Up Next the After party.

Coming off I-90 onto the West 14th ramp the road bends, and there it is. Three domes and a row of gold crosses, sitting maybe a stone’s throw off the off-ramp like the highway department drew the merge lane around it and kept going. Most people clock it for half a second at sixty and never think about it again. Tens of thousands of cars a day. A church older than the road, parked at the road’s front door.

That’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox, 2187 West 14th. The first Greek church in Cleveland, and for eighteen years the only one.

Get a drone up over it and you see what the drivers never do. The domes are gold, a cross standing on each. The yellow brick towers wedged in tight against the inner belt, and past all of it, flat on the horizon, Lake Erie.

The Greeks didn’t start on this side of the river. The first ones showed up in the 1890s and packed into a few blocks downtown off Bolivar Road, a stretch they called Greek Town, between Ontario and East 9th. Coffeehouses. Rented rooms. When a priest passed through he’d say the liturgy wherever there was space, somebody’s apartment, or up the hill at St. Theodosius, the Russian church with the onion domes you’ve seen in The Deer Hunter. For a while the only regular clergy they had was Father George Scarpas, who rode the train in from Pittsburgh once a month and rode it back.

The first real Greek Orthodox service in Cleveland had a roof over it and a movie screen under it. Christmas Eve, in a hall above a theater at Ontario and Bolivar. That’s where it started. Above a movie house.

By 1912 the congregation had organized itself as the Pan-Hellenic Union and scraped together $12,000. Fifteen families. They crossed the river and bought two mansions on West 14th, then called Jennings Avenue, that had belonged to a pair of industrialists named Lamson and a partner named Sessions. Cleveland money, the kind of names that ended up bolted to factory walls. The Greeks tore the mansions down and started building a church on the lot.

They incorporated in February 1913. The building wasn’t done for years. They held the liturgy in it anyway, unfinished, starting in 1919. Weddings and funerals were still happening in people’s living rooms into the 1930s because the church couldn’t hold them yet.

Then the icons.

In 1924 a priest named John Zografos took over the parish. He stayed four years. In those four years he painted every icon in the building. All 85 of them. The Christ in the dome, the saints down the walls, the screen standing between the people and the altar, every one of them came off the brush of one man who was also running the parish and starting the first Greek school in the city. They’re still up there. Walk in today and you’re looking at one man’s four years of work, a century later, nobody having to repaint it.

That’s the part that gets me. In the Orthodox way of seeing it, an icon is a window. You look at the saint and the saint looks back. You don’t sign one the way a painter signs a canvas. Zografos spent four years putting those faces on the walls so people could look through them to whatever’s on the other side. He died, the priests after him died, and the windows stayed open.

The neighborhood around the church came apart. By the 1960s the old estates on West 14th were gone and the state ran Interstate 90 straight through Tremont. The freeway split the neighborhood and dumped an on-ramp at the church’s front step. The money moved to the suburbs. SS. Constantine and Helen went up in Cleveland Heights, St. Demetrios out in Rocky River. Both trace back to this one corner. The parish on West 14th stayed put. Back in the thirties the mortgage nearly went under, and a man named Antony Hoty stepped in and pulled it off the foreclosure block. They kept the doors open through all of it. That’s why they still call it the Mother Church, the one every Greek parish in town descends from.

There’s something fitting in the name. The Annunciation is March 25, the morning the angel Gabriel tells Mary she’s going to carry Christ. It’s the hinge the whole story turns on, the very start of it. They named the first Greek church in Cleveland after a beginning, and it became the root the rest grew out of.

For most of a hundred years the view out the front door was an on-ramp and not much else. That’s finally turning. Cleveland Metroparks is putting a four-acre park on the ground in front of the church, tied into the new bridge work down by the river. Grass and trees where there’s been concrete and merge lanes since Eisenhower was president. And every Memorial Day weekend the lot fills for the Tremont Greek Fest, lamb off the spit and loukoumades fried to order and a line out the door, the one weekend a year the rest of Cleveland walks through the doors instead of glancing at the roof from the highway.

Next time you come off the belt and the road bends toward West 14th, give it the half second you’ve got. Look up. Fifteen families. Twelve thousand dollars. One priest with a paintbrush and four years on the scaffold. It’s all still up there, holding the same corner it held before the road existed, and it isn’t going anywhere the freeway can put it.

Carter Woods Park in Grand Chute, Wisconsin hides a wild corridor most people walk right past.

The parking lot won't tell you. Drive in off Bluemound and you get the usual town-park stuff. A softball diamond. A playground. Picnic tables, and pickleball courts that fill up with regulars by 8 in the morning. Looks like every other suburban park in the Fox Cities.

Then there's the middle.

Down the center of Carter Woods runs a strip of real woods, with dried-out stream beds that feed Mudd Creek. Bridges cross it. Footpaths wind through it. On foot it's all leaf litter and downed trunks, the light coming through green. And the deer are almost always in there. They hang back, far enough to keep one eye on you.

You can't read the shape of it from the ground. So I put the drone up.

Not for long. There's a National Guard armory sitting right next to the park, and that changes how you fly. You keep it short and tight. You keep the bird close, and you don't linger over anything with a fence and a flag. I got my shots and brought it back down.

Even in that short window, from a couple hundred feet, the whole place flips. Two ball diamonds, red infields set in a sea of green. I dropped low and skimmed the open field, tree shadows stretched halfway across the grass. What the camera caught from up there is a green seam cutting straight through the suburb, and it doesn't stop at the park line. Follow that tree line west and it threads through the Butte des Morts Country Club and runs to the Fox River. The deer use it like a road. So do the hawks nesting on the cell towers.

The pickleball place is a wildlife corridor wearing a town park.

A patch of wild woods right alongside a National Guard armory. Same fence line, middle of the Fox Cities. The deer don't seem to mind the neighbors.

Footage is up top. If you want more of these, overlooked parks and small-town corners shot from a couple hundred feet, subscribe to the Drone Drifter.

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The rain started the second I had the drone up. A Gulf drizzle, the kind that blows in sideways off the water for ten minutes and quits before you've decided whether to pack up. My niece was in town. She'd brought her boyfriend, and my second nephew came along too, so the four of us stood out on the rocks at the south tip of Casey Key watching me fly a drone into weather I'd normally land it for.

Nobody wanted to leave. That's the thing about the North Jetty.

It sits at the very bottom of Casey Key, a skinny barrier island about eight miles long that runs down the coast just north of Venice. The county stacked the jetty out of rock to keep the sand from washing into Venice Inlet. A breakwater. Practical, ugly, the kind of thing nobody flies across the country to see.

Then the rock did something nobody drew up. It bends the wave energy coming off the gulf and throws it back, and the North Jetty turned into one of the only spots on this whole flat Gulf Coast where you can actually surf. They built a wall to stop the sand from moving and ended up with a wave. I think about that more than I should. You set out to fix one small problem and the world hands you back something it never occurred to you to ask for.

From two hundred feet up, the inlet goes dark green where it drops off. You can see the exact seam where the calm intracoastal water meets the chop of the open gulf, sharp as a chalk line. Two guys fished the rocks below us with cut bait. Not moving. Barely talking. A dolphin worked the inlet for a minute, then gone.

And under all of it, in the dark band of sand the low tide leaves behind, the shark teeth.

People drive here for them. Black fossilized teeth, tiger and lemon and bull, washed up from a seafloor that's been giving them up for millions of years. Find one and you're holding something older than Florida, older than the idea of Florida, older than anything around you with a name. My niece found two before the rain came. Didn't make a thing of it, just dropped them in her pocket and kept her eyes down on the sand.

The drizzle passed. The light went soft and gray instead of gold. Better that way.

We stayed until the lot emptied out. Best afternoon I've had in a while, and I didn't get one clean sunset shot to show for it.

All of it sitting on top of a strange piece of history. This town didn’t exist one morning in August 1901. By nightfall it had a few thousand people living in tents on bare prairie and they called it Ragtown. Now it’s a courthouse square in Kiowa County with the oldest working courthouse in the state dead center and one of the biggest tile mosaics in the country set into the ground.

Catch it from the air at the right hour and the whole place glows the same red as the dirt it grew out of.

A small town that still knows how to fill its own square.

Red stone clubhouse from 1925, up on a rise with the prairie running flat in every direction, sun going orange over Route 66 and grill smoke hanging in the air. Eat there once and you’re already planning the drive back.

This was my last flight over the place. Every other time I came up here I flew it alone. This time I had folks with me I can truly call friends. Makes a difference, looking down at a spot you love and knowing the people standing next to you actually matter.

Mini 5 Pro caught one more sunset off that hill.

Good way to shut it down.

Why the Same Story?

Convergence, Not Influence

I want to be clear about something. There’s no evidence that Shotaro Ishinomori knew anything about the Ottoman devshirme, the Janissary corps, Skanderbeg, Ballaban Badera, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, or any of the history I’ve described. Zero evidence. I looked. I don’t think he was drawing on Ottoman history. I don’t think there’s a chain of influence connecting Ishinomori’s studio in 1970 to the Sultan’s court in 1450.

This isn’t an influence argument. It’s a convergence argument. And the convergence argument is stronger.

Two completely unrelated systems of imperial subject-creation, separated by five centuries and six thousand miles, produced the same story. The same sequence: seizure, erasure, remaking, deployment, escape, rebellion. The same spectrum of outcomes: loyalty, failed resistance, internal subversion, defection, revolt, seizure of power. The same climax: the state trying to destroy what it made when the creation proves uncontrollable.

They produced the same story because they are the same story. The specifics differ. The structure is identical. And the reason is mechanical.

The Logic

Any system that (1) seizes people from outside itself, (2) erases their prior identity, and (3) remakes them as instruments of its own power contains a built-in vulnerability. The remaking might be incomplete. The instrument might retain enough of its prior self to refuse. And the system can’t easily hedge against this, because the same process that makes the instrument powerful is the process that makes the instrument dangerous if it turns. A Janissary trained to be the finest soldier in Europe is also, if he defects, the finest soldier fighting against the empire. A cyborg built to be Shocker’s most lethal weapon is also, if he escapes, the most lethal threat Shocker faces.

The system can’t produce weak weapons. Weak weapons are useless. But strong weapons, if they turn, are existential threats. The better the system is at its job, the worse the consequences when the job fails.

This is a structural feature of empires that manufacture soldiers from stolen subjects. Not a bug. A load-bearing design flaw. The devshirme had it. Shocker has it. Any system built on this model will have it, because the vulnerability is baked into the logic.

The Image That Doesn’t Erase

Political and structural analysis gets you most of the way through this parallel. The mechanical argument holds. But the Neomartyrs break the mechanical explanation.

Structural analysis can explain Skanderbeg. He defected before the final step, retained memory of who he was, had the military capability to act on it. You can explain that as incomplete conditioning. You can explain Sokollu as ethnic solidarity, or the ordinary human drive to preserve what you came from. Patrona Halil, the Köprülüs, Kabakçı Mustafa. All explainable in political and psychological terms.

The Neomartyrs are harder. The process finished. The conditioning completed. There’s no political incentive to recant publicly. It means death. There’s no escape, no war. Just a person who had been living as something the system made them, and one day decided they weren’t, and said so out loud.

Aristotle argued in De Anima that the soul is the form of the body, not a substance added to it but the body’s organizing principle. The rational soul, the nous, isn’t a product of conditioning. It’s the thing doing the processing, the thing that orients and decides. You can alter circumstances. You can layer new habits over old ones. But the form persists. It goes quiet. It waits.

Plato’s argument is related but sharper. The soul has a natural orientation toward the Good. Not the good defined for it by the Sultan, not the good Shocker’s scientists approved. The Good itself, which no institution gets to assign. Coercion can redirect the soul’s attention, make it look the other way, train it to perform against its own nature. But the appetite for its true end doesn’t get trained out. The allegory of the cave makes it concrete: a person who has glimpsed the light, even briefly, even in some half-remembered childhood before the officials arrived on horseback, can’t be permanently satisfied with shadows.

The Eastern Church synthesized both of these and went further. The eikon isn’t only a philosophical concept. It’s a theological reality. God made every person in his image, and that image is what makes resistance possible at the deepest level. Not political will, not military training. The image. The thing that no production line can reach, that no decade of conditioning can fully overwrite, that asserts itself in the Neomartyr who walks out into a public square and says “I am Christian” knowing exactly what comes next.

The devshirme’s failure rate is the empirical evidence. Four centuries of systematic identity erasure, and it kept producing Skanderbegs and Sokollu Mehmed Pashas and Neomartyrs. Not because the process was poorly designed. Because there’s something in a person that a production line can’t reach. The Ottoman Empire ran the test. The Church Fathers provided the explanation.

Ishinomori’s Postwar Context

Ishinomori was born in 1938 in Tome, Miyagi Prefecture. He was seven years old when Japan surrendered. He grew up in the rubble of an empire that had, within living memory, done its own version of this same thing: conscripted its citizens, indoctrinated them in the ideology of kokutai (the national body), remade civilians into soldiers who were expected to die for the Emperor.

I’m not going to overclaim this. I don’t know what Ishinomori was thinking about when he created Skull Man and Kamen Rider. I don’t have diary entries or interviews where he says “I based Shocker on the Imperial Japanese military” or “I was thinking about the devshirme.” But he was a Japanese man born in the late 1930s, writing in the early 1970s, and the thing he kept writing about, the story he told over and over, was: a state kidnaps a person and remakes him into a weapon, and the weapon escapes.

Japan had direct experience with that machinery. The whole country did. Every family that sent a son to the Imperial Army knew some version of it. The state takes your child. The state remakes your child. The state sends your child to die.

That context helps explain the convergence. Ishinomori and the Ottoman devshirme produced the same narrative because they were both describing systems of imperial subject-creation. Different empires, different centuries, different methods. Same logic. And the same logic produces the same story, because the story isn’t about any particular empire. The story is about what happens when power tries to eat people and turn them into instruments, and what it looks like when one of them gets free.

The Weapon Remembers

November 28, 1443. Krujë. Skanderbeg raises the double-headed eagle of his family over the fortress walls. He took the city with a forged Ottoman letter and a lifetime of Ottoman military training. His brother’s killer, maybe. His father’s pride, maybe. A warlord who would spend twenty-five years bleeding the empire that built him. They called him Iskander Bey, Lord Alexander, and the name they gave him became the name that haunted them.

1557. Istanbul. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, born a Serbian Orthodox boy in Herzegovina, signs the order restoring the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć. He installs his own cousin as Patriarch. He does this using the full authority of the office the devshirme gave him. The imposed identity funding the survival of the erased one.

1558. Krujë again. Ballaban Badera, born Michael, son of Mark, dies outside the walls his brother defends from within. A hunter named Gjergj Aleksi shoots him through the neck. The conversion held. Michael never came back. The system won that one.

September 1730. Istanbul. Twelve thousand Albanian Janissaries storm the capital. Patrona Halil forces a Sultan off his throne. Two months later, the new Sultan has him killed. The creation was too dangerous to leave alive, even after it did what the state wanted.

June 15, 1826. Istanbul. Mahmud II fires on the Janissary barracks. Six thousand dead. The empire dismantling the army it spent four centuries building out of stolen children, because the children grew too strong.

1803. Constantinople. A man named Demetrius, living as a Muslim for years or decades, walks out into a public space and announces that he is Christian. He knows what happens next. The Ottoman court executes him. The Orthodox Church declares him a saint. There was no tactical calculation in what he did. No escape route, no guerrilla campaign, no twenty-five-year war. Just the image asserting itself, past all the conditioning, past everything the system spent years installing.

April 3, 1971. A Japanese television screen. A college student named Takeshi Hongo, surgically altered into a grasshopper cyborg by a global terrorist organization called Shocker, escapes before the brainwashing can take. He looks at the body they gave him, this monstrous rebuilt thing, and he decides to use it against them. He puts on the mask. He fights.

Different centuries. Different continents. Different bodies carrying the marks of different empires.

The same crack in the system. The place where the remaking failed. The ten percent that didn’t take. The will that survived the surgery, the conversion, the renaming, the decade of training, all of it designed to produce an obedient weapon, and somehow the person inside held on.

Five hundred years of Ottoman history couldn’t close that crack. Fifty years of Kamen Rider franchise storytelling keeps returning to it, episode after episode, series after series, because the story refuses to be finished. The weapon keeps remembering. The weapon keeps turning.

And the empire, whatever empire, in whatever century, on whatever continent, keeps learning the same thing the hard way: you can remake the body. You can bury the name. You can kill the god and teach a new language and train the hands to hold a sword for your wars.

The Church Fathers said you can’t destroy the eikon. The Ottoman Empire tested that for four centuries and never succeeded. Ishinomori wrote the same answer in manga and then in a children’s television show.

You can’t always get the last ten percent. And that’s enough.

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God Bless. — George

Now hold all of that. Keep the devshirme in your head. Keep Skanderbeg on the walls of Krujë and Ballaban dying outside them. Keep the eight boys tortured for a year. Keep Sokollu restoring the Serbian Patriarchate with Ottoman money. Keep the 6,000 dead in Istanbul in 1826.

And open a manga from 1970.

Ishinomori’s Architecture: From Skull Man to Kamen Rider

Skull Man: The Unfiltered Version

Shotaro Ishinomori published Skull Man as a hundred-page one-shot in Weekly Shōnen Magazine in 1970. It sold over 1.5 million copies. The protagonist is Tatsuo Kagura, eighteen years old, an orphan whose parents were murdered. He takes the name Skull Man. His only companion is Garo, an artificial creature. He pursues vengeance against the people who destroyed his family.

That description makes him sound like a hero. He isn’t.

Skull Man kills innocents. He kills indiscriminately. Ishinomori designed him to frighten children. The press in the story’s world censors his existence because the public can’t handle knowing he’s out there. He is manga’s first anti-hero by most credible accounts, and the reason he’s the first is that nobody before Ishinomori had the nerve to build a protagonist this ugly. A person made monstrous by what was done to him, who turns that monstrousness outward without much caring where it lands.

The weapon is loose. And it doesn’t care who’s standing in the way.

This is the honest version of the escaped-weapon story. The version where the system’s product, once freed, isn’t a savior. He’s damaged. Dangerous. Shaped entirely by the violence that made him. Skull Man is what Skanderbeg looks like if you strip away five centuries of national mythology and look at the warlord underneath: a man who burned a quarter-century of his life making war, trained to kill by the people he was killing, incapable of becoming anything other than what the system built him to be.

The Transition

In 1970, Toei Company producer Toru Hirayama came to Ishinomori looking for a TV superhero. Ishinomori pitched Skull Man.

Toei said no. Too dark. Too violent. A hundred pages of an anti-hero slaughtering people wasn’t going to work as a children’s show airing on Saturday mornings.

So they softened it. The skull motif became a grasshopper. Ishinomori’s son reportedly picked the insect. The indiscriminate violence became directed heroism. The moral ambiguity got scrubbed out for broadcast.

On April 3, 1971, Kamen Rider premiered on Japanese television.

The underlying machinery was untouched. A person is seized. Remade into a weapon. Escapes before the process is complete. Turns against the system that made him. The structure survived the transition from Skull Man to Kamen Rider perfectly intact. What changed was the moral packaging. The escaped weapon became a good guy.

This mirrors something in the Ottoman parallel that I think is worth flagging: the same softening happened to Skanderbeg over centuries of Albanian folk memory. The warlord who fought a brutal guerrilla campaign for twenty-five years became a clean national hero, a symbol of freedom, a figure on stamps and statues. Ishinomori told the raw version in 1970 and the mythologized version in 1971. Albanian culture did the same thing over five hundred years. Different timescales. Same process. The escaped weapon gets cleaned up for the audience that needs him.

Kamen Rider: The Hero

Takeshi Hongo is a college student. Shocker, a global terrorist organization, kidnaps him and surgically alters him into a cyborg. The Japanese term is kaizō ningen, “modified human.” They graft animal and insect DNA into his body alongside cybernetic enhancements. The conversion happens while Hongo is unconscious.

The brainwashing doesn’t.

Dr. Hiroshi Midorikawa, a scientist working inside Shocker, intervenes before the final step. He gets Hongo out. Later, when Shocker tries the brainwashing again, Hongo uses self-hypnosis to resist. The body is Shocker’s work. The mind stays his.

In Ishinomori’s manga, the version he drew himself, Hongo is wrecked by this. He hates what he’s become. He looks at his cyborg body and sees a monster, something Shocker built, something that isn’t fully human anymore. He carries that self-loathing for a long time before he accepts who and what he is and decides to use Shocker’s modifications against them.

The gap between physical transformation and mental subjugation is Hongo’s entire story. That gap is where his freedom lives. It’s a thin space. Everything Hongo is as a hero exists because of one incomplete step in a process designed to produce an obedient weapon.

Sound familiar?

Shocker: The Antagonist as Empire

Shocker wants to conquer the world. The method: kidnap human beings, surgically modify them into mutant cyborgs called Kaijin, brainwash them, and deploy them. The organization’s scientists are themselves coerced, kidnapped specialists forced to work under threat of death. When a scientist stops being useful, Shocker kills them. When a scientist tries to escape, Shocker kills them.

The Kamen Rider Spirits manga connects Shocker’s founders to former Nazis. The fictional organization is rooted in the specific history of twentieth-century totalitarianism. The Great Leader of Shocker’s stated endgame is the conversion of the entire human race into Kaijin, a single unified entity under his control.

Shocker doesn’t want to rule people. It wants to replace them. Every human being is raw material waiting to be processed. The person who walks into a Shocker lab ceases to exist. What walks out is an instrument. A tool. Property.

The devshirme, with surgical tables instead of circumcision rites and cybernetic implants instead of Turkish language immersion.

The Mirror: Structural Parallels

The Production Cycle

Lay the two systems next to each other and walk through them step by step.

Seizure. Ottoman officials ride into a Christian village and take boys from their families. Shocker operatives kidnap Takeshi Hongo off a street.

Erasure. The Ottoman boy is separated from his parents, his church, his community. He is told to forget his name. Hongo is placed on an operating table, unconscious, his body opened and rewritten without his knowledge or consent.

Remaking. The boy is converted to Islam, given a Turkish name, trained in a new language, acculturated through years of labor in Anatolian villages, then military drilling in Istanbul. Hongo is implanted with insect DNA and cybernetic systems, his body rebuilt into a weapon.

Deployment. The boy enters the Janissary corps. He fights the Sultan’s wars. Hongo is intended to enter Shocker’s Kaijin army. He is meant to fight the Great Leader’s wars.

The key fact in both cases: the subject isn’t killed. He’s replaced. The original person is overwritten with a new one. That’s what makes the escaped weapon so dangerous to the system. Shocker knows exactly what it put inside Hongo, because Shocker put it there. The Ottoman state knew exactly what its Janissaries were capable of, because the state spent a decade building them.

When the product escapes, the manufacturer knows its specifications. That’s terrifying.

What the System Produces

I laid out nine Ottoman figures in Part I. Each one represents a different outcome of the devshirme, a different answer to the question of what happens when you steal a child and remake him. Each one maps onto something in Ishinomori’s world.

Skanderbeg defected. He’s Takeshi Hongo, the escaped hero who fights back.

Ballaban Badera stayed loyal. He’s the Kaijin, the completed product sent to kill the one who got away. He fought his own father across a siege wall and never flinched, or if he flinched we have no record of it.

The Neomartyrs completed the conversion, lived inside it for years, then reversed it at the cost of their lives. They’re the Kaijin who, deep into service, somehow remembered who they were before the table. No escape route, no war. Just the image coming back through.

The eight Christian boys tried to resist from inside and failed. They’re the unnamed captives in Shocker’s labs, the ones the audience never sees, the ones whose resistance ended in a room with no witnesses.

Sokollu Mehmed Pasha subverted from within. He’s Dr. Midorikawa, the insider who uses his position to sabotage the machine. Sokollu restored the Serbian Patriarchate with Ottoman authority. Midorikawa broke Hongo out of Shocker using Shocker’s own infrastructure.

Patrona Halil seized the throne. He deposed a Sultan. This is the anxiety that runs underneath the entire Kamen Rider franchise, the one that never quite gets spoken aloud: the modified human isn’t just a rogue. He’s a rival. He could replace his makers.

Kabakçı Mustafa refused to be replaced. When Selim III tried to build a new army, the old one tore him off his throne. Shocker can’t tolerate Kamen Rider’s existence for the same reason. A superior product, walking around free, is proof that the system’s control has failed.

The Dahijas went rogue and burned everything down. Their tyranny in Serbia triggered a national uprising that eventually ripped a piece of the empire away. This is what happens when Shocker’s methods produce consequences the organization can’t contain. Chaos multiplying beyond the point of retrieval.

The Köprülü family ran the empire. Six Grand Viziers from a single Albanian devshirme line. The stolen children surpassed their masters. This is the thing the Kamen Rider franchise accidentally keeps proving: the hero is always stronger than the organization. Always. Every single series. The modified human surpasses the modifier. The weapon outperforms the arsenal that produced it.

That’s nine outcomes. Nine different answers to the same question. And the devshirme and Shocker produced all of them. The system’s logic is identical, so the system’s outputs are identical. This is where the argument stops being an analogy and starts looking like a law.

The Incomplete Conversion

Skanderbeg served the Ottoman military for roughly two decades before he defected. Whatever identity erasure the devshirme performed on George Kastrioti, it held for twenty years. Then it didn’t. Something remained, or something came back. He raised his family’s banner over Krujë. He used a name the Ottomans gave him, Skanderbeg, “Lord Alexander,” to wage war against the Ottomans. He couldn’t shed the name. He couldn’t shed the military training. He could only point it all in the other direction.

Hongo can’t undo the surgery. His body is Shocker’s work permanently. The grasshopper cyborg form, the enhanced strength, the combat capabilities. All of it stays. He carries Shocker’s modifications for the rest of his life. What he can do, the only thing he can do, is refuse the purpose those modifications were designed to serve.

The hero in both cases is defined by an incomplete process. The devshirme or Shocker did ninety percent of the work. The body was remade, the skills were installed, the power was granted. The last ten percent, the part where the person inside gets erased and replaced with obedience, didn’t take.

Contrast Ballaban. The conversion completed. He fought his brother. He besieged a city defended by his father. Whatever was left of Michael of Badera, it wasn’t enough. The hero and the villain in this story came off the same production line. Same system, same process, same inputs. The only variable is whether that final step, the one that kills the person and replaces them with a tool, finishes.

That’s a specific kind of heroism. Not the heroism of the pure, the untouched, the chosen one born special. The heroism of the partially converted. The hero is always, to some degree, a product of the enemy. He carries the enemy’s work in his body. He fights using skills the enemy gave him. His power comes from the people he’s fighting against. And his freedom, the narrow gap between what was done to his body and what wasn’t done to his mind, is everything.

The Name and the Mask

George Kastrioti was renamed Iskander Bey. After his defection he was known by both names. The Ottoman name stuck. It’s the name Albania remembers him by: Skanderbeg. The imposed identity became inseparable from the person. He couldn’t go back to being George Kastrioti, a minor nobleman’s son from a province the Ottomans swallowed. The devshirme made him Skanderbeg, and Skanderbeg is who he was when he fought the devshirme.

Hongo becomes Kamen Rider. Literally: Masked Rider. The mask is Shocker’s work. The grasshopper cyborg form is what they built him to be. But Hongo wears it to fight them. The mark of captivity becomes a weapon of resistance. He can’t take it off. He can’t go back to being a college student. The transformation is permanent. So he turns it around.

Sokollu Mehmed Pasha kept his Ottoman name for his entire life. He never reclaimed whatever Serbian name he was born with. He used the authority that the Ottoman name gave him, the Grand Vizierate, the full weight of imperial power, to restore the Serbian Patriarchate. The imposed identity became the instrument of preserving the erased one.

In all of these cases, the person can’t return to who they were before the system took them. The process is irreversible. What they can do is repurpose the new identity. Turn it against its creators. The mask becomes the weapon. The Ottoman title becomes a rebel’s banner. The Grand Vizier’s seal restores a church the empire tried to bury.

The State Destroys What It Creates

Selim III tried to replace the Janissaries in 1807. Kabakçı Mustafa and the Janissaries deposed him. Nineteen years later, Mahmud II succeeded where Selim failed, but only by surrounding the barracks with cannon and firing until the problem was solved. Six thousand dead. The corps abolished.

The Dahijas, rogue Janissaries in Serbia, provoked the First Serbian Uprising by overreaching so badly that an entire nation rose against them. The empire’s products, operating outside any command structure, triggered the dismemberment of the empire’s territory.

Shocker pours resources into hunting Kamen Rider. Every episode, every arc. The organization sends Kaijin after Kaijin, devotes operational capacity, sacrifices personnel. Because it has to. It built Hongo. It knows what he can do. An escaped product walking around free, using Shocker’s own technology against Shocker, is an existential problem precisely because of how good the technology is.

Any system that manufactures weapons out of human beings will eventually face the possibility that those weapons turn. The Janissary history shows every version of that turning: defection, subversion, revolt, rogue action, outright seizure of power. The Ottoman state tried integration, accommodation, reform, and finally extermination. Shocker tries the same progression across the franchise. None of it works. The weapon keeps fighting.

The Conscience Inside the Machine

Dr. Midorikawa saved Hongo. He was a Shocker scientist who broke ranks, who looked at the operating table and the unconscious college student strapped to it and decided he couldn’t let the last step happen. He got Hongo out. It probably cost him his life.

Sokollu Mehmed Pasha spent fourteen years as Grand Vizier doing something quieter but structurally identical. He worked inside the system and used the system’s resources to protect the thing the system was designed to destroy. He restored a church. He appointed his Christian relatives to positions of power. He never left. He never raised a banner. He just bent the machinery, degree by degree, toward a purpose its builders never intended.

Ottoman administrators sometimes looked the other way when Balkan families tried to hide their sons from the devshirme. They let circumcision ruses work. They lost paperwork. The system was never airtight. There were always people inside it who cracked, who couldn’t stomach what the machine required of them.

Skanderbeg didn’t defect alone. Three hundred Albanians left with him at Niš. Skull Man has Garo, his artificial companion, the one loyal figure in a hostile world. The escapee rarely operates in isolation. The system produces not just individual defectors but clusters of dissent, small networks of people who recognize each other and move together.

The machine leaks. That’s structural too.

In Part III: Why the same story keeps appearing across five centuries and six thousand miles. And what the Eastern Church knew about it that political analysis doesn't.

Part III drops next Tuesday — the theological argument, and the answer to why this story keeps appearing across centuries. Subscribe if you aren't already. And drop a comment: which figure from Part I maps closest to Hongo in your reading?

An empire steals a child.

It takes him from his family, strips his name, buries his language, kills his god and gives him a new one. It trains him to fight, to kill, to obey. It pours years into making him the sharpest blade in its arsenal. Then it points him at its enemies and says: Go!

And sometimes the blade turns around.

This is one of the oldest stories that power tells about itself, and one of the oldest stories that the powerless tell about surviving it. You can find it in Albanian folk memory, where a stolen nobleman’s son named George Kastrioti burned twenty-five years of his life fighting the empire that raised him. You can find it in a 1970 Japanese manga called Skull Man, where an orphan remade by violence becomes a walking nightmare that frightens children. You can find it the following year, April 3, 1971, when a TV show called Kamen Rider premiered on Japanese television and told a cleaned-up version of the same story to millions of kids eating breakfast.

These two histories have nothing to do with each other. A fifteenth-century Balkan military system and a twentieth-century Japanese superhero comic share no common source, no line of influence, no borrowing. Shotaro Ishinomori, the manga artist who created both Skull Man and Kamen Rider, almost certainly never read a word about the Ottoman devshirme.

That’s the point.

The argument I want to make here is that the parallel between Ishinomori’s fiction and Ottoman history isn’t coincidence, and it isn’t influence. It’s convergence. Empires that manufacture soldiers out of stolen people produce, built into the logic of their own operation, the possibility of the weapon that turns. The story recurs because the machinery recurs. Ishinomori and the Ottomans arrived at the same narrative because they were describing the same thing: what happens when a system tries to erase a human being and rebuild him as a tool, and what happens when the erasure doesn’t take.

There’s a frame for this that political analysis misses. The boys taken by the devshirme didn’t come from a secular tradition. They came from the Eastern Church. And the Eastern Church had been thinking about this exact problem for over a thousand years before the Ottomans arrived. What happens when power tries to unmake a person. The Greek Fathers called it the eikon. The image. Genesis 1:26, in the Greek of the Septuagint: kat’ eikona hēmeteron, “according to our image.” Not a metaphor. An ontological fact about every human person. The way a coin carries the face of the emperor, the Church Fathers said, every person carries the image of God. You can bury the name. You can stamp over the face. But Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa were clear on the result: you can’t destroy the image. The Ottoman Empire spent four centuries running an empirical test on that claim.

The Devshirme: Empire as Production Line

The Ottoman word was devshirme. It means “collection.” The bureaucratic flatness of the term is worth sitting with for a second, because what it describes is the systematic kidnapping of children.

Starting roughly under Sultan Bayazid I in the late fourteenth century and reaching its full form by the 1400s, the devshirme worked like this: every four or five years, Ottoman officials rode into the rural Christian provinces of the Balkans and Anatolia and took boys. One boy per forty households. Ages seven to twenty, though the younger ones were preferred. The boys were separated from their parents, their churches, their villages. They were told to forget.

That was step one.

Step two was conversion. The boys were circumcised, given Muslim names, and forced to convert to Islam. Their birth names were buried. Step three was assimilation: the boys were shipped to Turkish villages in Anatolia and hired out as agricultural laborers for three to five years, learning Turkish, absorbing Islamic practices, forgetting whatever language they’d spoken at home. Step four was the recall to Istanbul for another three to five years of labor and training. Step five was deployment: the finished product entered the Janissary infantry corps, the Sultan’s personal military force, or was placed in palace schools to be trained as an administrator.

The whole process took a decade or more. By the end, the Christian boy from a Balkan village had been replaced. His name, his language, his religion, his family, his community, his sense of who he was before the officials came through town on horseback. All of it erased and overwritten. What came out the other end was a kul, a slave of the Sultan, loyal to no one and nothing except the Ottoman state.

That was the idea, anyway.

The Janissary Paradox

The Janissaries became the most feared fighting force in Europe and the Middle East for roughly two centuries. The Sultan’s personal guard. The shock troops of imperial expansion. The institution that held the empire together.

And they were all stolen children.

This is the paradox at the center of the devshirme, and it’s the same paradox that powers Ishinomori’s fiction: the system’s most capable instruments were the very people it had seized and remade. The empire elevated its captives into positions of extraordinary power. Janissaries could rise to the highest offices of the state. They accumulated wealth, political influence, institutional authority. By the seventeenth century they were deposing Sultans.

Some historians have complicated the picture, arguing that the devshirme was also a vehicle for social mobility, that families sometimes volunteered their sons because the Janissary path offered wealth and status otherwise impossible for a Christian peasant. This is true. It’s also true that a kidnapped boy given a sword and a title is still a kidnapped boy. Elevation and enslavement aren’t opposites. They can live in the same body at the same time, and the tension between them is exactly where the story gets interesting.

The Spectrum of Resistance

The devshirme didn’t produce one type of outcome. It produced a full range of them, from total loyalty to outright rebellion, with every shade of compromise and subversion in between. Each of these outcomes has a counterpart in Ishinomori’s fictional world. I want to walk through the major ones, because the breadth of the parallel is where the real argument lives.

Skanderbeg: The Hero Who Broke Free

George Kastrioti was the son of an Albanian lord. He was taken into Ottoman service around 1414, possibly as early as age four, certainly by his late teens. The Ottomans renamed him Iskander, after Alexander the Great, and added the title Bey: Lord. He trained as a Janissary. He was good at it. He rose through the Ottoman military ranks and commanded troops in the Sultan’s campaigns.

Then, on a November night in 1443, during the Battle of Niš, Skanderbeg deserted.

He took three hundred Albanian soldiers with him. He rode south to the fortress of Krujë, presented a forged letter from Sultan Murad II to the garrison commander, and took the city. He raised the double-headed eagle of his family’s banner over the walls. On November 28, 1443, he proclaimed Albanian independence.

He would fight the Ottoman Empire for the next twenty-five years, until his death in 1468. He founded the League of Lezhë in 1444. Albanian chieftains who’d spent generations fighting each other joined his coalition and held off repeated Ottoman invasions. He won battles he should have lost, against armies that massively outnumbered his, using terrain and guerrilla tactics he’d learned while serving the very empire he was now fighting.

The name he reclaimed when he raised that banner was the one he was baptized with. George. In the Orthodox tradition, a baptismal name isn’t administrative. You’re named for a saint, placed under that saint’s protection, expected to imitate that life. George Kastrioti was named for the soldier-martyr whose icon hangs in churches across the Christian East: the one who kills the dragon. The Ottomans gave him Alexander. He took George back. Whether he thought of it in those theological terms I can’t say. But the act maps onto something the Church Fathers would have recognized immediately: a person reasserting the identity that no empire has the authority to revoke.

Everything the Ottomans gave him, he turned against them. Their military training. Their strategic doctrine. His understanding of their logistics and their weaknesses. Skanderbeg is the weapon that remembered who it was before. He is Albania’s national hero to this day.

Ballaban Badera: The Weapon That Didn’t Escape

Skanderbeg’s story has a mirror, and it’s uglier.

A boy named Michael was born Catholic in the village of Badera, in the Mat region of Albania. Son of Mark (some sources say Milosh) and Helena. Taken through the devshirme. Given the name Ballaban. He rose through the Ottoman ranks just as Skanderbeg had, and by the 1460s he’d reached the rank of Pasha under Sultan Mehmed II.

Here’s where it turns. Michael’s brother, Constantine, and Michael’s father, Mark, both served as soldiers under Skanderbeg’s command. They were fighting against Ottoman armies led by their own son and brother.

Ballaban commanded Ottoman forces against Skanderbeg at the Battle of Vajkal in April 1465. He came back as commanding general of the Second Siege of Krujë in 1466. He kept the fortress under siege for nearly a year. He died there, shot through the neck by an arquebus fired by Gjergj Aleksi, a city defender who was a hunter in civilian life.

Father and son on opposite sides of a siege wall. Brother against brother. The devshirme’s logic made flesh.

Ballaban is what happens when the conversion finishes. He is the completed product, the one who didn’t remember or didn’t let himself remember. In Ishinomori’s terms, Ballaban is every Kaijin that Kamen Rider has to fight: a former human, fully converted, sent back to destroy the one who escaped. The system made both Skanderbeg and Ballaban. The only difference was whether the final step held.

The Neomartyrs: The Conversion That Still Turned

The Orthodox Church documented a category of person who doesn’t appear in most political histories of the Ottoman period but is essential to any full accounting of what the devshirme did. They called them Neomartyrs. New Martyrs.

These were men and women, and some of them began as boys taken through forced conversion, who had been living as Muslims for years or decades. The conversion appeared to have held. Then they recanted.

Publicly. In front of witnesses. Knowing the penalty.

The Orthodox Church canonized several hundred of them between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The scholar Nomikos Michael Vaporis documented them in Witnesses for Christ. The wave of public reconversions was especially concentrated between 1730 and 1820, the same decades when the Janissary Corps was at its most politically unstable. One of them, Demetrius the Neomartyr, was executed in 1803. They weren’t political revolutionaries. They weren’t military commanders. They were people who had apparently completed the conversion process and then, by their own choice, reversed it at the cost of their lives.

They washed out the stain of forced apostasy with an atoning death. That’s the theological category. That’s how the Church understood what they were doing.

In Ishinomori’s terms, the Neomartyrs are the strangest entry in the gallery. Skanderbeg escaped before the final step. Ballaban never looked back. The eight Christian boys resisted from inside and failed immediately. The Neomartyrs don’t fit any of those slots. They’re the completed product, the ones the process appeared to finish, who years or decades later reasserted the identity the system had buried. In Kamen Rider terms, they’re the Kaijin who, after full conversion and years of service, remembered the name on their baptismal certificate and said it out loud in public. No escape. No war. Just the image asserting itself, past everything the system spent years installing.

The Eight Christian Youths: The Resistance That Failed

Not every act of resistance produced a hero. Under Mehmed II, eight Christian boys taken into the Sultan’s personal service formed a pact to assassinate him. Their stated reason, preserved in the historical record: “None other than our great sorrow for our fathers and dear friends.”

The plot was discovered. Mehmed had the boys tortured over the course of a year, then beheaded.

No escape. No rebellion. Just eight boys who couldn’t bear what had been done to them and tried to strike at the source, and failed. The will to resist existed. The capacity to succeed didn’t. These are the stories the hero narrative requires us to forget, the ones who fought the system from inside and lost. In Ishinomori’s world, they’re the nameless captives in Shocker’s labs who resisted the brainwashing but never made it out.

Sokollu Mehmed Pasha: The Subversive Who Stayed

Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was born into a Serbian Orthodox family in Herzegovina. Taken through the devshirme as a boy. He never defected, never rebelled, never raised a banner or forged a letter. He did something stranger.

He climbed.

By 1565 he’d become Grand Vizier, the highest office in the Ottoman Empire below the Sultan himself. He held the position for fourteen years, until his assassination in 1579. And during that time he used the full weight of imperial authority to do something the devshirme was specifically designed to prevent: he preserved the identity the system had tried to erase.

In 1557, Sokollu secured the restoration of the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, the institutional heart of Serbian Orthodoxy, and installed his own cousin Makarije Sokolović as Patriarch. He appointed both Muslim and Christian relatives to positions of power throughout the empire.

He never stopped being an Ottoman Grand Vizier. He never reclaimed his Serbian name. He operated entirely within the system. He used the tools the system gave him to protect the thing the system was built to destroy. If Skanderbeg is Kamen Rider, Sokollu is Dr. Midorikawa: the conscience inside the machine.

Patrona Halil: The Creation That Seized the Throne

In September 1730, an Albanian Janissary named Patrona Halil led a force of 12,000 Janissaries, most of them Albanian, in an open revolt in Istanbul. They forced the abdication of Sultan Ahmed III. They killed his Grand Vizier, Nevşehirli Damad Ibrahim Pasha. They ended the Tulip Period, an era of cultural flourishing and elite extravagance that the Janissaries saw as corrupt. They installed Mahmud I in Ahmed’s place.

Two months later, Mahmud I invited Patrona Halil to a meeting and had him killed.

Patrona Halil didn’t escape the system. He seized it. The creation deposed the creator. A stolen Albanian child, processed through the devshirme, trained as a Janissary, became powerful enough to remove a Sultan from his throne. The empire’s own production line had built something it couldn’t control.

Kabakçı Mustafa: The Creation That Refused to Be Replaced

In 1807, Sultan Selim III attempted to modernize the Ottoman military through the Nizam-ı Cedid, the “New Order,” which aimed to train a new European-style army that would eventually replace the Janissaries entirely.

The Janissaries saw this for what it was: their own obsolescence.

A Janissary officer named Kabakçı Mustafa led the revolt. The rebels forced Selim’s abdication, installed Mustafa IV, and demanded the abolition of every reformist institution Selim had created. The creation refused to be scrapped. The tool informed its maker that it wouldn’t be replaced by a newer model, and backed the refusal with violence.

The Dahijas: Rogue Weapons Catalyzing Revolution

By 1801, renegade Janissary commanders called the Dahijas had seized power in the Sanjak of Smederevo, roughly modern central Serbia. They ruled independently of both the Sultan and any Ottoman chain of command. They suspended Serbian rights, confiscated land, imposed forced labor.

In January 1804, the Dahijas ordered what became known as the Slaughter of the Knezes: the execution of somewhere between 70 and 150 Serbian village leaders and Orthodox priests, in a single coordinated purge designed to prevent a rebellion.

It caused one instead.

The First Serbian Uprising began on February 14, 1804. It was the start of the Serbian Revolution, the process that would eventually produce an independent Serbian state. The Dahijas were captured and beheaded by August of that year.

Janissaries, gone completely rogue, with no imperial authority behind them, committed an atrocity so severe it triggered a national liberation movement that eventually tore a piece of the empire away. The system’s products, uncontrolled, catalyzed the system’s dismemberment.

The Köprülü Family: The Weapons That Ruled

The Köprülü family came from Roshnik, a village near Berat in Albania. Taken through the devshirme. They produced six Grand Viziers between the mid-1600s and the early 1700s. Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, the first of them, served as Grand Vizier from 1656 to 1661 with a degree of autonomy no Grand Vizier before him had held. The Sultan granted him extraordinary powers, political rule without interference.

The Köprülü era represents the Ottoman Empire at its peak geographic expansion. The largest version of the empire, its greatest territorial reach across Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa, was administered by a family of stolen Albanian children.

The devshirme’s final paradox. The weapons didn’t just serve. They ran the whole operation.

The Auspicious Incident: The State Destroys Its Creation

By the seventeenth century, the devshirme had largely been abandoned as a recruitment method. The Janissary Corps had become entrenched, hereditary, politically untouchable, and increasingly resistant to any reform that might weaken their position.

On June 15, 1826, Sultan Mahmud II ended the argument. He surrounded the Janissary barracks in Istanbul with loyalist troops and artillery. He opened fire. Approximately 6,000 Janissaries were killed. The survivors were exiled, imprisoned, or executed in the following weeks. The corps was abolished. Mahmud II called it the “Auspicious Incident.” The Janissaries didn’t get to name it.

Read against everything above, the Auspicious Incident is the empire’s answer to every variation of the problem the devshirme created: escape, subversion, revolt, rogue action, seizure of power. When the system can no longer manage what it made, it reaches for the only tool left. Extermination.

Stay stuned Next week for In Part II: Legendary Mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori built the same machine in 1970. He just didn’t know it.

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I pulled off on Tatanka Hill at 5:47 AM on August 22nd.

Still dark. Pines were black shapes. The sky was doing something orange and violent behind them. That particular color that looks fake in photos but lands different when you’re standing at 4,500 feet with nobody else around and you can smell the pine and the dirt and the cold air all at once.

I took a picture.

Then I thought: “I need to fly here. Wish I had a drone.” The Idea was planted.

Aug 22, 2024 · 5:47 AM

Fire sunrise over Tatanka Hill. Orange and yellow burning behind silhouetted pines, dark mine tailings and fresh-turned earth in the foreground.

Tatanka Hill sits just north of Deadwood on Highway 85. Kevin Costner built his Tatanka Museum up there after filming Dances With Wolves. Fourteen bronze bison and three Lakota horsemen frozen mid-buffalo jump. The third largest bronze sculpture in the world, sitting on a high prairie hill overlooking the gulch.

I know that hill. I worked it.

From July 28th, 2024 to February 1st, 2025, I was up there every day on the site directly across from the museum, where the new Lawrence County Law Enforcement Center now stands. Six months of early mornings, cold starts, and a sky that never looked the same twice. Before the crews showed up, before the equipment warmed up, I was standing on that cut hillside watching the Black Hills do what they do at first light.

Nobody talks about that part of a job. The part where you show up before sunrise and the whole place belongs to you for about twenty minutes.

Four months of photos. Same hill. You’d never know it was the same place.

That’s the Black Hills. They don’t repeat themselves.

The Gulch

Deadwood sits at the bottom of a gulch carved by Whitewood Creek. You don’t see the town until you’re basically in it. The hills close in, the canyon narrows, and suddenly there’s a Main Street and a Starbucks and a casino and a sign that says someone got shot here in 1876. The sign is on a brick building. The brick building has a FedEx drop box in the lobby.

That’s Deadwood.

The name came from a party of miners in 1875. They came through a gulch full of dead trees and called it Deadwood Creek. Practical. No poetry. The Lakota had been calling this place Owáyasuta, which means “to approve or confirm things,” for considerably longer. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was supposed to protect it. It died the same way Wild Bill did. Somebody snuck up from behind.

Gold. Custer’s 1874 expedition found it on French Creek. Word got out. By 1876 the gulch had 5,000 people. By 1877 it had 12,000. No law, no government, no real claim to the land at all. Just men digging, saloons selling, and a whole economy running on gold dust and bad decisions.

July 28th, First Week on the Hill

A summer storm came through on July 28th and dumped rain on Main Street for about forty minutes. That was my first week on the hill. When the storm stopped, a rainbow came up over the canyon wall and arched directly over the casino storefronts. The wet pavement reflected everything back. Rock boulders sat in puddles in the median. The kind of boulders you only see in a median because someone blasted them out of a hillside to build a parking lot. Ponderosa pines on the ridge were still dripping.

Deadwood always does this. Gives you something gorgeous and then puts a slot machine in front of it.

Main Street, August 16th

Wild Bill Hickok showed up in Deadwood looking for fortune in the summer of 1876. Three weeks later Jack McCall walked up behind him on August 2, 1876 and shot him in the back of the head at Nuttal and Mann’s Saloon. Hickok was holding aces and eights. They still call that the Dead Man’s Hand. McCall got caught about a block away. There’s a sign on Main Street marking exactly where. It hangs above a gift shop.

I stood there in August 2024 and read it twice.

Calamity Jane is out there in Outlaw Square, bronze, sitting on a bench, holding a jug, fringe jacket spread wide like she owns the whole block. Martha Jane Cannary arrived in Deadwood in June 1876 in the same wagon train as Wild Bill. She outlived him by 27 years and ended up buried next to him at Mount Moriah Cemetery anyway.

The plaque at the base says the sculptor was Paul Moore from Norman, Oklahoma. The Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission paid for it, with major sponsorship from Old Style Saloon #10. That’s the same saloon where Hickok was playing cards when he died. They’re funding statues of the people who drank there. I respect the hustle.

The Town That Refused to Die

The town burned three times. September 1879 took out more than 300 buildings, 1959 hit again, and December 1987 took the Syndicate Building. That last fire is what pushed South Dakota to put gambling on the ballot. The referendum passed in 1988. Cards were back on the tables in 1989. The town didn’t die.

It never has.

"Someone is always blasting through these hills for something."

The No-Fly Zone

There’s one more thing worth saying straight.

Deadwood has a no-fly zone over the entire historic downtown. The city commission voted it in unanimously. Every casino, every brick storefront, every sign marking where someone got shot in 1876. Off limits.

I get it. I don’t love it. But that’s the deal.

So every shot in this piece is from the hill. From the job site. From the road cuts and the ridgelines and the pre-dawn pull-offs where I stood with a phone and watched the sky do something that no drone could have improved on anyway.

Sometimes the restriction is the story. You can see the whole shape of a canyon from above without ever flying into it.

February 1st — Last Night

I walked into Saloon #10 on February 1st, 2025. My last night in Deadwood. Last shift on the hill. Last round with my co-worker.

Felt right.

I sat down at the bar. Canadian Wicket. 17% alcohol. Special Selection. Whatever that means. It was there and it was cold and it was Saloon #10 and six months of Black Hills mornings were ending in about eight hours.

I drank it looking at Wild Bill’s portrait on the stone wall. He still doesn’t look impressed.

The Whiskey is the recipe they would have drank back in the day, it isn’t that strong as our Whiskey of today that’s why in Westerns they tell the barkeep to leave the bottle. This was velvety smooth, I forgot to pick up a bottle sadly. Oh well, next time and then the Bartender pointed me toward the stairs going down.

Downstairs

That’s where the real saloon is. Underground, stone walls, low ceilings, plank floors. The recreation of what Nuttal and Mann’s actually looked like in 1876 is down there in the basement, not up on the main floor with the barstools and the slot machines and the pressed tin ceiling. You have to go down to find it.

Which feels right. Deadwood buries its history but it doesn’t throw it away.

Near the entrance a coffin stands upright, skeleton and noose behind, with a plaque below that tells you exactly what happened. Jack McCall entered Nuttal and Mann’s Saloon No. 10 on August 2, 1876 around 3 PM and shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back of the head as he played cards. McCall was 24 years old and from Kentucky. On a wet drizzly morning of March 1, 1877, Dakota Territory carried out its first legal execution. When they moved the cemetery in 1881 they found McCall still buried with the hangman’s noose around his neck. His grave is now unmarked. Location unknown.

That plaque doesn’t hedge. I respect that.

The card tables are still set up. Round wood table, chairs pulled out, cards laid down, a revolver sitting in the middle like someone just stepped away. A second table behind it, same setup. This is where it happened. Right here on this floor.

Replicas of his guns are in a case nearby. Two engraved ivory-handled Colt 1851s, .36 caliber, carried butt-forward so he could cross-draw with either hand. He wasn't holding them when McCall came in.

His portrait is on the stone wall. Wide brim hat, long dark hair, knotted necktie. Credited to the Deadwood History Inc. Adams Museum Collection. He's looking at something past the camera. He looks like a man who knew something was coming but not when.

Two full interpretive panels on the wall lay out the whole story. The saloon layout in 1876. The card game on August 2nd. His last letter to his wife Agnes, written the day before. He told her if he never saw her again she should be a good girl. He said he didn’t know who was going to kill him but someone was going to do it.

He was right.

The roulette table is set in the corner, green felt, chips on the numbers, the original wood and brass wheel behind it against the stone wall. Wild Bill's photo is pinned to a board nearby, playing cards spread around him, a bronze Old Grand Dad Bottled in Bond bust sitting on a silver tray next to the wheel. Wild Bill watching the gambling from a corner of the room for 149 years.

On the back wall, an old photograph. About 25 men on a blasted hillside, some on horseback, all staring at the camera. Rock cuts behind them. Trees at the top of the ridge. No equipment visible, just bodies and shovels and horses. This is Deadwood Gulch in 1876. This is what the hills looked like when the gold was still in them.

I spent six months up on that same hillside in 2024. Different tools. Same rock.

The back shelves hold everything a frontier saloon needed to stay open. Crystal decanters on top, Belfast Cut Plug tobacco, Sweet Mist chewing tobacco tins, a copper pot still, stoneware jugs, an oil lantern, horse tack hanging on the left wall. On the stone wall, a Goetzmann Distillery Company mirror, Brookdale Rye, paint peeling off the frame, silver going dark. Pennsylvania rye whiskey advertised on the wall of a South Dakota saloon in a Black Hills canyon in 1876.

Supply chains haven’t changed that much.

There’s a glass display case in the main room holding what looks like a costume from the HBO series. Burgundy frock coat. Top hat. The plaque references the show. Al Swearengen’s coat, most likely. The real Swearengen was found dead in a Denver rail yard in November 1904. Blunt trauma to the head. Nobody was ever charged.

Deadwood takes care of its legends one way or another.

Watch and Pray

They took me further back. The rooms down there are set up as they were. A cream satin dress on a mannequin next to an enamel washbasin. A brass bed with a patchwork quilt, perfume bottles on the vanity, a red fan in the open drawer, a hairbrush. Someone’s personal effects, preserved behind a rope. On the wall above the bed, a small painted sign.

Watch and Pray.

The walls in the hallway are papered with old newspaper pages. Not decorative. That was insulation. That was wallpaper. That was how you kept the cold out when you were living above a saloon in a canyon in 1876.

I stood in those rooms for a while.

The women who lived here didn’t always get to leave.

The Bison Are Still Up There

Back up on Tatanka Hill, fourteen bison are frozen mid-charge on the hillside right across from where I worked for six months. Three Lakota horsemen behind them. You can’t really see the bronzes before sunrise. But you know they’re there.

The Lakota called the bison tatanka. They called this land Owáyasuta. They had a treaty.

Then came the miners. Then the gold. Then Deadwood. Then a no-fly zone.

Someone is always drawing a line through these hills.

The Night I Ordered the Drone

We walked back up, back out through the door, back onto Main Street.

February 1st, 2025. 4,530 feet above sea level. Last night.

I stood on that street and looked up at the canyon walls closing in from both sides, the ponderosa pines dark against whatever light was left in the sky, and I thought about every morning I’d spent up on that hill watching the Black Hills do something impossible with the sunrise, and I thought: I should have had a drone up here.

Six months. I had six months in one of the most photographed gulches in American history and I was shooting it all from the ground with a phone.

That was the night I ordered my DJI Neo. Sitting in the truck outside Saloon #10, shipping address set to Florida. Home state. Home.

Deadwood didn’t give me the drone footage. It gave me something better. It gave me the reason.

The Drone Drifter starts here. Six months on a hill in a Black Hills canyon, a co-worker I won’t forget, a glass of Canadian Wicket in a basement saloon where a man got shot in 1876, and a sky I never stopped staring at on the way up every morning.

The DJI Neo was waiting when I got back to Florida.

First flight was everything.

The Drone Drifter’s Jouney drops on the last day of the month. George Spanos flies so you don’t have to squint at Google Maps.

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This month will be my True Origin Story of how I became Drone Drifter X.

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About the year 370, when the bishop of his country reposed, he was elected to succeed to his throne and was entrusted with the Church of Christ, which he tended for eight years, living in voluntary poverty and strict asceticism, having no other care than to defend holy Orthodoxy as a worthy successor of the Apostles. The Emperor Valens, and Modestus, the Eparch of the East, who were of one mind with the Arians, tried with threats of exile and of torments to bend the Saint to their own confession, because he was the bastion of Orthodoxy in all Cappadocia, and preserved it from heresy when Arianism was at its strongest. But he set all their malice at nought, and in his willingness to give himself up to every suffering for the sake of the Faith, showed himself to be a martyr by volition. Modestus, amazed at Basil’s fearlessness in his presence, said that no one had ever so spoken to him. “Perhaps,” answered the Saint, “you have never met a bishop before.” The Emperor Valens himself was almost won over by Basil’s dignity and wisdom. When Valens’ son fell gravely sick, he asked Saint Basil to pray for him. The Saint promised that his son would be restated if Valens agreed to have him baptized by the Orthodox; Valens agreed, Basil prayed, and the son was restored. But afterwards the Emperor had him baptized by Arians, and the child died soon after. Later, Valens, persuaded by his counsellors, decided to send the Saint into exile because he would not accept the Arians into communion; but his pen broke when he was signing the edict of banishment. He tried a second time and a third, but the same thing happened, so that the Emperor was filled with dread, and tore up the document, and Basil was not banished. The truly great Basil, spent with extreme ascetical practices and continual labours, at the helm of the church, departed to the Lord on the 1st of January, in 379. at the age of forty-nine.

His writings are replete with wisdom and erudition, and rich are these gifts he set forth the doctrines concerning the mysteries both of the creation (see his Hexaemeron) and of the Holy Trinity (see On the Holy Spirit). Because of the majesty and keenness of his eloquence, he is honoured as “the revealer of heavenly things” and “the Great.”

Saint Basil is also celebrated on January 30th with Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint John Chrysostom.

Rest from labour.

Sourced from https://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints?contentid=364

Dunno how long it was there for.

This time, I decided to skip the hostess and head straight to the bar.

I was greeted by a fellow around my age named RJ. To start, I went with something familiar: the Hot and Sour Shrimp Soup. As always, it was delicious and warming — the perfect way to ease into the meal.

For my main course, I ordered the Thai Spicy with vegetables at level 7. Every bite was delicious and fiery — it felt like being wrapped in a warm, spicy blanket. The rice was just as good as I remembered.

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For drinks, I stuck with the same sake as last time — Nigori. Smooth, tasty, and it pairs perfectly with spicy food.

I also tried a cocktail called The Blitzen: spiced rum with cranberry juice, lime, and cinnamon. It was excellent — you catch the cinnamon in the lingering aftertaste.

For dessert, I had the Mango Sticky Rice. Every bite was pleasant and balanced, not overly sweet. The mangoes were fresh, and the rice carried a subtle umami with gentle sweet undertones. A sprinkle of cinnamon would have elevated it even more, reminding me of Greek rice pudding.

Surprisingly, RJ comped the dessert — all because we had such a great conversation. It goes to show the golden rule really does go a long way.

After leaving, I happened to find a black-and-white cat. They stayed for me to snap the pic, and looking into their eyes, they’ve seen stuff.

Tomorrow: church at the Annunciation, where I’ll meet some extended family.

Tune in for the next episode of Drone Drifter X’s Journey! 🚀 God Bless!

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It was one of those bone-chilling winter days in Dayton—the kind where the wind whips through the Oregon District and you can see your breath lingering in the air. I needed something to thaw me out from the inside, something bold, spicy, and deeply comforting. That's when I ducked into Thai 9, a gem tucked away on Brown Street that's been a local favorite for years.

Thai 9 isn't just another Thai spot; it's a fusion of authentic Thai flavors with a killer sushi menu, all served in an elegant space with hardwood floors, exposed brick, and lush plants that make you forget you're in the Midwest. The atmosphere is warm and inviting—perfect for shaking off the cold. There's a full bar, too, which is where my meal took a delightful turn.

I started with the Tom Yum Goong, the classic Thai hot and sour shrimp soup. One slurp, and I was transported. The broth was a fiery symphony of lemongrass, kaffir lime, galangal, and chili—bright, tangy, and just spicy enough to clear the sinuses without overwhelming the palate. Plump shrimp bobbed alongside mushrooms and tomatoes, each spoonful steaming hot and bursting with flavor. On a frigid day, this soup isn't just food; it's medicine for the soul.

Then came the star of the show: the Seafood Clay Pot. Served bubbling in its traditional pot to keep every bite piping hot, this dish is pure comfort. Tender shrimp, scallops, squid, and mussels mingle with clear glass noodles, vegetables, and a fragrant ginger-soy broth infused with herbs. The noodles soak up all that savory goodness, and the seafood is perfectly cooked—juicy and fresh. It's hearty without being heavy, and the lingering heat from the pot makes it ideal for winter dining.

To pair with it all? A bottle of chilled sake. Yes, sake with Thai food—and it works beautifully. The clean, crisp rice wine cuts through the spice, complements the seafood, and adds a subtle warmth as it goes down. Sitting there with steam rising from my bowls, sake in hand, watching snow flurries outside the window... it was bliss.

Thai 9 has been a Dayton staple for good reason. The service is attentive, the portions generous, and the menu has something for everyone—from pad Thai classics to inventive sushi rolls. But on a cold winter day, nothing beats their soups and clay pots for that deep, satisfying warmth.

If you're in Dayton and the weather's got you down, head to Thai 9 in the Oregon District. Order the Tom Yum Goong, the Seafood Clay Pot, grab some sake, and let the flavors chase the chill away. You won't regret it—I certainly didn't.

*What’s your go-to winter comfort food in Dayton? Drop it in the comments—I’m always hunting for the next great meal.*

*Thai 9 is located at 11 Brown St, Dayton, OH. Open for lunch and dinner, with outdoor seating in warmer months. Reservations recommended on weekends.

Drone Drifter X Recommended

Picture this: You’re cruising through the sun-baked landscapes of Cyprus, the Mediterranean breeze carrying hints of salt and cypress, when you realize you’re traversing the very soil that birthed one of Orthodoxy’s most beloved miracle-workers. Not just any detour; this is a detour to sanctity itself.

Spyridon—shepherd-turned-saint, humble-hearted defender of the faith—began his journey herding actual sheep before God called him to tend a flock of the two-legged variety. Talk about a divine career pivot! Before donning his bishop’s robes in Trimythus, he’d married and fathered a daughter named Irene (whose name, ironically, means “peace”—something Spyridon would later bring to theological battlefields).

When the theological heavyweights gathered at Nicaea in 325 for what would become Christianity’s first all-star council, our shepherd-saint didn’t come packing sophisticated rhetoric or philosophical pyrotechnics. Instead, he brought something the clever Arians never expected: devastating simplicity. While others launched theological missiles, Spyridon reportedly silenced heresy with the conversational equivalent of a well-placed pebble from a spiritual slingshot. The original David versus theological Goliaths!

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But here’s where the story gets DJI Mini Pro-worthy for aerial documentation—around 350 AD, Spyridon exits earthly existence, leaving behind not just teachings but something far more Instagram-worthy: his miraculously preserved remains. Fast-forward through four centuries of veneration to the mid-600s, when barbarian raiders forced his relics to take an unscheduled road trip to Constantinople. There, even emperors themselves bowed before the shepherd’s earthly vessel.

The plot thickens faster than a good barbacoa sauce in 1453! With Constantinople about to fall faster than battery life on a drone filming in 4K, a quick-thinking priest named George Kalokhairetes (whose name deserves its own tongue-twister challenge) grabs Spyridon’s remains along with those of Saint Theodora and embarks on a medieval version of “The Amazing Race.”

The sacred convoy zigs through Serbia, zags through Epirus, and finally—around 1460—washes up on the shores of Corfu like spiritual driftwood of incalculable value. While Theodora’s relics became community property, Spyridon’s remained a family heirloom of Kalokhairetes’ descendants—the original family treasure passed down through generations!

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Here’s the cliffhanger that’ll have you smashing that subscribe button: 1,500 years after his death, Spyridon’s body remains freakishly well-preserved, with—get this—flexible flesh! No formaldehyde, no modern preservation techniques, just pure, inexplicable miracle status. We’re talking supernatural preservation that would make both morticians and jerky manufacturers jealous!

Truly, as Psalm 67 reminds us between bites of roadside tacos, “Wondrous is God in His Saints!” And if that doesn’t deserve drone footage set to ethereal music, I don’t know what does.

_Want more sacred road trips and miraculous encounters? Hit subscribe for Sunday’s journey to Annunciation Church in Dayton Ohio.

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Roots in Personal Pilgrimage: The Founders’ Path to Orthodoxy

The story of St. Basil begins not in Weatherford, but in the diverse spiritual landscapes of Southern California, Portland, Oregon, and the rolling plains of Oklahoma. Father Nicholas Aiello, born in 1957 to Italian-American Roman Catholic parents, experienced a profound conversion at age 23 after immersing himself in the Gospel of Matthew. Rejecting Catholicism, he embraced Evangelicalism and earned a BA in Biblical Literature (with a minor in Koine Greek) from Multnomah Bible College in Portland.

There, he met Matushka Elizabeth (Beverly) McCall, born in 1958 in South Dakota to native Oklahoman parents and raised in Tulsa and Southern California. Beverly, from a nominally Lutheran background, found her faith reignited through Nicholas’s enthusiasm. Together, they served the Yiu-Mienh Laotian refugee community in Portland’s housing projects from 1985 to 1994, offering spiritual guidance, education, and practical aid during a time of resettlement challenges.

This ministry marked a turning point. In 1994, the couple became catechumens in the Orthodox Church, drawn by its ancient traditions and depth. They were received into the OCA in 1995. Spiritual formation was undertaken under mentors such as Archimandrite Paisios of St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Arizona (Fr. Nicholas’s confessor since 1996) and Fr. Nicholas Letten in Portland. By 2000, they assisted an inner-city Orthodox mission, where Fr. Nicholas honed skills in liturgy, counseling, and diaconate studies.

A pivotal moment came in 2007 during a visit to Matushka Beverly’s family farm in Custer County, Oklahoma—about 18 miles from Weatherford. Fr. Nicholas, struck by Weatherford’s position as a regional hub (home to Southwestern Oklahoma State University), its economic vitality, and demographic mix, envisioned it as fertile ground for an Orthodox mission. With blessings from their parish priest and spiritual father, they committed to the seminary and relocation.

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Planting Seeds: Arrival and Ordination (2009–2012)

The global financial crisis of 2008 tested their resolve. After nine months on the market, their Portland home sold to the first buyer, bolstered by an unexpected inheritance from Fr. Nicholas’s parents. In 2009, Fr. Nicholas enrolled at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, while Matushka Beverly, after six rejections elsewhere, gained acceptance to Southwestern Oklahoma State University’s nursing program in Weatherford.

The family relocated to the Custer City farm, commuting to St. Elijah Antiochian Orthodox Church in Oklahoma City under Fr. Constantine Nasr’s guidance—the nearest Orthodox presence, as the OCA had none in western Oklahoma. Fr. Nasr became a de facto dean, encouraging their efforts. Fr. Nicholas balanced seminary (with summer returns) and Matushka Beverly’s studies, laying the groundwork for the mission.

Momentum built in summer 2011. With support from Fr. Joel Wilson and blessings from Fr. Nasr and OCA’s Fr. Justin Frederick, they rented office space in Weatherford. Icons adorned the walls, a reader’s stand was built, and the website (saintbasil.org) was launched. Business cards circulated, ads ran in the local paper, and daily Matins and Vespers began. Two local Orthodox Christians joined immediately, with the space open for prayer year-round.

Mentorship from Fr. Michael Storozuk of Sherman, Texas, proved invaluable; he traveled four hours to baptize the first convert and serve early Liturgies. Fr. Nicholas’s ordinations followed swiftly: deacon on March 25, 2012, at the OCA’s St. Nicholas Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and priest on April 20, 2012, at Dallas’s St. Seraphim Cathedral by Metropolitan Jonah, who personally blessed the mission. The first Divine Liturgy was held on April 27, 2012, at their Custer City home, and soon thereafter at the rented chapel. Matushka Beverly served as reader until Photeini Ball, a retiree from nearby Watonga, joined in 2012.

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Building a Foundation: Growth and Permanence (2013–2019)

Officially founded in 2013, the mission was formalized under the OCA’s Diocese of the South. Early members included Photeini Ball (who read ~300 services, later becoming a novice at St. Paisius Monastery in Arizona), Professor Joe London (a SWOSU convert inspired by Fr. Nasr’s 2013 lectures on Orthodox history), Sally Simon, Mustafa Sami, Carl and Sharon Anderson, Reader Leo and Anne Schommer, and Catherine Wiley. Helpers like Jim Kirkpatrick aided catechesis.

Fr. Nicholas served unpaid full-time, while Matushka Beverly worked as a registered nurse (earning her nurse practitioner degree in 2017). Services averaged twice-weekly Vigils and Divine Liturgies, plus three-to-four daily offices—totaling ~13 hours weekly. Fr. Nicholas engaged the Weatherford Ministerial Alliance, ministered at local facilities and prisons, and fostered an ethos of repentance over numerical growth: “Our ‘success’ does not depend on more people—it depends on more repentance.”

A milestone came in 2014: Through member Jeff Massad, Quail Creek Bank, and diocesan treasurer Milos Kontsevic, they acquired a historic “rock house” on a half-acre lot near Main Street and the university. Volunteers—led by Prof. London (iconographer), Mustafa Sami, and Bob Giger—remodeled it extensively, painting, tiling, and updating interiors. The mission relocated in October 2015, transforming it into a dedicated worship space.

By late 2019, the diocese had cleared the mortgage, accelerating debt freedom (achieved in under six years). Plans emerged for a larger temple, repurposing the current building as a fellowship hall, office, and restrooms—while seeding new missions across western Oklahoma.

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Resilience Amid Challenges: The 2020s and Beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic tested the young mission. In 2020, restrictions paused in-person gatherings, but livestreamed services drew participants from beyond Oklahoma, including daily Matins and Vespers. This digital outreach reversed a dip in catechumenate inquiries, sparking renewed interest. Joyful milestones included the Chrismation of Calliopius (Cal) Castle on August 12, 2020, coinciding with the blessing and mounting of an outdoor entrance icon (royal doors to follow). Pascha that year featured the Chrismation of beloved brother Cyril (Mustafa) Sami, a testament to deepening community bonds.

By 2021, membership surged post-restrictions, with several catechumens and inquirers in formation via service recordings and chant lessons (using tools like ponomor.net). The mission upheld its rigorous schedule—weekday offices four times weekly—and amplified community ties. Fr. Nicholas led the Ministerial Alliance’s “Caring & Sharing” Christmas drive, distributing toys, food, and clothes to over 600 families, boosting visibility and goodwill.

Into the mid-2020s, the mission continues to evolve. Recent updates highlight ongoing catechesis, such as the August 2025 reception of the Coggins family (including four children) into the catechumenate, alongside baptisms like that of J’Lene and Iakovos’s son, signs of generational growth. As of November 2025, services remain vibrant: Saturday Vigil at 4:00 PM and Sunday Divine Liturgy at 9:30 AM (preceded by 9:10 AM Hours), with feasts and specials announced.

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A Vision of Healing and Discipleship

St. Basil the Great Orthodox Mission stands as a living testament to faithful perseverance. From a rented office to a debt-free chapel, it has nurtured souls through the “therapy of the services and sacraments,” personal counseling, and marital guidance—aiming to form mature disciples of Christ. In a region once devoid of Orthodoxy, it now serves west-central Oklahoma, embodying St. Basil the Great’s (329–379 AD) legacy of philanthropy, theology, and monastic zeal.

As Fr. Nicholas and Matushka Beverly reflect, security lies not in strategy but in peace. With eyes on expansion, St. Basil invites all to its “beautiful place of worship,” where ancient faith meets contemporary hearts. For more, visit saintbasil.org or join a service in Weatherford.

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