Juan de Fuca or Apostolos Valerianos or Ioannis Phocas

Juan de Fuca strait in Canada

Juan de Fuca was a Greek navigator who sailed for Spain under a Spanish name. His original name was Apostolos Valerianos or Ioannis fokas and he was likely born in the Greek island of Kefalonia.He was the fourth son of Emmanuel Phocas or Phocas Valerianos who was from Constantinople.Likely  his first name may have been Ioannis-Apostolos. Like many Greeks sailors at his time he  seeked a job at the Spanish navy.

He worked for 40 years as a navigator in the Spanish navy and participated in numerous expeditions.In one of them in November 1587 his ship Santa Anna was attacked by the English somewhere near modern Philippines and he was captured as a hostage losing a cargo worth of 60.000 ducats.

Later he was released and in 1588 he went to Mexico. There he was appointed by the viceroy of Mexico Luis de Velaseo to explore the Northern shores of N. America and find the  mythical strait of Anian which alledgedly connected the Pacific with the Atlantic ocean. He was given one small caravel at his disposal.


He made two travels. His first travel was unsuccesful because of a mutiny and he returned back to Acapulco.He then tried a second travel going this time more northern. He  sailed up the western coast of North America from Acapulco of Mexico to Vancouver Island which is in modern Canada in 1592, looking for a passage from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean.He was perhaps the first European to see this area. He sailed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca (which was named for him in 1725) and believed it to be the beginning of a route to the Atlantic Ocean (it is not). This strait connects the Pacific Ocean to the Puget Sound and the Georgia Strait, between the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, USA, and Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
He awaited two years for a reward for his discovery  but unfortunately for him his discovery was considered dubious.He travelled to Spain in 1594 to speak to  the king in person about his discovery but again his efforts were futile.
Dissapointed he started a journey back to his homeland. In Florence he met an Englishman called John Douglas to whom he narrated his adventures. Douglas gave him a reference letter  and sent him to Mickael Locke a rich English merchant who at the time happened to be in Venice. He asked Locke to mediate to the English crown on his behalf. He hoped that the English would pay a compensation for holding him a captive by apointing him to find the Anian strait. Locke tried to communicate with English officials but there was no response. Juan de fuca couldn't afford to wait so long and continued his journey back to Kefalonia.
In 1602 Locke sent a letter to Kefalonia for Juan but he never got a response. Thus he assumed that may have died. Locke's story about Phocas' life was published in 1625 in a travel  book called "Hakluytus Posthumus or 'Purchas His Pilgrimes Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and others"  
In 1787 the British  Charles Barkley explored the area were Juan de fuca had been and confirmed the Greek navigator's discoveries by giving his name to the strait.

That's how the Spanish believed the Northern America was

Al Khazini The Greek slave who became a great Islamic scientist

Abdal Rahman al-Khazini was a Muslim of Byzantine-Greek origin who was brought to Merv as a slave by the Seljuk sultan after his victory over the Byzantine Emperor Romanos Diogenes in Mantzikert in 1071 CE.

With the Byzantine army defeated the Turks raided all the Asian holdings of the Byzantine empire and sent thousands of Greeks at the slave markets of the east. One of them turned to become Al-Khazini.

His master, al-Khazini, gave him his name and the best possible education in mathematics, philosophy, science and astronomy.

Al Khazini

Al-Khazini was also a pupil of the famous Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyám (d 1131 CE) who was living in Merv at that time. Very  little is known about his life, but it is known that he was a man who refused rewards and handout sent to him by the wife of the emir.

He preferred to live a simple life on a  meager income which he earned himself.  The exact date of his death is also not known, but it is believed that he died by the middle of 12th century.

Al-Khazini was a great physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher and an alchemist. He is better known for his contributions to physics.

His treatise; Kitab Mizan al-Hikma (The Book of  Balance of Wisdom) written in four volumes, remained an important part of  physics among the Muslim scientists. The first volume deals with his predecessor’s theories of centers of gravity, including al-Biruni, al-Razi and Omar Khayam. In this book al-Khazini draws attention to the Greek philosopher’s failure to differentiate clearly between force, mass and weight. He explains  how the weight of the air  and  its  density decrease with altitude. By looking at his predecessor’s science, al-Khazini provides crucial records of their contributions that could have remained unknown or lost.

The remaining treatises deal with hydrostatics, most particularly the determination of specific gravities. Al-Khazini goes to extreme lengths in describing the equipment necessary to obtain accurate results. He was very careful in the preparation of his equipment and materials while doing his experiment.

He carried  out various  experiments with his balances with rigorous attention to scientific accuracy. His interest  to  determine the specific gravities of precious metals and alloys had some commercial purposes in mind. With the accurate value of specific gravity he could determine the purity of gold and silver without any chemical treatment. To determine the specific gravity of a substance, its weight has to be known in air and water, and the volume of air and water displaced, so most researchers used water balances in their experiments.

Using the same instruments  Al-Khazini made repeated experiment with several metals and gemstones. He also measured the specific gravities of many other substances like salt, clay, liquids and amber–a total of fifty one substances.

He developed his own hydrostatic balance, and specialized balances which was extremely precise. He could find the weight of an object on the microgram level, a precision only surpassed in the 20th century.

In another experiment, he discovered that the density of water is greater nearer the earth’s center, which was proved by Roger Bacon two centuries later. Al-Khazini defines heaviness in traditional terms, he says in his book;

“A heavy body is one which is moved by an inherent force, constantly, towards the center of the world.  I mean that a heavy body is one which has a force moving it towards the central point, and constantly in the direction of the center, without being moved by that force in any different direction; and that the force referred to is inherent in the body” 

It appears that what al-Khazini meant by gravity, is both an idea similar to the modern concept of gravitational potential energy.  In any case, al-Khazini appears to have been the first to propose that the gravity of a body varies with its distance from the center of the Earth. In his first sense of the word gravity, the concept was not considered again, till five centuries later by Isaac Newton.

Al-Khazini contributions   in  astronomy includes a astronomical treatise Zij as-Sanjari or  ‘Sinjaric Tables’. In this treatise he gave a description of his construction of a 24 hour water clock designed for astronomical purposes which he invented. This was an early example of an astronomical clock. He computed the positions of 46 stars for the year  (1115-16 CE). and tables for the observation of celestial bodies at the latitude of Merv. His astronomical treatise was translated into Greek and was studied in the Byzantine Empire.

Al-Khazini’s book Risala fi’l-alat (Treatise on Instruments) consisted of seven chapters in which he has described about a number of highly specialized  and innovative mechanical devices. These instruments include dioptra, (a classical surveying instrument) triangular instruments, triquetrum, (an instrument to find altitude of heavenly bodies) quadrant, sextant and the astrolabe.

Al Khazini, no doubt was a great physicist and astronomer  of the middle age who made tremendous advancement in the field of physics and instrument-making. Charles Jillispe, editor of the Dictionary of Scientific Bibliography proclaimed him the greatest of any time.

text source:http://muslimmedianetwork.com  By Syed Aslam

Hypatia the first female Greek philosopher astronomer and mathematician in history

Hypatia

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more. Yet even she fell victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them, therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles.* After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort. This happened in the month of March during Lent, in the fourth year of Cyril's episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius, and the sixth of Theodosius.

Notes
* The Greek word is ostrakois, literally "oystershells," but the word was also applied to brick tiles used on the roofs of houses.

source: Socrates Scholasticus,  Ecclesiastical History

HYPATIA, daughter of Theon the geometer and philosopher of Alexandria, was herself a well-known philosopher. She was the wife of the philosopher Isidorus, and she flourished under the Emperor Arcadius. Author of a commentary on Diophantus, she also wrote a work called The Astronomical Canon and a commentary on The Conics of Apollonius. She was torn apart by the Alexandrians and her body was mocked and scattered through the whole city. This happened because of envy and her outstanding wisdom especially regarding astronomy. Some say Cyril was responsible for this outrage; others blame the Alexandrians' innate ferocity and violent tendencies for they dealt with many of their bishops in the same manner, for example George and Proterius.

Rachel Weisz starring as Hypatia in the movie Agora

Regarding Hypatia the Philosopher and the Sedition of the Alexandrians

Hypatia was born, reared, and educated in Alexandria. Since she had greater genius than her father, she was not satisfied with his instruction in mathematical subjects; she also devoted herself diligently to all of philosophy.

The woman used to put on her philosopher's cloak and walk through the middle of town and publicly interpret Plato, Aristotle, or the works of any other philosopher to those who wished to hear her. In addition to her expertise in teaching she rose to the pinnacle of civic virtue. She was both just and chaste and remained always a virgin. She was so beautiful and shapely that one of her students fell in love with her and was unable to control himself and openly showed her a sign of his infatuation. Uninformed reports had Hypatia curing him of his affliction with the help of music. The truth is that the story about music is corrupt. Actually, she gathered rags that had been stained during her period and showed them to him as a sign of her unclean descent and said, "This is what you love, young man, and it isn't beautiful!" He was so affected by shame and amazement at the ugly sight that he experienced a change of heart and went away a better man.

Such was Hypatia, as articulate and eloquent in speaking as she was prudent and civil in her deeds. The whole city rightly loved her and worshipped her in a remarkable way, but the rulers of the city from the first envied her, something that often happened at Athens too. For even if philosophy itself had perished, nevertheless, its name still seems magnificent and venerable to the men who exercise leadership in the state. Thus it happened one day that Cyril, bishop of the opposition sect [i.e. Christianity] was passing by Hypatia's house, and he saw a great crowd of people and horses in front of her door. Some were arriving, some departing, and others standing around. When he asked why there was a crowd there and what all the fuss was about, he was told by her followers that it was the house of Hypatia the philosopher and she was about to greet them. When Cyril learned this he was so struck with envy that he immediately began plotting her murder and the most heinous form of murder at that. For when Hypatia emerged from her house, in her accustomed manner, a throng of merciless and ferocious men who feared neither divine punishment nor human revenge attacked and cut her down, thus committing an outrageous and disgraceful deed against their fatherland. The Emperor was angry, and he would have avenged her had not Aedesius been bribed. Thus the Emperor remitted the punishment onto his own head and family for his descendant paid the price. The memory of these events is still vivid among the Alexandrians.

The first centuries AD christians Jews and Pagans fought for prevalence.

source: Damascius's Life of Isidore, reproduced in The Suda

Chemical war in antiquity?

The skeleton of a Persian soldier found in the siege tunnels of Dura. The man may have choked on toxic fumes from a fire he himself started. The man's armor is pulled up around his chest; archaeologists suspect he was trying to pull it off as he died.
CREDIT: Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection

Almost 2,000 years ago, 19 Roman soldiers rushed into a cramped underground tunnel, prepared to defend the Roman-held Syrian city of Dura-Europos from an army of Persians digging to undermine the city's mudbrick walls. But instead of Persian soldiers, the Romans met with a wall of noxious black smoke that turned to acid in their lungs. Their crystal-pommeled swords were no match for this weapon; the Romans choked and died in moments, many with their last pay of coins still slung in purses on their belts.

Nearby, a Persian soldier — perhaps the one who started the toxic underground fire — suffered his own death throes, grasping desperately at his chain mail shirt as he choked. [look at the image above]

These 20 men, who died in A.D. 256, may be the first victims of chemical warfare to leave any archeological evidence of their passing, according to a new investigation. The case is a cold one, with little physical evidence left behind beyond drawings and archaeological excavation notes from the 1930s. But a new analysis of those materials published in January in the American Journal of Archaeology finds that the soldiers likely did not die by the sword as the original excavator believed. Instead, they were gassed.

Where there's smoke

In the 250s, the Persian Sasanian Empire set its sights on taking the Syrian city of Dura from Rome. The city, which backs up against the Euphrates River, was by this time a Roman military base, well-fortified with meters-thick walls.

The Persians set about tunneling underneath those walls in an effort to bring them down so troops could rush into the city. They likely started their excavations 130 feet (40 meters) away from the city, in a tomb in Dura's underground necropolis. Meanwhile, the Roman defenders dug their own countermines in hopes of intercepting the tunneling Persians.

The outlines of this underground cat-and-mouse game was first sketched out by French archaeologist Robert du Mesnil du Buisson, who first excavated these siege tunnels in the 1920s and 30s. Du Mesnil also found the piled bodies of at least 19 Roman soldiers and one lone Persian in the tunnels beneath the city walls. He envisioned fierce hand-to-hand combat underground, during which the Persians drove back the Romans and then set fire to the Roman tunnel. Crystals of sulfur and bitumen, a naturally occurring, tar-like petrochemical, were found in the tunnel, suggesting that the Persians made the fire fast and hot.

Something about that scenario didn't make sense to Simon James, an archaeologist and historian from the University of Leicester in England. For one thing, it would have been difficult to engage in hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels, which could barely accommodate a man standing upright. For another, the position of the bodies on du Mesnil's sketches didn't match a scenario in which the Romans were run through or burned to death.

"This wasn't a pile of people who had been crowded into a small space and collapsed where they stood," James told LiveScience. "This was a deliberate pile of bodies."

Using old reports and sketches, James reconstructed the events in the tunnel on that deadly day. At first, he said, he thought the Romans had trampled each other while trying to escape the tunnel. But when he suggested that idea to his colleagues, one suggested an alternative: What about smoke?

Fumes of hell

Chemical warfare was well established by the time the Persians besieged Dura, said Adrienne Mayor, a historian at Stanford University and author of "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World" (Overlook Press, 2003).

"There was a lot of chemical warfare [in the ancient world]," Mayor, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. "Few people are aware of how much there is documented in the ancient historians about this."

One of the earliest examples, Mayor said, was a battle in 189 B.C., when Greeks burnt chicken feathers and used bellows to blow the smoke into Roman invaders' siege tunnels. Petrochemical fires were a common tool in the Middle East, where flammable naphtha and oily bitumen were easy to find. Ancient militaries were endlessly creative: When Alexander the Great attacked the Phoenician city of Tyre in the fourth century B.C., Phoenician defenders had a surprise waiting for him.

"They heated fine grains of sand in shields, heated it until it was red-hot, and then catapulted it down onto Alexander's army," Mayor said. "These tiny pieces of red-hot sand went right under their armor and a couple inches into their skin, burning them."  

So the idea that the Persians had learned how to make toxic smoke is, "totally plausible," Mayor said.

"I think [James] really figured out what happened," she said.

In the new interpretation of the clash in the tunnels of Dura, the Romans heard the Persians working beneath the ground and steered their tunnel to intercept their enemies. The Roman tunnel was shallower than the Persian one, so the Romans planned to break in on the Persians from above. But there was no element of surprise for either side: The Persians could also hear the Romans coming.

So the Persians set a trap. Just as the Romans broke through, James said, they lit a fire in their own tunnel. Perhaps they had a bellows to direct the smoke, or perhaps they relied on the natural chimney effect of the shaft between the two tunnels. Either way, they threw sulfur and bitumen on the flames. One of the Persian soldiers was overcome and died, a victim of his own side's weapon. The Romans met with the choking gas, which turned to sulfuric acid in their lungs.

"It would have almost been literally the fumes of hell coming out of the Roman tunnel," James said.

Any Roman soldiers waiting to enter the tunnels would have hesitated, seeing the smoke and hearing their fellow soldiers dying, James said. Meanwhile, the Persians waited for the tunnel to clear, and then hurried to collapse the Roman tunnel. They dragged the bodies into the stacked position in which du Mesnil would later find them. With no time to ransack the corpses, they left coins, armor and weapons untouched.

Horrors of war

After du Mesnil finished excavations, he had the tunnels filled in. Presumably, the skeletons of the soldiers remain where he found them. That makes proving the chemical warfare theory difficult, if not impossible, James said.

"It's a circumstantial case," he said. "But what it does do is it doesn't invent anything. We've got the actual stuff [the sulfur and bitumen] on the ground. It's an established technique."

If the Persians were using chemical warfare at this time, it shows that their military operations were extremely sophisticated, James said.

"They were as smart and clever as the Romans and were doing the same things they were," he said.

The story also brings home the reality of ancient warfare, James said.

"It's easy to regard this very clinically and look at this as artifacts … Here at Dura you really have got this incredibly vivid evidence of the horrors of ancient warfare," he said. "It was horrendously dangerous, brutal, and one hardly has words for it, really."

source: www.livescience.com

Christos o Arapis (Chris the Coloured man)

Christos' portrait by the famous Greek painter Nikolaos Gyzis

Christos Arapis was a "distinguished" personality in the society of Athens in 19th century.
 He was a beloved person and often the press was hosting articles about him. He was  multilingual  and had a good knowledge of politics and diplomacy which was in fact weird cause he was brought as a slave in Greece from Ethiopia  to serve as a soldier of the Ottoman empire.After the Greek revolution in 1821 and the formation of the Greek state in 1830 he defected towards the Greek side and lived until his death in Athens.
According to the Athenean press of the period he was fully aware of the celebrations and the events in his city and his flowers along with his wishes were arriving first than any other presents. Many modern Greek painters have painted his portrait and a poem was also dedicated to him when he died.
He died in Athens dissapointed about how the things were going about the recently formed Greek state. There's a memorable quote he uttered before his death.«την ελευθερία σας καταντήσατε κλεφτερία» which means You have turned your freedom into stealing  Adressing towards the corrupted financial ministers of the government.

A Greek scientist who acquired his nuclear physics knowledge through self-study

The title says: Self studying atomic scientist finds a way to materialize energy

Nicholas Constantine Christofilos (Νικόλαος Χριστοφίλου) (December 16, 1916 - September 24, 1972) was a Greek-American physicist.

Christofilos was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Greece. He was working for an Athens elevator company when he became interested in high-energy particle physics.

In 1946 he independently developed ideas for a Synchrotron and in 1949 he conceived the strong-focusing principle. Rather than publishing in a journal he submitted a patent application in the US and Greece. His discovery went unnoticed for several years and strong-focusing was rediscovered in 1952 and applied to accelerators at Brookhaven, Cornell and CERN.

Christofilos was offered a position at Brookhaven in 1953. In 1956 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to continue his work on ASTRON a proposed thermonuclear reactor under the Sherwood Project.

At LLNL, Christofilos worked on a number of military projects. He became a member of JASON and was the principal behind Operation Argus, a series of high-altitude nuclear detonations intended to create a radiation belt in the upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere as a defence against Soviet ICBMs.

In the early 1960s Christofilos proposed Extreme low Frequency Waves (ELF) as practical way to communicate with submarines. The concept was tested in a 22500-square-mile antenna system called Project Sanguine.

The greek assasin of the apartheid architect. A madman? or a Modern Harmodius and Aristogeiton

Dimitris Tsafendas

Prior life

Tsafendas was born in Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo) to Michaelis Tsafendas, a Greek seaman, and Amelia Williams, a Mozambican of mixed race. He was raised by his grandmother. At the age of ten, he moved toTransvaal, returning to Mozambique four years later. Tsafendas was shunned in white circles in Southern Africa because of his dark skin, though under the Apartheid system's racial laws he was classified as white.

During the 1930s, Tsafendas joined the Communist Party. He became a seaman in the merchant marine in 1941. By this time, symptoms of schizophrenia had already begun to manifest. He was hospitalized several times in various countries due to outbreaks of irrational behavior.

He had become a baptised member of the Twos by Twos sect while visiting Greece, and associated with its members after returning to South Africa on a temporary visa.

In 1966, Tsafendas obtained a temporary position as a parliamentary messenger. A month later on 6 September, Prime Minister Verwoerd entered the House of assembly and made his way to his seat. Tsafendas approached him, drew a concealed knife, and stabbed Dr. Verwoerd multiple times in the chest before he could be pulled away by other members of parliament.

Following the assassination, he was disowned by the Two by Twos church.

Aftermath

At the trial, Judge Andries Beyers declared Tsafendas not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. He had been diagnosed as being schizophrenic and it was claimed by police that he had said that he had a giant tapeworm inside him, which spoke to him. The court ordered that he be detained "at the pleasure of the State President", which meant that only the State President (later President) had the authority to release him. He was never released.

Tsafendas was at first given a cell on death row in Pretoria Central Prison, next to the room in which men were hanged, sometimes seven at a time. In 1986, he was transferred to Zonderwater Prison near Cullinan. In 1994, he was transferred again, this time to Sterkfontein psychiatric hospital outside Krugersdorp, where he died at the age of 81.

Tsafendas died in October 1999 of pneumonia aggravated by chronic heart failure. His funeral was held according to Greek Orthodox rites, and he was buried in an unmarked grave outside Sterkfontein Hospital.

An award-winning play entitled Tsafendas by Anton Krueger was presented to South African audiences in 2002. A London production entitled . was written by the noted Shakespearean actor Anthony Sher, who had lived in Cape Town at the time of the incident. I.D. premiered at the Almeida Theater in London in 2003, followed by an American debut in 2005.

The Greek-American battalion of WW2.

The 122nd marching with an American and a Greek flag

122nd INFANTRY BATTALION

This photo, taken in Camp Carson, Colorado in early 1943, pictures the first and only time a foreign flag was allowed to fly next to the American flag leading a United States Armed Forces group on American soil.!!! Passing in review for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and General George C. Marshall, the soldiers were Greek-American and Greek Immigrants, many of whom were not yet American citizens.

The Battalion Commander was Major Peter D.  Clainos, the first Greek born American to graduate from the West Point Academy and a co-founder of the Sons of Pericles.  A demanding task master, Major Clainos vowed that he would not allow his men to embarrass themselves or the Greek People and made certain they were well trained and in outstanding physical condition.

When the "Greek Battalion" was disbanded, most of its members were transferred to infantry units that fought in both the European and Pacific Theaters.  One hundred-sixty members of the Battalion volunteered for a small elite commando group that fought with the Greek Resistance in Greece as members of the Greek/US Operational Group, Office of Strategic Services.

Carlos Mavroleon: A Greek Mujahideen

Carlos Mavroleon

Carlos Mavroleon

 He was the old Etonian heir to a £100m fortune. He was close to the Kennedys and almost married a Heseltine. He'd been a Wall Street broker and a war correspondent. He'd even been a leader of the Mujahideen. So why did Carlos Mavroleon die of a heroin overdose in a rundown hotel near the Afghan border?

Peshawar is a rough town. Its bazaars are thick with suppressed violence and its traders rarely smile. Five times a day the call to prayer howls through the air in a clatter of static and guttural vowels. At night the roads rattle with automatic gunfire and it is impossible to tell if there has been a wedding or an assassination.

Many people die in Peshawar, violently or otherwise. Nobody chooses to end their days there. No one asks for his ashes to be scattered in the churned mud of the Storytellers Bazaar or from the battlements of the Purana Qila, the old fort. To the west of the city, the Khyber Pass leads up through the dusty, rocky hills of the Hindu Kush towards the border with Afghanistan. When the pollution above the city clears, the hills are sharp against a very blue sky. But they are gritty, sullen mountains and no traveller wants his bones to lie among them.

Carlos Mavroleon didn't want to die here. Certainly not in the small, claustrophobic hotel room where they found his heroin-soaked body, on 27 August 1998. Carlos didn't want to die anywhere. Perhaps more than at any other time in his incredible life, Carlos wanted to be alive.

He had packed it in to his 40 years. The old Etonian heir to a £100m fortune, he had been a war correspondent, a Wall Street broker, a lover of glamorous women from glamorous political dynasties (the Kennedys) and from less glamorous ones (the Heseltines). He had been a cool, gimlet-eyed war reporter, blowing off the tension of his assignments in the bars and clubs of Notting Hill. He had commanded a unit of Afghan Mujahideen against the Red Army and had been a bodyguard for a Pakistani tribal chief. And, for most of his adult life, Carlos had been a regular user of speed, coke, Ecstasy, heroin and enough pharmaceutical products to stock a large, if specialised, chemist.

But through it all, it seems, he knew what he was doing. Carlos was rarely, if ever, out of control. He pushed it to the edge, looked over - and came back again. And again and again and again. Except in Peshawar on that stinking hot August day two years ago.

On 7 August 1998, two massive blasts devastated the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and killed more than 200 people. American investigators followed the trail of the bombers from East Africa to Pakistan and on, via Peshawar, into eastern Afghanistan. Thirteen days after the explosions, President Clinton launched 75 cruise missiles against the camps that the CIA believed were run by Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind supposedly behind the attacks. It was called, slightly optimistically, Operation Infinite Reach, and successfully killed a dozen or so young Pakistanis who were training in the camps as well several blameless old men and a large number of goats. When the missiles went in, I was in Kandahar, a fiercely Islamic city in the desert south of Afghanistan. We heard of the attack at about midnight and I spent much of the night filing to my newspaper. It was only at dawn that I really began to realise the situation. We sat tight in the United Nations compound and listened to the radio and the chanting from the mosque.

Feelings ran high in the aftermath of the strike. In Kandahar, it took a long speech from the most senior cleric in the city to stop the mob marching on us. In Kabul, the capital 300 miles to the north, two UN peacekeepers were machine-gunned, one fatally. There were huge demonstrations against the Americans across Pakistan. Reports started circulating in Peshawar that a bounty of $15,000 had been offered by Bin Laden for dead Westerners.

Carlos was staying with his family at his father's seaside home in Athens when the missiles went in. He arrived back at his flat in Fulham, west London, to find 12 messages winking at him on the answerphone. Carlos was known to other journalists as a 'shithole specialist'. The worse the war, the deeper the poverty, the nastier the place, the better Carlos liked it. His favourite shithole was Afghanistan. The calls on his answerphone can't have been unexpected. He rang CBS, the American TV network, to accept an assignment for their flagship Sixty Minutes programme. Leslie Cockburn, the producer at CBS, knew him well. 'I can't imagine why you are calling,' he joked when he called her. 'By the way, I have a multiple Afghan visa.'

CBS wanted him to get to Peshawar as soon as possible to try to get to the camps. The hardline Taliban militia who ruled much of Afghanistan - including the bit I was stuck in - were not letting any journalists into Afghanistan. To get into the country would mean travelling in disguise. It would be very risky. Even a team of Afghan journalists had been badly beaten up and narrowly escaped execution when they tried the same exercise. But if anyone could pull it off, he could. Carlos called his fiancée, a 26-year-old TV researcher who he was due to marry in November, and then rang his father. 'Don't worry, papa, I'll be careful,' he told him. He packed his gear, picked up a $5,000 expenses advance and flew straight out to Pakistan on Emirates first class. He arrived in Peshawar on 23 August and checked into Green's hotel just off the central Saddar Bazaar. He had four days to live.

Saddar police station is only a mile from Green's hotel. Ten days after Carlos' death a smiling detective called Nisar Ali Marwat flicked a brown file on to his glass-topped desk and told me to read it. Under a slowly rotating fan, I leafed through the badly typed pages. A heavily moustached sergeant brought sweet, milky tea in stained cups. Another, sitting on a broken chair behind me, played with his handgun while I read, emptying and refilling the magazine with small, snub-nosed bullets.

The death certificate was numbered 83/98. It gave the cause of death as 'Heroin poisoning (self)'. The autopsy was conducted at 8am on 28 August by Professor Inayatur Rehman Khalil of the Khyber Medical College, Peshawar. Time of death: between 18 and 24 hours before the time of the autopsy. Carlos's body was fully rigormortised and showed no visible signs of violence. All organs were normal. The face and upper part of the chest were 'livid'. There was a blood-stained discharge from the right nostril. The left arm showed a prick-mark in the ante-cubital region and an insulin syringe contaminated with blood lay beside the body. The syringe tested positive for diacetyl morphine (heroin). Carlos's stomach also tested weakly for diacetyl morphine. There were three small packets of drugs in the room. One, opened, was diacetyl morphine. The second was crude powdered opium. The third was an antihistamine tranquilizer called chlorophenaramine maleate.

According to the police statements, Carlos was sitting upright on his bed when he was found, a cigarette between his lips. The bloody syringe was on the coffee table in front of him. There was also a blackened coin. He had died of 'heroin asphyxiation'.

A press photograph taken of his body as it was removed from the hotel shows a swarthy, good-looking man with tight, black curly hair that made him look much younger than his 40 years and a lean, muscular body. He was stripped to the waist when he died and was wearing baggy, local-style trousers.

Another sheet of paper listed his belongings: satellite phone and spare battery, camera charger, British passport B451472, small video camera, Leatherman-style knife/tool, Sony audio recorder, first-aid kit, Maglite torch, tripod and head, Sony shortwave radio stethoscope, four syringes, duty-free pack of Marlboro Lights, sewing kit, video camera battery packs and charger, two shalwar kameez (local baggy trouser and shirt), white local prayer cap, local leather sandals, Holy Koran (translation), books of Islamic history - four, $1,800 in $100 bills, $2,400 in $50 bills, and 12,265 Pakistani rupees [£150].

I read the list and looked up at Nisar Ali Marwat. The man behind me had put his pistol away. The tea cups had left oily stains on the glass of his desk. He shrugged.

When 'Bluey' Mavroleon said goodbye to his son for the last time he cannot have been too reassured by his promise to be careful. Carlos may have been kind, brave, intelligent and charming. But, by ordinary standards, he was not careful.

But then Carlos had never lived by ordinary standards. He was born in April 1958 and grew up in the rarefied air of real high society, not the ersatz Hello! version. His father is a Greek shipping tycoon who was once married to Somerset Maugham's granddaughter Camilla. She eventually left him, when Carlos was three, for Count Freddy Chandon, head of the champagne house Moët et Chandon. Carlos's mother, Giaconda, is Mexican. His brother, Nicky, is married to the filmstar Barbara Carrera. The family fortune is estimated at £100m. Carlos's address book contained phone numbers for Fawn Hall, the secretary at the heart of the Iran-Contra affair and an old flame, Barbara Streisand and Christina Onassis. He went out with Annabel Heseltine, the journalist daughter of the former deputy prime minister for two years. She wanted to marry him. When it became clear that something awful had happened to Carlos, Ethel Kennedy, wife of Bobby senior, rang the White House to find out exactly what was wrong.

In 1979, Bluey inherited the family fortune. Carlos grew up in London's Eaton and Cadogan squares and was sent to Eton but, though he did well, hated it. He started to rebel, at first in the ordinary ways; with left-wing politics, music that his parents wouldn't like, soft drugs and drink. But as ever he soon left the ordinary far behind. At 14, he left his privileged world and signed himself into a London comprehensive.

After two years of taking a lot of LSD and indulging in 'industrial scale shoplifting', he told his parents he was going to the southwest of France to stay with friends. There were no phones, he said, so they wouldn't hear from him for at least two weeks. He had calculated that would give him enough time to get free. He planned to head to Burma and smuggle rubies.

He got as far as Pakistan. High in the Hindu Kush foothills, close to the border with Afghanistan, in lands that are barely controlled by the current Pakistani administration let alone by the British Raj, Carlos did odd jobs - including bodyguard and labourer, learned to speak the guttural language of the Pashto tribesmen who looked after him and converted to Islam. He never contacted his family. They gave him up for dead.

After nearly two years, he returned to Britain and Belgravia, thin, sick and still restless. His family welcomed him back, hopeful that his youthful wanderlust was sated. Carlos worked hard to get his A levels, but played hard, too. He moved from amphetamines and acid to heroin. Before long, he had picked up a serious habit which he never entirely shook.

He may have been reckless, but he wasn't stupid. He crammed at Millfield, a top public school, and got a place at Princeton University. Not satisfied with that, he applied to Harvard and, on the strength of a successful interview and a fistful of forged references, got in to read politics. With his money and connections, he was soon mixing with the best of America's East Coast society. He was a favoured guest of the Kennedy clan. He had an affair with Mary Richardson, who later married Bobby Jnr, and a short fling with Fawn Hall.

From Harvard he went on to Wall Street. It was the 80s and Carlos, intelligent, well-connected and bold, did well. He lived in Manhattan. He made a lot of money. And spent much of it on cocaine and heroin.

And yet it wasn't enough. By 1985, the attractions of his Manhattan lifestyle had palled. He flew to Islamabad - the capital of Pakistan - and drove up to Peshawar. It was then the main headquarters and logistics base for the guerrilla groups. He introduced himself to them and convinced them to take him into Afghanistan. It was his first taste of war. Within months of returning to America he had sold the New York apartment and was on his way back to the sub-continent. He was 26.

A canal runs through Peshawar. It is full of refuse and dead animals, but the children play in it anyway. By the banks of the canal, in a bungalow set back behind high walls and a courtyard, is the Afghan Media Resource Centre (AMRC). Throughout the Afghan war, it funded journalists' trips into Afghanistan and disseminated the material they collected. It is widely believed to have been set up and supported by the CIA. Carlos used to sleep on its floor between trips 'inside'.

One of the films they have at the AMRC was taken in June 1988 near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. I watched it an hour or so after reading through the police report on Carlos's death. A keen young Afghan projected it on to the only wall not covered in pictures of blown up tanks, dead guerrillas or Russian soldiers, burned out villages and downed helicopters.

First the camera pans across a field full of Mujahideen fighters. They are waiting to go into action, squatting with their weapons in lines in the sun or standing in the shade of trees. In the background are the mountains typical of eastern Afghanistan. The film flickers, jumps and weaves. A bearded, grinning Carlos appears.

'My name is Karimullah,' he says, his voice deep and unaccented. He is wearing the pakol - the beret-like woollen cap of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan - and has four curved magazines and an AK47 slung across his shoulders. He is a head taller than everyone else. His new name means 'blessed by God'.

'I am a Mujahideen,' he continues. 'We are making an attack today on the city of Jalalabad. All the Mujahideen commanders have come together for this attack. I am very happy and proud to be with my Mujahideen brothers. Allahu Akbar. God is great.' Karimullah then continues in fluent Pashto. 'I am from London. In London I fought the Jihad with a pen. Now I fight it with a sword. I have come to Afghanistan to take part in the Jihad.'

The cameraman asks if when the Jihad is over Carlos/Karimullah will bring his family to Afghanistan. 'Inshallah [God willing],' he replies with a broad smile. Carlos had arrived in Peshawar three years previously. At first he had been involved in the political side of the Mujahideen's struggle, handling foreign journalists and visiting American VIPs, but the urge to be physically involved in the action became too strong. By 1988, he was an experienced fighter and, according to former comrades-in-arms, a good one.

'When you go into battle, you do what you are told. Karimullah would do whatever he was asked and do it well,' said one former comrade. Several former fighters said that by the end of his time in Afghanistan, Carlos was in charge of a dozen men and was running ambushes by himself. He was always in the thick of any action and even prayed longer and harder than his comrades. One former Mujahideen remembered how Carlos had gone outside for dawn prayers in a freezing gale and had returned wet through. 'We laughed at him when he came back in, but he just said "Ahumdilallah [God be praised]", and lay down again.'

In 1989, the Soviets pulled out. The war carried on as the guerrillas took on the Moscow-backed government's forces, but Carlos was becoming disillusioned with the infighting among the various groups. It was time to reinvent himself again. He returned to London and within months had metamorphosed into a war correspondent. At the end of his time in Afghanistan he had worked as a cameraman and had shot footage of frontline action. With that, and his languages and charm, the work was soon rolling in. In 1991, he was in Oman trying to sneak, in disguise, into Kuwait during the Gulf War. He failed, but succeeded in getting into northern Iraq a few months later. The next assignment was Somalia, then the Sudan, Burma, Angola, Rwanda and back to Afghanistan. On several occasions, he found himself back in Peshawar. Twice he tried and failed to use his connections with the Mujahideen to get access to Osama Bin Laden.

In the early 90s, he made a number of trips to Somalia for the American networks. Tim Deagle, a journalist who had worked with Carlos in East Africa, said their time together had revealed Carlos as 'a seriously good human being'. 'Despite everything we saw - and we saw hundreds of dead bodies in a day - he never lost his compassion. We went into one village and there were about three people left uninjured and he went around giving out first aid and looking after people. Most would have just taken their pictures and left.'

Yet there was a spirit of recklessness in Carlos, a flamboyance, that seemed never to die. Deagle remembered his colleague insisted on a lunch-stop during a particularly chaotic moment during the fighting. 'He had found two lobsters, so we stopped in a field hospital with an army withdrawing around us and cooked them up and ate them with bayonets.'

On another occasion, Deagle found Carlos standing on top of a jeep with a pistol in his hand, a huge stack of dollars in the other and a crowd of angry Somali gunmen around him. 'NBC and ABC had asked him to pay off the people they had hired for protection. Carlos told them all they had to pray before he would pay them. You or I would have been executed on the spot, but he got away with it. He always did.'

In between trips, he had a number of relationships - 'women just flocked to him' according to his brother - and took a lot of cocaine. He spent time in the clubs and bars of Chelsea and Notting Hill. He read dozens of books, usually classics, and read and re-read TE Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom . He wrote book reviews for the Literary Review . Almost always he managed to keep his addiction hidden. Colleagues who he worked with closely for years never saw him take drugs. There are hints though that he did. Several people in Peshawar told me that he had got into an argument with an Afghan journalist after smoking heroin in Jalalabad. It was in 1996 after a second failed attempt to find Bin Laden. It seems Carlos didn't cope with disappointment well.

Green's hotel is gloomy and claustrophobic. Poor backpackers and wealthy Pakistanis stay there, not journalists working for American networks. Carlos's room cost £8 a night and was on the third floor facing east. From its small window there was a view of tangled electricity wires and roofs.

Carlos arrived in Peshawar on the evening of Sunday 23 August. He dumped his bags and walked a hundred or so yards to the office of The News - a local paper - to catch up with Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pathan reporter who knows everyone and everything. If Osama Bin Laden wants to talk to the Western world he gives a statement to Rahimullah. So do the Taliban.

Rahimullah knew Carlos from the time of the Afghan war and was generous with his advice. He was happy to talk over the various ways to get to the bombed camps, even though he was trying to work out how to reach them himself. Yusufzai told Carlos what he must have suspected: that his only chance was to disguise himself as a local and work his way through the mountains and across the border. The best place to try, Rahimullah said, was from the small town of Miram Shah which is only a score or so miles from the camps themselves. The next day Carlos hired a car - a big Toyota pick-up - and a driver and set off. By nightfall he was at Bannu, a dusty town on the edge of the mountains, by late afternoon on the next day he was in Miram Shah itself.

Within hours he was picked up by Pakistani intelligence services. It was the evening of Tuesday the 25th. Though the Pakistani spooks didn't touch him, they scared him. The whole of the country was jittery after the strikes and the intelligence services were more jumpy than anyone. Despite his credentials, he must have had a hard job convincing his interrogators of his true identity and purpose. After a tense and sleepless night he was put on a bus back to Peshawar. As he was not found to be in the possession of heroin when picked up on Tuesday evening, it is fair to assume that he bought the drug after his release from custody.

Around 7.30pm the next day, Cockburn, his producer, began calling Carlos's satellite phone. It rang out every time. By the evening, she was very anxious. She called Green's and was told that Carlos had his key and was in his room which was locked. She kept trying the sat'phone. Eventually the hotel staff used a master key to open the door of the room. Carlos was dead on the bed. He had died a few hours earlier.

I arrived in Peshawar on the day Carlos died. After three days stuck in the UN compound while the authorities tried to restrain angry mobs in the streets we were finally evacuated by the UN back to Pakistan and I had driven up to Peshawar to cover the story of the missile strikes' fall-out from there. After only a few hours in the city, a local newspaper editor, Faisal Quazi, called me on my mobile to ask if I knew anything about the dead British cameraman.

That evening, Peter Jouvenal, a veteran cameraman who knew Carlos from the days of the Afghan war, mentioned over a drink that the dead man had been to Eton. Suddenly everyone wanted an answer to the same question: how did a man with so much end up dying in such a mean and sordid way? Two year's on there is still no good answer. And, as a result, though the authorities have officially closed the file, there are many who believe that the bald facts of the police report and the post-mortem are concealing something more sinister.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that Carlos would have been unlikely to have accidentally overdosed. Nicky Mavroleon pointed out that his brother was an experienced drug user. 'Carlos used to tell me that to him it was like having a drink. When he was having a good time he just wanted to get high... but he always knew what he was doing,' he said. Carlos did have a doctorate in drugs and he was far from unused to the vagaries of the local Peshawar heroin.

Also, everyone seems to agree Carlos had not injected for years. Not since 1993 according to his doctor. He had been put off by a friend dying of Aids some years before, his father said. Would he suddenly switch back to syringes? Particularly if, as the police suggest, he had already been smoking the drug.

Could he have committed suicide? Rahimullah Yusufzai saw him shortly before he died and said that though he was shaken by his ordeal at the hands of the intelligence men he was not too worried. A CNN cameraman who bumped into him in a Peshawar street later that day said, with no pun intended, that he 'seemed full of beans, really on a high'.

'He told us how he had been in prison and seemed to think that it was all very amusing,' the cameraman said. 'He had a cutting from a local paper that said that he was a British spy which he said he was going to have framed.'

Everybody who knew him said he was planning to settle down and was as happy as he had ever been. He was to marry in the autumn and was, according to his father, 'devoted' to his fiancée. He had also never entirely lost his Muslim faith and in Islam suicide is as great a sin as it is in Catholicism.

And it seems strange that he would be taking drugs at all. As an old south Asian hand, he must have known that, at least following his arrest, he would almost certainly be under surveillance? Would he have bought the heroin anyway? So would an experienced drug-user make a major mistake using a method he had given up at a time of his life when more than anything he wanted to be clean and happy?

Carlos Mavroleon after he had converted to Islam

The answer has to be yes. If the suicide scenario is rejected, as it has to be, and the accidental overdose explanation is thrown out too, you are left with nothing but half-baked conspiracy theories. We know that he was tailed throughout his stay in Peshawar and that Green's hotel staff were interrogated by intelligence men both before and after his death. And we know that he was suspected of being a spy. And we can assume the intelligence services, who were tailing him, knew he had bought drugs. But Peshawar breeds conspiracy theories. The basic fact is that there are easier ways to kill someone than making them inject themselves with a deadly syringe. You have to apply Occam's Razor. What is more plausible - an accidental suicide or a plot involving spooks and forced overdoses? In the end, all that you are left with is a grieving family, a brown file on a police chief's desk, a dozen badly typed sheets of paper and the pathologist's 'Heroin poisoning (self)'. The most likely scenario is that a bitterly disappointed Carlos turned to the stand-by which had always helped him when he was feeling low. Relatives say that despite his amazing life he actually had very low self-esteem. The heroin was a prop when he felt down.

And that afternoon in Peshawar the disappointment must have been acute. He desperately wanted the assignment to work. To have got the footage from the camps would have made him a media star. He was 40, wanted children, wanted to settle down and wanted some conventional respect from his more conventional peers. And having, in the last few years, watched reporters like Carlos working in Iraq, in Sierra Leone, in half a dozen other such places, I have seen, and felt the sense of heroic difference, the adolescent joy at your distance from the nine-to-five, from the office, from the suits. Heroin gives you that distance, too. If, when he returned to Green's hotel, Carlos momentarily lacked it he wouldn't for long. To start with he would have felt a mellow, sleepy high as the drug triggered the release of dopamine in his brain. It is quite likely that, if he started off smoking the drug, he would welcome the rush of an injection straight into the bloodstream. If you haven't been using the drug for a while the rush is, one regular heroin user tells me, intensified. A wave of contentment overcomes you. Things stop mattering. For Carlos, by the late afternoon of 27 August 1998, as the towers of Peshawar's mosques stretched their shadows across the superheated roofs of the city and the loudspeakers crackled into the Maghreb prayer, nothing mattered at all.

I left Pakistan earlier this year. Every week I get calls from old friends and contacts in Peshawar and Islamabad. Recently, I have been asking if anything new has turned up on Carlos's death. People have forgotten it now, and these days I am offered friendly advice rather than information. 'Let sleeping ghosts lie,' said one police officer I know.

If Carlos has a ghost it is unlikely to be sleeping.


source: The Guardian

A Greek-Georgian cosmonaut

FYODOR NIKOLAYEVICH YURCHIKHIN
His mother is Greek and his father Georgian 

FYODOR NIKOLAYEVICH YURCHIKHIN (PH.D.)
RSC ENERGIA TEST-COSMONAUT

PERSONAL DATA: Born January 3, 1959, in Batumi, Autonomous Republic of Ajara in Georgia. Married to Larisa Anatolievna Yurshikina, born in Shyolkovo, Moscow region. They have two daughters. His father, Nikolai Fyodorovich Yurchikhin, and mother, Mikrula Sofoklevna Yurchikhina(from Grammatikopoulos family), reside in Sindos, Greece. He also has a brother, 2 years younger. Hobbies include collecting stamps and space logos, sports, history of cosmonautics, and promotion of space. He also enjoys reading history, science fiction and the classics.

EDUCATION: After graduation from high school in Batumi in 1976, he entered the Moscow Aviation Institute named after Sergey Ordzhonikidze. He finished studying in 1983, and is qualified as a mechanical engineer, specializing in airspace vehicles. In 2001, he graduated from the Moscow Service State University with a Ph.D. in economics.

EXPERIENCE: Since graduating from the S. Ordzhonikidze Moscow Aviation Institute in 1983, Yurchikhin has worked at the Russian Space Corporation Energia. He began working as a controller in the Russian Mission Control Center, and held the positions of engineer, senior engineer, and lead engineer, eventually becoming a lead engineer for Shuttle-Mir and NASA-Mir Programs.

In August 1997, he was enrolled in the RSC Energia cosmonaut detachment as a cosmonaut-candidate.

From January 1998 to November 1999, he completed his basic training course. In November 1999, he was qualified as a test cosmonaut. In January 2000, he started training in the test-cosmonaut group for the ISS program.

In October 2002, Fyodor Yurchikhin flew aboard STS-112. In completing his first space flight he has logged a total of 10 days, 19 hours, and 58 minutes in space.

Fyodor Yurchikhin is currently serving a six month tour of duty as commander of the Expedition-15 mission to the International Space Station. Expedition-15 launched on April 7 aboard a Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft arriving at the ISS complex on April 9, 2007.

SPACE FLIGHT EXPERIENCE: STS-112 Atlantis (October 7-18, 2002) launched from and returned to land at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. STS-112 was an International Space Station assembly mission during which the crew conducted joint operations with the Expedition-5 by delivering and installing the S-One Truss (the third piece of the station's 11-piece Integrated Truss Structure). Three spacewalks were required to outfit and activate the new component. The crew also transferred cargo between the two vehicles and used the shuttle's thruster jets during two maneuvers to raise the station's orbit. STS-112 was the first shuttle mission to use a camera on the External Tank, providing a live view of the launch to flight controllers and NASA TV viewers. The STS-112 mission was accomplished in 170 orbits, traveling 4.5 million miles in 10 days, 19 hours, and 58 minutes.