Phoenician Myths - Zeljko Prodanovic (ebooks children's books free .TXT) 📗

and then out of gratitude, I painted this painting.’
Pablo only blinked his eyes, then looked at the painting.
‘Seemingly, there is no tear,’ Leonardo said. ‘But with a bit of luck, you can see a tear shimmering in her eye.’
Pablo gave a confused smile, then said he had a lot of unfinished work to do and left.
When he came the next morning, Pablo found his master lying in bed and thought he must be asleep. He decided not to wake him and went to the nearby room to see the beauty with a tear in her eye once again.
He stood before the painting, but a few moments later he trembled with fear – out of her left eye dropped a tear. As soon as he managed to pull himself together, the same thing happened again – out of the same left eye dropped another tear, then another. Distraught and out of breath, he ran to the painter. ‘Master,’ he shouted, ‘master, your Phoenician lady is crying!’
He came to him, but the painter did not move. He lay with his hands clasped together and with a blissful smile on his face. ‘Master…’ Pablo whispered once more and then realized that the great master had died. He felt that he was short of breath and wished to leave. He turned around and walked away, but stopped by the painting that Leonardo had painted the previous day.
And he could not believe his eyes again – the cranes were gone!

Torches of the New Age

One of the biggest delusions in the history of the world was the belief that the earth stood at the centre of the universe and that the sun traveled around it.
The first man to realize that sunrise and sunset were illusions was Aristarchus from Samos, the famed astron- omer with the purple soul. But when he revealed his discovery, a poet by the name of Cleanthes accused him of impiety and asked the bedouins from Samos to stone him.
‘Have you heard the ranting of that crazy astronomer?’ he said. ‘He claims that the earth moves around the sun! As if we are blind and as if all those famous Greeks, from Homer to Aristotle, were also blind.’
‘But Homer was blind,’ said the bedouins.
Cleanthes stopped for a moment, then went on, ‘Such follies could be heard only from the Phoenicians and I am telling you that this astronomer is not a Greek, but a Phoenician!’ Fortunately, the bedouins did not understand what these two were arguing about, and so our Aristarchus saved his neck.
But when he died his discovery descended into oblivion and sixteen centuries passed before another Phoenician, one who would prove that ‘the crazy astronomer from Samos’ had been right, emerged – Nicolaus Copernicus, the canon from Frauenburg.

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When he discovered that sunrise and sunset were illusions, Copernicus wrote a book about his discovery and, with the zeal that only the youthful can have, wished to publish it. So, he went to see a publisher in Regensburg.
‘I will tell you immediately why I have come,’ he said. ‘I have discovered that the earth is only a small dot in the universe, which revolves around the sun. I have written a book about this and now I want to publish it.’
‘Is that right?’ the publisher said with a derisive smile.
‘Yes, sir,’ Copernicus replied. ‘I want to destroy the old delusion that has followed us for centuries, and tell the world the truth!’
‘That sounds good, canon,’ the publisher said, ‘but surely you must know how dangerous destroying old delusions is these days.’
‘Sir,’ Copernicus exclaimed, ‘I do not fear the gallows or the stake! I am not afraid of the Roman censors or the fires of hell they threaten me with. And if it is meant to be – I will be the torch of the new age!’
The publisher laughed and said that, while he understood Copernicus’ desire, he was not prepared to burn with him at the stake. Then this message arrived from Rome: ‘Canon, don’t cut the branch you are sitting on and don’t under- mine the foundations of god’s temple, which has been built for fifteen centuries!’
And what could he do? Nothing, really. He resigned to fate and remained a canon. However, in the loft of the cathedral he hid a telescope and from time to time watched the stars, and so spent his life neither in heaven nor on earth.
And the great shining eye that sees everything assigned the role of the torch of the new age to the philosopher with a purple beard – Giordano Bruno.

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Giordano spent his life in flight. When the ‘Roman rats’ – as he called the Inquisitors – finally caught him and put him in jail, he told them that they may have caught him but they would never tame him. Although he had told them a thousand times that he would not recant, the rats kept coming and tried to tame him, and this absurd game lasted for almost ten years. Then, one day, they decided to try for the last time. The main censor, whom Giordano called ‘the chief of the rats’, came to Giordano’s dungeon.
‘Well, philosopher with a purple beard, what have you decided?’
‘So, again this entertaining question’, Giordano replied.
‘Well, you still claim that the mad canon from Frauenburg was right?’
‘Copernicus, censor, was not mad.’
‘Philosopher,’ the censor said, ‘I didn’t come to persuade you that Copernicus was mad. I only came to tell you what you should expect if you don’t recant – the stake!’
‘And do you, chief, really believe that you can scare me? Do you really believe that in order to live a few more years, I would annul all that I have said and throw into the Tiber everything I know? And, above all, that I would renounce the most beautiful death? The game is over, chief. Tell your rats to build my pyre!’ The censor looked at him and crossed himself.
‘But, for god’s sake,’ he said, ‘what about your soul? Where will she end up?’
‘In Baalbek,’ Giordano replied quietly.
‘In Baalbek?’
‘Yes, censor, in Phoenicia, home of the most beautiful souls!’
He smiled and looked at the censor, who crossed himself three times. A few days later, on the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, Giordano Bruno was burnt.

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The purple flames were still burning when a curious youth arrived at the Campo dei Fiori and asked a canon what had happened.
‘We just burnt the crazy Giordano,’ the canon answered.
‘Why?’ the youth asked.
‘Because he claimed that we were all fools and he was the only smart one!’
‘Oh!’ gasped the youth with surprise.
‘Yes, yes, young man,’ the canon went on. ‘This lunatic stated that the earth revolves around the sun!’
He spat at the fire and left, and the youth remained on the Campo dei Fiori for a long time, watching the purple flames frolicking joyfully in the young wind. It was Galileo Galilei, the young astronomer from Pisa.
Many years later Galileo wrote a book in which he claimed that Copernicus was right and that the earth was only a small dot in the universe, revolving around the sun. As he had expected, the Roman censors soon arrived and confiscated the book, and they took him to be tried in Rome.
‘You have three options, astronomer,’ the chief censor said. ‘The first one is to show us that the earth really revolves around the sun. If you can do that, we will admit that we were wrong and that we are blind. But because, as we all know, you can’t do this, we will give you a second option – to recant and admit that Copernicus was mad, and that you were deluded. There is also the third option, but I don’t think you are as crazy as Giordano Bruno, to burn at the stake. So, astronomer, what do you say?’
‘I wasted my life,’ Galileo said, ‘trying to tame with my eyes what nobody has ever seen – the universe. Of course, it was a delusion.
‘I wanted to embrace with my mind this endless space and discover the secret of its heart. Do I need to tell you in what torments I burnt?
‘But what else can we do,’ he added and skimmed over the faces of the six censors, ‘so cruelly lost in the universe, but burn in the flame of our own delusions?’
It took the censors six days to interpret what Galileo had said and to pass the sentence. And it said: ‘The astronomer has recanted and shall not be burnt. But, since he still looks at us with the eyes of a heretic, we cannot let him go either. He will spend some time in jail and then we shall see.’
Some years later, when he was freed from the dungeon, Galileo retired to his estate and spent the rest of his life in solitude. One night, when he felt that the cranes from Baalbek were about to arrive, he walked up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and looked towards the sky. ‘Good-bye, dear stars!’ he said and kissed a star, and a tear dropped out of his eye.
And she is still, along with the earth, revolving around the sun.

St. George and the Vizier

The grand vizier Mehmed-pasha, known as ‘the Falcon’, sat on a hill above the river Drina and with a joyful smile in his eyes watched the masons build the large stone bridge, which he thought would finally connect the two banks of the turbulent river. The silence was suddenly broken by a song coming from the nearby forest. The vizier turned around and could clearly hear someone singing, ‘The girl harmed the falcon, she set the forest on fire...’
A few moments later the soldiers brought before him a scared-looking young man. ‘Leave him,’ the vizier ordered, and the soldiers went away.
‘Where did you learn that song?’ the vizier asked.
‘I heard it from a monk from Zvornik,’ the young man answered.
‘Are you from Zvornik?’
‘No, sir. I only spent some time on the wall of a monastery near Zvornik. I used to be a fresco.’
The vizier stared at him in wonder. ‘And where are you going now?’ he asked.
‘Home to Phoenicia,’ the young man replied.
The vizier looked at him again. ‘And where is it… This Phoenicia of yours?’
‘Phoenicia, vizier, was a miraculous land at the foot of Lebanon, but then one day she mysteriously disappeared. But I know that she is still there, hovering above the cedar forests, neither in heaven nor on earth.’
‘What a crazy monk!’ the vizier thought.