Yiddish on the border
How to say electric teapot in a language that existed 50 years ago? How to cure the evil eye? How to decide, if you should flee from the German army, if you don't have any information from media?
In April 2011, I interviewed a 84-year-old jewish woman Roha Sandler, a resident of a small Latvian town Ludza. Roha's family fled from Nazis one day before they occupied Ludza. She was one of very few east-european jews who survived the Second World War and who can still speak yiddish. Trying to make Roha speak yiddish, I started asking her how she calls things in her house, like teapot, clock, or glasses. At the end she told me her life story, partly in this beautiful disappearing language, which is so rare to hear in Europe and which can give us an impression of the forgotten pre-Holocaust jewish world.
This 6-minute movie is a small illlustrated dictionary of Yiddish words, mixed with old photographs, songs and memories.
Crimean–Nogai raids into East Slavic lands | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Crimean–Nogai raids into East Slavic lands
00:02:38 1 Causes
00:02:47 1.1 Economic factors
00:03:55 1.2 Political factors
00:04:41 2 Military
00:04:49 2.1 The theater of war
00:08:12 2.2 Tactics
00:10:08 3 The fate of the captives
00:10:17 3.1 On the steppe
00:12:06 3.2 In Crimea and Turkey
00:15:41 4 Resistance to the raids
00:15:51 4.1 Russia
00:16:18 4.2 Poland–Lithuania
00:17:06 5 In folk culture
00:17:49 6 Historians on the Tatar raids
00:18:34 7 List of raids
00:18:43 7.1 Outline
00:20:37 7.2 1480–1506
00:34:18 7.3 1507–1570
00:59:11 7.4 1571–1599
01:15:51 7.5 1600–1648
01:48:24 7.6 Wars 1648-1709
01:50:13 7.7 1648-1655: Khmelnitsky Uprising
02:03:20 8 1657-1663 Vyhovsky and the Poles
02:10:13 8.1 1665–1678
02:48:46 8.2 1677–1699
03:03:13 8.3 1700–1769
03:13:00 9 See also
03:13:17 10 Sources
03:13:57 11 Notes
03:14:05 12 External links
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- Socrates
SUMMARY
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The Crimean-Nogai raids were slave raids carried out by the Khanate of Crimea and by the Nogai Horde into the region of Rus' then controlled by the Grand Duchy of Moscow (until 1547), by the Tsardom of Russia (1547-1721), by the Russian Empire (1721 onwards) and by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1569). These raids began after Crimea became independent about 1441 and lasted until the peninsula came under Russian control in 1774.Their main purpose was the capture of slaves, most of whom were exported to the Ottoman slave markets in Constantinople or elsewhere in the Middle East. The raids were an important drain of the human and economic resources of eastern Europe. They largely inhabited the settlement of the Wild Fields – the steppe and forest-steppe land which extends from a hundred or so miles south of Moscow to the Black Sea and which now contains most of the Russian and Ukrainian population. The raids also played an important role in the development of the Cossacks.Estimates of the number of people involved vary: according to Alan W. Fisher the number of people deported from the Slavic lands on both sides of the border during the 14th to 17th centuries was about 3 million. Michael Khodarkhovsky estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 people were abducted from Russia in the first 50 years of the 17th century.The first major Tatar raid for slaves occurred in 1468 and was directed into Galicia. Crimean Khan Devlet I Giray even managed to burn down Moscow during the 1571 campaign. The last raid into Hungary by the Crimean Tatars took place in 1717. In 1769 a last major Tatar raid, which took place during the Russo-Turkish War, saw the capture of 20,000 slaves.
What made the wild field so forbidding were the Tatars. Year after year, their swift raiding parties swept down on the towns and villages to pillage, kill the old and frail, and drive away thousands of captives to be sold as slaves in the Crimean port of Kaffa, a city often referred to by Russians as the vampire that drinks the blood of Rus'...For example, from 1450 to 1586, eighty-six raids were recorded, and from 1600 to 1647, seventy. Although estimates of the number of captives taken in a single raid reached as high as 30,000, the average figure was closer to 3000...In Podilia alone, about one-third of all the villages were devastated or abandoned between 1578 and 1583.