplus child on a poor farm up a mountain in Ireland, my father was kept out of school and rented out to a childless couple who made him sleep in the barn with the animals, then threw him out to stagger home to his resentful parents when he got sick. In the 1950s. Digging ditches and tunnels in England was a joy by comparison, at least he got the money.
Gawd! My great-grandparents “migrated” to Manchester from Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere in England in the late 19th century. My paternal grandparents had a two-up two-down with a privy in the back porch - spotlessly clean and I have many happy memories of being in the area on visits, with communal bonfires and fireworks on November the Fifth, dandelion and burdock, jumpers for goalposts….
Although he didn’t enjoy a long life, George Orwell didn’t half see some changes in his country and in the wider world. His childhood was mostly spent in the Edwardian era - he was 10 in 1913. During WWI he started his secondary education at Eton College on a scholarship. He noted the rise of communism and he participated in the Spanish Civil War. During WWII he saw the use and abuse of official information firsthand and he lived to see the dismantling of the British Empire in the late 1940s - a new age of jet fighters, supersonic missiles and atom bombs. Oh, and he wrote a popular sci fi novel.
Hi Greg, I know you from the other place. Your interest in Orwell gives me yet another chance to plug Minoo Dinshaw’s brilliant life of Steven Runciman, “Outlandish Knight”. Runciman pops up everywhere, including sitting next to George Orwell at Eton, where they were taught physics by Aldous Huxley - as acute a dystopian prophet as Orwell.
Wasn’t Jeanne Calment exposed as a fraud? She’d sold her house to a neighbour on condition she could live there as long as she lived, but the buyer died almost immediately and she supposedly outlived him by 50 years. In fact, or so I read, her daughter took over her identity for the free accommodation soon after.
There was an amazing case in Japan revealed in 2010, when it turned out that the country’s oldest man had been dead for 32 years. His body was found in a bedroom at home; his relatives said he’d asked not to be disturbed but they made sure to collect his pension every week.
Subsequent enquiries revealed that Japan had over 230,000 people registered as being over 100, 77,000 of whom were over 120 and the oldest 186. Most were thought to have been killed in the war but their deaths not recorded.
Sorry, just spotted the Calment discussion above! I like the stories of the last American Civil War widows, many of them single mothers who married old fossils for the right to a widow’s pension in hard times and depression. One then married her first husband’s grandson!
The last one (we think!) died in 2020, though she never claimed the pension due to threats from her much older stepdaughters and kept the marriage secret until only a few years before she died.
Late to this- I was looking up something about the Irish Taioseachs for the name piece
Liam Cosgrave was old enough to have heard his father complain about the boundary commission. Old enough to have seen Dublin Metropolitan Police officers in the Street. Yet Young enough to have voted for gay marriage in 2015
My mother's (born 1948) father (born 1915) was the youngest child of a man born in 1858, who in turn was the youngest of a family where the oldest two boys fought in the American Civil War.
Which means I can say my grandfather's uncles fought in the Civil War.
I have a cousin of the age of 88 (I am way out of step with the generations in my family being a youngster in my 50s). When she was a little girl she met our great grandmother, who was born before the Civil War and whose father, a Union cavalry, was killed in battle in 1864. I am just two degrees of separation separation from someone alive during the Civil War.
On the topic of questionable claims of the very old, we apparently must now battle with deliberate misinformation (to use a newly-popular phrase) from Russian nay-sayers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49746060
Probably just best to sit back and enjoy the stories - thanks for the run-down Ed. So much there brought a smile to my face at the apparent incongruity of the disparate events book-ending those lives.
I seem to remember she had some deal with a neighbour that he bought the house but she got to live in it until she died, which turned out to be decades later...
There were other remnants of the ERE that lasted beyond 1453:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/FxganwT3auo
The "Romaioi" designation in the Aegean Sea certainly lasted a long time. Yet, as late as the second half of the 20th Century, Nicholas Taleb was officially identified as a "Rum" on his Lebanese documents:
https://x.com/nntaleb/status/927165648542846976
Very enjoyable indeed.
All this reminds me of the first paragraph of GM Young's wonderful 'Portrait of an Age':
A boy born in 1810, in time to have seen the rejoicings after Waterloo and the canal boats carrying the wounded to hospital, to remember the crowds cheering for Queen Caroline, and to have felt the light had gone out of the world when Byron died, entered manhood with the ground rocking under his feet as it had rocked in 1789. Paris had risen against the Bourbons; Bologna against the Pope; Poland against Russia; the Belgians against the Dutch. Even in well-drilled Germany little dynasts were shaking on their thrones, and Niebuhr, who had seen one world revolution, sickened and died from fear of another. At home, forty years of Tory domination were ending in panic and dismay; Ireland, unappeased by Catholic Emancipation, was smouldering with rebellion; from Kent to Dorset the skies were alight with burning ricks.
One I left out was Anglo-Irish aristocrat Katherine Plunket was included in the first ever Guinness Book of World Records in 1955 as the then oldest ever person in Ireland. Born in 1820, she met Walter Scott (1771-1832) as a child when he stayed in her grandparents’ house and, by the time she died in 1932, well, everything in Ireland had changed.
To have met Scott!
What a lovely happy ending
Salvador Dali died in 1989, meaning that he could have listened to, and enjoyed, “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley.
Somewhat related, but the song “Fields of Athenry” is one of those songs that sounds like it has been passed down the generations since the 1840s, but it was only written in 1979, making in younger than disco.
Love it!
Love this series. Another goodie not sure if featured yet: Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1833), librettist for Mozart's greatest operas. Ended up as a language professor at Columbia University, NYC and founding the city's first opera house, forerunner of the Met.
wow. And thank you!
It particularly impresses me when an individual is an active participant in events so widely separated that they seem different eras, rather than they 'lived long enough to see' the later one.
For example the four most senior commanders of the British armed forces during the Falklands War were all combat veterans of WWII:
Chief of the Defence Staff -Terence Lewin
Chief of the General Staff - Edwin Bramall
Chief of the Air Staff - Michael Beetham
First Sea Lord - Henry Leach
This info is maybe not so impressive to younger people as The Falklands War is now nearer to The Battle of Britain than it is to the present.
Well, my father was a US GI in WWII and was still alive and kicking in 1981.Because of his war stories WWII always seemed more real and immediate to me than Vietnam with which my family had no direct connection.
Mrs Thatcher remembered WWII. Michael Foot co-wrote the polemic “The Guilty Men” in 1940. My ex-mother in law flew Spitfires - From one UK airfield to another, but even so!
There were WW2 veterans in the Falklands
I have a friend who is part Greek, though he never met his Greek father until he was in his teens (don't ask). Finally visiting him on the Aegean island where he lives, my friend, who was a very good looking youngster, was told by the islanders he looked like a good and proper Roman.
Unlike Tom Cruise, Jimmy Stewart actually flew in combat (he flew B-24s in the war and turns up as an interviewee in The World At War).
David Lynch was a Scout at JFK's inauguration. He saw Einsenhower and Kennedy go past together in their limo, followed by their Vice Presidents, Johnson and Nixon. Years later he realised that within a few seconds, he'd seen four consecutive Presidents go past.
John Peel was at the Dallas Police Station when Lee Harvey Oswald was being interviewed by the press after being arrested.
there's a great picture of Stewart signing up to fight, right from the off.
My dad was working in Charing Cross Hospital in the 70s. Dad goes across the road to buy somthing. As he is leaving he recognises the man in the shop from somewhere
Up the road Dad realises it was Jimmy Stewart buying milk
hope it was full fat
Haast's Eagle- is an extinct eagle from New Zealand Haast's eagle like all aves is a Dinosaur. So Dinosaurs ate children in New Zealand after the Magna Charta was signed.
The acceleration of living conditions is much greater for those shifting from the country to the city in any period, even now for the billions who still live without electricity or sanitation. As a surplus child on a poor farm up a mountain in Ireland, my father was kept out of school and rented out to a childless couple who made him sleep in the barn with the animals, then threw him out to stagger home to his resentful parents when he got sick. In the 1950s. Digging ditches and tunnels in England was a joy by comparison, at least he got the money.
Gawd! My great-grandparents “migrated” to Manchester from Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere in England in the late 19th century. My paternal grandparents had a two-up two-down with a privy in the back porch - spotlessly clean and I have many happy memories of being in the area on visits, with communal bonfires and fireworks on November the Fifth, dandelion and burdock, jumpers for goalposts….
Although he didn’t enjoy a long life, George Orwell didn’t half see some changes in his country and in the wider world. His childhood was mostly spent in the Edwardian era - he was 10 in 1913. During WWI he started his secondary education at Eton College on a scholarship. He noted the rise of communism and he participated in the Spanish Civil War. During WWII he saw the use and abuse of official information firsthand and he lived to see the dismantling of the British Empire in the late 1940s - a new age of jet fighters, supersonic missiles and atom bombs. Oh, and he wrote a popular sci fi novel.
Hi Greg, I know you from the other place. Your interest in Orwell gives me yet another chance to plug Minoo Dinshaw’s brilliant life of Steven Runciman, “Outlandish Knight”. Runciman pops up everywhere, including sitting next to George Orwell at Eton, where they were taught physics by Aldous Huxley - as acute a dystopian prophet as Orwell.
Just ordered it! I was at school with Nigel Farage btw - he was year above so only knew him vaguely. Give me a clue to “the other place”?
Wasn’t Jeanne Calment exposed as a fraud? She’d sold her house to a neighbour on condition she could live there as long as she lived, but the buyer died almost immediately and she supposedly outlived him by 50 years. In fact, or so I read, her daughter took over her identity for the free accommodation soon after.
There was an amazing case in Japan revealed in 2010, when it turned out that the country’s oldest man had been dead for 32 years. His body was found in a bedroom at home; his relatives said he’d asked not to be disturbed but they made sure to collect his pension every week.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato
Subsequent enquiries revealed that Japan had over 230,000 people registered as being over 100, 77,000 of whom were over 120 and the oldest 186. Most were thought to have been killed in the war but their deaths not recorded.
that's a real 'only in Japan' story
Sorry, just spotted the Calment discussion above! I like the stories of the last American Civil War widows, many of them single mothers who married old fossils for the right to a widow’s pension in hard times and depression. One then married her first husband’s grandson!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century
The last one (we think!) died in 2020, though she never claimed the pension due to threats from her much older stepdaughters and kept the marriage secret until only a few years before she died.
incentives matter!
Late to this- I was looking up something about the Irish Taioseachs for the name piece
Liam Cosgrave was old enough to have heard his father complain about the boundary commission. Old enough to have seen Dublin Metropolitan Police officers in the Street. Yet Young enough to have voted for gay marriage in 2015
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/124-candles-peru-stakes-claim-worlds-oldest-human-born-1900-2024-04-09/
If he is telling the truth.
Tangenically
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Medina#:~:text=Lina%20Marcela%20Medina%20de%20Jurado,seven%20months%2C%20and%2021%20days.
She is still alive in Lima. Last time I heard. She would have given birth in the first weeks of the 2nd World War
My mother's (born 1948) father (born 1915) was the youngest child of a man born in 1858, who in turn was the youngest of a family where the oldest two boys fought in the American Civil War.
Which means I can say my grandfather's uncles fought in the Civil War.
I have a cousin of the age of 88 (I am way out of step with the generations in my family being a youngster in my 50s). When she was a little girl she met our great grandmother, who was born before the Civil War and whose father, a Union cavalry, was killed in battle in 1864. I am just two degrees of separation separation from someone alive during the Civil War.
On the topic of questionable claims of the very old, we apparently must now battle with deliberate misinformation (to use a newly-popular phrase) from Russian nay-sayers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49746060
Probably just best to sit back and enjoy the stories - thanks for the run-down Ed. So much there brought a smile to my face at the apparent incongruity of the disparate events book-ending those lives.
I seem to remember she had some deal with a neighbour that he bought the house but she got to live in it until she died, which turned out to be decades later...