Marriage Can Be Liberating

No proof has been found, but Conservative MP Boris Johnson insists that his ancestor bought himself a wife.

Mr Johnson says his great-great-grandmother, a Circassian slave from a region in southern Russia, was sold to his great-great-grandfather after she fled from war to Turkey in around 1862.

She was set free only when the couple later married.

Yesterday, Mr Johnson insisted he was the "proud offspring of Turkish immigrants", saying: "This is not in any way casting aspersions on my great-great-grandfather.

"He wasn't a slave owner, he was a slave marrier." [Link]

The Turks of Tuscany

A just-released DNA study appears to prove that Greek historian Herodotus was right about the origins of the ancient Etruscans of Northern Italy: they really did come from Turkey.

The Tuscan samples were taken from individuals who had lived in the area for at least three generations, and were selected on the basis of their surnames, which were required to have a geographical distribution not extending beyond the linguistic area of sampling. The samples were compared with data from modern Turkish, South Italian, European and Middle-Eastern populations.

"We think that our research provides convincing proof that Herodotus was right", says Professor [Alberto] Piazza, "and that the Etruscans did indeed arrive from ancient Lydia. However, to be 100% certain we intend to sample other villages in Tuscany, and also to test whether there is a genetic continuity between the ancient Etruscans and modern-day Tuscans. This will have to be done by extracting DNA from fossils; this has been tried before but the technique for doing so has proved to be very difficult." [Link]

Turkey Consul Goes Native

From Turks.US Daily News of July 12, 2005:

At a dinner in honor of the end of the Turkish-American Work Council's project in Turkey, the US Consulate General in Istanbul, David Arnett, noted that is was quite possible that he himself carried Turkish blood, and then said: "There could be no greater honor than knowing that there is Turkish blood in my veins."

Arnett, whose tour of duty in Istanbul comes to an end in August, said that he thought some of his ancestors might be "Melanjans," a group of early American settlers who were brought to the US by the Portuguese, but who were Turkish in origin.

Arnett noted that he had traveled over all of Turkey, and that he had thoroughly read the history of the Melanjuns in the US. In describing his father and grandfather, who grew up in the borderlands between Tennessee and Kentucky, Arnett said "If you had seen my grandfather, you would have said he was a Turk.

[snip]

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