Word: vitus
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Once again, June 28--the feast of St. Vitus in the Christian Orthodox calendar--had written itself into the history of the Balkans. On St. Vitus day in 1389, Serbs were defeated by the Turks at the battle of Kosovo Polje, the event that launched Serbian claims to eternal victimhood. On the same day in 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo, plunging Europe into World War I. And on the same day in 1989, Milosevic--speaking at Kosovo Polje--launched his career as the defender of Serbian nationalism. Twelve years later, he finds himself imprisoned...
Justice knocked at six in the evening last Thursday for Slobodan Milosevic. It was St. Vitus' Day, a date steeped in Serbian history, myth and eerie coincidence: on June 28, 1389, Ottoman invaders defeated the Serbs at the battle of Kosovo; 525 years later, a young Serbian nationalist assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, lighting the fuse for World War I. And it was on St. Vitus' Day, 1989, that Milosevic whipped a million Serbs into a nationalist frenzy in the speech that capped his ascent to power...
...have not survived. A modern eye is more apt to enjoy the spectacle of the concentrated, disciplined labor that went into building a tiny sarcophagus out of gold and rock crystal to house a brown bit of human tissue that may or may not have been part of St. Vitus, or a supposed rag off the "seamless robe" worn by Christ at his Crucifixion. Seven hundred years ago, of course, it was the relic itself that really counted, that was "precious" and "unique"; the roles of container and content have reversed...
Best Foreign Picture, that is. Whereupon, to extend the analogy between Character and Titanic, as the director accepted his Oscar, his ego succumbed to an attack of St. Vitus' dance, causing some among us to avert embarrassed eyes. But it's worthwhile, in the case of Dutch director Mike van Diem, to refocus them on his work, which is a true epic--long, dark, complex, enigmatic and curiously riveting...
Davidson considers himself an environmentalist, and in recent years -- especially in the past three weeks -- he has had plenty of company. But for most of its history, Alaska has not been dominated by the conservation ethic. Almost from its discovery in 1741 by Vitus Bering, Alaska was seen as a land to be exploited for all it was worth. At first the lure was furs, and then whaling, timber and fishing. When the U.S. bought the territory from Russia in 1867 for $7 million, little changed. The gold rushes of the late 1800s brought hordes of prospectors, beginning a boom...