The Empire the World Forgot | Hacker News Reader

The Empire the World Forgot

bbc.com

118 pointsThevet42 comments

I'm a little late, but anyway - I spent a couple of weeks in 2009 travelling around Eastern Turkey with a mate and visited Ani. Now I've seen a fair amount of impressive ruins in my time - Tunisia, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Israel - but I have to say Ani was one of the most haunting and evocative places I've ever been. We wandered around the site - which is not small - for a couple of hours, and the only other people we saw in that time were three other tourists and a bored teenage boy steering around a few hungry looking cows. There were stone blocks strewn around with ornate carvings, which in the UK would be in a museum, but instead the cows tramped amongst them chewing the grass. Across the border in Armenia - visible from the site - a bulldozer cleared an area for Russian gun emplacements, to add to those already installed. At one point we wandered into a half ruined church and as we did so a crow somewhere up in the roof started calling out.. It echoed around the ruin and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

Later on the wind picked up and storm clouds started to appear, and somehow that seemed a fitting end to my visit to this once great place, now reduced to desolation.

And I had to take a picture of the famous church of course! http://imgur.com/DPSiDLW

Charming. "We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."

I missed the part which explains why I'm not allowed to read it? I don't see what a TV license fee (which I don't pay anyway as I don't watch TV) has to do with a website.

The bizzare thing is someone made this exact complaint about BBC Future, whose situation is legally identical to BBC Travel, and in response they simply made it accessible (it now carries a banner).

http://halfblog.net/2013/01/16/why-is-this-bbc-website-not-a... http://www.bbc.com/future

Just an interesting fact, General Pyotr Bagration ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Bagration ) was one of the heroes of Napoleonic Wars.

He was also from Bagratid dynasty that ruled the city of Ani.

Yup, Bagratunis were among the longest reigning dynasties in the region (in all of Europe & Middle East, AFAIK). The last name still pops up even today, in various dialectal forms. Like this Lebanese-Armenian politician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karim_Pakradouni

Oh, and this dude: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prince-ioane-bagrationi-mukhrane...

Also a major character in Tolstoy's novel War and Peace!

Yup, I'm pretty well-traveled, and this is arguably the most beautiful place I've been, especially by bicycle, and certainly among the least touristed of anyone's short list.

Behind any fallen empire are systemic failures.

Having lived through the systemic failures, were countless bit players who looked around then basically said, "Apres moi, le deluge!"

Behind every mass atrocity and war are resource scarcity situations brought about by systemic failure and/or natural disaster.

Wow! Eerie photographs. Reminded me of the game Zork, circa late '90s.

Well that sucks...

> We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.

If I didn't live in the US, I would have trouble imagining life without some sort of VPN based in the US. The amount of crap I experienced the last time I was overseas was astounding, and it seems to be getting worse, not better.

Perhaps its just your lack of imagination.

If you didn't live in the US, then you'd be living in another country. Like most of the locals, you'd probably adjust to getting many services the way they are provided locally. In time, you may even come to find some of the things you take for granted about the US now to be just weird. This is not to disparage the US, but to offer perspective.

"the worst thing about living overseas is that its full of foreigners"

Well I'm Canadian and am in the US for school, and it honestly is just a lot more convenient to live in the US. More sites offer delivery, more content is available. Of course, Canada might be a special case; YMMV depending on what country you live in.

> More sites offer delivery, more content is available.

Which is wonderful if you define your quality of life by how often you can get things delivered to your house and how much heavily-funded Hollywood-produced video you can watch.

In much of the rest of the world, we do things outside our houses - I'm not sure if Canada is like the US for cities, but I can personally be in my city centre in 20 minutes by bus, and hang out with friends or see a film with my unlimited cinema card or check out the new cafes or find a new tasty Belgian beer. I can get my bicycle out and cycle with the cycling club - or run around one of the parks.

These things matter much more to my quality of life than what I can access instantly at home - I don't like being at home very much long-term.

If you prefer English-language content it can cost a lot more to get it through local distributors -- sometimes services are only made available in the US and a select few countries internationally. Everyone else would have to lie and proxy to get such a service, with no local alternatives.

Ironic, since we're talking about how you can't visit this article from the UK, and for reasons that have nothing to do with US licensing. Of course, I've had the same happen to me with UK-exclusive, unlicensed content, so.... Works both ways. Ultimately even though the US catalog of Netflix is huge, it's overshadowed by the global catalog's selection in aggregate...

I was shocked!

If you don't have a VPN, you can view it with Tor Browser (so long as you don't get assigned a Tor exit node in the UK).

Javascript deniers have it almost as worse, please can someone archive.is/mirror the page?

https://archive.is/kCJFQ

Get the Resurrect Pages extension for Firefox/Pale Moon and access with a simple right-click.

https://archive.is/kCJFQ

Thank-you.

For others' info: the above link points to a UK accessible version of this article.

Yep, BBC future is the same. Utter bullshit - it may not be paid for by the TV license but that's no reason to (try to) block access.

I don't get it. What prevents bbc worldwide to make money from UK viewers?

I don't get it either. But I guess they are are concerned about Mr. Disgusted, Cheltenham complaining: "I don't see why I have to pay my license fee AND suffer these interminable commercials".

Come to think of it, it may be in the BBC's Charter that their content be free from commercials (to license payers). If so, they are contractually bound to hide the commercials or, keeping it simple, just not provide content with commercials to license-payers.

Of course, most of the BBC's internet accessible content has always been geo-restricted in the opposite direction. So they have form there.

BBC.com shows ads to people geolocated outside the UK. Most of that content is not blocked to the UK.

Here we see something a bit different - the article is blocked to people in the UK.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/faq/

Murdoch complaining about unfair competition

Because BBC Worldwide is a commercial organisation and the BBC (the parent company) is a public service broadcaster. Even though BBC Worldwide is a subsidiary, if it started publishing content in the UK (where it has no commercial interest), it would give rise to a conflict of interest. You could argue that if BBC Worldwide were available in the UK without advertising, then it would in effect mean that the parent company was licensing content from a commercial partner.

I like to think it's because the article mentions the Georgian empire, which in the UK means something very different, so could be confusing. i.e. Georgians being the British immediately prior to the Victorian era, or (for obscurity points) the alien race inhabiting Uranus.

The title is misleading... Empires by definition are encompassing and large, not local and regional. The article does touch on the empires and kingdoms that have affected the location, though.

Armenia was an empire at some point, just not at the time of Ani. The title could be referring to Armenia in general, since it's most definitely an empire the world forgot about :)

>Empires by definition are encompassing and large, not local and regional.

I am not sure empire has a good/strict definition. Its like porn, you know when you see it.

Those recommending a VPN: what should I get? Preferable something within an order of magnitude $1/mo, obviously featuring end-to-end encryption, perhaps even something I could torrent through? ;)

There is a huge list of vpn services compared a couple of days ago on Hn.

try HolaVPN, free

"The church also housed a fragment of the True Cross, upon which Jesus was crucified."

What is this, grammatically? It's hard to believe the person who wrote it believed it was literally true, so is it a metaphor?

> The True Cross is the name for physical remnants which, by a Christian tradition, are believed to be from the cross upon which Jesus was crucified.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross

I know what it is, but seeing it in this context is like reading an article about the archaeology of Mount Ararat and finding the casual statement that Noah landed the Ark there.

Edit: Jesus, how could someone downvote that?

If you google "Mount Ararat Archaeology", all of the top results are about Noah and his famous Ark

The edit alone must have been worth a few up votes. Was that intentional?

I think he means that any news/documentary source needs to provide an important qualifier like "believed-to-be".

It sounds weird but it is a term on common use. I hadn't heard it myself until a visit to Rome last year (where it shows up frequently ). But think of it like "The Holy Grail". Perhaps that should be "The Grail believed by some to be holy", but we don't say that.

I would say that "The Holy Grail" is the name (a trademark if you wish), like is "True Cross".

So, True Cross, upon which Jesus is believed to have been crucified or similarly, The Holy Grail, which is believed to have special powers.

We can even go further: a fragment of a cross we believe is a fragment of the True Cross, upon which Jesus is believed to have been crucified, a grail we believe is The Holy Grail, which is believed to have special powers.

If it is regional, it is not an empire...

China was an empire, and was forgotten. Today I could go to the book store and buy "Historic Atlas of the world" that completely ignore China.

I have lived in China and of course the Chinese propaganda does the opposite: They consider Confucius the best philosopher of the world(because is the only one they have with Universal status), and what Europe only did was copying China innovations, and so on.

I used to like the bbc in the past.

>> If it is regional, it is not an empire...

Armenia was an Empire long before Ani. List of Largest Empires in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires If you look at "Ancient Empires" section, there are only 6 empires and both Armenia and China are in the list.

>> China was an empire, and was forgotten.

I do not think that is the case. I have never seen any respectable historical atlas that does not have China. Also there are Hollywood movies depicting China in times when it was (or was becoming) an Empire, so you can hardly call it forgotten.

The main reason that Chinese Empire is not forgotten and won't be anytime soon, is that China is still a major power with 1.357 billion population.

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