Late enough that I was not booking a flight to Spain. Late enough that third shift in Buford was not moving out of the way. I was going to miss the thing I was writing about.

I could still build the guide.

Drone pilots had real questions. Could a normal ND filter protect the camera? Where should the aircraft sit during the important minutes? How early should it launch? What happens when the best-looking field fills with people or falls inside controlled airspace?

I had two days to answer them.

The guide went live on August 10. Roughly 48 hours later, the publisher dashboard showed 758 views. Search supplied 62 percent of the traffic. Google alone supplied 60 percent. Nearly three out of every four readers were on a phone.

New subscribers: zero.

That number bothered me more than the 758 impressed me.

The article had done what I asked it to do. It answered a timely question, ranked quickly and reached far beyond my email list. Then those readers took the answer and left.

Search had done its part. I had not.

Discovery worked. Conversion did not.

This case study is free because the lesson belongs in the open. Search can find a useful page. It cannot tell a new reader why the rest of a publication is worth following.

That second job was mine.

I am leaving the workbench open: the numbers, the decisions, the wrong turns and the checklist I will carry into the next timed story.

The eclipse guide split the result cleanly. Discovery worked. Conversion did not.

Here is the dashboard without the victory lap.

The first 48 hours

Total views: 758
Search traffic: 62%
Google traffic: 60%
Direct traffic: 34%
Email traffic: 4%
Mobile web: 74%
Desktop web: 22%
Email recipients: 92
Email opens: 27
Open rate: 29.35%
Link clicks: 2
Click-through rate: 7.41%
Engagement rate: 14.81%
Likes: 7
Public comments: 7
Restacks: 3
New subscribers: 0
Revenue: $0

Those percentages work out to about 455 visits from Google and about 561 readers on mobile.

My email list received 92 copies. Twenty-seven people opened the email. Only 4 percent of total traffic came through email. Google brought a crowd several times larger than the list I already had.

Direct traffic accounted for 34 percent. Some of that may have come from X, Notes, copied links or apps that stripped the referral information. I did not use separate tracked links, so I cannot honestly divide that bucket after the fact.

The numbers are a snapshot, not a lifetime verdict. The article was only about two days old and the eclipse was driving a short, hard burst of interest. I cannot claim the page had earned a permanent search position.

I can claim this: SEO put the article in front of people who had never heard of Drone Drifter.

Then I gave them no clear reason to remember the name.

What worked

The title answered the search

The title did not try to be mysterious:

How to Film the August 12, 2026 Solar Eclipse with a Drone (Without Damaging Your Camera)

It named the event, the tool, the date and the risk. A pilot searching the night before knew exactly what the page promised.

I am leaving that title and URL alone. When a page is already getting search traffic, changing the address for cosmetic reasons is not clever. It breaks old links and forces Google to relearn the page.

The guide dealt with decisions, not spectacle

The useful part was not telling people that an eclipse would look dramatic. Everybody already knew that.

The guide dealt with choices a pilot had to make before takeoff:

• A normal ND filter controls exposure. It is not automatically a safe solar filter.

• A wide drone camera is better at showing the changing ground than filling the frame with the Sun.

• The launch point still needs an airspace check.

• An eclipse crowd is still a crowd.

• Battery planning has to leave room for a return and landing after the shot.

Those decisions gave the article a reason to exist after the headline wore off.

The place kept it from becoming a manual

The guide could have turned into a list of settings copied from camera sites.

Instead, it came back to the ground. Streetlights waking up. Water losing its shine. A church dome holding the last hard light. A town changing color while everyone looked in the other direction.

That is the part that belongs to Drone Drifter.

The deadline cut the soft parts

An event with a fixed date does not care how long I want to polish a sentence. The deadline forced every section to answer a question or leave.

That pressure helped the article.

It also hid the missing conversion path until the traffic arrived.

What failed

The article solved the problem and ended the relationship

A search reader arrived with one job: film the eclipse without hurting the camera or breaking a rule.

The article did that job.

Then it ended with a broad invitation to subscribe for more stories. That invitation could have appeared under almost any article on the internet. It did not connect the eclipse guide to a specific thing the reader would receive next.

Useful is not the same as memorable.

I never built the bridge to the rest of Drone Drifter

Someone landing from Google did not know about the small-town flight logs, airspace lessons, courthouse stories or field decisions behind the footage.

The guide needed one short bridge, not a sales speech:

Drone Drifter follows what happens before and after the shot: practical flight planning, small-town history and the decisions that turn drone footage into a story.

That tells a new reader what remains after eclipse day.

Mobile readers had to work too hard

Seventy-four percent of the audience arrived on mobile.

Several section labels were bold paragraphs instead of real headings. Long checklists were harder to scan than they needed to be. The information was present, but presence is not enough on a phone.

A mobile reader should be able to find camera safety, settings, airspace and battery strategy with a thumb and half a second of attention.

I measured promotion badly

The direct bucket was 34 percent. That is too large to shrug off and too vague to learn from.

Future X posts, Notes and email links need separate tracking. Otherwise a successful promotion disappears into “direct” and I end up guessing which platform did the work.

Event traffic borrowed urgency from the calendar

The date created demand I did not own.

That does not make the traffic worthless. It means the follow-up had to be ready before the interest disappeared. I published the guide, promoted it and only then started thinking about the permanent version.

Next time, the afterword and evergreen update get planned with the original article.

What I will change without damaging what worked

I am not rebuilding a page that Google already found. Changes should be controlled.

1. Keep the existing title and URL.

2. Turn every major section into a real H2 and every subsection into an H3.

3. Convert settings, mistakes and preflight items into actual lists.

4. Add two or three internal links where they naturally answer the next question.

5. Use one strong subscription invitation near the end, not buttons scattered through the article.

6. Make that invitation explain what Drone Drifter publishes after the event passes.

7. Use tracked links for X, Notes and future email promotion.

8. Update time-sensitive details while keeping the permanent safety and planning sections intact.

One CTA is enough if it says something.

My event-article flight plan

This is the repeatable part. Eclipse, launch, demolition, storm front, festival or courthouse reopening—the date changes, but the work around it does not.

Before writing

• Name the exact question a reader will type.

• Identify the decision only field experience can improve.

• Separate hard safety facts from personal judgment.

• Choose the permanent lesson that survives the date.

• Decide what the reader should open next.

Before publishing

• Put the event, date and practical promise in the title.

• Write an SEO description that finishes the promise without repeating the title.

• Set a clean URL before publication.

• Use real headings and short lists for mobile readers.

• Add one internal link to the next useful field note.

• Prepare separate tracked links for Notes, X and email.

• Write one specific subscription invitation.

• Draft the post-event update before the event happens.

During the first 48 hours

• Record total views.

• Record search, direct, Substack and email shares.

• Record mobile versus desktop traffic.

• Record opens, clicks, likes, comments and restacks.

• Record free and paid subscribers attributed to the post.

• Save the snapshot before changing the title, CTA or structure.

After the event

• Remove expired urgency.

• Keep safety guidance and reusable planning sections.

• Update the introduction for the next event.

• Link the original guide to the afterword without creating two pages that chase the same search.

• Compare subscriber conversion before and after the revision.

Copyable brief for the next timed story

Event:

Publication deadline:

Reader’s immediate question:

Decision this article helps them make:

Safety or legal risk that needs a primary source:

Field detail only I can add:

What remains useful after the date passes:

Article the reader should open next:

One-sentence subscription promise:

Tracked Notes link:

Tracked X link:

Tracked email link:

First 48-hour snapshot:

Seven-day snapshot:

Post-event revision date:

What counts as a win next time

I am not choosing a conversion percentage because it looks good in a marketing article. I do not have enough data for that.

The next test has a simpler job: produce a measurable, nonzero subscriber result and preserve the search traffic.

One conversion gives me a baseline. More than one gives me something to compare. Zero tells me the bridge is still missing.

The eclipse guide was not a failure. It answered real questions. It may have kept someone from treating an ND filter like solar protection. It showed that a small publication can reach well beyond its subscriber list when the page is useful and the title is clear.

But attention is not an audience.

Seven hundred fifty-eight people came through the door. I showed them the eclipse and forgot to show them what came next.

This free case study is the correction.

The numbers are open. So are the wrong turns and the field plan.

Related work

• How to Film the August 12, 2026 Solar Eclipse with a Drone

Analytics note: Figures above come from the Substack publisher dashboard snapshot taken August 12, 2026, roughly 48 hours after publication. Percentages may not sum to 100 because the dashboard groups devices and sources separately and rounds displayed values.

Subscribe to Drone Drifter for field-tested drone guides, flight logs, small-town history and honest after-action reports. I will show you the flight plan and the result.

I load the vehicle, point it toward another state and spend more hours watching highway lines than I care to count. The drone rides with me because work gets me to the place, but the camera gives me a reason to look around once I am there.

That became Drone Drifter.

Why I carry a drone

I did not start traveling across the USA with a drone because I had a perfect route mapped out. There was no production crew waiting at the next exit. I had work, a little down time and an aircraft small enough to fit beside everything else.

The first flights changed how I looked at a stop.

A courthouse square can feel ordinary from the sidewalk. From above, the streets show why the town grew where it did. A church that disappears behind trees from the road suddenly owns the hill. Old factories, rivers, farm fields and empty railroad lines start explaining one another.

The drone slows me down.

Places between the destinations

Big landmarks are easy to find. Search engines have already told everybody where to stand.

I keep getting pulled toward the places in between. Decatur, Texas. Galena, Illinois. A marina on Lemon Bay. An Orthodox church far from the part of the world where its story began. A restaurant at the end of a long workday. Sometimes a place earns a full article. Sometimes the clip is the whole story.

That is fine.

I want Drone Drifter to feel like the road really feels. Some days give me clean light and enough time for three batteries. Other days give me wind, a locked gate and ten minutes before I need to leave. The camera does not owe me a shot because I drove a long way.

Flying around work

The job comes first. That rule keeps the travel honest.

I fly when the schedule, airspace and location allow it. I check weather, temporary flight restrictions and nearby airports before launch. If people are moving through the area, the flight path changes or the drone stays in its case.

There are days when I see a place from the highway and know the light is right. I also know I cannot stop. That one hurts.

Another town eventually appears.

What I am trying to show

Drone footage can make every place look polished. Smooth movement, music and a sunset can hide the cracked parking lot just outside the frame.

I am more interested in the place itself.

I want the old brick beside the new roof. I want the water tower, church dome, courthouse clock and road that keeps trucks moving through town. If a building is weathered, let it be weathered. That is part of why I stopped.

The best flights give people another view of somewhere they already know. A local sees the roofline differently. Somebody who moved away remembers the street. A stranger adds the place to a future drive.

That is enough reason to keep launching.

What you will find here

Flight Log holds the road stops and drone views. These are the towns, churches, restaurants, waterfronts and odd places that made me pull over.

Airspace covers rules, equipment and policy when those things affect the aircraft in my case. I read the documents because a loud headline can make a legal drone sound illegal by lunch.

The essays sit closer to the person behind the controller. Travel changes what I notice. Faith, fatigue, work and long roads come with me whether they appear in the shot or not.

I am not chasing one narrow version of drone content. The drone is the thread. The road decides what it runs through next.

Why subscribe

Social platforms are good at showing a clip for eight seconds and burying it by dinner. This publication gives the flight a home.

Subscribers get the story behind the shot, the route, what worked and what went wrong. You will also get practical drone guides when rules or equipment change. No launch-day shouting. No copied press release pretending to be a field report.

If that sounds like your kind of trip, come along.

Where should I stop next?

Tell me about the place people pass without seeing. Give me the town square, church, roadside restaurant, strange monument or piece of water that looks different at sunrise.

I may already be heading that direction for work.

Subscribe to Drone Drifter:

https://www.dronedrifter.com/subscribe

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.

If places like this are your kind of stop—the history hiding beside the road, seen from the ground and the air—subscribe to Drone Drifter. I’m always looking for the next one.

Subscribe now

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.

The stories converge because both systems begin with the same act: treating a person as raw material. The details are different. The structure is close enough to expose the same weakness.

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.

Start with Part I: The Collection.

Then read Part II: The Weapon.

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.

Ottoman history supplies cases that test that claim. Across centuries of forced recruitment and identity change, it still produced defectors, internal subversion and public reversals. Not because every subject resisted. Most did not. The point is that the process never guaranteed complete ownership of the person inside it.

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.

That's the series. If it earned your time, share Part I — that's the entry point, and it's free. If you've been reading along without subscribing, now's the time. And if you want to support work like this, a paid subscription keeps it going.

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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 and nine answers to the same question. The point isn’t that Ottoman history and Ishinomori’s fiction are identical. It’s that both expose the same weakness in a system that remakes people as tools: the stronger the tool becomes, the greater the danger if control fails.

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.

Start with Part I if you came in here: The Collection.

If this series is earning your time, subscribe and keep going. And tell me which figure from Part I maps closest to Hongo in your reading.

Continue with Part III: The Image That Doesn’t Erase, where the argument moves from political machinery to the person the machinery cannot fully replace.

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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.

I found no evidence that Ishinomori drew on Ottoman history when he created Skull Man or Kamen Rider. The connection I see isn’t influence. It’s convergence.

Systems that seize people and remake them as weapons also create the possibility of the weapon that turns. The story repeats because the machinery repeats. An empire can bury a name, install a new language and train the hands. The harder question is whether it can finish the erasure.

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.

Continue with Part II: The Weapon, where Shotaro Ishinomori builds the same machine in Skull Man and Kamen Rider.

Read Part II: The Weapon

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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 founded Tatanka: Story of the Bison there after filming Dances With Wolves. Fourteen larger-than-life bronze bison run ahead of Native American riders across the 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 Rule at the Time

There’s one more thing worth saying straight.

When I was there, Deadwood’s local code designated protected airspace over the National Historic Landmark District as the “Deadwood Drone No Fly Zone.” The city removed that provision in April 2025 after South Dakota law changed. The FAA still controls the airspace, and pilots still have to follow federal rules.

I didn’t love it, but I respected the rule that was in place.

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 Canadian Wicket was velvety smooth. I meant to pick up a bottle before I left and forgot. Oh well. That gives me one reason to go back. 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. Native American riders follow 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 another set of rules.

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.

One of the flights that came after Tatanka Hill: https://www.dronedrifter.com/p/the-eye-that-watches-dallas

That hill is where the idea started. Subscribe if you want to follow what happened after I finally bought the drone.

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Most of this is where my head was: work had pulled me away from Substack, I wanted to get back in shape, and Oklahoma was next. That meant another chance to fly White Dog Hill at sunrise and sunset.

If you like the unpolished side of the journey—the meals, miles and plans behind the finished footage—subscribe. The next flight is the point.

Related flight: https://www.dronedrifter.com/p/ghosts-steaks-and-sunsets-the-haunting

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He returned to Cappadocia, gave his wealth to those in need and eventually became Archbishop of Caesarea around 370. This was not a quiet appointment. Emperor Valens supported Arianism, and Basil became one of the bishops who refused to let political pressure decide what the Church believed.

The confrontation with the imperial prefect Modestus is the part that stays with me. Threatened with confiscation, exile, torture and death, Basil would not move. When Modestus said nobody had ever spoken to him that way, Basil answered, “Perhaps you have never met a bishop before.”

But Basil was not only a man of arguments. He wrote the Hexaemeron and On the Holy Spirit, shaped Orthodox monastic life, used his wealth for the poor and built places of refuge for travelers and the homeless. His theology had hands and feet.

The Church commemorates Saint Basil on January 1, the day of his repose in 379. He is also remembered on January 30 with Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint John Chrysostom, the Three Holy Hierarchs.

I keep coming back to the same thing: Basil knew the difference between humility and surrender. He could live with almost nothing, but he would not give away the faith to make an emperor comfortable. That still preaches.

Sources: https://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints?contentid=364 and https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/1001/01/01/100003-saint-basil-the-great-archbishop-of-caesarea-in-cappadocia

Related: The History of St. Basil the Great Orthodox Mission in Weatherford, Oklahoma — https://www.dronedrifter.com/p/the-history-of-st-basil-the-great

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Dunno how long it was there for.

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

RJ was working the bar, a fellow around my age. I started with something familiar: the hot-and-sour shrimp soup. It was as good as I remembered and exactly what I wanted on a cold Dayton night.

For the main course I ordered the Thai Spicy with vegetables at level seven. Every bite carried real heat without losing the flavor. It was the kind of dish that warms you from the inside out, and the rice was just as good as I remembered.

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For drinks, I went back to the same Nigori sake as the first visit. Smooth, slightly sweet and a good match for the level-seven heat.

I also tried a cocktail called the Blitzen: spiced rum, cranberry juice, lime and cinnamon. The cinnamon stayed behind after the sip. That was the part that made it work.

Dessert was mango sticky rice. It was balanced and not overly sweet, with fresh mango and a subtle savory note in the rice. I still think a little cinnamon would push it toward Greek rice pudding—in a good way.

RJ comped the dessert after we got into a good conversation. I did not ask, and I was not expecting it. Sometimes treating people like people still works.

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.

The next morning I was headed to Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church to meet some extended family. Dayton was becoming more than a work stop.

The flights are the destination, but nights like this are the road between them. Subscribe if you want both. God bless.

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It was cold enough in Dayton that I did not want to wander around pretending I had a plan. I was walking through the Oregon District, saw Thai 9 on Brown Street and went inside looking for something hot.

Thai 9 sits inside an old brick building in Dayton’s Oregon District. Dark wood, exposed brick, plants, Thai food, sushi and a full bar. After the walk through the cold, warm was enough.

I started with the Tom Yum Goong, the hot-and-sour shrimp soup. It arrived steaming. The broth was bright, sour and hot enough to clear my head without burying the shrimp. That first bowl did exactly what I came in for.

Then came the seafood clay pot. Shrimp, scallops, squid and mussels sat over glass noodles and vegetables in a ginger-soy broth, still bubbling when it reached the table. The noodles picked up everything underneath them. This was the dish that made me decide I would come back.

I paired it with a bottle of chilled Nigori sake. Thai food and sake may not be the obvious order, but the slight sweetness worked against the heat. I quit questioning it after the first glass.

Thai 9 earned a second visit from me. The room was comfortable, the portions were generous and both dishes delivered what I needed on a cold night. That is the whole review.

If you are in Dayton’s Oregon District and want the same kind of meal, start with the Tom Yum Goong and look at the clay pots. I would order both again.

What is your cold-weather meal in Dayton? Leave it in the comments. I am always looking for the next stop.

Thai 9 is at 11 Brown Street in Dayton’s historic Oregon District. Check current hours, reservations and restaurant details at https://thai9restaurant.com/ before going.

I did go back. Read the second visit here: https://www.dronedrifter.com/p/thai-9-dayton-dinner-drinks-bar

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The Hat That Wouldn’t Leave Me Alone

The first thing I noticed about Saint Spyridon was the hat.

It looks almost out of place on a bishop. No jeweled crown. No attempt to hide where he came from. It is a woven shepherd’s cap, the same shape repeated in icon after icon, sitting above the face of a man the Church calls a Wonderworker.

That detail stopped me. A shepherd from Cyprus becomes a bishop, stands at the Council of Nicaea and is remembered sixteen centuries later with the old work hat still on his head.

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A Saint on the Road

Spyridon was married and had a daughter named Irene. After his wife died, he became Bishop of Trimythus. Church tradition places him at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, where the argument over Arianism was tearing through the Church.

The polished men had the education. Spyridon had the life he had lived. The stories remember plain speech, stubborn faith and a bishop who never polished the shepherd out of himself.

He died around 350. His body did not stay in Cyprus.

When Arab raids reached Cyprus in the seventh century, his relics were taken to Constantinople. They remained there for centuries. Then the city itself began to close in.

For Orthodox Christians, the relics point to a blunt claim: holiness reaches the body as well as the soul. That belief deserves more care than gawking at a curiosity.

Before Constantinople fell in 1453, a priest named George Kalokhairetes carried the relics of Spyridon and Saint Theodora out. I keep picturing that part: sacred remains packed for escape, roads through Serbia and Epirus, the old capital about to fall behind them.

By about 1460, Spyridon had reached Corfu. He is still there.

Orthodox tradition says Spyridon’s relics remain incorrupt and flexible. His slippers wear down. They are replaced. Then they wear down again.

I can’t prove what happens to those slippers. I can say the story fits the man in the icon. He never seems to sit still. Cyprus. Nicaea. Constantinople. Corfu. Even the hat made the trip.

Maybe that is why Saint Spyridon stays with people. You can put a bishop’s robes on a shepherd. The old cap still tells you who he is.

The mission’s own history traces the idea to a 2007 visit to Custer County. Father Nicklas Aiello saw Weatherford’s university, regional traffic and mix of people as the right place to plant an Orthodox community where the Orthodox Church in America had no local presence.

The plan took time. Father Nicklas entered St. Tikhon’s Seminary, the family moved to Oklahoma in 2009, and St. Elijah Antiochian Orthodox Church in Oklahoma City helped provide a base while the mission was taking shape.

In the summer of 2011, the first chapel was a rented office in Weatherford. Icons went on the walls, a reader’s stand was built, a website went live and daily Matins and Vespers began. It was not grand. It was enough to start.

Father Nicklas was ordained to the priesthood in 2012. Early Divine Liturgies were served with help from visiting clergy. The Orthodox Church in America formally lists St. Basil as founded in 2013 within the Diocese of the South.

The community eventually acquired a rock house near Main Street and Southwestern Oklahoma State University. Volunteers remodeled it, and the mission moved in during October 2015. The building is modest, but that is part of the point: a permanent place for prayer was built out of what was available.

Today the OCA directory lists Saturday Vigil at 4:00 PM and Sunday Hours at 9:10 followed by Divine Liturgy at 9:30. Feast-day services change, so anyone planning a visit should check the mission’s current calendar first.

What interests me is not the growth language. It is the persistence. A visit in 2007 became a rented office, then a chapel, then a parish home serving western Oklahoma. Small things stayed small long enough to become real.

Related: Saint Basil the Great — The Bishop Who Would Not Bend

Official history of St. Basil the Great Orthodox Mission

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White Dog Hill sits on a rise east of Clinton, just off Route 66. I arrived after dark, when the restaurant windows and the lights around the Beany Bar were surrounded by open Oklahoma sky. The place felt removed from I-40 even though the highway was not far away.

Nothing prepared me for the view over Clinton or the blackness above it. I kept looking up at the night sky before I ever sat down to eat.

The setting has history. The stone buildings began as the Clinton Country Club and Golf Course in 1925. After the club closed in the late 1950s, the property declined and was eventually abandoned. Restoration began in 2001, and White Dog Hill opened in August 2007.

The staff also told me the property has a resident ghost named Dotty. That is their story, not something I can prove, but it fits a place whose own history page leaves room for an “occasional haunting.”

Forgive the photo of a phone screen. It was the only way I could capture it quickly. The staff pointed to the figure by the window and told me that was Dotty, ready to cause a little mischief.

The older stories are best handled as stories. A 2007 account from Route 66 News says owner Nelson King had a Cheyenne man bless the property while he was having trouble with it. I did not need a ghost to make the hill memorable. The building, the darkness and that uninterrupted sky did the work.

The restaurant’s name comes from King’s namesake white dog. That detail feels right here. White Dog Hill is polished enough for dinner, but it still carries the character of a place rebuilt because someone saw value in what had been left behind.

I ordered the ribeye medium rare with feta, garlic mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables. It was the right meal for the setting: straightforward, well cooked and worth slowing down for. The current menu still centers on steaks, grilled entrées, salads and cheeseboards, but menus and prices change, so check the restaurant before making the drive.

Reservations are the sensible move. White Dog Hill also hosts private dinners, weddings and other events, but my reason for returning would be simpler: another steak and enough time to watch the light change over western Oklahoma.

A short path leads from the main restaurant to the Beany Bar. The building began as the country club caretaker’s house in 1925, built from sandstone quarried on the hill. A bedroom was added in the 1940s, and a later addition created more room for small gatherings.

The Beany Bar is intimate rather than grand—small rooms, drinks and conversation before or after dinner. The restaurant lists wine, beer, cocktails and cheeseboards, including Oklahoma wines. It feels like a separate stop even though it is only a short walk from the dining room.

What stayed with me was the combination: an old stone clubhouse brought back from abandonment, a good ribeye, staff willing to share the local ghost story, and a night sky that made Clinton feel much farther away than it was.

I will take the steak and the view. Dotty can keep watch over the window.

King of steaks, Ribeye cooked Medium Rare with feta and garlic mashed potatoes, and roasted veggies

If you are crossing western Oklahoma on I-40, White Dog Hill is worth planning rather than treating as a last-minute detour. Make the reservation, arrive early enough for the view and leave time to walk down to the Beany Bar.

Official White Dog Hill website, current menu and reservations

Route 66 News: White Dog Hill before its 2007 opening

This is the kind of Route 66 place I look for: history that is still being used, a story I could not have found from the highway and a view worth stopping for. What place along the old road has surprised you?

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There are two different things to say about an encounter like this. I can describe what I saw, what the parish told me and what Orthodox tradition teaches. I cannot independently prove the chain of custody for either fragment. That distinction matters, especially when the history reaches back more than sixteen centuries.

What the Fourth-Century Sources Actually Say

Eusebius of Caesarea describes Constantine clearing the site in Jerusalem and ordering a church over the place Christians identified with Christ’s burial and Resurrection. Eusebius does not say that Helena discovered the Cross. That detail belongs to the tradition as it developed in later fourth- and fifth-century accounts.

Orthodox tradition credits Saint Helena with finding three crosses near Golgotha and identifying Christ’s Cross through a miracle. I receive that as the Church’s tradition. Historically, the surviving accounts do not all say the same thing or appear at the same time.

One point is firmer. By the middle of the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem could say that pieces of the wood of the Cross had spread throughout the world. Later in that century, the pilgrim Egeria described the wood being brought out for veneration in Jerusalem on Good Friday. Those texts show how early the devotion was. They do not authenticate every fragment claimed in later centuries.

That is the ground I am comfortable standing on: early Christian testimony to the veneration of the Cross, an Orthodox tradition surrounding Saint Helena and an honest limit on what I can verify about the fragment I encountered in Oklahoma.

The reliquary presented to me as containing a fragment of the True Cross.

Saint Basil the Great and the Relic I Venerated

Saint Basil the Great reposed on January 1, 379, after serving as bishop of Caesarea and defending the Nicene faith. Gregory of Nazianzus remembered the overwhelming crowd at Basil’s funeral. The Orthodox Church has honored Basil ever since as a hierarch, theologian and pastor.

The Weatherford reliquary was presented to me as containing a relic of Saint Basil. I forgot to ask what part of him it held. I would rather admit that than fill the gap with a confident story that I cannot source.

For me, the importance of the moment was not the size of either fragment. It was the connection between the faith described in old texts and the faith still practiced in a small Orthodox mission in western Oklahoma.

• 

  The reliquary presented to me as containing a relic of Saint Basil the Great.

  ---

Why Relics Matter in Orthodox Life

Orthodox Christians do not worship wood or bone. Veneration is an act of honor directed through the relic toward Christ and toward the saint whose life was given to Him. The material world is not treated as disposable; it can carry memory, blessing and witness.

Standing in that chapel, I understood the practice less as an argument and more as an encounter. I came away grateful, curious and aware of how much history can be held in a very small object.

What Stayed With Me

Related: Saint Basil the Great — The Bishop Who Would Not Bend

Related: How St. Basil Orthodox Mission Took Root in Weatherford

Primary text: Cyril of Jerusalem on the wood of the Cross

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That reputation is part of the culture surrounding menudo. It is not medical fact. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says there is no scientifically proven hangover cure other than time. A hot, salty bowl of soup may feel comforting the next morning, but comfort and a cure are not the same thing.

What Is Menudo?

At its simplest, menudo is a slow-cooked Mexican soup built around beef tripe. Menudo rojo gets its deep color and heat from dried red chiles. Menudo blanco leaves those chiles out and lets the broth stay pale. Hominy appears in many versions, but recipes change by region, restaurant and family.

The bowl is only half the experience. Lime, chopped onion, oregano and crushed chile let each person finish it their own way. Corn tortillas or bread belong close by because leaving that broth behind feels wrong.

The work behind menudo is part of its meaning. Tripe has to be cleaned carefully and simmered until it becomes tender. This is not a rushed weeknight soup. It is the kind of food that makes sense in a large pot on a weekend morning, with enough to feed whoever walks through the door.

From Necessity to Tradition

Menudo brings together cattle and offal traditions introduced after Spanish colonization with ingredients rooted in the Americas, including maize and chiles. The exact birthplace is debated, and I am not going to invent a neat origin story where the record does not give us one.

What is clear is that menudo became deeply rooted in Mexican and Mexican-American life. Library of Congress oral-history material from South Texas describes it as a folk food with its own history and folklore. The dish turned an inexpensive, difficult ingredient into something people gather around.

Why It Endured

Menudo endured because it asks for patience and gives back something bold, filling and communal. It can be a Sunday breakfast, a holiday pot or the meal someone swears by after a late night.

I would rather call it a comfort food with a legend attached than sell it as a cure. The legend may get people talking, but the bowl has enough character to stand on its own.

Sources

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism: Hangovers

Library of Congress: Usable Pasts — Mexican American folk food in South Texas

Open the Library of Congress study

Open the NIAAA hangover fact sheet

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But slowing down changes the view. Hobart did not grow gradually from a lonely trading post. It arrived in a rush, became the seat of Kiowa County and built a downtown that still shows what the railroad and agricultural years meant to southwestern Oklahoma.

The Town That Appeared Almost Overnight

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, the present townsite was open prairie on August 1, 1901. By the next morning, thousands of people had gathered in tents for the opening of lands that had been part of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation.

The settlement was named for Garrett A. Hobart, who served as vice president under William McKinley. Hobart became the Kiowa County seat, giving the new town a permanent government role even before its streets had fully settled into place.

The popular Ragtown image gets at the speed and roughness of the beginning, but it should not hide the harder part of the history. This was not empty land waiting for a town. Native nations had lived across and shaped this region long before federal policy opened it to non-Native settlement.

Railroads, Agriculture and Growth

Hobart’s location mattered because railroads turned a county seat into a market town. The Rock Island reached the area around the time of settlement. A north-south line that later became part of the Frisco system followed in 1902. Another regional line connected the county to wider agricultural markets.

Cotton, wheat and cattle tied Hobart to the surrounding farms and ranches. The population reached 3,136 by Oklahoma statehood in 1907, then peaked at 5,380 in 1950. The 2020 census counted 3,415 residents.

Those numbers tell a familiar Great Plains story: fast settlement, railroad growth, an agricultural peak and decades of gradual population loss. They do not tell the whole story of the people who stayed.

What Still Stands

Downtown Hobart is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. So are the Kiowa County Courthouse, Hobart City Hall, the public library and the Rock Island Depot.

The depot matters because it is more than an attractive old building. National Register records describe it as the surviving depot that best represents the arrival of rail transportation in Hobart and Kiowa County during the territorial and early statehood years.

That is what makes Hobart worth noticing. Its history is not locked in one museum case. It is spread across the street grid, public buildings and the distance between downtown and the surrounding fields.

Why Hobart Matters

Small towns are often written about in only two ways: as charming places frozen in time or as communities waiting to disappear. Hobart is more complicated than either version.

It has lost population. Its economic role has changed. Yet it remains the county seat, a farming and ranching center and a place where early Oklahoma history is still visible without much staging.

Hobart does not need postcard glamour. Its value is in the layers: Native history, the 1901 opening, railroads, agriculture, public architecture and the people who kept a county seat functioning after the boom years passed.

If you are crossing southwestern Oklahoma, do not treat Hobart as blank space between destinations. Slow down long enough to read the town.

Source: Oklahoma Historical Society — Hobart

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