The fourth graders in this “Basis of Orthodox Culture” class are discussing some pretty heavy duty concepts.

“God is a creator,” says the teacher. “How do you understand this? what does it mean?”

A small girl answers, “he created the whole world.”

The teacher is using brand new textbooks and audio/visual materials prepared by the education ministry.

This little classroom in St. Petersburg is one of the fruits of a two-decades-long battle by the Russian Orthodox Church to introduce religious education into every school in Russia. Church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin says it was a tough slog.

“We had very uneasy and sometimes emotional discussions with some state officials,” said Chapin. “Some members of the pedagogical bureaucracy are still very much Soviet-minded.”

In the end, Chaplin says, the church is pleased with the outcome.

“I think both children and their parents understand that such an education brings more ethics into the life of the child and the family, it brings more understanding of what is the difference between a Muslim and a Jew and a Christian and a non-believing person,” Chaplin says.

But the new course wasn’t what the church bargained for. Analysts say the Church had to accept compromise with the deeply secular Russian state bureaucracy. The Church initially pushed for religion classes only on Russian Orthodox Christianity.

While polls find that between 70 and 80 percent of Russians consider themselves Orthodox believers, many are clearly uncomfortable mixing religion and secular education. Nationwide, only a third of parents chose the class on Orthodoxy for their children.

One mother, Natalia Sapruga, who considers herself a devout Orthodox Christian, says religion doesn’t belong in public schools.

“We think religion is a really private matter and religious education should start in the family and continue in the church,” says Sapruga. “That’s why we chose this secular ethics course that is aimed at helping our children developing qualities like honesty, kindness and justice.”

At this “basis of secular ethics” course, the class is discussing Abraham and his importance to both Jews and Muslims. The class is the most popular of the six choices, both nationally and at this school. In fact here, only four out of the 110 fourth graders take the Russian Orthodox class.

Teacher Natalia Savinova says the class may be so popular because it goes beyond religion. She says parents want their children to be more moral people but don’t feel confident in their ability to teach them at home.

“This class has been introduced, I think, because families don’t give enough time to the upbringing of their children and have placed this responsibility on the shoulders of the school,” says Savinova. “The course has the potential to affect the upbringing of children and is meant to help solve the problem of morality in Russia.

The third most popular course is a survey of world religions. In addition to that course, the secular ethics curriculum and the class in Russian Orthodoxy, there are basic courses in Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. Political commentator Konstantin Von Eggert says the Russian Orthodox church may not have gotten what it had hoped for, but he commends the church’s efforts to make itself more relevant in today’s society.

“Our hierarchy can not just sit and think that because we are in theory an Orthodox majority country they can have their cup of coffee,” Von Eggert says.

As a national church, Russian Orthodoxy has never had to compete with other faiths, Von Eggert says. Until now. He says the fight for hearts and minds will make the church stronger. However Russian parents choose to teach religion to their children, it probably wont be through education in public schools.

“Assalamu Alaikum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh” says host Rustem Arifdghanov, a seasoned Azeri journalist who also heads the channel. He says the mission is to reconnect Russian Muslims with their faith after 70 years of enforced atheism during the Soviet era.

“It was a big break so many Muslims don’t know what Islam is,” Arifdghanov says. “We would like this channel to tell the real story of Russian Islam, not Arabic, Turkish or Iranian Islam.”

But the goal isn’t just to re-acquaint some Russians with their heritage. Armed Islamic militants are fighting several violent insurgencies across Russia’s northern Caucasus. So Arifdghanov says another important mission for AL RTV is to encourage “moderate” Islam by filling the information vacuum for Russian Muslims.

“What is Islam like in reality?” says Arifdghanov. “What is the history of our ancestors? Is it true that Muslims have peacefully coexisted with Christians in Russia for centuries? We will give answers to these pointed questions. And we will have more influence than those preachers who want to persuade people to pick up arms to fight for mythical Wahabi or Salafi Islam.

The problem is partially a result of the failure by the state to offer serious resources for Islamic education in Russia, says religion analyst Geraldine Fagan from the Forum 18 news service. So starting 20 years ago, many Muslims went abroad to study.

A talk show underway at Al RTV. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

“The government decided they should try and counter this influence by encouraging a moderate homegrown version of Islamic education,” Fagan says.

Experts see the new state-supported channel as part of this new approach by the Russian state.

Timur Bulgakov, a producer at AL RTV, says the tone of the channel will be secular, informative and fun. It will be celebratory during holidays and appeal to several generations of Russian Muslim families. Content-wise, he says, the enormous cultural diversity of Muslims in Russia provides plentiful material.

“And although the channel is in Russian, we will leave in the original languages to show the rich variety of Russia’s many Muslim regions,” Bulgarkov says. The audience will be able to enjoy the sound of languages like Avar, Chechen, Ingush, Tatar, Bashkir and Udmurt.

In an editing booth, editors are adding Russian subtitles to a show about cooking, in a Dagestani language.

Islam experts say the channel will be a success if it can foster dialog between Russia’s disparate Muslim communities. Alexander Sotnichenko, at the St. Petersburg State University, says the Russian state is good at dealing with insurgents in only two ways: using money and force. But the state is horrible at dialogue with religious communities about what it means to be a citizen of the Russian Federation.

“It is weak in identity,” Sotnichenko says. “We have to present a new project of post-Soviet new Russian identity. 20 years now after the fall of the Soviet Union but we don’t have this project. Is Russia a national state? Or is it an empire? What is it? We don’t know.”

The questions are so difficult, Sotnichenko says, because even Russia’s governing party doesn’t know the answer.
“And that’s why they are afraid of discussion,” Sotnichenko says. “But we need this discussion, and maybe in this discussion we will find the new Russian identity.”

Al RTV could be a hopeful sign he says. But with political violence by Islamic groups spreading to other Russian regions beyond the Caucasus, pressure is growing for some kind of a more aggressive non-military approach.

The idea was cooked up in the Gulloglu baklava shop in Istanbul. In the shop’s six decades in business, only three other historical figures, all Turks, have been so honored. Owner Nadir Gullu says the portraits require enormous craftsmanship.

“Under the command of one chef with five assistants, it takes 10 days to make one,” Gullu says. “In each piece of baklava there are 55 layers of pastry. It’s all handmade and is very hard. Obama’s big ears made it very difficult, but we managed.”

Gullu doesn’t like politics. But he says he and other Turks had high expectations of Obama and they were dashed.

A Gulloglu shop manager and the Barack Obama baklava. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

The shop smells sweet, of butter and syrup, an ambiance not conducive to talking politics.

Turks were clearly excited by Obama’s visit in April of 2009. But as chef Gullu says, disappointment soon set in.

“When Obama first came to power all the countries of the world cheered him and declared him an angel,” says mechanic Enes Durmus. “But I said then and I say now, ‘it doesn’t matter who is in power, the foreign policy of the United States will never change.”

Indeed, Obama did try to tamp down the high expectations during his visit. He said that US foreign policy is a big ship which takes a long time to turn around.

Ayten Sucu, a biology teacher, says she’d still vote for Obama.

“I think he has solved problems which other presidents have been unable to, like health care reform. His own mother suffered from cancer and had trouble getting medicine. He cares about how the lower classes of society feel. He feels close to those people,” Sucu says.

Another customer Aykut Calikusu says he supports Romney. But for a different reason: Obama is too close to Israel.
“Even though they say that Obama is a Muslim, I think Romney will have closer relations with Turkey than with the Jews,” Calikusu says.

With the Syrian civil war heating up on Turkey’s southern border and escalating attacks by Kurdish militants, Turks have not been focusing much on the US elections. Just ask anyone at the Gulloglu shop. Most will tell you: they’re much more interested in baklava than the Baracklava.

The reawakening of religion in Russia, 20 years after the end of the athiest Communist system, comes as the church tries to find a new place and relevance in Russian society.

Theologically, Russian Orthodox Christianity has always focused more on the spiritual world, following rituals and living a life free of sin, than on the earthly “good works” practiced by western churches. So a mobile soup kitchen in St. Petersburg is actually not the first place you’d expect to find an Orthodox church group.

Nikolai Fomitcheff, a leather designer, is a volunteer. Fomitcheff says that churches in Russia are getting more crowded. He notices it at every service. The church is also becoming more socially active: a change he attributes to Patriarch Kirill, who took over in 2009. Fomitcheff says the church’s social activism is a way to reach out and offer comfort to believers who feel lost in the modern world.

“World events are making people think about the meaning of their lives and why they are here,” says Fomitcheff. “And in our church we have a lot of young people.”

Russians are still figuring out what role the church should play. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

“I think his primary motivation is to raise the profile of the church in society,” says religion analyst Geraldine Fagan. She says Kirill is more of a politician and diplomat than a pastor. So Kirill is trying to make the church more relevant, through social work, religious education and active engagement on social issues, like homosexuality.

“If the church actually is to have a future, then it has to be present in society,” Fagan says. “And I think he would understand it in those sort of terms.”

At the recent Queerfest in St. Petersburg, activist Olga Lenkova says the gay community feels singled out by a more confident church.

“The church has very strong anti-gay rhetoric, its getting stronger and stronger all the time,” says Lenkova. “Five years ago, they would ignore the issue and now they say homosexuality is a sin.”

Lenkova says the church’s new activism has enabled politicians to use the increasingly conservative mood of Russians to distract public attention away from real social ills. The most controversial measure, supported by the church, is a ban on “homosexual propaganda.” Legislator Vitaly Milonov says the law represents the morality of a large part of Russian society. And he denies the public criticism that the church had anything to do with writing the law.

“This is a problem of conflict inside our society, not inside our church,” says Milonov. “Because our society is split into two different parts, one direction is moving toward absolute freedom, and another part is trying to conserve our country, key values, stone values to build a house called Russia.”

Russian spirituality doesn’t get much stronger than at the Sergiyev Posad monastery. From here, Russia’s patron saint, Sergius, helped unite Russians against Mongol control in the 14th century. Today its one of the holiest places in Russia. And many would say, the keeper of the spirit of Russian Orthodox Christianity.

Outside, worshiper Yulia, who like many Russians doesn’t give her family name to strangers, says the church doesn’t belong in politics. But it should speak loudly about issues dear to Russians like: “confirming moral values,” she says. “Including fighting with such things as homosexuality, which should be in the blood of each normal person. The so-called freedoms you have in Europe and the US are not suited for us, they would be the ruin of us Russians and our souls.

But the church clearly faces a big job filling the pews with the faithful. Many Russians do support the position and moral authority of the church; it’s the institution they distrust. Anthropologist Jeanna Kormina says that most Russians identify themselves as religious but almost none go to church.

“This is also a question of control and freedom,” says Kormina. “People want to be religious and want to be Russian Orthodox. But they don’t want to be under control of someone they don’t trust, they don’t trust the institution.”

In fact, statistics show that more than 70 percent of Russians consider themselves Orthodox believers. But only one percent go to church even monthly.

At a recent opposition rally in Moscow, some of the banners and slogans normally directed at President Vladimir Putin also attacked the Russian Orthodox Church, seen as a key Kremlin ally. Gleb Pavlovsky, who was a Kremlin political adviser for 15 years until he was fired last year, said Russia has been deeply affected by Pussy Riot.

“There is a tremendous split,” he said. “I know a lot of families in Russia in which the topic of Pussy Riot is forbidden to talk about at the dinner table.”

Pavlovsky attributes the political muscle of the Orthodox Church to Russia’s immature political culture. Simply put, politicians are losing credibility and there is no other game in town. The Pussy Riot case brought this trend out into the open.

“It has shown that in our culture, a secular alternative has not yet formed,” Pavlovsky said. “That’s why many so people turned directly from the religious indifference of the Soviet years into fierce religious warriors.”

The divisiveness of the Pussy Riot trial has fuelled talk about two Russias. Pyotr Verzilov, husband of convicted Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, said the government has used the case as a wedge between two Russias. One – urban, educated and worldly – supports Pussy Riot.

“And the other Russia, lives in small cities or villages, doesn’t use Internet, is very disconnected from mainstream media and from mainstream western culture and to that portion of society,” Verzilov said. “It was very easy to explain that what Pussy Riot did was some horrible blasphemous act they should be brutally punished for.”

A protester at a recent Moscow opposition rally. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

Politically, some commentators see the Pussy Riot uproar as a victory for President Putin in the short-term.

“He made the church fend for him, fend for the Kremlin, pretending rather that it was solely an offense to religion rather than an offense to the Kremlin and Putin personally,” said Konstantin von Eggert from Komersant FM in Moscow. “And it presented the opposition as a bunch of marginal idiots whose idea of being in opposition is dancing in churches.”

This political maneuvering between the Kremlin and the church was the result of a few church officials, according to Priest Georgi Mitrofanov. He said most church officials are indifferent to politics. Mitrofanov agrees that the Kremlin used the church for political cover.

“That’s why I think the church should be keep a maximum distance from the state, so that the state won’t be able to use the church to protect its own actions,” Mitrofanov said.

Among politicians who support close ties between the state and the church is Vitaly Milonov. He is a legislator in the regional parliament of St. Petersburg from the governing United Russia Party. Milonov makes no apologies for using the levers of the state to protect religious belief.

“This faith should be protected because faith is the most deep inside tender feeling,” he said. “If we protect health, we protect private property, why should not we protect faith?”

At the end of the interview, legislator Milonov shared his frank opinion about living in a democratic society.

LGBT protestors at a recent Moscow opposition rally hold an image of the three Pussy Riot women as the Holy Trinity in a Russian Orthodox-style Christian icon. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

“Most of the people in Russia, they absolutely agree that this action should be punished,” Milonov said. “Without any doubt. Of course there are a certain number of people whose reaction is different. But no, we are living in a democratic society. Unfortunately.”

A good number of those who feel differently are young people. Religion analyst Geraldine Fagan said Russians over 30 grew up in the Soviet era when the church was a symbol of resistance to state oppression. So they are used to giving the church the benefit of the doubt.

“The younger generation whose conscious experience is really only living under Putin, what they know is a privileged church, a church that’s shown on television, a church that’s allied with the regime. And they think negatively about the regime,” Fagan said. “For them, I think there isn’t this automatic feeling of support for the church when something like this happens.”

While the Communist state tried to crush the church, analysts note the government today is trying co-opt it. The Russian parliament introduced a bill on Wednesday enacting criminal penalties for “offending religious feelings.”

“Any civil society which respects itself, at some point starts to understand that it is not possible to live only on the grants which come from abroad,” Lukashevich said. “There are other sources of financing, including inner sources of course, which help NGOs to exist and solve tasks. I don’t see anything dramatic here.”

NGOs are often the favored means of western governments to help develop “transitional” countries, such as those in Eastern Europe. They work in areas like democracy-building, environmental protection and public health. Often staffed by educated young people, Western policy-makers say they allow local people to build local institutions. At Moscow’s Komersant FM, commentator Konstantin von Eggert said that in Russia, the government views them as dangerous because they are beyond state control.

“Putin sees Western-funded NGOs as direct agents of regime change in Russia,” Von Eggert said. “These entities of course don’t have any other sources of financing, because Russian businesses and Russian charitable foundations will never give them money because by monitoring elections they play against the Putin regime. So they have to rely on Western funding.”

In the Moscow office of vote-monitoring NGO Golos, the Russian national seal and the Russian word for "elections." (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

In its statement Tuesday, the Russian foreign ministry accused the US government of exerting influence, through grants, on Russian politics and elections. One Russian NGO frequently accused of furthering foreign interests is Golos, Russian for “voice.” It has a $3 million USAID project to help monitor elections. Project manager Ksenia Sokolova said that journalists and political parties will still be free to monitor elections, but Golos will not be able to help train and coordinate in the same way.

“Golos was like the main trainer, the main organization which provided materials, expertise, knowledge and trainers to educate observers,” Sokolova said. “It’s just another step to close NGOs who are trying to tell the truth.”

Almost all of the funding came from USAID she said, funding which is impossible to find from Russian sources. Sokolova also rejected accusations by the Russian government that Golos and other NGOs are following orders from foreign governments.

“The process of financing starts with our application,” she said. “We say, ‘Guys, we Russian people want to do something good for Russian people, we don’t have Russian money. Can you please support some democratic initiative in Russia. Can you give us money?’”

Project manager Ksenia Sokolova, in the office of Golos, holding the Sherlock Holmes doll, symbolizing the group's dogged search for electoral irregularities. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

Other NGOs that have nothing to do with democratic institutions will also close up. USAID funds 100 percent of the budget of the Russian Health Care Foundation. Its $10 million budget goes to help improve tuberculosis treatment. Director Dmitry Goliaev is grim about the future after October 1, 2012.

“Nothing will happen,” Goliaev said. “The project will be closed.”

Russia has a high rate of tuberculosis. Goliaev’s NGO is trying to improve the efficiency of treatment that will help slow the spread of new cases. He said that Russia also spends the most money in the world on tuberculosis treatment per patient, without results.

“Efficiency is very poor,” Goliaev said. “That’s why our task to prepare scheme[s], to prepare technology, to prepare program[s], is less costly and more efficient.”

Critics charge the Russian government with deepening the country’s isolation and turning back the development of its democratic institutions. But the government may score points by kicking out Western projects on the grounds that Russia can do the job just fine on its own.

The Greek constitution says that while Orthodox Christianity is the “prevailing” religion of Greece, the state guarantees freedom of worship for all faiths. But it doesn’t look that way to many who aren’t Orthodox Christians. Like Muslims in this unofficial basement mosque in Athens.

The Greek government has not allowed an official mosque to be built in Athens since the country became independent from the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1821.

Ziad el-Sharkawi, born in Athens to Egyptian and Lebanese parents, says freedom of worship doesn’t mean the same thing for Christians and Muslims. “The difference is people pray in churches and I pray in an underground basement,” he says.

A 1936 law requires houses of worship to get a permit which Sharkawi says the government won’t hand out. At least not to Muslims. So this mosque is one of dozens in Athens alone operating illegally.

Authorities do turn a blind eye. But congregants say that’s only a half-way solution. The government plan to build an official mosque has been stalled for more than a decade.

At a nearby cafe, some local residents say they’re unhappy about their Muslim neighbors. Hristina Yanaki has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years. “If they build the mosque here in the neighborhood I would oppose it along with many others,” says Yanaki. “But if they want to build it on the top of a mountain I would have no problem.”

Thanos Plevris is a member of parliament for the right wing ruling New Democracy party. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

“I don’t want to send the message to the illegal immigrants that here in Greece we are a friendly place for illegal immigrations,” says Plevris. “We have a huge problem with immigration. We have to solve this problem first. And then we can solve the problem with freedom of religion.”

Human rights groups say the issues are separate. And that it’s not just Muslims facing religious persecution. Panayote Dimitras, a human rights activist from the Greek Helsinki Monitor, says pure and simple, church and state are not separate in Greece.

“Not every state has to be like France, but no state should be like Greece,” says Dimitras. “Greece is a state which has nothing to do with the criterion of state neutrality vis-à-vis religions and respect of religious minorities that exist in all other European and North American countries.

One key example of that lack of neutrality, says Dimitras, is the oath taken by Greek parliamentarians.

Lots of places have lawmakers swear in with a holy book, if they choose. But this swearing in ceremony of the Greek Prime Minister in June was done in front of a group of black-robed Greek Orthodox bishops.

Such ceremonies are not officiated by high religious officials anywhere else in Europe, Dimitras says. But they are in Iran.

“The legal status is not the same for every church,” says Theodor Kontidis, a Catholic priest.

Kontidis says Catholics face administrative obstacles. While the state allows him to worship freely, Kontidis says the Orthodox church essentially controls state policy toward other religions.

Kontidis says: “The Orthodox Church is the state church and is the most important and very close to the state. For all other religious communities, something is problematic.”

As a result, Kontidis says, the Catholic Bishop is not recognized as the CEO of all the churches in his diocese. Paperwork and property decisions are a big headache. Panayote Dimitras, the human rights activist, says the idea of Greeks being of different faiths is foreign to Greeks. So foreign that religious minorities are dealt with by… the foreign ministry.

“Even with religious minorities, on serious issues, it’s a division of religious minority communities in the foreign ministry which deals,” says Dimitras. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows better about minorities.”

Until recently the official name for minority religions in Greece was “foreign dogmas.” Dimitras admits there have been some improvements in recent years. Laws preventing the opening of new temples of other religions have been relaxed or abolished. And while the law criminalizing proselytizing by other faiths remains on the books, it’s no longer enforced.

Syrian refugees began flooding into Turkey a year ago.

And their is little sign they will be going home anytime soon.

In one refugee camp, residents organized a musical ensemble for the children living there.

“The Blossoms of Revolution” is probably not like any other children’s musical group you may have heard before.

Matthew Brunwasser reports from the Yayladağı One refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border.

Erol Can (left), an anesthesiologist, and Bingur Sonmez, a cardiac surgeon play for a patient. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

Slideshow: Sufi music in a Turkish hospital.

The intensive care unit of Istanbul’s memorial hospital looks like any modern hospital anywhere. But it definitely doesn’t sound like one.

Dr. Bingur Sonmez introduces himself: “I am Professor Doctor Bingur Sonmez, I’m a cardiac surgeon, I’ve been doing cardiac surgery more than 30 years. What we are doing in intensive care, we are playing Sufi music to our patients to calm down, to make them feeling much better.”

Sufism is a mystical strain of Islam whose traditional music is popular among Turks. Sonmez says that five centuries ago when Europeans were burning people alive for having mental illnesses, the Turkish Ottoman Empire had a more civilized approach.

“In this country, in Ottoman Empire times, we used to treat psychiatric patients with music in hospitals, in local hospitals,” Sonmez says. “So what we are doing is the same.”

So doctors here don’t consider themselves doing anything new.

“If you look at the patient’s face, you can see that he is very anxious. But after 10 minutes you will see that he is very much relaxed,” says Sonmez.

After a short performance, anesthesiologist Erol Can says the patient’s heart rate decreased 15 percent.

Can says the approach has scientific backing. He says the hospital conducted a study of 22 patients and measured their stress levels on a scale of one to 10. Their stress went down from an average of seven to three after a 20 minute musical performance.

“We recorded heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, respiratory rate and oxygen delivery, the oxygen saturation of the blood. Every parameter was better after this 20 minutes,” Can says.

Sonmez and Can demonstrate the traditional medicinal properties of different melodic systems – or makams in Turkish music. Sonmez says certain makams can treat specific conditions.

“That makam makes you sleepy, it’s a real meditation music,” says Sonmez. “So its good to listen to when you go to bed. If you listen to this makam when you are waking up in the morning, you won’t be able to get out of the bed.”

The Mahur makam is the opposite of Sabah, so it might make you agitated and unable to sleep.

“If you play that makam to a depressed patient, you can cheer him up easily,” says Sonmez.

There are makams that can help with other conditions as well. One supposedly increases your appetite. Another can help you lose weight. The music has significant health results, the doctors say. But while they sing the praises of music therapy, they stress it’s a compliment — not a replacement — for conventional medicine.

Gaziantep in southern Turkey is known as one of the “Anatolian Tigers” for its dramatic economic growth, driven by industry and border trade.

But the boomtown has been hit hard by the crisis next door. From Gaziantep, Matthew Brunwasser reports.

There’s no one for miles around this muddy field near the Turkish-Syrian border to hear anything. But that didn’t stop the 300 activists from singing “damn you Hafez,” about the father of Bashar Al Assad and founder of Baath party rule in Syria.

“The concept is a bunch of Syrians from around the world, coming together in a convoy, with humanitarian aid and trying to get them into Syria, to try to break the siege on Syrian cities,” says Syrian-born Anas Nader, who came with a group from London. “Right now we have mainly food, baby milk, medications, bandages, and pain killers and that kind of medication basic care packages for the people of Syria. Whether they are injured civilians – or food aid for starving families and kids.”

There are two convoys: one here, near Syria’s northern border, another from Jordan in the south. The isolated location of this protest could be seen as symptomatic of the impractical nature of the activists’ fight.

But a woman calling herself Syriana Jihad, who’s lived in Turkey for 15 years, is confident that eventually their message will get out – and that the aid will get through to those who need it in Syria.

“We’re really very persistent,” she says. “We feel psychologically we’re very high, and we believe 100 percent that we will be victorious.”

A year after the uprising that began in Deraa things are not going well for anti-government forces. The rebel Free Syrian Army is on the run following a major army offensive in the north. Civilians are unable to escape the besieged city of Idlib. And reports are emerging of massacres and massive destruction by the Syrian military.

“So its a matter of feeling sad, at the same time, i think its pushing us to be more strong and be more unified, and to focus on our purpose: for a free and civil Syria,” Syriana Jihad says.

Ibrahim Basha came from Detroit, where he's a student at Wayne State University. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

“Moral support obviously is huge, we don’t want that fire to not burn anymore,” says Basha.

“The people over there have been doing this for a year and have continued to do so, with all the killing and arrests and they are still going strong,” Basha says. “So if it’s going to take 300 people over here to give them that extra push or what not, we should do that. Because what they are doing over on the inside there is very courageous and brave. So we’re just trying to do our little part to help.”

It didn’t come as much of a surprise when the Syrian authorities refused permission for the convoy to cross into Syria. So the Red Crescent took over the aid and said it would try to deliver it to Syria or else distribute it to refugees in the camps in Turkey. This latest convoy was the third attempt in the past year, and it most likely won’t be the last.

In this sleepy Turkish bordertown, locals pass the time playing a dominos-like game and drinking strong black tea from tulip-shaped glasses.

It’s here that a Syrian refugee named Mahmoud chooses to tell his story about the government offensive in Idlib. He arrived on Saturday from Jisr Al Shigur a town in the Idlib region. He was scouting an escape route for his family. He found the situation was worse than expected.

“If I could return to Syria to get my family and bring them here I would,” says Mamoud. “But I would be killed if I went back now because of all the snipers, tanks and soldiers in the mountains. I will try but if I can’t we’ll have to depend on God.”

He says the shooting started on Friday. Before he left, friends had warned him that the Syrian military had recently placed landmines in fields favored by refugees. On his seven hour journey by foot, he says he saw the freshly turned earth where they had been placed. Like many Syrians nowadays, Mahmoud is well-versed in the esoteric world of military hardware he saw on the way.

“A huge number of tanks, APCs (armored personal carrier), about 40 BMB tanks, 50 or 60 vehicles with soldiers, 10-15 cannons,” says Mahmoud. “And the Shabiha militia’s pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the back. I saw this convoy with my own eyes as I was leaving.”

There are reports Tuesday of fighting in Idlib between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel movement and government forces.

Mustafa Haid is a Syrian human rights researcher. He says that the military is moving to control the city before international demands are realized for a humanitarian corridor to deliver aid.

“They talk about these these secure lines for humanitarian aid and buffer zones, some countries have started talking about that,” Haid says. “It sounds like the regime knew Idlib would be the perfect place to do such things. And that’s why they want to make sure they’d keep Idlib under control.”

Syrian lawyer Ahmed Hasoun from B'dama in the graveyard in Yayaldagi, with fresh graves for Syrians who died of injuries crossing the border. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

Haid says he saw the mines in the field during his research.

“This kind of mine is Russian-made and it’s called BMN2,” he says. “It’s also a pressure mine, only 15 kilograms [33 lbs] are needed to explode it, its not 30 or 40 [66 or 88 lbs]. It’s even anti-children. Which means that they didn’t put it there because they are afraid of the Free Syrian Army going back and forth to Turkey. They just want to kill people. They are placed in known refugee crossings.”

Haid met a Syrian living along the border who received anti-mining training during his military service. The man personally removed 300 mines near his home but had no training in how to defuse them.

“He crossed like 10 km [about 6.2 miles] with one in his hand to show it to me just to take a photo to show me for proof that they are placing landmines,” Haid said.

Leaders of the FSA believe the new Assad offensive is about projecting power rather than capturing land. Captain Ayham al-Kurdi is an FSA commander. He says the government has been sending forces to Idlib for several weeks. Al-Kurdi doesn’t expect Assad to destroy the entire city but just a neighborhood, to set an example.

“He wants to terrorize Idlib by staging strategic attacks and create maximum terror among the civilians,” says al-Kurdi. “He is making a massacre in each city in the north. And just like they did in Hama, in the massacre of 1982, the rest of the country was so afraid that they did not even react.

Al-Kurdi says Idlib has opposed the regime since Bashar Al Asaad’s father – Hafez Al Assad – first took power in the 1970s. Recent government gains have driven almost all of the rebels out of the cities. Al Kurdi says Idlib will be a hard battle, and a long battle, because the mountainous terrain of northern Syria is favorable to the rebels’ guerrilla tactics.

It has a collection of everything from East German blueprints to Soviet artwork.

The museum’s most spectacular exhibit is probably its portion of the Berlin Wall. It is the biggest chunk of the wall anywhere outside of Berlin.h

So where exactly is this museum where all this Cold War stuff is amassed?

Hint: It is nowhere near Eastern Europe. It is within the heart of “Screenland” not the heart of the old continent.

The Wende Museum is located in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles, Calif.

For many scholars and historians, the Wende is a treasure trove of unusual objects from East Germany and Eastern Europe, which you won’t find in many other archives.

The World’s Matthew Brunwasser recently visited the museum.

The Wende (“Turning point” in German) Museum offers the rich resources of its Los Angeles-based collection to visitors, scholars and exhibitions. Almost 6,000 miles away from the divisive historical debates in Berlin, the Wende hopes to preserve selected physical remains of the Cold War in order to inform present and future generations about its legacy.

An anonymous business park in sunny southern California is the unlikely home for this Cold War archive. It’s hard to imagine anywhere farther away from the emotional debates about Europe’s painful past, but Museum director Justinian Jampol says that’s exactly the point.

“We wanted to have a archive away from it all, to be able to begin to preserve the materials for future generations,” says Jampol.

Europeans have long been ready to move on, so saving the material culture of the unpleasant era isn’t especially high on anyone’s list. Jampol says the museum sends out scouts across Eastern Europe looking for art and artifacts, including Communist-era statues about to be melted down for scrap.

“That happened up until about a year ago,” Jampol says. “We have a 10 foot bronze sculpture, by Bondarenko, one of the very important Russian artists, that was still being melted down. And we got a call saying that this is available and we bought it for the price of the bronze plus five percent.”

Preserving the history of political, cultural and personal life, the Wende collects materials you won’t find in a typical historical archive.

“Ranging from furniture to blueprints to design material, artwork, menus, erotika, photo albums, journals, diaries,” Jampol says.

The collection also includes pop music, like the Puhdys, one of East Germany’s most popular rock bands.

“This is dissident artwork, this is from perestroika in the 80s, critical of both Lenin and Stalin, when the process started of coming to terms with the past,” says Jampol. “In fact, this is one of my favorite pieces…”

One of the iconic pieces is a bust of Lenin which once stood in Leipzig, the Tahrir Square of East Europe back in the tumultuous days of October 1989.

“It was painted to look like a clown using pink and green florescent paints,” Jampol says. “As the main figure of the ideology, if you could paint him like a clown, what next? Where does the state stand? In fact, one month later to the day, the Berlin wall collapsed.”

The main archive has about 75,000 items in its supermarket-sized facility. Many might find this enormous and neatly organized and cataloged collection of historical bric-a-brac – a warehouse full of old junk.

Scholars find it a precious resource of valuable information about the minutia of daily Cold War life. But outside academia, the Wende has another life, trying to make the Cold War resonate with the public today.

It is a living museum after all. The Wende organizes public events like one celebrating the anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. The Wende built a replica across Wilshire Boulevard — dividing LA for a night into west and east.

One current exhibition displays original surveillance equipment of the Stasi, or East German secret police. The idea is to provoke debate about contemporary surveillance of American citizens.

While Europeans try to put the Cold War behind them, the Wende is trying its best to give life to the memory and the lessons learned.

The province used to be part of Syria once, but was ceded to Turkey in 1939.

It is an ethically diverse province and even includes a village with a 100 percent ethnic Armenian population.

The capital of the province is the city of Antakya.

Hatay is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

Hatay is home to the only village in Turkey that is populated solely by ethnic Armenians considering that most ethnic Armenians, in what was then the Ottoman empire, fled or were killed or ethnically cleansed in 1915.

Reporter Matthew Brunwasser paid the village a visit.

Bitterness over the 1915 Armenian massacres and ethnic cleansing in Turkey by then Ottoman forces is still unresolved. But Turkey’s last remaining village inhabited solely by ethnic Armenians is a seriously peaceful place. Vafikli Koyu today attracts visitors with its pretty views, excellent climate and tasty organic produce.

It’s a balmy Sunday in Vakifli Koyu, a sleepy village on a lush mountaintop overlooking the Mediterranean. The air smells like orange blossoms and the townsfolk, all 135 of them, never seem to hurry.

It feels like it could be any Sunday from over the centuries, as services start at the St. Astvatzatzin Armenian Apostolic Church. But today there is big news. The village has a new resident priest for the first time in 11 years. And today is his first service.

Father Avedis Tabashyan was born and raised nearby. He is 31 and excited about his new job.

“I think more worshipers will come to church because there will be regular services,” says Tabashyan. “The spiritual life of the people will improve because they have a priest now with whom they can share their problems.”

The village looks and feels more prosperous than its neighbors – largely due to the money sent by family members working abroad. There is also innovation here. The village was one of the first in Turkey to start growing organic oranges in 2004. Tabashyan says most of the young people have left and the remaining villagers have realistic expectations.

“Agriculture doesn’t bring us much money so the population will continue to shrink,” he says. But even if there are only 50 people left in the village, there will still be Armenians here. And whenever there is a holiday those who have left will always remember the village and many will come back.

A historical Ottoman-era building, crumbling and neglected. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

“There’s a little difference, but our traditions are very similar,” Chaparyan says. “We go to each others villages for weddings and religious festivals and there’s no problems at all.”

The village is tranquil. The runoff from village farms flows down steep stone steps, carved into the mountainside along the village’s streets.

It’s also a small village. Taking a short walk, I run into Chaparyan again, sitting on a bench and playing a wooden folk flute.

The song he’s playing is emblematic of the painful relations between Turks and Armenians, sari gelin or “blond bride” in Turkish.

“Sari gelin, sari” says Chaparyan. “It’s a song both Turks and Armenians share. The real meaning in Armenian is ‘mountain bride.’”

A documentary film using the name of the song, produced by Turks, promotes the Turkish nationalist perspective that Armenians were in fact the aggressors in the bloody events of 1915. But the people of Vakifli Koyu can’t be bothered. They’re more concerned about business.

Gohar Kartun is selling jars of locally grown and prepared food products to the crowds of Sunday tourists who like to shop here.

1187 Gohar Kartun selling locally-produced preserved fruit and vegetables, oils, sauces and juices on behalf of the Vakifli Koyu's women's collective. (Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

“Sometimes, sometimes,” Kartun says. “It depends on the questions they are asking. Not everyone looks through the same window. Some of them say, ‘we are so happy to see Armenians in our Turkey.’ They want to come and see what kind of creatures we are.”

Kartun says that tourism is one economic bright spot for Vakifli Koyu. The main attraction in the Hatay region is the nearby ancient city of Antakya, Antioch in the bible. The province also has one of Turkey’s most multi-cultural populations, including Turks, Arabs, Christians of various denominations, Alevi and Sunni Muslims.

“Hatay is a rainbow and we are one of the colors. And I’m trying to show it to the world, ” Kartun says.

As Turkey matures politically and moves away from the ethnic nationalism of its founders, minorities like Armenians hope that Turks learn to appreciate diversity. Locals want people to think of Vakifli Koyu as nothing more than a place for a relaxing weekend stroll.

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People everywhere are moved by the power of Esma Redzepova’s voice.

But now the queen of gypsy music has taken on power of another kind. She was elected to the city council of her hometown Skopje, Macedonia, in 2005. She is currently serving her second four-year term.

“I’m most active on the council in matters concerning physical improvements to the city, for it to be cleaner and more beautiful, “Redzepova said. “I support the construction of public monuments.”

A member of the governing nationalist political party, Redzepova says she is mainly involved in the city’s cultural affairs. She has a long history of working for humanitarian causes, helping orphans, women and Roma war refugees among others.

She has sung more than 2000 charitable concerts. She says working on the city council is an opportunity to serve the public in much the same way.

“I said as a city counselor that we should not have such high salaries and that we should lower them,” she said. “I stood up and said that it is a very beautiful thing that we are able to work for the citizens and make their lives better, for young people and old people, and for pensioners and children. The city has opened playgrounds and many sports centers.”

Her political career hasn’t really affected her music she says. But her music and some 15, 000 performances around the world, she says, have given her a global perspective, which she brings to the council. She also wants to serve her country. Ethnic Roma minorities face severe discrimination in most countries, and Redzepova says Macedonia is one of the few places were they are not forced to assimilate.

“I think everyone should consider Macedonia as a model for how countries deal with their Roma populations,” she said. “When I travel abroad to perform, people say, ‘oh, you are very lucky, you are born in Macedonia where Roma have a lot of rights.’ They are not mistreated. A roma can go anywhere, without any limits. no one will ever say to you ‘hey, you Gypsy, what are you doing here?’ People here live in the most normal way.”

Redzepova’s smile radiates much like her voice. She wears big gold earrings and each finger and toe nail is painted in a different bright color. A star since childhood, Esma, as she is known, was a favorite of the socialist-era dictator Marshal Tito. She represented Yugoslavia at official high-profile state events around the world.

“I have been composing since I was 9 years old when i made “chaje shukarije,” the most famous Romani song in the world,” Redzepova said. “There is no wedding or joyful occasion anywhere in the Balkans where they do not sing it. Many musicians from all over the world want to record cover versions.”

“Chaje Shukarija” means “beautiful girl” in Romani language and tells a story of unrequited love. After more than five decades of singing, she’s still getting rave reviews.

“I haven’t changed my style,” she said. “I’ve used the same ornaments since I was little, and continue to do so now; the only difference is that now my voice is more mature, my voice is more beautiful. Because I’m getting older, I know better what to do with my voice.”

Despite the collapse of her beloved Yugoslavia and the coming of the free market to the Balkan music business, Esma has stuck with her trademark sound. She said she hopes the Balkans becomes better known for the beauty of its music than for the bitterness of its wars.

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