Word: sultans
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There is an old Middle Eastern story about the beggar who boasts in the bazaar that he is going to marry the sultan's daughter. "I've decided to do it, and I have my parents' consent," said he. "All I have to do now is get her agreement-and the sultan...
...conveys so genial a manner that it is hard to believe he is called the Butcher of Damascus. Last week he once again lived up to that name. Syria was a charnel house. In the midland city of Hama, mothers wailed over the bodies of dead sons, the famed Sultan Mosque lay in ruins, and the corpse of one rebel leader, riddled with 50 bullets, was contemptuously dumped by soldiers from an open jeep onto the sidewalk. The bloody-handed Baath (Renaissance) Party was again engaged in its favorite pastime: killing...
During the night, Hafez moved up additional units, including T-54s. Next morning, the tank columns and armored infantry broke through the barricades and drove the rebels into last-ditch positions in the rabbit warrens of the old city and in the Sultan Mosque. Tanks and artillery hammered at the mosque for an hour, and shells brought the 60-ft. minaret, together with a rebel machine-gun nest, crashing down...
Janissaries of Sultan Selim II wrested control of the island from Venetian merchant princes in 1571, and quickly demonstrated to the Cypriots the basic style of Ottoman administration. The defender of the Cypriot city of Famagusta, one Marcantonio Bragadino, had held off the Turkish troops for nearly a year, and when Famagusta finally fell, the Turks slowly and publicly flayed him alive. Bragadino's straw-stuffed skin was paraded through the city, and the lesson was not lost on the Cypriots...
Enter the British. In 1878, Britain took Cyprus in "trust" from the declining Ottoman Empire and disregarded Cypriot demands for union with Greece on the grounds that the Sultan was still the suzerain. But after Turkey sided with the Central Powers at the start of World War I, Britain annexed the island outright. Under the British, a state of wary but peaceful coexistence developed between Turkish and Greek Cypriot. Greek landowners in the craggy Troodos Mountains leased their pastures to Turkish shepherds; Turkish shopkeepers bought oranges and carobs from Greek farmers. In the village taverna, Turk and Greek...