Crumbs from the Table

In 1830, at the time of Belgian independence, the city of Brussels was confined to the historic "pentagon", circumscribed by the old city ramparts which were dismantled between 1812 and 1840, and replaced by wide Parisian-style boulevards. (See also History of Brussels - part 1 )  In 1853, the city expanded beyond the "pentagon" to include Schaerbeek, Etterbeek (part), and Saint-Josse-ten-Noode - what became the Leopold Quarter, and the Quarter of the Squares. In 1864, the city expanded southwards to encompass what became Avenue Louise and Bois de la Cambre. In 1907, the "Jardin du Roi" and "Abbaye de la Cambre" were added (see map below).  An example of this expansion was rue Belliard, which stretches from Avenue des Arts (inner ring) to the Cinquantenaire park. The first section of this road was opened in 1855 (up to Rue van Maerlant ), followed by a second section, completed in 1869 (up to what is now the Cinquantenaire park, previously a mil...

The earliest settlement of what is now Brussels goes back to the year 580 and the island (Saint-Géry island) between two branches of the river Senne which ran through Brussels, on which Gaugericus (Géry), Christian bishop of Cambrai, built a chapel (Saint-Géry Chapel), which remained the oldest place of worship in the city until the building was demolished in the 1790s. (See also  History of Brussels - part 2 ) Brussels is mentioned in the historical record again in 695.  In the year 979, Lambert the Duke of Louvain, fortified the settlement on Saint-Géry Island - this is the traditional date of the founding of Brussels. What is now the Cathedral of Saints Michael and Gudula dates back to a parish church in 1047. In the 1100s, the Dukes of Brabant transformed the fortress on Saint-Géry Island into a inhabitable castle. The city was enclosed by the first city walls ( première enceinte - see shaded region on map to the right) in the 1200s. Brussels had developed into a subs...

I am due to make a trip to Poland soon, and I have been reading up about Polish history.  The original homeland of the Slavic peoples is considered to be the region of Pripyat' in Belarus.  The Polish people descended from the West Slavic tribes, known collectively as the Lechtitic tribes,   who settled in the Vistula and Oder river basins between the 300s and 700s AD. These included the Polans, Vistulans, Pomeranians, Goplans, Lendians, Mazovians, and Silesians, with the Polans playing a central role in unifying them.  The history of Poland begins with the conversion of Duke Mieszko to the Christian faith in 966. The main Christian influence was Great Moravia, the homeland of Mieszka's bride, Dobrawa, a devout Christian - her country having been Christianised by Cyril and Methodius about a century earlier. The map below shows the geographical extent of Poland under the rule of Mieszko. His capital city was at Gniezno. The light blue is the extent of Mieszko's Duchy ...

The beginnings of what became Ebenezer Baptist Church in Bury go back to Andrew Nuttall (1784-1846) from Haslingden who came to live in Bury and started the "cause" as a branch of West Street Church in Rochdale, and later taken on by the "County Home Mission". In 1844, the Home Mission appointed Joseph Harvey as its missioner, and this led to the church being constituted in 1845 with fifteen members including Joseph Harvey (the founding pastor) and Andrew Nuttall.  During Harvey's pastorate, in 1853, the church moved into a permanent building on Knowsley Street (on the site of the present Art Picture House opposite the travel interchange, see picture). There may have been another Baptist church building on Spring Street completed in 1852.  Joseph Harvey would later baptise as a believer Franklin Howorth (d.1882), former minister of Bank Street Unitarian Chapel in Bury. Howorth amicably resigned the ministry at Bank Street and in 1854 started the "Free Chris...

The Age of Enlightenment was a intellectual movement in Europe arguably from the mid-1600s until the start of the 1800s.   The roots of the Enlightenment included a reaction to the religious conflict ensuing from the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, as well as new discoveries in science. These coalesced into a period of thought which emphasised the capacity of human reason to attain knowledge, and no longer needing to rely on the authority of tradition or claims to supernatural revelation. The mood of the Enlightenment can be summed up in the motto, "Sapere aude!" (Dare to know!) One precursor of the Enlightenment was Rene Descartes, a Frenchman residing in the Netherlands, who famously doubted everything apart from his own existence, affirming "I think therefore I am." He published "A discourse on method" in 1637. Another figure at the start of the movement was the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1714).   Many people consider the Enlighten...

The indigenous population of the British isles were Celtic peoples such as the Picts in the north of what is now Scotland, and various tribes of Britons.  In the year 43 AD, the southern part of Britain (without most of what is now Scotland) was invaded by the Romans and integrated into their expanding empire. The Romans retained control of much of Britain until they withdrew in the year 410, leaving the Britons to fend for themselves and defend against attack from the Picts in the North and the Irish in the west.  It was at this time that Germanic peoples living in what is now northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, known collectively as "Anglo-Saxons", migrated across the North Sea and settled the eastern half of Britain, bringing with them Germanic languages and dialects which over time developed into what we recognise as "English". King Arthur, who may have been legendary figure, was possibly a leader of the post-Roman Britons as they sought, unsuccessful...

The Russian language is a language in the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family.  The Proto-Slavic language was spoken by the Proto-Slavic people living in the area around the modern-day town of Pripyat (famous for its association with the Chernobyl nuclear power station) between modern-day Belarus and Ukraine. From the 500s, the Slavs spread out westwards and southwards (and some in a north-westerly direction).  From 862, missionaries from Constantinople, Cyril and Methodius, introduced an alphabet and liturgy (text of a church service) for the Slavonic-speaking people of Great Moravia (modern-day Czechia), based on the Slavonic language spoken near their native city of Thessalonica. The Slavonic liturgy, originally created by Cyril and Methodius for the people of Great Moravia, is common to all Slavic peoples who profess Eastern Orthodox Christianity, however it has increasingly differed from the everyday speech of the various Slavic peoples. Already by the time...

The homeland of the Slavic peoples was originally in the area near to the present town of Pripyat , between Belarus and Ukraine. It was from here that, from the 500s, the Slavic peoples spread westwards and southwards (and also in a north-easterly direction). For example, according to Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos of Constantinople, the ancestors of the Croats and Serbs settled in the area now known as Bavaria, later relocating to their present homeland in the Balkans. What became the Moravian people settled in what is now Czechia, and in the early 800s formed the first Slavic state (Great Moravia) with its capital in Velihrad. Other Slavic tribes migrated as far south as what is now Greece in the Empire of Constantinople.  Particularly in the early 800s (but also for some time before that), the Empire of Constantinople reclaimed territories settled by Slavs, re-establishing government control and re-introducing Greek language and the Orthodox Christian faith. This is known as t...

The Anabaptists were Christians at the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s who wanted a more radical break with the past and return to the truth of the Bible.  The Anabaptists were a very eclectic collection of different people and causes, united only by the fact that they did not align with the Roman Catholic church nor with the so-called Magisterial Reformers. "Anabaptist" means "rebaptiser" because in many if not most cases they rejected the longstanding practice of baptising infants, and instead practised believer's baptism on profession of faith.  The Anabaptists are called the "stepchildren" of the Reformation - at times disowned and unloved, but clearly the product of the time and in some ways more consistent and radical than their Protestant counterparts.  The first iteration of Anabaptism were the Carlstadt and the Zwickau prophets, who sought a more radical reformation that Luther espoused.  A second expression came in the form of...

The most ancient African civilisation south of the Sahara is known as the kingdom of Cush or Kush, located in what is now Sudan.    The first phase of the Cushite civilisation began around 2500 BCE and was centred around the city of Kerma, which is considered the "first urban centre" south of the Sahara. The Kerma culture particularly flourished between about 1780 and 1580 BCE. The language spoken by the Kerma culture may have belonged to the Nilo-Saharan (like the modern-day "Fur" language of Sudan) or Afro-Asiatic (like Semitic, Egyptian or Berber) language family. Around 1504, the Kingdom of Kerma was invaded by its powerful northern neighbour, Egypt, and was occupied by the Egyptians until about 1070 BCE.  When Egyptian power weakened (what is known "Third Intermediate Period" in Egyptian history, from about 1069 BCE), independence was regained.  The emerging centre of the Cushite civilisation was the city of Napata, founded in 1400s and situated near ...

The French people trace their roots back to a tribe called the Franks who, as the Roman Empire waned, lived on its northern frontier around the area of what would now be called Belgium/western Germany. From the early 400s they made incursions from the north into the Roman Gaul; the local population, under Roman rule, were a Celtic people called the Gauls. Meanwhile, the Frankish language was a Germanic language (like modern-day English and German).  The Franks did not have a single leader. Clovis, one of the Frankish leaders at the end of the 400s, married a Christian wife called Clothilde whose background was from another Germanic people, the Burgundians (based in what would now be southern France). Facing defeat in battle against the Alamans (yet another Germanic tribe) in 496, Clovis called on the Christian God. Sometime between 498 and 508 he was then baptised, and recognised as King of the Franks. Thus began the Merovingian dynasty that lasted for over 200 years. Clovis and hi...

 When you look through old photos of Bury, the town where I live in Greater Manchester, a recurring scene is the "Whit Walks". The pictures show crowds of people, young and old, processing with banners. In Bury, a muster point for these walks was the old Union Square which was demolished to make way in the late 1960s for what later became the Millgate shopping centre.  The origin of the Whit Walks was the Sunday school movement, which was started in 1781 by Robert Raikes in Gloucester. The first Sunday school in Manchester dates to 1784. The Whit Walks commemorate the anniversary of this movement, which provided basic education on a Sunday for children who were forced to work the other six days of the week. Dr Elmer Towns who wrote an early Raikes biography says “the early Sunday School basically aimed at teaching reading and writing with the Bible as a text book”. Many if not all churches locally ran a Sunday school teaching dozens of children every week; even our little chu...

Rome began its outward expansion in the 200s BC. The first Roman colony was Sicily, conquered during the course of the First Punic war in 254 BC. Carthage was subsumed after three Punic wars, and Greece later likewise included in the ongoing expansion.  By the time of the late Roman Empire, from 284 AD, the Empire was divided into 4 Praetorian prefectures, totalling 15 or so civil dioceses:  Praetorian prefecture of the Gauls   Gallia (including, in part or in whole, areas of what is now Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland)  Vienennsis (southern, Romanised Gaul)  Hispania Britannia Praetorian prefecture of Italy & Africa Italia suburbicaria (around Rome) Italia annonaria (northern Italy) Africa (north Africa)  Praetorian prefecture of Illyricum (Balkans) Pannonia Dacia (modern-day Romania)  Macedonia (including modern-day Greece) Praetorian prefecture of Oriens (from Bulgaria across modern Turkey and down to the Levant and Egypt) ...

Novosibirsk, Russia is a city of two million right in the middle of Russia, just to the north of Kazakhstan. It is there that I spend my linguist's year abroad 1995/6, and also met my wife, Oxana, who was a student there. Having got married in 1999, and after the birth of our eldest daughter, Sophia, in 2004, we moved and made our home there until 2019/20. This is the story of Novosibirsk Baptist Church.  The city of Novosibirsk was founded as a settlement for railway workers in 1893 with the name Alexandrovsky. Shortly thereafter it was recognised as a town in Tomsk gubernia, with the name Novonikolayevsk. Around that time, in 1903, a young man called Luka Frolov alighted the train in Novonikolayevsk, and the origins of Novosibirsk Evangelical Christian/Baptist Church go back to him. The core of the church which formed around him was former Molokans (an evangelical movement within Eastern Orthodoxy). By the end of 1930 there were 30 people in the church.   At this time, ...