Europe's new powerhouse; The North Sea economy.

"The building blocks of a new economy

Can the old continent's most turbulent body of water give it a second wind?

PICTURE A MECCANO set, but one made for gods. Blades as long as Big Ben is tall, rotors and tower sections the size of school buildings, shafts and generators so heavy they must be rotated every 20 minutes so as not to be crushed by their own weight: all these parts are strewn across an area the size of 150 football pitches. Clicked together, they form edifices rivalling the Eiffel Tower, except more useful--wind turbines to be planted somewhere in the North Sea.

Welcome to Esbjerg, the hub of Europe's offshore-wind industry. Two-thirds of the turbines currently spinning off Europe's coast, enough to power 40m homes, were put together in the Danish port town of 72,000 people. And Esbjerg's gods have only started tinkering. The city's port operator plans to nearly triple capacity to handle wind projects by 2026. Local engineering firms that once served the fossil-fuel industry now supply the wind-power sector instead. Meta has bought 212 hectares of farmland outside Esbjerg to build a renewables-powered data centre for its social networks. Out on the sea, cables that will ferry 30% of the international data traffic into Norway are being laid. Esbjerg's mayor has travelled as far as Vietnam and Washington to share its success story.

With a dose of strategic thinking, and a bit of luck, a string of Esbjergs could scale up into a new North Sea economy. This would help Europe meet its ambitious climate goals and rebalance its energy sources away from countries ruled by people such as Russia's Vladimir Putin. Its newly minted corporate champions could offer Europe's best, and perhaps last, chance to stay globally relevant. And it could alter the continent's political and economic balance by creating an alternative to the sputtering Franco-German engine.

The North Sea has always been econo mically significant. Bordered by six countries--Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway--it is where many important shipping routes intersect. Its strong tides, which sweep nutrients to its shallow seabed, are a boon for fishermen. In the 20th century oil and gas were discovered beneath its floor. At their peak in the 1990s Britain and Norway, the two largest North Sea producers, together cranked out 6m barrels of crude a day, half as much again as the United Arab Emirates does today. One Scottish field, Brent, lent its name to the global price benchmark. As that bounty runs out--and demand for what remains dwindles amid concerns about climate change--the turbulent body of water is finding lucrative new uses.

The biggest bet is on a resource of which the sea has an infinite amount--awful weather. With average wind speeds of ten metres per second, the basin is one of the gustiest in the world. The day your correspondent visited Esbjerg speeds were twice that, enough to push the wholesale price of electricity down to nearly zero. The North Sea floor is mostly soft, which makes it easier to fix turbines to the seabed (the floating kind have yet to be deployed at scale anywhere in the world). It is also typically no more than 90 metres deep, which allows wind farms to be placed farther away from the coast, where winds are more consistent. Ed Northam of Macquarie Group, an investment firm with stakes in 40% of all British offshore wind farms in operation, says his offshore turbines work at up to 60% of capacity, compared with the 30-40% that is typical onshore.

In 2022 North Sea countries auctioned off 25 gigawatts (GW) in wind-power capacity, making it the busiest year by far. Nearly 30 GW-worth of tenders have already been scheduled for the next three years. Annual new connections are expected to grow from under 4 GW today to more than 10 GW by the late 2020s. At a meeting in Esbjerg in May the European Commission and four North Sea countries agreed to install 150 GW by 2050, five times Europe's and three times the world's current total. In September this group and another five countries raised the number to 260 GW, equivalent to 24,000 of today's largest turbines.

This ambition is made possible by wind's version of Moore's law, which described the exponential rise in computing power. Three decades ago the world's first offshore wind farm--Vindeby in Denmark, comprising 11 turbines--had a total capacity of five megawatts (MW). Today a single turbine can generate 14 MW, and one farm may contain more than 100 of them. More robust cables and transformers at sea to convert wind power from alternating into direct current, which can travel over long distances without big losses, enable more electricity to be generated farther away.

The result is that several wind farms being installed surpass 1 GW in capacity, the typical output of a nuclear plant. The one at Dogger Bank, between 130km and 200km off the British coast and due to come online this summer, will clock in at a record 3.6 GW at full capacity in 2026. Economies of scale are driving down costs, making offshore wind competitive with other sources of power. In July Britain awarded contracts to five projects, including Dogger Bank, at a price of £37 ($44) per megawatt-hour--less than a sixth of the British wholesale electricity price in December.

The bad weather is not always a boon: its vagaries can also stress the grid. Helpfully, technology and falling costs are allowing wind-power operators to combat the elements. One way to do this is with more interconnections, first between the farms and land--today most wind farms have one link to the shore, which is inefficient--and then among the farms themselves. Half of the 3 GW to be tendered by Norway will have the option to create links to more countries. Phil Sandy of National Grid, which runs Britain's power infrastructure, predicts a future of complex undersea grids similar to that on land.

Another way to manage the variability of wind power is to use it to split water molecules to produce "green" fuels, such as hydrogen and ammonia. In May the European Commission and heavy-industry bosses pledged a ten-fold increase of EU manufacturing capacity for electrolysers, which do the splitting, by 2025. This would allow it to produce 10m tonnes of green fuels by 2030. The commission has also proposed a "hydrogen bank", capitalised with [euro]3bn ($3.2bn), to help finance the projects.

Investors are giddy. In August Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), a private-equity firm, said it had raised [euro]3bn for a fund that will invest solely in hydrogen assets. A dozen projects have been announced in Europe; the three largest add up to 20 GW of green power. Topsoe, a Danish firm that provides technology for such ventures, says its orders amount to 86 GW.

Eventually the North Sea's power system could take the form of an archipelago of "energy islands" that host wind-farm repair staff, aggregate electricity and produce hydrogen to be transported onshore by ship or pipeline. Up to ten such schemes are being considered, according to SINTEF, a research firm. North Sea Energy Island, an artificial atoll 100km off the Danish coast, is due to be tendered in 2023. It will act as a hub for ten nearby wind farms, with links to neighbouring countries.

One bidder, a joint venture between Orsted, a Danish offshore-wind developer that is the world's largest, and ATP, a big local pension fund, envisages a modular design, with components made onshore and assembled at sea. "We expect it to still be functional in 100 years' time," says Brendan Bradley of Arup, an engineering firm that is advising the bid.

 Thomas Dalsgaard of CIP, which is part of a rival consortium, reckons that producing green fuels offshore will not only help reduce pressure on grids but also save money: hydrogen pipelines are one-fifth the cost of high-capacity power-transmission lines.

Another valuable product criss-crossing the North Sea is information. If you follow one of the newer transatlantic submarine data cables that land in Esbjerg, called Havfrue, and then turn right at a fork in the middle of the North Sea, you end up in Kristiansand, a city in southern Norway. It is the home of N01 Campus, the "world's largest data-centre campus powered by 100% green energy", according to its owner, Bulk Infrastructure. "We want to build a platform for sustainable digital services," says Peder Naerbo, the firm's founder.

North Sea countries are an excellent place to store and process data. Low electricity prices make for cheaper number-crunching, which is energy-intensive. A cold climate means data centres can be cooled just by circulating outside air instead of using costly cooling systems. The region boasts a highly skilled workforce, stable institutions and some of the world's most enlightened data laws. Latency, the time it takes to move data in and out of the computing clouds, is becoming less of a problem as the technology improves, so digital workloads can be processed in ever more far-flung facilities. And data centres are hitting limits elsewhere in Europe. In 2021 Irish data centres and other digital uses consumed 17% of the country's power. To prevent blackouts, EirGrid, a state-owned Irish utility, will no longer supply electricity to new server farms.

According to TeleGeography, a data firm, 13 new cables have been installed in the North Sea since 2020, compared with five in all of the 2010s. Data centres, too, are springing up, as big cloud providers vow to decarbonise their supply chains. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the two largest cloud companies, have built server farms in the Nordics. Meta has its plot outside Esbjerg. Older industries are also moving more of their computing north. Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have computers sitting in former mines in Norway, simulating wind-tunnel and crash tests for their cars. On average, estimates Altman Solon, a consultancy, demand for data centres in the region will grow by 17% a year until 2030.

Go north, old industrialist

More European economic activity could be drawn north. "Abundance of energy tends to attract industry," says Nikolaus Wolf, an economic historian at Humboldt University in Berlin. That is what happened in the early 19th century, when abundant hydropower helped attract the cotton industry to Lancashire. Mr Wolf and Nicholas Crafts of the University of Warwick calculate that if Lancashire had 10% less hydropower it would also have had 10% less textile employment by 1838 in key places.

Energy is easier to distribute via grids and pipelines today than it was in the Industrial Revolution, and existing industrial centres across Europe exert their own pull. Transplanting cement-making kilns to North Sea shores would mean transporting limestone there and cement back to customers, making the process uneconomic (and, until the advent of zero-emissions lorries, climate-unfriendly). Giant steam crackers, which split hydrocarbons into smaller molecules at chemical factories, won't be moving north soon, either: they are too big an investment, too integrated in existing supply chains, and already in the process of being electrified.

But Mr Wolf's principle still holds for some industries--and may benefit other northerly locations not directly on the North Sea. In Narvik, farther north on the Norwegian Sea, Aker Horizons, a firm that invests in renewable energy, wants to establish a green industrial hub powered by offshore wind. In Boden, a Swedish town near the eastern coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula, H2 Green Steel is erecting a new steel mill, Europe's first in half a century. The factory will run not on coal or natural gas but on green hydrogen, created in one of the world's largest electrolysis plants using onshore wind and hydroelectric power.

Besides exporting steel, H2 Green Steel hopes to export sponge iron, an intermediate product which accounts for much of the total energy used in steelmaking. This would amount to splitting the steel industry in two, explains Henrik Henriksson, the firm's boss. The energy-intensive bits of the process would migrate to where they can be done most efficiently: right next to the sources of renewable energy. The more labour- and knowledge-intensive parts could remain in Europe's steelmaking heartlands, like the Ruhr valley.

In Wilhelmshaven, a German coastal city, Uniper, a state-owned energy company, has just completed Germany's first import terminal for liquefied natural gas (LNG), to replace some of the Russian gas no longer flowing through pipelines from Siberia. The firm plans to erect crackers to produce hydrogen from ammonia next to the LNG terminal. In another corner of the port, close to a decommissioned coal plant, Uniper will build a hydrogen plant and provide space for energy-hungry businesses. "Wilhelmshaven will play an important role as the place where green energy comes onshore," says Holger Kreetz, who is in charge of managing Uniper's assets.

Others flocking north include makers of electric-vehicle batteries, which also require lots of energy to produce, and manufacturers of wind turbines, hit by supply-chain snarls. Vestas, the world's biggest turbine-maker, is closing a factory in China and opening one in Poland, in part to be close to a new wind farm on the Baltic Sea.

As with all such shifts, some see problems. Renewable energy will be even cheaper elsewhere, warns Christer Tryggestad of McKinsey, another consultancy. Rather than investing in and around the North Sea, firms could move to sun-kissed places such as the Middle East or Spain. 

Not everyone is convinced that the EU can meet its ambitious goals to ramp up the production of offshore wind power. Vestas and its fellow turbine-makers are already complaining bitterly that permits for new wind parks can take a decade or more to secure. The offshore-wind-services firms warn that they may soon run out of people and machinery to keep customers happy.

The last obstacle comes from across the Atlantic. President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act includes $370bn in subsidies and tax credits for climate-friendly products and services, so long as they are made in America. The EU worries that the handouts will lure investors away from its shores. The bloc is looking into whether the law breaches international trade rules.

If these problems can be overcome, the new North Sea economy's impact on the continent will be momentous. As Europe's economic epicentre moves north, so will its political one, predicts Frank Peter of Agora Energiewende, a German think-tank. This could shift the balance of power within littoral countries.

Coastal Bremen, one of Germany's poorest states, could gain clout at the expense of rich but landlocked Bavaria.

At the European level, France and Germany, whose industrial might underpinned the European Coal and Steel Community, the EU's forebear, may lose some influence to a new bloc led by Denmark, the Netherlands and, outside the EU, Britain and Norway. The French and Bavarians may bristle at the idea of a de facto Wind-power and Hydrogen Community centred on the North Sea. But it would give Europe as a whole a much-needed economic and geopolitical boost." [1]

What rich Bavaria will do? Rich people often do not give up.

·  ·  · 1. "Europe's new powerhouse; The North Sea economy." The Economist, 7 Jan. 2023, p. 49(US).

Gydanti gamta; genetinė inžinerija

"2018 M. HE JIANKUI , kinų biologas, pateko į antraštes visame pasaulyje, kai paskelbė apie pirmųjų genetiškai modifikuotų žmonių gimimą. Naudodamas naują ir galingą genų redagavimo techniką CRISPR-Cas9, daktaras He bandė atkurti mutacijas kūdikiams, kurios, kaip žinoma, sukelia atsparumą ŽIV, AIDS sukeliančiam virusui.

 

     Dr Jis galėjo tikėtis pagyrimų. Vietoj to jis gavo plytų batus. Genetikai pasmerkė eksperimentą (vienas jį pavadino „etiniu fiasko“). Paaiškėjo, kad genų redagavimas suklydo, o kūdikiams atsirado naujų, dar nematytų mutacijų, o ne numatytų. Ir svarbiausia, kad „Dr He“ pakeitimai yra paveldimi, o tai reiškia, kad vaikai sugadintus pakeitimus perduos savo palikuonims. 2019 m. jis buvo nuteistas kalėti trejus metus ir 3 mln. juanių (435 000 dolerių) baudą.

 

     Be branduolinės fizikos, kuri įgalino saujelę lyderių sunaikinti civilizaciją, tik kelios mokslo šakos sukėlė tiek daug visuomenės baimės ir ginčų, kaip genų inžinerija, leidžianti susitvarkyti su pačia gyvybe. 

 

Šie moraliniai rūpesčiai pagyvina naują Mančesterio universiteto zoologo Matthew Cobbo knygą.

 

     „Kaip dievai“ yra tiek genų inžinerijos, tiek rūpesčių – pagrįstų, abejotinų ir kartais atvirų sąmokslinių – istorija, kurią ji išprovokavo. Ši technologija sulaukė daug sėkmės. Diabetikams reikalingas insulinas dabar gaminamas, pavyzdžiui, iš modifikuotų bakterijų, o ne sunkiai paimamas iš kiaulių lavonų. Modifikuoti virusai, turintys pataisytas netinkamai veikiančių genų versijas, galėjo išgydyti kai kurias retas ligas, tokias, kaip stuburo raumenų atrofija, kuriai neseniai Didžiojoje Britanijoje buvo patvirtintas genų inžinerijos gydymas.

 

     Tačiau buvo ir daug nesėkmių. Nuo 1970-ųjų į lauką plūstelėjusių pinigų banga sukėlė lūkesčius, kuriuos teko nuvilti. Tyrimus vargino netikslūs įrankiai, kuriuos sunku tinkamai naudoti. Genetika, kurią įgyvendino motina gamta, pasirodė esąs niūrus, Heath Robinson košmaras, kai atskiri genai paveikia daugelį gyvūno ar augalo savybių vienu metu, dažnai nenuspėjamai.

 

     Tuo tarpu, nors mokslininkai iš tikrųjų gali perskaityti genetinio kodo raides, išversti jas į prasmingus žodžius ir sakinius buvo daug sunkiau, nei dauguma stebėtojų būtų spėję prieš 30 metų. Genetiškai modifikuoti augalai buvo mišrūs; sergančiųjų genetinė terapija nepasisekė dažniau, nei pavyko.

 

     Ponas Cobbas sparčiai nagrinėja šiuos pokyčius, lengvai paaiškindamas molekulinius genų redagavimo pagrindus ir įvairius galimus jo panaudojimo būdus, pradedant ligas sukeliančių mutacijų taisymu ir baigiant bakterijų pavertimu vaistų gamyklomis. Pažangesnės ir spekuliatyvesnės idėjos apima „genų valdymą“ – genetinės informacijos bitus, kurie nepaklūsta įprastoms natūralios atrankos taisyklėms, ir buvo pasiūlyti, kaip būdas sunaikinti tokius, kenkėjus kaip uodai – ir sena svajonė žmogaus genetinis tobulinimas.

 

     Šioje knygoje, kaip ir moksle, yra nesklandumų. Diskusija apie daktaro He darbą atrodo polemiška ir šiek tiek perkrauta; tai galiausiai susilpnina jo poveikį, o ne sustiprina jį. Retkarčiais pasitaikantis techninis terminas kitaip skaitomoje M. Cobbo prozoje lieka nepaaiškinamas. Kai kurie jo prieštaravimai žmogaus genų inžinerijai yra pagrįsti pastebėjimu, kad šiuo metu naudojami įrankiai yra gana nepatikimi. Tai svarbi kliūtis, tačiau skaitytojus gali labiau sudominti didesnis klausimas, kas galėtų arba turėtų nutikti, jei šios problemos būtų išspręstos.

 

     Nepaisant to, „Kaip dievai“ yra puikus pradžiamokslis tiems, kurie nori gerai pagrįstos diskusijos apie šio ilgai prieštaringai vertinamo mokslo moralines pasekmes. Skaitytojams susidaro įspūdis, kad nepaisant visų proveržių, jis dar turi pateisinti savo pažadus. Vis tiek verta pagalvoti, kas gali nutikti, jei – arba kada – galiausiai atsitiks.

     Kaip dievai.

     Matthew Cobbas.“ [1]

·  ·  ·1.   "Healing nature; Genetic engineering." The Economist, 7 Jan. 2023, p. 61(US).

Healing nature; Genetic engineering.

 

"IN 2018 HE JIANKUI , a Chinese biologist, made headlines around the world when he announced the birth of the first genetically modified human beings. Using a new and powerful gene-editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9, Dr He had tried to recreate mutations in the babies that are known to confer resistance to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Dr He may have been expecting plaudits. Instead, he got brickbats. Geneticists decried the experiment (one called it an "ethical fiasco"). The gene editing turned out to have gone wrong, introducing new, never-before-seen mutations in the babies instead of the intended ones. And, crucially, Dr He's tweaks are heritable, meaning the children will pass on the botched edits to their own offspring. In 2019 he was sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 3m yuan ($435,000).

Apart from nuclear physics, which has empowered a handful of leaders to destroy civilisation, few branches of science have inspired as much public dread and disputation as genetic engineering, which allows tinkering with the stuff of life itself. These moral concerns animate a new book by Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester.

"As Gods" is a history of both genetic engineering and the worries--justified, dubious and sometimes outright conspiracist--it has provoked. The technology has had many successes. The insulin needed by diabetics is now produced by modified bacteria, for instance, instead of being laboriously harvested from pig corpses. Modified viruses carrying fixed versions of malfunctioning genes have been able to cure some rare diseases, such as spinal muscular atrophy, for which a genetic- engineering treatment was recently approved in Britain.

But there have been many setbacks, too. The tide of money that flowed into the field from the 1970s raised expectations that were bound to be disappointed. Research has been plagued by imprecise tools that are hard to use well. Genetics as implemented by Mother Nature has proved to be a knotty, Heath Robinson nightmare, with individual genes affecting many of an animal's or plant's characteristics at once, often unpredictably.

Meanwhile, though scientists can in effect read the letters of the genetic code, translating them into meaningful words and sentences has been much harder than most observers would have guessed 30 years ago. Genetically modified crops have been a mixed bag; genetic therapy for the sick has failed more than it has succeeded.

Mr Cobb rattles through these developments briskly, accessibly explaining the molecular basics of gene editing and all sorts of possible uses for it, from fixing the mutations that cause diseases to turning bacteria into drug factories. More advanced and speculative ideas include "gene drives"--bits of genetic information that do not obey the usual rules of natural selection, and have been proposed as a way of wiping out pests such as mosquitoes--and the long-standing dream of human genetic enhancement.

There are glitches in this book as there are in the science. The discussion of Dr He's work feels polemical and a bit overwrought; that ends up diluting its impact rather than amplifying it. The occasional technical term goes unexplained in Mr Cobb's otherwise readable prose. Some of his objections to human genetic engineering are based on the observation that the tools involved are, for now, rather unreliable. That is an important obstacle--but readers may be more interested in the bigger question of what could or should happen if those problems are solved.

Nevertheless, "As Gods" is an excellent primer for anyone seeking a well-informed discussion of the moral implications of this enduringly controversial science. Readers are left with the impression that, for all the breakthroughs, it has yet to live up to its promise. It is still worth pondering what might happen if--or when--it ultimately does.

As Gods.

By Matthew Cobb." [1]

 

·  ·  ·1.   "Healing nature; Genetic engineering." The Economist, 7 Jan. 2023, p. 61(US).

Pasaulio karaliai; Helenistinė istorija

  „Makedonijos karalių muziejus kelia klausimų apie senovės istorijos lanką ir imperijos palikimą

 

     MIGLOTAS šiaurės Graikijos kaimo ruožas, įspraustas tarp miškingų kalvų ir pakrantės lygumos į vakarus nuo Salonikų, yra modernus Verginos kaimas. Tačiau Angeliki Kottaridi, kuris čia kasinėjo visą gyvenimą, pirmenybę teikia senoviniam tos vietos pavadinimui Aigai – tariamas Egg-eh – ožkas, kurių vis dar gausu netoliese. Vieta buvo visiškai neaiški, kol maždaug prieš pusę amžiaus iš drėgnos žemės pradėjo veržtis lobiai.

 

     Būdama 20-metė studentė M. Kottaridi išgyveno įkvepiančią akimirką archeologijoje: 1977 m. buvo atrastas karališkasis kapas su aukso dirbiniais ir gražiomis freskomis, kurį, prieštaringai iš pradžių, jos mentorius Manolis Andronikos nurodė kaip poilsio vietą, kur palaidotas Pilypas II Makedonietis. Paveldėjusi Andronikos mantiją, M. Kottaridi ir jos komanda nuo tada iškasė karališkuosius rūmus, tris kartus didesnius už Partenoną; dar dešimtys karališkųjų kapų ir daugiau, nei 1000 įprastų kapų; ir teatrą, kuris turi būti Filipo nužudymo vieta per vestuvių puotą 336 m. prieš Kristų.

 

     Jį pakeitė 20-metis sūnus Aleksandras (pavaizduotas mozaikoje iš Pompėjos). Likusi dalis yra pasaulio istorija: kai mirė 323 m. pr. Kr., Aleksandras Makedonietis vadovavo imperijai, besidriekiančiai nuo Egipto iki Hindukušo. 

 

Gruodžio 19 d. atidarytas naujas muziejus tyrinėja jo šeimos laimėjimus, kurie, anot M. Kottaridi, buvo daug daugiau nei užkariavimas. Jai senovės Makedonijos sostinė buvo savotiškos miesto civilizacijos, vėliau nusidriekusios nuo Magrebo iki Centrinės Azijos, prototipas. Jos darbas ir muziejus meta iššūkį įprastinėms senovės istorijos pažiūroms ir kelia aštrius klausimus apie imperijos palikimą.

 

     Nepaisant jo trumpumo, Aleksandro Makedoniečio valdymas visada buvo gerbiamas. Turkai, arabai ir persai jį vadina Iskander – populiariu žmonių ir vietovių vardu. Britų bibliotekoje Londone veikianti paroda primena daugybę būdų, kuriais buvo pasakojama Aleksandro pasaka – nuo viduramžių rankraščių iki šiuolaikinės animacijos. M. Kottaridi ypač intriguoja du monarchų istorijos aspektai.

 

     Pirma, efektyvumas, kuriuo Filipas iš grubių piemenų grupės sukūrė sudėtingą, pinigais pagrįstą visuomenę. Kaip Aleksandras kartą pasakojo savo kariams, jo tėvas „surado skurdžių valkatų gentį, dažniausiai apsirengusią kailiais, šeriančią keletą avių“.

 

     Antrasis yra būdas, kaip greita urbanizacija, kurią skatino Pilypas, pasikartojo visame vadinamajame helenistiniame pasaulyje, kitaip tariant, visose įpėdinėse valstybėse, nuspalvintose Graikijos įtaka, kurioje ištirpo Aleksandro imperija. Makedonijos užkariautojai, sako ponia Kottaridi, paliko savitą miesto visuomenės formą: ne tokią demokratišką ar suverenią, kaip aukso amžiaus Atėnai, bet aprūpinta gerai veikiančiomis institucijomis, gausiais viešaisiais patogumais ir pilietiniu pasididžiavimu, kuriame daug kalbų ir tikėjimų žmonės galėtų dalyvauti. Kaip rašoma naujojo muziejaus skydelyje, Aleksandro ekspedicijos „amžių senumo susidūrimą tarp Europos ir Azijos pavers kūrybiškiausia kultūrų sinteze ir sambūviu, kokią pasaulis kada nors matė“.

 

     Senovės istorijos lankas paprastai nubrėžiamas labai skirtingai. Daugiausia dėmesio skiriama Graikijos miestams-valstybėms, kurios klestėjo penktame ir ketvirtame amžiuje prieš Kristų: pirmiausia Atėnus, bet taip pat Korintą, Tėbus ir karingą Spartą. Žvelgiant iš šios perspektyvos, Pilypo ir Aleksandro, užvaldžiusių pietų Graikijos miestus, iškilimas buvo posūkis atgal. M. Kottaridi nuomone, Graikijos miestai valstybės buvo išvarginti tarpusavio kovų. Kosmopolitiški miestai, susikūrę Aleksandro laikais, buvo pažanga.

 

     Asmeniškai ji eina toliau. Helenistiniai miestai, anot jos, vaidino labai svarbų vaidmenį, formuojant šiandieninį religinį pasaulį, kaip ankstyvosios krikščionybės ir, be abejo, budizmo kultūros centrai. Pavyzdžiui, Indo-Graikijos karaliai, kurie valdė šiandieninį Pakistano Pendžabą, ne tik praktikavo budizmą; jie aktyviai propagavo tą tikėjimą ir jo meninę raišką.

 

     Kad lankytojai suprastų šią sritį, muziejus pristato milžiniškus vaizdo įrašus apie helenistines liekanas Levant ir nukreiptas į rytus. Tai pirmasis žingsnis, sako M. Kottaridi, rengiant didžiulę skaitmeninę helenizmo eros parodą. Tarp ginklų, papuošalų ir indų, ko gero, geriausias fizinis artefaktas yra Pilypo motinos, karalienės Euridikės, skulptūra, apvilkta plevenančiais drabužiais. Kaip karališkųjų ar dieviškųjų moterų vaizdavimo pavyzdys, ši meninė forma dažnai kartojasi, ypač Mergelės Marijos vaizdavime. 

 

Muziejaus vidinis kiemas yra tiksli reprodukcija, naudojant daug originalių dalių, viršutinio rūmų aukšto, kurio netoliese esanti vieta netrukus turėtų būti atverta visuomenei.

 

     Ar ponia Kottaridi perdeda Helenistinių miestų, kaip šiuolaikinio pasaulio tiglio, vaidmenį? Kalbėtojai gali atkreipti dėmesį į tai, kad krikščionybė, judaizmas ir islamas priešinosi politeistinei graikų dvasiai, kurią toli platino užkariaujantys makedonai. Tačiau bent jau helenistinė kultūra buvo šių tikėjimų, kurie iš dalies išsivystė didžiuosiuose miestuose, tokiuose kaip Aleksandrija Egipte, vystymosi katalizatorius.

 

     Taip pat ginčijamasi dėl Makedonijos karalių palikimo rytinėje graikiško atspalvio pasaulio dalyje, kur nuo 200 m. pr. Kr. žmonės skaitė graikų literatūrą ir praktikavo budizmą. Kaip ginčų dėl vėlesnių kolonizatorių aidas, Indijos mokslininkai, suprantama, nemėgsta Aleksandro, kaip „civilizacinės misijos“ vadovo idėjos.

 

     Kaip neseniai konferencijoje sakė Indijos vyriausybės ministras Meenakshis Lekhis, mainai tarp graikų ir indų kultūrų vyko seniai prieš jo užkariavimus. Anot indų kilmės klasiko Yaamiro Badhe, tie Homerą skaitantys budistai neturėtų būti vertinam,i kaip Vakarų imperializmo ietis. Atvirkščiai, jie buvo kūrybingas buvimas vietinėje kultūroje, kuriai būdingas atvirumas išorės įtakoms.

 

     Būtent tokią plačią istorinę diskusiją tikisi paskatinti naujasis M. Kottaridi muziejus. Graikijos kaimo vietovė gali atrodyti keista tokių diskusijų pradžia, bet tada ji buvo ir mažai tikėtina pasaulio užkariavimo bazė." [1]

 

·  ·  ·1.  "Kings of the world; Hellenistic history." The Economist, 7 Jan. 2023, p. 61(US).