The life of Matthias Loïc E-Book

António de Sousa

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 474

Beschreibung

Through his interest in history, Matthias Loïc searches his near and distant past for explanations for the present in his life, in Germany and the world. Growing up in a small town in the southern Heath, his life and his paths lead him to Tübingen, Kassel, Portugal and Scotland. The brutal death of his father on the day of his birth, his childhood sweetheart, the influence of a priest - a chance acquaintance - and life in small-town society with its turmoil, pain and joys lead to an unusual proposal of marriage to a charming old lady who has her own story to tell. At the wedding reception, Matthias is surprised by unexpected guests who usher in the finale.

Leseprobe

1. The Origins

My father died on the day I was born. That's what my mother told me. He died in a car accident while he was on his way to the maternity hospital to visit us. He had just arrived at Hanover airport from abroad and driven onto the A7 highway, which connects Hanover with Hamburg, where he was involved in the accident.

Today I am celebrating my twenty-seventh birthday. I have just been to the cemetery in Bergen to visit my father's grave. A few years later, my maternal grandparents were also buried here. The place is not as gloomy as many of the cemeteries we see from afar as we drive past in other countries.

The small chapel at the entrance was built with small red bricks, giving its arches and windows precise geometric shapes and retaining the beautiful pale red color of the brick, reminding us of medieval churches.

The main driveway consists of gray paving stones that intersect harmoniously in straight lines. The bright flowers planted between the graves and along the various paths make the place peaceful, beautiful and inviting.

Some of the paths are lined with manicured grass, as are the bushes around them, which are so carefully trimmed that not a single twig, not a single leaf towers above the height of another. The large and beautiful trees of various species planted between the graves provide us with an extraordinary amount of shade, especially on sunny and hot summer days.

The trees look just as festive in the fall as they do in the winter, but then they wear different dresses. The dark green painted garden benches stand beneath them and invite you to read, meditate or rest and blend in with the green and flowery decor in spring and summer.

The place, embellished by the flowers, shrubs, lawns, trees, the scent of the various noble flowers, the singing of the birds make us forget where we are. We feel as if we were walking or reading and sitting somewhere in a beautiful public garden.

Last year I took the train to Portugal, to Lisbon. I visited the small town of Sertã, where my paternal grandmother was born. It was in this town that my father had lived with his grandparents, completed his schooling and attended the Technical Institute. There were still a few friends from his school days, from soccer. They told me about the adventures they had had together and told me I looked like him. But when I look at him closely in photos, I can't see this resemblance, although my mother mentions it from time to time.

When I went to the local cemetery in the company of one of my father's uncles to visit some of the graves of deceased relatives in order to get an idea or a connection with the past, in particular by visiting the grave of the one whose name I bear, and on this occasion also visited the mausoleum of the other great-grandfather, I realized that this cemetery had nothing in common with the beautiful park of the cemetery in Bergen where my father was buried. In all cemeteries in southern Europe the characteristic coldness of death is clearly noticeable. The pale white of the marble that covers almost all the graves and mausoleums is a macabre reminder of our common fate. The lack of natural flowers on the graves, which, when they are there, are mostly made of plastic to increase the intervals between the visits of the deceased, makes the place morbid.

Only the hedges and shrubs that line the paths between the graves and the large cypress trees with their sharp tips lend the place a little naturalness. The ivory white of the marble forms a slight contrast to this decor. Even the privileged in their mausoleums cannot escape the rule imposed on them by the uniformity of the stone.

Cypress trees are rarely seen anywhere else in this area. You usually only see them when you visit a cemetery. Visible from the road, situated on a hill and surrounded by white walls painted with quicklime, they indicate the presence of a cemetery. As if they were trees announcing death. The situation is different in Italy, where they can be found on roadsides and around villages.

My father's body was laid in the ground. There are no mausoleums in the Bergen cemetery. The rich and the poor are returned to the earth. The names of the deceased and their dates of birth and death can be read on huge, shapeless granite stones, almost in their raw state, between the beautiful natural flowers. Hardly anyone has their photo on the stone to satisfy the curiosity of passers-by and show them what they looked like when they were alive.

If they do, the most beautiful photo is always chosen to commemorate the deceased. An appearance that usually does not correspond to that of his last days. At the Bergen cemetery, photos are rare or non-existent. Families keep the memory of their loved ones alive in a different way.

Unfortunately, we always remember the last image we have of a person, and that is not always the one on the grave. There are some gravestones that don't even have the two years carved on them. My father's granite stone says that he died on July 28, 1993.

Fate has such surprises in store for us. It gave me life that day and took his away the same day, to a place no one knows. It simply left us his memory so that we would remember him by his name and the most important dates of his life, visibly engraved on this tombstone with its glittering rust-colored crystals. Around it, bushes in different shades of green and with different types of flowers smile at us. The affection and love I feel with the memory of my father is passed on through this date that connects us. It marks the beginning of my life and the end of his.

My siblings, Carolina and Carlos, who accompanied my mother through the suffering of my father's death were the ones helping her through. My mother's pain is still present when she talks about her memories of their life together. Hardly a day goes by without her talking about him. I can see my father's presence in her melancholic eyes. When I was a young student and came home from university for a short stay, there were nights when I heard many a sigh and a muted crying from her room.

The only people who didn't suffer from my father's death were my sister Andrea and, of course, me. Andrea was almost a year old when he died. My sister Carolina and my brother Carlos were twelve and ten years old. My mother was widowed very young, at the age of thirty-two.

She never remarried. Maybe because she didn't want to bring someone else into our lives. Or because, despite her many trips abroad, and even when she was still living with us, she didn't find the right person. On one occasion, we saw her in gallant company. An old acquaintance from her teenage years. When my father died, she was working as a nurse at the American embassy in Congo-Kinshasa.

After my father's death, she had continued to work for the Americans, taking turns filling in for colleagues in various diplomatic missions who were on vacation. She worked for several months in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and Thailand. She had shorter stays in Japan and African countries. She has been to the Congo several times to fill gaps for colleagues.

Over the last twenty-five years, she has divided her time between Germany and these countries, never being away from us for more than two months and two or three times a year.

During their absences in our childhood, we lived with Hilde and Ruben, our maternal grandparents. Years later, my older sister was admitted to a boarding school in Kassel and my brother went to another school in Freiburg.

Andrea and I went to elementary school in Bergen. Then she went to the Christian-Gymnasium in Hermannsburg and I went to the Gymnasium in Celle. Two places near Bergen and Wietzendorf, where my grandparents lived. Celle is our district town. We took the bus every morning and returned home in the afternoon.

My mother told me that my father was born in the Congo and had four brothers and sisters. One brother is a doctor and the only sibling living in Portugal. My grandfather on my father's side was also born in this country. His father, my great-grandfather, who was buried after his death in the marble mausoleum that I visited last year in Portugal, went to Africa at the age of sixteen to work for an uncle.

He married an African woman there. So I had an African great-grandmother. My mother told me this and was amused by my surprise. The mixture of my genes was an advantage for my organism, apart from the fact that I was culturally interesting, a citizen of the world, she concluded and laughed that easy laugh that only she could do and unfortunately so rarely used. She told me, also amused, that if I were to marry a European one day, I would have to take her word for it if I happened to notice that our child had slightly darker skin, like someone who had just come from vacation in Palma de Mallorca.

My mother had taken Andrea and me on one of these short trips to the Congo during our big vacation. The way the heat and the stuffy air took our breath away when we got off the plane, even though we only arrived in the evening, made a big impression on me.

The next morning we were dazzled by the intense sunlight, by the magnificent and varied colors that began to shine through the windows. We were surrounded by the smells that were quite different from the pines and firs that the cold breezes in Europe blew around our noses.

Here, the different aromas are rather spicy. Also different is the immense movement of hundreds of people on foot, crossing the avenues overflowing with cars, in the crowded cabs with yellow colors, constantly honking, climbing or on motorcycle cabs, all these movements and colors of the clothes of the passers-by, brought to life by the sun, bringing good humor and joy, between cheerfully exchanged conversations, as if they were to be heard by all passers-by, as if they all knew each other.

Carolina and Carlos were also born in the Congo. They had spent their pre-school years there. They had returned to live with our mother in Germany. She wanted to accompany them until the end of their primary school years and had waited for them to be accepted into the boarding schools of private secondary schools. In the meantime, my father visited them for a few days every two months.

My recently completed history degree at the University of Tübingen, which included historical subjects on the ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary eras, prompted me to get to the bottom of my family's roots.

Lost in thought, I look at the ancestral gallery at home. The black and white picture of a serious-looking couple with four almost grown-up children. Ruben the eldest.

My German grandfather was born in Romanowka, a small village in the Ukraine, in 1913. So were his father and mother. They were the descendants of Germans from Russia. Those who had been summoned to Russia by Tsarina Catherine the Great.

From July 1763, Germanic population groups, mainly Lutheran but also Catholic, from south-western Germany, Hesse, the Rhineland, the Palatinate and Alsace, began to settle in the Volga region around the western Russian city of Saratov at the invitation of the Russian Empress Catherine II in order to colonize these vast and almost uninhabited steppe regions.

The empress was a German-born princess named Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, who was born in the city of Stettin in Pomerania, a region that is now Polish. It should be emphasized that throughout its history, Poland saw a large part of its territory occupied by the Russians and the Germans as a result of the many wars that were fought.

Sophie Friederike Auguste had received a strict, rigid, Protestant upbringing from her parents, which had been supplemented by a French education from a Huguenot teacher. Huguenots were Protestants who had fled France and the Basque country, where they were persecuted by the Catholics, during the so-called Wars of Religion in the 16th century. Sophie's teacher taught her the good manners of the French nobility and the society she came from. At the same time, he gave her a taste for the French literature of the time. The princess soon developed into a culturally educated person with a passion for literature and science. Introduced to the court of the Prussian king by her mother, she soon became known for her charisma.

The ambitious Empress Elisabeth Petrovna of Russia saw her as the ideal wife for her nephew, the future Peter III of Russia, to whom she wanted to cede the empire. Moreover, the young Sophie was inexperienced in politics. She clearly posed no threat to the Russian throne. Sophie, for her part, understood what was at stake. She was well aware of the prestige and power that would be associated with her future status as empress. She pushed aside her mother's initial reservations about the marriage.

Her rise to Grand Duchess of Russia went smoothly, as she converted to the Orthodox Church with great pomp. On this occasion, she spoke in Russian to a people who took her to their hearts to the satisfaction of Empress Elisabeth Petrovna. On this day, she officially took the name Catherine Alexeyevna.

After eight years of marriage, Katharina was still childless. Empress Elisabeth, who was childless herself, was determined that Katharina should have an heir. She suspected that her nephew was impotent due to a venereal disease. She suggested that Catherine take a lover and recommended Count Sergei Saltykov. Thus the future Emperor Paul I was born.

After a coup d'état in the palace, perpetrated by her lover with the involvement of other court officials, Emperor Peter III was declared dead as a result of colics. This declaration was presented to the western chancelleries in any case. Rumor has it that he died by strangulation with the assistance of his wife, the future Tsarina Catherine II, known as "the Great".

During her more than thirty years of rule, her brilliant military conquests wrested just over five hundred thousand square kilometers of territory from the Ottoman Empire in what is now Ukraine.

These new territories were slowly being settled by a numerically insufficient Russian and Ukrainian population and had very little cultivated land. As a result, Catherine II published a manifesto in July 1763 inviting people from Western Europe, including her former German compatriots, to emigrate to Russia in return for privileges such as tax exemption for thirty years, abolition of military service, religious freedom and the opportunity to live relatively independently of Russian authority. These conditions, attractive on paper, prompted thousands of German peasants, affected by the fragmentation of their inherited land into ever smaller plots, to leave feudal Germany for Russia with its large agricultural areas.

The second wave of immigration of German settlers took place during the reign of Tsar Alexander I. After his victory over the Ottoman armies in 1812, Russia forced the Ottomans to withdraw from Bessarabia, which lies between the Dniester and Prut rivers, as far as the Black Sea as part of the Treaty of Bucharest. At the time, the region was largely populated by Turkish-speaking nomadic tribes. Many of them fled after the Ottoman troops were defeated, while others were taken to the Crimea.

The Russian Empire once again needed pioneers to colonize the newly conquered territories. Western Europe was devastated by the Napoleonic Wars at this time. The population was hungry. Added to this was the religious pressure exerted by the Catholics on the Protestant minorities, particularly in what is now southern Germany.

This time, most of the German settlers came from Swabia and Prussia. The Swabians traveled on the Danube on makeshift rafts, the so-called Ulmer Schachteln, one time use boats whose planks were to be reused to build houses or as firewood on arrival. They reached the Danube delta on the Black Sea around 1816-1817. In the two previous years, the Prussians had come overland via Warsaw.

Protestants regarded professional success as a reward from God for a pious life. They also remained open to technical progress in the fields of agriculture and crafts. However, their beginnings in the Ukrainian steppe were anything but easy. The black and fertile land required a lot of irrigation. So wells had to be dug. The cattle imported from Germany had to be crossed with the native breeds and the animals had to be adapted to the local climatic conditions. It was also necessary to build mills for the basic requirements of oil and flour and to produce roof tiles in order to achieve a similar standard of living as in their country of origin.

These were some of the unexpected difficulties and challenges. Promised things cannot always be taken for granted and the first arrivals found very hard living conditions in their first years. Some of them could not bear it and returned to Germany frustrated.

The remaining settlers, who were open to technical progress, benefited from the industrial revolution of the 19th century. The first steam-powered harvesters were used in the fields. The new veterinary treatments and fertilization techniques enabled them to increase livestock numbers, better control pests and achieve a higher yield on their land.

They also looked after the welfare of their community and built schools, orphanages, old people's homes and hospitals. Many small Protestant churches with their typical German architecture were built in the villages. One example is the construction of St. Paul's Church in Odessa, the seat of the German Lutheran Church in Ukraine, which can accommodate more than a thousand believers.

The outbreak of the First World War turned everything upside down and the decline seemed irreversible. The Germans and Austrians were seen as the enemy to be fought and the tone towards their minority quickly became more hostile. There were rumors that they were plotting. The Tsarina, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II, whose real name was Alix von Hessen Darmstadt, a German-sounding name, had been baptized with the much more Russian name Alexandra.

The revolution and the beginning of the civil war in 1917 plunged the country into chaos. The peasants were caught between the fronts of the "Reds" and the "Whites". Both sides pursued a ruthless policy of summary executions and arbitrary land confiscations. The country was in flames. To make matters worse, a famine had broken out.

The end of Bolshevism and the wars it had brought with it brought a small respite and enabled the start of a new economic policy at the beginning of the 1920s. Lenin hoped that the partial restoration of private small business would lead to an economic recovery for the country, which was at the end of its tether.

Stalin's seizure of power after Lenin's death and the long internal struggles to take over the party apparatus, during which some rival comrades were eliminated, put an end to the "laxity" he accused Lenin of in the administration of the previous years.

Stalin ordered strict and brutal collectivization by force. The hunt for the small landowners, who had been declared enemies of the people, soon developed into a witch hunt. The wealthiest farmers were robbed of their land and deported with their families to distant and often hostile countries.

The consequences were dramatic. After the weak economy based on small family businesses was destroyed, the Soviet Union experienced shortages, particularly of food. This led to an unprecedented famine that hit Ukraine hard and cost millions of people their lives. Many of the German settlers in Russia fled to the West in an attempt to reach their homeland.

This was also the case for my grandfather Ruben and his father, my great-grandfather Rudolph, who were born in the territories of the Russian Empire in Ukraine. They were the descendants of the Germanic, mainly Lutheran population that came from Prussia and settled in this region almost two centuries ago. These are the stories that my grandfather, the pastor of the Lutheran church in Wietzendorf, a truly cultured man, patiently told me.

The next photo in the gallery shows a young woman with long braids, also in black and white - Hilde. My grandmother Hilde was born in 1924 in Dinslaken, a small town not far from the current border between Germany and the Netherlands. She was a descendant of those who had come to Germany from France a few centuries earlier. In her case, they were Protestants, so-called Huguenots, who had fled persecution in France.

Protestantism has its origins in the sixteenth century. The German Augustinian monk and theologian Martin Luther published the 95 Theses, in which he denounced the shortcomings and abuses of the Roman Catholic Church and demanded that the Bible should be the sole authority on which faith should be based. Under the protection of the Duke of Saxony, he burned the Bull of Excommunication in 1520 together with a copy of papal law threatening him with excommunication.

The following year, he refused to renounce, as he considered himself subject only to the authority of the Bible and his conscience. For the first time, he called on people to turn directly to God and declared everyone had an individual conscience. For him, the Bible was no longer a holy book intended exclusively for the elite. It should be accessible to all, without social discrimination, and proclaim the equality of all people. His ideas had a great influence on the predominantly peasant population, so much so that they triggered uprisings in the Holy Roman Empire.

In order to put a swift end to this outbreak of violence against the ruling class, the princes met and decided that each principality should choose the religion to be practised in its state. The Saxon prince had already initiated the institutionalization of Lutheranism.

In the absence of this assembly formed by the electors, Emperor Charles V, who was accused by the Holy See of supporting Luther, decided to stop the dissemination of the Lutheran theses. He revoked all concessions that the princes had made to the peasants. He reintroduced Catholic worship and the Latin mass, which had no longer been held in this language.

The princes reacted immediately under the leadership of John of Saxony and protested. They have since been called "the Protestants", giving rise to the terms "Protestants" and "Protestantism".

Lutheran Protestantism spread throughout Europe via the northern trade routes. Many German princes adopted it as part of their quest for independence from the external powers of the Holy Roman Empire, which was subordinate to the Holy See and ruled by Emperor Charles V.

He fought against the Ottomans, who had conquered more and more European territories since the fall of Constantinople and threatened the east of his empire. However, he was unable to intervene against the princes who had become Protestant. Lutheranism became the state religion in Sweden and then in Denmark. After a period of tolerance under the Edict of Nantes, which protected the Protestants, France in turn fell into the "Wars of Fraith".

For almost a century, the Huguenot Protestants in France were subjected to severe persecution. The worst massacre took place in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1572. According to various historians, this massacre was ordered by King Charles IX or his mother Catherine de Medici. It lasted several days and spread from the French capital to more than twenty provincial towns in the following weeks and even months.

The influence of the Catholic Church was so great that France, under the leadership of Louis XIV, made the persecution official with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. From then on, the repression became increasingly severe. Many Huguenots were tortured, imprisoned and ostracized and were forced to leave the country. More than two hundred thousand people fled to more hospitable foreign countries such as England, Holland, Switzerland and the Protestant states of the Holy Roman Empire, including the Palatinate, Brandenburg, Württemberg and Hesse in Germany.

It is these extraordinary mixtures of stories that are reflected in myself. They remind me of the water of those rivers and streams that flow and mix and flow into a large lake. Like the little road we take which always leads us a little further, without knowing that later another and then another will lead us into new and unknown worlds.

Like matter with its small units, the atoms that give it its shape, weight and resistance. At its center is a nucleus, which is small but dense and consists of protons and neutrons. The atom is so small that it takes about ten million atoms in a row to reach one millimeter.

All these elements, the rivers and streams, the small roads that are connected to each other, the atom, its electrons and protons, are examples of the diversity of my origins. Just like the origins of many of us who have never bothered to fathom them. The search for my origins did not stop on my maternal grandparents' side. I also researched my paternal grandparents.

A Congolese historian and friend of my uncle, vicar of the parish of Saint-Anne, had also told me the story of my paternal great-grandmother's ethnic origins when we met at my cousin Irene's house in the Algarve while I was visiting Portugal at the invitation of my great-uncle Celso.

The friendly historian accompanied my uncle Jorge, my father's younger brother, when he went to visit his daughter. He was on vacation for a few days in the south of Portugal, while I went to Nazaré beach to meet up with a surfer friend from Germany who wanted to take advantage of the big waves and was visiting another friend who lived nearby.

The origin on my great-grandmother's side plunged me into the depths of time and Africa. It goes back to this woman, daughter of a great traditional chief of the Mbala ethnic group, one of the two hundred and seventy ethnic groups living in this vast continental country, the D. R. Congo.

As Father Bechia explained, the origins of the Mbala people lie well before 1482, i.e. before the arrival of the navigator Diogo Cão, one of the first Portuguese "discoverers" of the African coast.

In other words, even before the colonization of the Congo people by the Belgian settlers. The undeniable similarities between the "Mbala" people and the "Congo" people prove that the Mbala have their origins in the present-day Congolese province of Central Congo and in northern Angola.

The Mbala had then fled the region in a hurry because of the slave trade and the mistreatment they were subjected to. They had found refuge further north on the banks of the Kwangu River and decided to live together with the Yaka people for safety reasons, as they consisted of great warriors, stronger than those of the Kongo kingdom.

But here, too, they became victims of attacks because the Yakas wanted to sell them to slave traders. Thus began a new phase of flight for the Mbala. Discouraged, they once again left their crops, dwellings, savannahs and forests and continued their journey to the northeast, i.e. to the Kwilu River, to resume the exodus that had begun a hundred years earlier.

This new migration took place gradually and over a longer period of time. On this occasion, many Mbala families separated. Some went north or south, others west, others east and settled in many places. As a result, Mbala families are now found in various villages from the Kwango River to the Kwilu River, a distance of almost two hundred and forty kilometers in the southwest region of the country. Demographically, the Mbala are more numerous than other ethnic groups and inhabit more extensive areas in the Kwango-Kwilu region.

Mbala society is traditionally organized into groups, each of which bears the name of its chief, bequeathed to him by his ancestors. A group is a collection of villages, the number of which varies depending on the area. The size and boundaries were determined by the ancestors.

The villages have a certain degree of internal autonomy, but their chiefs are politically and hierarchically subordinate to the respective head of the group. They must report regularly to the head of the group about everything that happens in their village. The village chiefs are responsible for the lives and safety of all the inhabitants of their village and must protect them from all dangers and evil forces, both internal and external.

The traditional position of power is hereditary and only ends with the death of the holder. The succession is mainly settled between the group leader and the village chief. If one of them dies, the eldest son of the deceased's eldest sister takes his place. In the absence of such an heir, the younger brother of the chief takes over.

At the enthronement of the new chief and before the presentation of the chief's insignia, the candidate, surrounded by the elders and the sorcerer, climbs onto the roof of the deceased chief's hut while the dignitaries of the group and the village surround the house. The deputy of the deceased chief, together with the chief candidate, takes a living rooster to the roof of the house. As soon as the magician gives the order, the deputy cuts off the rooster's head, opens the chest and removes the still beating heart to hand it over to the successor candidate.

Meanwhile, five men armed with rifles wait impatiently for the moment when the new chief, having swallowed the rooster's heart, lets out a cry that imitates crowing. As soon as this happens, five shots are fired, accompanied by the shouts of the crowd, who hail the new chief as strong and capable of ruling over them.

As soon as the new village chief descends from the roof, he is greeted with reverence by all the dignitaries, sorcerers and chiefs of the surrounding villages who have been invited for the occasion. They accompany him to the house of the deceased chief, where he receives instructions about his power and the traditional insignia that go with it.

When the new village chief leaves the house and announces the end of the ceremonies, the big celebrations begin. Several goats that have been slaughtered for the sumptuous meal provide the food, palm wine is drunk, kola nuts are chewed and the dancing begins.

My paternal great-grandfather, who was buried at his death in the marble mausoleum that I visited last year in the cemetery of Sertã in Portugal, had gone to Africa at the age of sixteen and married the daughter of a traditional Mbala chief, a beautiful African girl. He was also born in this small Portuguese town, located in the geodesic center of the country, and according to tradition is a descendant of the Lusitanians.

The history of the founding of Sertã is lost in the mysteries of the mists of time. The original human settlement in the area where the town is located today certainly dates back to pre-Roman times. Various archaeological remains bear witness to the settlement's great age.

According to legend, its name can be traced back to Sertorius, a Roman soldier who was expelled from the Iberian Peninsula by Roman troops for political reasons. After several years of exile, he returned and settled in the region of Lusitania, on the site where the castle of the city of Sertã was later built. He allied himself with the people living there, the Lusitanians, to fight the Roman invasions.

During the battles for the Roman conquest of Lusitania, the castle was attacked and Sertorius died. When his wife Celinda heard the news and realized that the enemy had reached the castle walls, she climbed onto the ramparts with a huge "sertage", a square pan of boiling oil in which she fried eggs. She poured the boiling oil onto the attackers, who then had to retreat. This gave them time to get reinforcements from the neighboring Lusitanian villages. This is how the name Sertã came about for the village, which until then had had an unknown name.

Historically, the death of Sertorius can be attributed to other circumstances. He is said to have been killed by a Roman soldier named Marco Perpenna, who had led a conspiracy against him.

In 83 BC, General Sertorius was sent from Rome to the Iberian Peninsula as proconsul, where he took over the government of the provinces of Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Città.

Three years later, with the support of the Lusitanians, Sertorius began a military campaign on the Iberian Peninsula to reconquer his provinces and overthrow the new order that had been created by the power of the "Optimists", the conservative faction of the Senate.

During the reconquest of his provinces, the brave Sertorius was in the area of Sertã and had his castle built. It is also likely that Sertã was known as Sartago during the Roman Empire. Tradition attributes the foundation of Sertorius Castle to the year 74 BC. Archaeological finds in the area testify to the presence of the Romans.

The Lusitanians had pledged their support to Sertorius and asked him to become their leader. He was an intelligent and skillful general and subsequently defeated the Roman armies that had been deployed against him. However, he was also a politician and a shrewd administrator who managed to gradually integrate himself into the various tribes by introducing Roman customs.

The Roman senators in Spain decided that Marco Perpenna should lead a conspiracy against him. After gaining the trust of Sertorius, Marco Perpenna murdered him at a banquet.

It is therefore very likely that my great-grandfather was of Lusitanian, or even Roman, descent. At least in terms of his courage. The fact that he left for an unknown country at the age of sixteen, far away from his home, his family and his friends, and that he married in an African country, was irrefutable proof for me.

He was not the only one of Lusitanian origin. My paternal grandmother's parents were also born in the village of the brave Celinda and her famous pan.

In contrast to me, who has the blood of Prussians, Huguenots, Lusitanians and Mbala, the ethnic group of my African great-grandmother, who is a mosaic of origins.

The Lusitanian branch of my family did not have the richness of this extraordinary mixture of origins. Rather, it ran the risk of being too closely related, even consanguineous. Unless the neighboring peoples or other foreign peoples who passed through Lusitania were involved.

My passion for the history of ancient and medieval peoples was born at the University of Tübingen through the knowledge I have acquired over the last six years thanks to my professors. They made me study with great enthusiasm books and ancient chronicles written by historians who sometimes held different and diverse opinions.

I recently read an article in the French magazine "Histoire et Culture" entitled "The Lusitanians may not be our direct ancestors", based on an interview with a certain Luis Almeida Martins, a Portuguese writer, historian and journalist.

He explains that thousands of years ago, African, South American and European peoples were already looking for inviting places to settle. This also happened in the area that is now Portuguese territory and where people from Central and Eastern Europe had arrived at the time.

Other peoples came from the region that is now Lebanon a thousand years before Christ. The Phoenicians from the Middle East had crossed the Mediterranean and settled along the entire Mediterranean coast. They were both seafarers and traders. In any case, they could convince everyone of the latter.

The well-known Portuguese history mainly mentions the origins through the Lusitanians, as the historian and writer Martins also explains in his article. As if the Apaches had never existed before the founding of America and were only regarded as Americans, or the Italians as the direct descendants of the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.

The Lusitanians were not the only people to inhabit the Iberian Peninsula. As early as the sixth century BC, around the year 400, several tribes lived in this region and fought bravely against the Roman invaders. They occupied the areas between the Tagus and Douro rivers in the central region of Portugal known as Beira, as well as in the Luso-Spanish border areas.

After the conquest of this central region by the Romans, they gave it the name "Province of Lusitania" with the city of Merida as its capital. Its inhabitants were given the Roman name Lusitanians, inhabitants of Lusitania.

According to the historian Martins, the ancestors of the Lusitanians were Celts from Central Europe. It is known that they liked a drink similar to today's beer. They did not understand the Latin language spoken by the Roman invaders.

Today, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, Galician and Romanian are languages with Latin roots. If an inhabitant of the new province of Lusitania were to speak to us today in his mother tongue, nobody would understand him. The Latin in the Romance languages goes back to the language of the Roman occupiers and not, as in the case of Portuguese, to a mixture of both languages.

The Celts who became Lusitanians liked to take steam baths and anoint their bodies with perfumed oils. Once a day they ate bread made from acorn flour. They made human sacrifices to the gods and were monogamous. The women were just as warlike as the men.

These were unusual customs in imperial Rome, apart from the sauna. It is questionable whether the sauna was not a fashion introduced to Rome by the generals of the military legions from Lusitania, particularly from the Beira region.

There were also neighboring tribes known as Celtiberians. Their ancestors probably came from the Caucasus - a region between present-day Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia and Turkey, which was known as Iberia in ancient times. This could be the reason for the name given to the Iberian Peninsula. They had mixed with the Celts, creating a new tribe known as the Celtiberians.

All these peoples, including the Celts, had been baptized as Lusitanians by the will of Rome. They lived in small villages with stone houses that were very similar to the traditional buildings we know today in northern and central Portugal.

Some houses were square, others were rounded at the corners and others were completely round. The floor was made of earth and the roof of tiles. The villages were called "citânias". Each village had a headman and a family-based social structure. The villagers were cattle breeders and already cultivated vegetable gardens. Those who lived near the coast fished. They loved the fresh air.

The dead were cremated and their ashes placed in urns near the houses to emphasize the importance of the family. The dead are still very present in Portuguese culture today.

The Portuguese were indeed a mixture of different peoples - Iberian, Celtic, Phoenician, Roman, Germanic and so on. You could say that they were as much Lusitanians as the French were Gauls or the English were Anglo-Saxons. This is the conclusion ultimately reached by Luis Almeida Martins.

My paternal grandmother and her parents, as well as her father-in-law, who went to Africa and returned years later with his son, who was to become her husband, also had different origins, although they were all born in the small town of Sertã.

2. Bergen and my Grandparents

My aunt Eva, my mother's older sister, always spent her school vacations with us in Bergen. She was a principal at an elementary school. She was accompanied by our cousin Marlos, who was the same age as my brother. She was divorced. I never found out the reason for Aunt Eva's divorce. There was little talk about my uncle at home. I only knew that he was a journalist for some regional or national radio station.

She spoke Portuguese fluently. She had learned it in Brazil, where my grandfather Ruben had lived for eight years during his time as an Evangelical Lutheran missionary. During this time, she had even attended elementary school there for two years. That's why she always spoke to me in Portuguese, as she did with my sister Andrea.

Aunt Eva had an extraordinary talent for speaking languages. When we were all at home, my grandparents were more or less excluded from our conversation. French, German, Portuguese and, more recently, Italian, all these languages flew back and forth non-stop, without interruption. If there had been someone who didn't speak any of these languages and was unable to distinguish between them, they would surely have believed that we were all talking in the same language. Italian came last, taught to us by a friend of my aunt. He was a chef in an Italian restaurant in Cologne. At the time, my aunt was teaching at a school in Pulheim, a small town nearby.

My mother also spoke Portuguese, but with much more difficulty. I noticed the difference when I heard my aunt talking to her. I always loved to see my mother's embarrassment when my aunt would explain to her in German that she wasn't using the right word and then repeat the correct phrase back to her. It made them both burst out laughing every time. My mother had a beautiful laugh, spontaneous, innocent, unlike most people's laughter. It was the same laugh I saw and heard from my sister Andrea.

As a young pupil, my sister's friend and schoolmate couldn't stand me without me knowing why. She often stuck her tongue out at me when there was no one around to tell her off. Kimberly Noelle, as she was called, did it when we met on the way to school and also when she came to our house to study. She was always sticking her tongue out at me. On the same occasion, she christened me "Husky". A dog that pulled a sled.

Huskies are unique animals, originally from the icy regions of Siberia in Russia. These intelligent, medium-sized dogs have an elegant and robust appearance. They were bred by the Chukchi Indians, who were the first to cross-breed their dogs with wolves.

Their resemblance to wolves is associated with the legend that the Siberian huskies originate from the love affair between a wolf and the moon. According to the story, this can be seen from the huskies' tail, which is shaped like a crescent moon. Their clear, bright eye color allows the huskies to see better on the glistening, snow-covered plains of Siberia. They are hyperactive dogs that are traditionally used to pull sledges.

Kimberly Noelle got on my nerves and was the person I disliked the most at the time. I couldn't fight this feeling. She and my sister Andrea were best friends. They were together all the time, at school, when they were studying at home and when they went for a bike ride.

Kimberly Noelle had freckles on the tip of her nose and under her beautiful bright eyes. They were the color of the honey my mother used to sweeten her milk. Her red hair, tied back with a flowered elastic band with two small baubles on either side as if they were ripe red cherries, accentuated the paleness of her complexion as if she had applied rice powder. The irises of her extremely bright eyes made her even prettier, not least because of the contrast with her black pupils.

One day I told Andrea how it annoyed me when she called me "Husky". My sister burst out laughing. Andrea, the lucky one, had inherited my mother's wonderfully spontaneous laugh. Amazingly, they both laughed in the same way. I shouldn't have told her about Kimberly. Because now she also started calling me "Husky". Gradually, people at home only knew me by the nickname "Husky", a Siberian dog, a relative of the one that was found in Alaska.

The reason, Kimberly Noelle told my sister, why she had given me that name was my eyes, which either glowed green or blue, depending on how intense the sun was shining. I hadn't inherited my mother's beautiful smile, but I had inherited the beautiful eyes of Hilde, my maternal grandmother.

My mother had only passed on her black, curly hair to me. I hated combing it because it was always knotted and because of the resistance it caused in me every morning. The brush struggled to get through the strands. Eventually I gave up combing them and left them to the capers of the wind and my mother's rebuke.

Even my brother once, when he surprised me sitting on the sofa, stroked his fingers through my tousled curls and asked with his charming and cheerful laugh how "Husky" was doing, only to make fun of my amazement.

At other times, he was quiet, reminding me of my mother's distant, distracted look when she thought of our father's absence. I always admired my brother. He spent almost three years studying political science in France, at the University of Lyon. According to him, our father had advised him to do so. He had told him that, unfortunately, politics was at the service of the economy. It needed people who represented its interests. The world would be divided into two camps. The elites and the others who would be there to serve the former. We would have to decide.

All too often he had told him that if he wanted to develop his own freedom, take responsibility for himself, make his own decisions, he would only succeed if he was successful. He would have to realize what decision he would have to make, that he would have to overcome the mindset, thoughts and habits of those who did not want new challenges in their lives.

My brother's success was based on the development of his personality. It was in his personality, not outside of it. It was he himself who defined his goals, depending on what he considered important for his life. It never occurred to him to imitate others. Suddenly, my brother had decided to continue his studies at business school to get a degree in business administration.

After graduating, he worked for several years for an international group of companies with offices in Paris, where he held the position of controller. Years later he changed companies and today he works for another international group where he performs the same function, but this time in Sri Lanka.

As far as my eldest sister was concerned, she managed to get over my father's absence. During conversations with my mother, I once surprised her by saying that my father was always present and around her. This presence helped her to cope better with her life. The blood of her ancestors that flowed through her veins encouraged her to live in the country where my father was born. The same country where she was born. She continued to live there and then came to visit us every year during the Christmas vacations with her son. A friendly nephew who spoke fluent English, French and even German thanks to his lessons at the American high school in Kinshasa.

My sister Andrea had recently made the acquaintance of Julia, a new classmate. She also started coming to our house to study with my sister. I don't know if Andrea and Kimberly Noelle told her about the nickname they had given me. Her shyness fascinated me and I was very curious about her personality. One day Andrea told me in confidence, laughing spontaneously as was her habit, that Julia really liked how much my appearance resembled that of a Siberian dog.

In the days that followed, I also began to look at Julia in a different way, with the eyes of a thirteen-year-old. She had the same fantastic light brown, chestnut-colored hair as my sister and black eyes as well. At the same time, I noticed that Kimberly Noelle had changed her attitude towards me. She no longer stuck her tongue out at me or called me by the name that amused and made everyone at our house laugh.

When I spoke to Julia, Kimberly Noelle now remained silent, contrary to her usual habit of interrupting me to contradict me, and looked at me intently with her brown, incredibly bright eyes, which changed color from time to time. I could sense that she was nervous and confused. The restless tapping with the slender fingers of her right hand on the dining table, as if she were playing the piano, betrayed her nervousness.

The sight of her inexplicably gave me a slight feeling of suffocation, as if I was running out of air. It intensified when our eyes crossed. I noticed her long fingers, one after the other. Playing the piano. Distraught, I avoided her gaze, which, aided by the beautiful black pupils, was possibly trying to read my thoughts, to probe my heart, wondering what the sudden reason for my embarrassment was.

All of this made me intensify my conversations with Julia in an attempt to hide my confusion. But without realizing it, and not because I really wanted to make Kimberly Noelle jealous, it increased her tension and the intensity of her gaze on me, giving her face a rosy color. And suddenly I realized that Kimberly Noelle was by no means indifferent to my "husky" eyes or to me as a person.

She had inherited the unusual color of her red hair from her father, an Englishman of Scottish origin. He was a military officer stationed for NATO at the military base very close to Bergen. Her mother, the same age as mine, worked as an employee for an insurance company. She was also the one who took care of the compensation my mother received from the insurance company for my father's accidental death.

People with red hair are very common in Northern and Eastern Europe. This hair color is particularly associated with the inhabitants of the United Kingdom and Scotland. It is also found among Germanic and Celtic peoples.

Redheads make up around 4% of the European population. Scotland has the largest proportion of redheads in the world. Elizabeth the First of England had red hair. Her eyes were blue, she had sharp features and, according to historians, a sensual and flirtatious demeanor.

Redheads have always been viewed with a certain amount of suspicion in many cultures. The Egyptians believed that they were sent by the god Seth. This god was the lord of thunder and lightning and exercised his power on the various branches of the river and on the plains of the Nile. He was regarded as a belligerent deity.

In ancient times, the Romans were both surprised and fascinated when they came across people with light eyes and blonde or red hair. They always emphasized the beauty of red-haired Celtic women. This prompted the Roman women to make wigs with this hair color when they became aware of their husbands and their lovers as well as the beauty of the Celtic redheads.

In the Middle Ages, red hair was considered a sign of a covenant with the devil, as well as witchcraft. In fact, it was believed that the souls and bodies of red-haired women were possessed by demons and that their hair had taken on the color of embers because they had burned in hellfire. This belief may have given rise to the saying: "Red-haired women have no soul." Meeting a redhead in those days was frightening, as many people believed them to be sorceresses or witches. They had hair that resembled the fur of beasts and at the same time symbolized strength and power. The color of fire was often associated with a passionate temperament or a strong character.

The Italian painters of the Renaissance used them as a model to paint Venetian women with red hair. In that era, freckles were one of the characteristic features of beauty in painting.

Like many people in the past, I was fascinated and attracted by Kimberly Noelle's fiery red hair, spontaneity and strength of character. And even though I wasn't a redhead, I, like her, had bold and brave ancestors among the Germanic Saxons in Germany.

Around the end of the 8th century, the region where I was born, Lower Saxony, which at the time was populated by the Germanic Saxons, was incorporated into a duchy and renamed Saxony by Charlemagne, the Christian king of the Franks who had been crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome. This was a warlike king who, under the guise of Christianization, had expanded his empire through a series of military conquests, in particular by intensifying the fight against the Saxons, who were considered a pagan people by the Romans.

At the end of the military campaigns he led between 772 and 804, he imposed Christianity on them and forced them to be baptized. The Saxon rulers, as well as their subjects, probably converted to Christianity in order to restore peace, with the exception of the most famous among them, a certain Widukind, for a long time a vehement opponent of the Franconian king's wave of Christianization.

WidukindorWitikind- both are old Saxon words that can be translated as "white child" or "child of the forest", i.e. wolf - was one of the most famous heroes of ancient Germania. Some chronicles from the Middle Ages attribute him as the father of a prince who was one of the main leaders of the nation of the Saxons. A powerful nation that settled in an area between the rivers Rhine and Elbe and even extended towards the river Oder.

As a young man, Widukind saw his country devastated by the troops of the Frankish king. Later, as Prince of Engern, he fiercely resisted Charlemagne's troops, who forced a war on the Saxons that was to last 32 years. In reality, it was all about enslaving a million peasants under the pretext of Christianization.

The Saxons, who were regarded as rebels, were massacred. The pagan place of worship known as the Externsteine in the Teutoburg Forest was destroyed in 772 on the orders of Charlemagne.

When the King of the Franks camped in Lodbad, a town on the Weser, in 775, the Westphalian warriors led by Widukind ambushed the Frankishn soldiers and killed many of them, taking the opportunity to snatch an enormous spoil of war from under Charlemagne's nose. This was the first major success for Widukind and his men.

In accordance with the demands imposed by Charlemagne on the peoples of the conquered territories, the Saxons had to pay tribute. They also had to provide their conqueror with troops. Widukind used this tribute as a pretext to persuade his brothers to maintain their revolt. He continued to resist Charlemagne's troops.

The fact that Widukind was absent from a meeting of the Saxons, who had been subjugated by the Franks and convened by Charlemagne, did not go unnoticed. The Saxons, who were now meeting in their capacity as vassals, agreed to convert to Christianity. However, after the victory of the King of the Franks, Widukind had fled to Denmark, a country with a 'pagan' population.

In 778, when the main part of Charlemagne's army was mobilized towards Spain in continuation of his policy of territorial expansion, Widukind, back in Saxony, organized the Saxon resistance. Under his influence, the pagans threatened the abbot of Fulda and forced the monks to flee. They had to take all the relics of Boniface of Mainz with them in order to save them.

Widukind was able to profit from Charlemagne's expansionist policy on the Iberian Peninsula, which kept him away from Saxony, and intensified his revolutionary efforts.

When Charlemagne returned to put down the uprising through repression, he organized a massacre in which more than 4,000 pagan Saxons were beheaded. He had 12,000 women and children deported for resisting the sacrament of baptism. This massacre and the deportations took place in Verden, on the banks of the Weser.

The majority of the rebels, who had been unable to flee, were handed over to Charlemagne by their Saxon rulers. Widukind, who had made it to Denmark, received support from the Frisians and the Danes, who had settled north of the Elbe. With their help, he defeated the Franks on Mount Süntel.

In 785, Charlemagne issued the capitulary "De partibus Saxonia" in Saxony. A law that forced the pagans to choose between converting to Christianity and death. It prescribed a forced conversion, which was introduced during the wars in Germania with the aim of eradicating paganism in Saxony.