Comments on: Searching for Hope? Look for Bridges with Kapias

By: Christian

Christian — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:40:24 +0000

When reading this I thought of Union Square. There are many places to sit and many people congregate there. Yet, how many strangers talk to each other? It seems clear to me that we need much more than kapias if want to encourage dialogue between strangers. I wish I knew what that was.

By: Rafael

Rafael — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:13:36 +0000

Having read Andric’s “Bridge” (who won the Nobel Prize primarily because of this novel), Matynia knows very well that the bridge was built by the Grand Vizier, that it was a check point, a place where atrocities were in fact committed. The point of the post, it seems to me, is that, designed as a check point as it was, the bridge nonetheless became a point of contact. That is the hope.

By: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:43:55 +0000

Althue Serre, I am tempted to take down your reply because of the personal tone of your attack on Matynia and your crude and disrespectful language. But actually I, as the host of Deliberately Considered, encourage robust debate, even what DC contributor Gary Alan Fine calls, “savory political speech.” So I wouldn’t take the reply down as a matter of principle and didn’t.

Nonetheless, I believe you are misreading Matynia’s post. I don’t know if this is intentional or not. There is a difference between art and history, and thinking through metaphors is a wonderful human capacity. As Matynia puts it, it is a way to “search for hope.”

The week’s theme at DC has been on art and politics. Matynia’s was a reflection on the meaning of Kapias, informed by the reading of a novel. It points to the capacity and achievement of understanding, despite differences. This is something that bridges, with and without Kapias, do. They bring people from two sides together.

By: Althue Serre

Althue Serre — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:27:17 +0000

Huh!?.. You don’t know what you are talking about at all. Perhaps in ordinary times kapias served as “balconies” for the passersby to enjoy the view on these bridges (which has nothing to do with the multiculturalism bullshit you are reading into them). But actually, this was not the primary function, the “raison d’être” of such architectural devices. At times of “trouble”, kapias served to the Ottoman military as “check-points” to control the traffic on the bridge. Or, once fortified, they served as military stations/defense outposts to control both sides of the bridge and the traffic on the river. They have nothing to do with “cultural pluralism”, they were simply built as military defense platforms.

You must be clinically naive, or you don’t care what you are crapping at all as long as some naive people like the guy who runs this site buys it as “discourse of multiculturalism”. Did you really think the “culturally diverse people” living on opposite sides of the river built these bridges just to say “hi!” to each other? “The bridge as envisioned by a 14th-century builder”???.. That “visionary builder” was no one other than Mimar Sinan, the legendary chief architect of Ottoman Empire, who was a yenicheri (born as non-moslem, and raised in Ottoman army from early age) from Balkans. Architect Sinan built the bridge under the orders of “Sokollu Mehmet Pasha”, the grand vezir of his time. Thus, the real name of the bridge, which you strictly avoid mentioning for some reason, is “Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Bridge” (Most Mehmed-paše Sokolovića). Check your history, get your facts straight before writing crap.

I can’t believe such crap passes as some kind of “social theory”. But, then, it must have been “deliberately considered” as social theory, I assume. How foolish, how said, how low…

You probably won’t publish my comment, since it doesn’t comply with your norms of “professionalism and civility” –which will be nicely paradoxical in the sense that, you are publishing plain false information to fulfill the space of “public discussion and deliberation”, and you will be censoring its most relevant criticism for the sake of “professionalism and civility”.

Enjoy…