Middle-Earth-Banner

 

! Middle Earth !

How did we miss it! Our first trip skirts around it. Our second goes under then over it. And our third slips away.

How curious? We are. How curious! Middle Earth is.

Turns out. Everything clatters here, in the Middle.

First – Vikings, Saxons, Slavs, Romans, Arabs, Turks and Persians.

Then the empires – Greek, Hapsburg, Ottoman and Russian.

Now the super-powers – Europe, Russia, the US and Arab world.

Strong-arm here, right in the Middle.

! Middle Earth !

And it hurtles in circles around a CALDRON of a BLACK SEA!

“Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and Caldron bubble.”

Spits and spills and flips and flops …. Here, we read, lie the most curious creations.

“Romania is a Slavic country but speaks a Latin language.

And imagine, its dictator stomps from Hitler to Stalin!

Transylvania gives birth to the blood-thirsty Count of Dracula.

And in Georgia South Africans slowly trickle in to farm.

Armenia is the world’s first to officially adopt Christianity.

And Iran is the place to go to for nose jobs and sex changes.

Turkey, in the east, is more Kurdish than Turkish.

And Ukraine’s Odessa dishes up scandal in novel proportions.

 Transdniestr declares a tiny republic nobody recognises.

And the Crimea peninsula now belongs to Russia.

 Moldova is not the world’s least happy country anymore.

But Belarus, some say, is still Europe’s last dictatorship.

 

Revolutions spring in velvet, rose, orange, green, grape and blue jeans.

And everybody trades in the CALDRON of a BLACK SEA.”

! Middle Earth !

We have a window of 3 months. And we hope to take it all in!

How curious? We are. How curious! Middle Earth is.

Middle Earth, of course, doesn’t exist, officially. But hear any hobbit worth his salt, disagree fervently.

Is that you, Harry?