Toynbee quote:
There were less than twenty million people in Turkey before the War, and
during it the Government has caused a million or so to perish by
massacre, starvation, or disease. Yet, in spite of this daemoniac effort
after uniformity, they are still the strangest congeries of racial and
social types that has ever been placed at a single Government's mercy.
The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but you might search long
before you found one among its inhabitants. These Osmanlis are a
governing class, indigenous only in Constantinople and a few
neighbouring towns, but planted here and there, as officers and
officials, over the Ottoman territories. They come of a clan of Turkish
nomads, recruited since the thirteenth century by converts, forced or
voluntary, from most of Christendom, and crossed with the blood of
slave-women from all the world. They are hardly a race. Tradition
fortified by inertia makes them what they are, and also their Turkish
language, which serves them for business of state and for a literature,
though not without an infusion of Persian and Arabic idioms said to
amount to 95 per cent. of the vocabulary.
This is a series of web backgrounds using pale or pastel colors which I've constructed because I find most backgrounds on offer are too intrusive. The idea is that dark text should show up against the background. These crystalline incandescence backgrounds are copyright © Regard-it 2004. You may use these crystalline incandescence backgrounds on your web site, but only if you include the following, complete with hyperlink to www.regard-it.com: Background copyright © Regard-it 2004
You do not have permission to redistribute, unless the whole of this text between and including the horizontal lines is also distributed unchanged.
To download a crystalline incandescence background (on Windows), right-click somewhere on the background, and click on "Save Background As...". Have fun!