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    Khazar Eyes: Return of the Khazars
    Khazar Eyes: Return of the Khazars
    Khazar Eyes: Return of the Khazars
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Khazar Eyes: Return of the Khazars

    By Edward Hirsch

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    About this ebook

    Logline:
    This darkly romantic comedy is embedded in the incredible but true story of the Khazars, an ancient people from the Russian steppes, who almost saved humanity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris US
    Release dateMay 18, 2012
    ISBN9781477114179
    Khazar Eyes: Return of the Khazars
    Author

    Edward Hirsch

    EDWARD HIRSCH is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. A MacArthur fellow, he has published ten books of poems and six books of prose. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for literature. He serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and lives in Brooklyn.

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      Book preview

      Khazar Eyes - Edward Hirsch

      Contents

      STYLISTIC INSTRUCTIONS

      PRINCESS DAPHNE TO THE RESCUE

      DAPHNE SAVES THE PLANET

      POWER JOURNEY

      A DRINK BEFORE DAWN

      THE TRANSFORMATION

      THE RUS

      THE ROADSIDE STAND

      THE PECHENEG CAFE

      CINDERELLA

      TIGER, TIGER BURNING BRIGHT

      THE HOLY GRAIL

      THE BULL’S EYE

      COCA-COLA

      THE LAST OF THE KHAZARS

      STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

      PICKY PICTS

      THE RAINBOW

      THE CASTLE

      THE BEDROOM SCENE

      THE FINAL BATTLE

      BORN TOO LATE

      RETURN OF THE KHAZARS

      RETURN OF THE KHAZARS

      This book is dedicated to Julius Moomer.

      In the waning days of the Khazar empire, a phantasm emerged who was to alter course of history.

      Despite the lack of monuments or other remainders of culture of the Khazar, it is possible to piece together the fall of this vast nation which formed a model constitution and forged peace between three world religions in a manner that has yet to be emulated.

      It can be done in the same way that the Khazars communicated—through dreams. The phantasm was a Khazar princess and she was about to throw the empire at the center of the world into a mid-life crisis from which it would never recover.

      The Khazars rode out of the dawn of history, speaking an unknown tongue and confounding the barbaric tribes around them. Bearing a banner emblazoned with the symbols of the three great religions, their origins were variously ascribed to the Scythians, the Turkish tribes, the Finno-Ugric hordes, the Persians and even the English.

      But they were truly none of these, but a unique people destined to set an example of tolerance and justice that won the admiration even of their enemies—of whom there were many.

      The men were renowned for their courage, never retreating in the face of adversity; the women for their beauty. Some Khazar princesses married into the Byzantine nobility.

      But none approached Daphne in her crystal gaze at the future.

      Before she wandered onto the stage of history, the Khazars were threatened by the Eastern Roman empire, while the kings of the powerful dynasty of Sassan constantly menaced their southern frontier. Both these countries tried to gain the alliance of the Khazars by establishing marriages of Byzantine princes with Khazar princesses.

      Later the Arabs invaded the Khazar empire, and conquered their capital, Semender. The king thereupon repaired to Itil at the mouth of the Volga in the area that is now called Astrakhan.

      One Arab writer relates that in a battle for possession of another Khazar city, Belendjer, the Khazar king and his four thousand warriors were slain.

      But the Khazars regrouped, and gathered the Jews who had been expelled from the Byzantine empire. In a typical gesture, the Khazar aristocracy later adopted the religion of the oppressed.

      The king’s palace was located in the western part of the city surrounded by houses of the nobles, while the eastern, called Khazeran was left to the commoners. The Khazar state was roughly divided between a Jewish royal family, a Muslim army and a Christian population.

      The Muslim bazaars contained houses of felt, straw or clay, and wound for miles over the harsh terrain. The town contained many markets, baths, mosques, churches and synagogues. All lived in harmony for the Khazars tolerated no inequality. They enforced ruthless ethics at a time when morality was virtually unknown. Their code, later expressed by Daphne was: No dishonor, no betrayal.

      The king alone dwelled in a building made of brick, in a palace on an island in the midst of a river, access to which was by a bridge of boats.

      Like that river, time flowed on for the Khazars. Like ourselves, they wandered along the riverbank lost in reverie. Because they had created a world of peace, of sanity, they thought their world would go on as long as the river. Just as we take crime, pollution, greed and war for granted as part of the human condition, the Khazars accepted their opposites as the natural state of things.

      The three powerful Khazar gods looked over them, and nothing could topple the edifice of their desires.

      When the king went out on horseback, his bodyguard of twelve thousand mounted warriors followed in a magnificent retinue. They formed a contingent of immortals, because if one was killed, another promptly took his place. Whoever met the king had to throw himself down and dared not rise until the king had gone by.

      The king’s harem consisted of twenty-five of the most beautiful and best educated women of the realm. Apart from these he was allotted sixty female slaves. If the king died, a house was built containing twenty chambers, situated in the middle of the river which even time could not reach.

      Every subject enjoyed full religious liberty of a kind not approached today. For the Khazars practiced what they preached.

      The Khazars celebrated great wealth and prestige. Their empire at its greatest height stretched from the Bashkides to the Caucasus, from the principality of Kiev to the Black Sea and into the Crimea. The emperors of Byzantium stood in such awe before them that letters to the Khazar king, the khagan, were sealed with three gold solidis, the mark of highest respect.

      Each citizen enjoyed total freedom of thought and action. The Khazar government consisted of seven councilors, two from each religion, and one who still professed belief in Tangri, the Khazar god of lightning and thunder, still represented in the logo of the Grateful Dead.

      But because the Khazars were real people, and this is a real story, not a myth or a fable, the tide eventually began to turn.

      A muslim army penetrated the country of the Khazars but

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