My Palestinian Story

Exploring the Palestinian side of my family

Category: MPS (Page 5 of 6)

Jerusalem 2015

10 Aug 2015 / / 4 Comments

I’ve picked up again The Club (Η Λέσχη), the first book of Stratis Tsirkas’ Drifting Cities trilogy (Ακυβέρνητες Πολιτείες, Στρατή Τσίρκα). I started it years ago but never finished it. Couldn’t appreciate it at the time and found it confusing. But after my last trip to Jerusalem, the book practically begged to be read.

Not only is the writing beautiful but I now have such a better sense of the place and even the time in which it is set: Jerusalem during World War II. And as one reviewer of the book has said, Jerusalem is the main character in the book.

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Graveyard Detective – Part II: Saturday morning

10 Jul 2015 / / 6 Comments

The last from last year’s trip, first posted on Facebook on 14 Jul 2014. Once again, lightly edited and with the addition of photographs.

Saturday was my last day in Jerusalem. And my last chance to visit the Greek Orthodox cemetery. I was glad I had gone exploring the afternoon before as I wouldn’t be wasting precious time now. So once again I walked across the old city, exited from Zion Gate and made straight for the cemetery. It was a hot day, the hottest one since my arrival, the official temp being 34C (93F). I was armed with a cap and water bottle.

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Graveyard Detective – Part I: Friday afternoon

9 Jul 2015 / / 3 Comments

First of a two-part post from last year’s trip, originally posted on Facebook on 14 Jul 2014. Lightly edited and with the addition of photographs.

One of the things I was hoping to achieve during this trip was to find the graves of two family members on my maternal grandmother’s side who I knew for certain were buried in Jerusalem.

The first one was my great-great-grandfather, George Schtakleff, who hailed from Tetovo, a town/village in what is modern-day Macedonia, and was, as far as we can tell, an ethnic Bulgarian albeit Greek-speaking. He came to Jerusalem as a pilgrim sometime in the mid- to late-1800s, felt there was a business opportunity to set up a flour mill and had his brother, Zachar(ias), join him. He married twice, ‘importing’ his wives from Tetovo, and built his life in Jerusalem. His first-born was my great-grandfather, John. (You still with me?)

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Dancing at the Greek Club - Jul 2014
Dancing at the Greek Club - Jul 2014

Dancing in the Greek Club

30 Jun 2015 / / 0 Comments

When I became involved in the Katamon Project, I made available to them a series of short video clips I had extracted from a film that was part of great-uncle  Nando’s (Ferdinand Schtakleff’s) extensive library.  ‘Nando’ and ‘films’ are synonymous in our family’s parlance. Rarely was he to be found without a camera in hand. In his Jerusalem days, he even ran the Regent Cinema in the German Colony for a spell.

A copy of this particular film, labelled Jerusalem 1946-47, had been given to us in VHS which I then had transferred to DVD from which I extracted the individual short clips. The quality, as a result of all these transformations, is poor but the content, depicting as it does various aspects of our family’s life in Jerusalem, is simply precious.

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Checkpoint at Damascus Gate. Arab men up to 50 years old need not apply!
Checkpoint at Damascus Gate. Arab men up to 50 years old need not apply!

“This is a strange country”

24 May 2015 / / 0 Comments

The second of last year’s reports from my trip to Jerusalem, first posted on Facebook on 11 July 2014. Once again, ligthly edited and with the addition of photographs.

It’s Friday, Muslim holy day of prayer. But in Jerusalem, this particular Friday is not just that. Not only it’s in the month of Ramadan but also in a week where rockets have been flying out of Gaza aiming at the city and in return Gaza is being pummelled by the Israeli Air Force with the BBC reporting 100 dead already. To say things are tense would be far from stretching the truth.

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