Who Stole Father Christmas?
The true story of the Heist of the Relics of St.Nicholas
In which we travel with @SamDalrymple123 to the mysterious empty tomb of St.Nicholas of Myra in Lycia, modern Turkey
Long before Coca Cola advertising gave him a nice red and white hat, Father Christmas was actually a real Byzantine saint- St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra or ‘Santa Claus’ in Dutch. He was renowned for his generosity and gift giving.
St Nicholas, or Nikolaos as he would have pronounced his name, was a Byzantine Bishop of Myra, capital of Lycia, now in southern Turkey, from 280-352AD
There has been a lot of talk about BBC bias today. Its a good moment to remember the BBC Gaza Report @cfmmuk by the Centre for Media Monitoring, just to remind ourselves of the scandalous bias against Palestine @BBCNews in the face of the Gaza Genocide share.google/rzQVhvigAoqQ3L…
Today we launch at new @EmpirePodUK series-
WRITERS ON EMPIRE
We kick off with a four-part look at George Orwell
Part One-
Orwell: The Anti-Imperialist in India & Burma
Eric Arthur Blair- Orwell's real name- was born on 25 June 1903 in a modest house in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India. His father worked as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China.
Part One-
Orwell: The Anti-Imperialist in India & Burma
Eric Arthur Blair- Orwell's real name- was born on 25 June 1903 in a modest house in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India. His father worked as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China.
New from @EmpirePodUK
The Final, Tragic Episode in our History of Gaza:
GAZA & THE NAKBA
How did neighbouring Arab nations respond to the displacement of Palestinians in 1948? Why was the future Egyptian prime minister, General Nasser, stationed in Gaza in 1948? Did Jordanian Arab Legion collude with Ben Gurion? linktr.ee/empirepoduk
How did the population of Gaza double almost overnight with the influx of Palestinian refugees who had lost everything, and what conditions did they face? linktr.ee/empirepoduk
The story of Gaza during the Ottoman period is one of the most controversial eras of its history. The early Zionists maintained that Palestine was an almost empty desert, a lost paradise ripe to be saved from the nomads & 'savages' who had wrecked it, "a land without a people for a people without a land."
But what was the reality? What does history tell us about the religiously & ethnically diverse population of hundreds of thousands who had aways lived there?
Friend of @EmpirePodUK and the greatest living writer on the Late Ottoman period, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, returns to the show to separate fact from fiction.
In today's @EmpirePodUK we tell the little known story of how the Imperial Camel Corps- including units from both Bikaner and Australia- helped win the epic 1916-17 Battles of Gaza
This largely forgotten World War One campaign that did far more than Lawrence of Arabia to defeat the Ottoman army on Palestine... but the promise of freedom for the Arabs was shortlived...
On 9 November, only two days after Allenby's forces entered Gaza, in London the Jewish Chronicle published a new British policy on Palestine. In a brief letter to Walter Rothschild dated 2 February, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the declaration that would come to bear his name linktr.ee/empirepoduk