(Rose)
We call them daiûas in our family, but this is a Finnish name found in an old collection of folklorish tales, related to the Kalevala, written somewhere between the 10th and 16th centuries.
The original document carrying these testimonies I had with me when I was returning from London.
These folkloric tales spoke of Nordic lands, where Louhi would be Tanriça.
What we call daiûas, were djinns. Though Djinn is more of an Arabic way to name them.
There have been djinns in this world for as long as there have been shamans in the northern world. Spirits of anima, or animals, which don't relate to humanity with the same logic as pagans nor christians.
For our family, there is one of such beings that is of excessive importance.
A djinn with powers from the land of the sun, and powers from the land of the rising sun, at the end of the known world.
But like every or most heroes, her heroic deeds came much later in her life, whilst her young days are mostly unreliable legends.
What was she, before she was marking our history with one of her many names? Dear Gülnihal...
It is said she had been loved long enough to receive life; but my Father met her at the evening of that century.
What was she at its dawn? What was she before?
What was she in the very beginning of time?
Before she was even a doll...
~
Picture yourself the Jordanian deserts. The sun blinding you, the warmth crushing you even as you sweat.
The sand flying around because the shore is near, merciless.
This is the very origin of her, long before the empire ruled over.
You learnt of these complex times, summarised as the crusades. Centuries of changes, wars, exchanges and cultures colliding and mixing, sparking ambitions and opportunities for many.
All over the lands at the crossroads of seas, continental lands, cultures, history, and faiths.
The middle of the world, in more ways than one.
A place were faiths were born, millennia ago. It spread, evolved, fought, grew.
Somewhere around this world, a very long time ago now, faith was like a hydra. New heads kept growing from the same roots, regularly growing and eating each other. It never ended, but a few main and bigger heads stabilised themselves over the centuries.
The faith in god engulfed lands and men, devoured them endlessly, serving spiritual and temporal ambitions.
Sometimes the invisible beast would sleep for centuries, and merchants would thrive. And sometimes, its hunger known no bounds, and the various heads of it were eating each other without pity, through armies and speeches, plowing skies and lands for decades.
Somewhere, sometime, in this old land of faith, footmen of two different heads would face each other in the middle of nowhere.
Picture the desert again. Forget the crusades and jihads, forget the hydra called god. Forget the entire world for a minute, along with them.
A long time ago, destiny brought in a twist of fate these two men to face each other where no one should ever have possibly met. They face each other, knowing very well they are alone there.
One is a european francorum, a knight, lost, with only a sword in his hands and the clothes on his back. He could be from any of the countries from Europe in this time.
The other one is a ghazi. He could be from any of the lands under the Abbāsīyah Caliphate of this time.
Unfortunately, he is lost as well there, with only a sword in his hands, and the clothes on his back.
The world was too far away and they could have escaped their destiny there.
But they yelled, and fought.
One died, the other was wounded.
The survivor, inspecting its opponent little possessions, found only one thing catching his curiosity. A ribbon. White and yellow, with blue stains here and there; or possibly blue but faded and discoloured.
The survivor had found what was probably a memento from a wife, a sister or a daughter, in another world he would never see. He couldn't partake leaving this ribbon with the dead for some reason. He could grieve easily the fallen enemy, but something stuck a string in him, with this only possession left behind and what it probably meant for the other one. Not a holy trinket, but a memento of something else and very far away.
This glint of emotion, this moment of pathos; it was the point of conception for her, into our world.
Something from the dead, something from the one alive. Something lingering on that ribbon like a smell, a distant perfume.
The invisible meeting of unseen elements, at that point in time, was the silent spark on which she appeared.
The survivor left this fringe of reality, unaware that his choice of keeping the memento had hooked the spore of a djinn in becoming.
He returned to the world with something hard to put into words lingering into his mind. A melancholia.
Over the following years, as he returned to jihad, he kept the ribbon near the handle of his sword and hand. This hint of blue in the corner of his eyes as he fought, always made some strength rise within him. A will to live, to survive.
A strengthened will which made him brave, and stronger than his enemies.
He prayed his god faithfully, and also kept pathos for this ribbon slowly aging with him, losing its fibres and colours.
As the ribbon went, everything he felt, especially during battles, the ribbon felt as well. The heartbeats, the fear, the exhilaration of victories, the devotion, the joy, the pain, the sorrow, the tears and laughs.
He thought they would die together.
And then, as he grew old, the war stopped to his surprise. At least for him, and his remaining years, there would be no more war.
The man went further north in these lands, to reach a country he had visited in his youth once more, in the still complex lands of Anatolia. And there, he settled.
The faint spot of blue on his sword hilt was still staining a corner of his mind.
Because the djinn roots had taken, and it had already begun to whisper something to him during the times that he slept.
The man had a family. He never forgot about the ribbon, and told tales about it.
His children and grand-children learnt of it. Some of them would even visit the western countries along with merchants and diplomats.
Until he died eventually, and his will to keep the ribbon's thought alive, remained with his family. It threaded thinly, but it kept going.
One of the children, artisan, made a doll for his own daughter. As the sword was inherited by another child, he kept ribbon, now buried inside the doll. Protected from decay, and kept close to a new beating heart, the legacy continued in another form. And against that new heart, the djinn inside kept growing, like a cherished thing, along feelings of love.
Over the years, the doll evolved as much as its story. The djinn within it kept protecting the dreams of the children, and even the household, as its power grew.
Over the decades and then centuries, the family grew with its renown for craftsmanship, of all sorts of gentle charms. Small pieces of cloth, scriptures, embroidery, jewellery, sculptures, and dolls.
A gentle and reassuring emotion was spreading around them, and growing around this family and its history.
The old cloth doll was repaired and recycled over and over, until the ribbon of origin was surely entirely lost and dissolved in time.
But the djinn that was born from it remained, and so did its tale. Though the tale also kept evolving endlessly, over and over, changing, never quite the same as before.
It was a family of tradition unknowingly influential. Now there even was a cultural tradition in this portion of land, for fathers to craft dolls for their children out of scrap cloth.
And for the children to cling to them for a very long time, and keep them as memento of their home country and parents, when they would leave.
One family in this area, centuries later, perhaps descendants of the same family, was especially enamoured with this lovely tradition. Their dolls meant a lot. The love shared around them was one of a kind.
The soft djinn chose them to grow further, to feel loved, through the guise of their dolls.
Most of the men of this family were in the Ottoman navy.
Decades went. This family withered, until only a few of them were left, and only one doll.
And thereafter, only one man.
He parted one day, toward the eastern edges of the world, aboard a ship that would be remembered for the saddest of reasons. He carried his doll along...
~
Bleue marked a pause and opened her eyes.
We were passing the night inside a tent, inside a freezing cold building.
I could still see her eyes glint, for many reasons.
She stopped. Because she somehow experienced a little what happened next.
She has experienced indirectly, and through echoes of her own past, that memory of the shipwreck.
And I know what happened next.
At the end of this nice story, there's us. Now with a longer past.
Gülnihal had stolen a few hearts along her long childish existence.
R - I preferred this tale to the ones you told back in Egypt. There was more love in this one, I like it here.
B - Love made her real. It made her exist... Soon, in more ways than one.
We chuckle all by ourselves, without a care in the world.
The djinn of the blue rose fed on many hearts, but brought one back to life someday in exchange.
I hope we can meet many other beings-like-her as the Gülnihal of the old days.
Plenty ribbons of the old world remain scattered across the world we live in.
It's just as many millions of seeds and spores, simply waiting to blossom someday...
~