PART SIXTY-TWO: In the Salon of Noor Sallajer (January 6th, 1868 – March 3rd, 1870)
After the conclusion of her second presidential term in 1815, Noor Sallajer— still only 42 years old— chose not only to eschew a second term, but to exit politics as a whole. Selling off the assets of her Thessaloniki printing house, she retired to an Athenian townhouse. She established what became known as the Sallajer Salon, although as she took pains to keep the gatherings she hosted apolitical, the salon was mostly known for hosting the wildest, most decadent parties the Athenian intelligentsia had known since that sun-drenched apex of the Roman Commonwealth, the reign of Julia Radziwiłł the Great.
Noor Sallajer died on January 21st, 1868, at the age of 94. Contemporary newspapers say she died in her sleep, but diaries kept by patrons of the salon write that the republic’s founder died beaming after leading a raucous three raucous toasts— the first to the victory of the Republicans in the Byzantine Civil War, the second to the execution of Kaisarios II Komnenos, and the third to the death of the Roman Empire. Three, of course, is an auspicious number in republican ideology— Ryuzoji Nagahito created three branches of government for the three gifts Amaterasu bestowed upon Nigini-no-Mikoto and put three cherry blossoms on the three-colored banner he hoisted above his new republic. Three leading generals (Demetriou, Cyrahzax, Sniperid) leading three revolutionary armies. Three stars over the moon of Constantinople (or Artemis, or Islam, or…)
“Sallajer’s Three Toasts” became the stuff of legends among the Byzantines for decades afterwards, until the 1880s, when Sallajer’s personal effects were transferred to new state archives. Among her papers were found notes for a fourth (to Nagahito and the death of the last Fujiwara emperor), fifth (to Brutus, ‘the last free Roman in the world’), sixth (to Manto Hira, for devising such a fine means of separating the heads of tyrants from their bodies), and seventh (for the future hiratining of the world’s remaining absolute monarchs) toast.
In any case, after the death of Noor Sallajer, the heirs to her estate saw no reason to keep the salon apolitical, and the Sallajer Salon became known as one of the premier intellectual battlegrounds between proponents of the Republic’s various political factions.
As well as the drinking, dancing, and scandalous fashions, of course.
DEBATE PARTICIPANTS
For the Junonians
Citizen Dionysos Gobroon
For the Irenicists
Rabbi Liraz Tavori
For HERMES
Citizen Philomon Anatolikos
For the Labour Party
Citizen Farooq Baydar
Fatima Sallajer, hostess
GOBROON (Junonians): Reyhan Hamzaoğlu was, quite simply, the greatest President the Republic has had since the Sallajer administration. I need not remind you of her instrumental role in achieving victory in the Komnenos revolt, thereby maintaining the status of the Republic as one of the most powerful & free powers in all an increasingly unstable world. Nationalism & other poisonous ideologies destablized all those powers who made the divers people under their rule subjects rather than citizens.
Even the Home Nations of Great Britain were seized by a strange & unfathomable mania, which saw the banners of the long-dead kingdoms of Wales, England, and Scotland borne by mobs of hooligans agitated to a fever pitch.
Nationalism is not true liberty. It is simply base tribalism, dressed in liberal motley. Only by maintaining the ideas of the Enlightenment can we gain the future our children richly deserve.
But even if we confine our inquiry to the practical, the tangible, evidence for the good and temperate governance of Citizen Hamzaoğlu exists in abundance. Contrast the declining fortunes of the French…
…with the speed with which we re-ascended the ranks of the Great Powers mere months after the conclusion of a major civil war.
TAVORI (Irenicists): Odd that you write off nationalism as a mask over tribalism, when so often modern “liberalism” is but a mask over primitive accumulation. Hamzaoğlu, to her credit, turned a blind eye to the attempts of my colleagues in the Labour Party to organize communities of workers to oppose the worst depredations of those pillars of liberal society, the bourgeois capitalist…
…but occasionally, the mask slips, and liberalism’s handmaiden, anarcho-capitalism rears its ugly head.
ANATOLIKOS (HERMES): Oh, fuck off. Trying to link HERMES to a bunch of Pangalist hotheads who started some pissant little rebellion? We’re a respectable political party who regularly caucus with Julians and Junonians. Anyway, Pangalos got blown up by the army in like three seconds, so it’s not like it mattered.
Justinian Pangalos, the world’s most dangerous economist
BAYDAR (Labour): And yet you and Pangalos still share a common vision of the future.
ANATOLIKOS: No shit we no. Industry is the future, industrialists should run the future. Q.E. fuckin’ D.
Even the French realize that, although they’ve still handed the keys to a bunch of imbred ninnies descended from the chief ass-wiper to Hugh Capet in the year who the hell cares, instead of, you know, self-made men and women who pulled themselves up by their own– under their own steam. Difference between pulling your carriage with a thoroughbred horse and replacing your carriage with a fuckin’ locomotive. We’re the locomotive, and you citizens of Byzantium are lucky enough to be hitched to us instead of standing besides the road shooting your horse in the fucking head ’cause it broke its stupid spindly legs.
Fuck horses! Why do our cities still smell like animal dung? That’s literally horseshit. Why do all the fucking mouth-breathers in Constantinople think the height of entertainment is watching a horse run around in a circle? Go watch a baseball game! Or if you haven’t mastered the use of simple tools, just kick the ball around like the Brits do. At least you aren’t taking a giant crap on the pitch that way.
SALLAJER (hostess): Less horseflesh, more politics, Citizen Anatolikos.
ANATOLIKOS: Okay, look, look– all that doesn’t change the fact that Pangalos went about it in the most short-sighted, boneheaded way possible. It’s not enough to have an ideology that’s right, you gotta have what the Krauts call realpolitik. It’s– hm, what’s something we all agree on. We all think we’re better off without an emperor, right? No man or woman shall conspire to restore the empire of Rome. Right? Right.
Okay, so now that we all agree with that, clearly Hamzaoğlu should have marched to Berlin, grabbed Charlotte von Habsburg, and cut her fucking head off.
What? She’s Holy Roman Empress. Holy Roman Empress. Says “Roman Empire” right on the fucking map! So we should behead her, right?
Of course not. That’s idiotic. We need them to fuck over France. Realpolitik.
BAYDAR: So the Pangalists were wrong not for their selfish and destructive ideology, but simply because of the means they used to attempt to gain power— armed insurrection.
ANATOLIKOS: Right.
BAYDAR: So is the Lithuanian Republic equally illegitimate?
ANATOLIKOS: Are you even paying attention to me? The Jacobins in Lithuania won. They didn’t jump the gun. Holy shit, it’s like I’m speaking Taíno over here.
SALLAJER (hostess): We’re talking in circles. Let’s discuss the election of 1870.
GOBROON: Yes, let’s! For the conduct of the elections themselves testament to the brilliance of President Hamzaoğlu’s leadership. Not one year prior the Republic was still ruptured by the scourge of civil war and royalist insurrection— yet by August 1869, the campaigning season was proceeding in the regular fashion throughout the Republic, from Constantinople and Athens to deep in Komnenos territory.
TAVORI: Yes, quite magnanimous of the President to allow the election to proceed legally, instead of, say, gunning down all the socialists. Such restraint! Such nobility! Truly, the greatest leader Byzantium’s had since Iouliana the Great!
GOBROON: We live in chaotic times, rife with revolution, assassination, and horrible volcano death.
TAVORI (aside, to BAYDAR): Who the hell is “Lincoln”? Why is this in our newspaper?
BAYDAR: (Shrugs hoplessly)
GOBROON: An age in which tyrants simply take what they wish.
TAVORI: Well, tell Hamzaoğlu we’re very grateful she let our coalition take its seats in the Assembly instead of having us all murdered and ushering in ten thousand years of liberalism, I guess.
BAYDAR: Well, I guess you can consider this debate won, Citizen Gobroon— Citizen Hamzaoğlu is indeed the greatest president Byzantium has ever had! And to think– she accomplished all this without even serving another term.
Kazimir Duvnjak, Twelfth President of the Byzantine Republic
Inaugurated March 3rd, 1870
The Labour Party
WORLD MAP, 1870