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CHRISTMAS TURKISH Historiograph in Catania Sicilia


CHRISTMAS TURKISH (Historiograph)
Catania 25 February 1922 - 18 December 1987

"O Sicily, or noble city, has betrayed you fate, you who were propugnacolo against powerful peoples." (IBN HAMDIS).

Born on February 25, 1922 in Catania, a bourgeois family that was also wealthy until the fifties, was a socialist since youth. From 1932 to 1938 he completed his classical studies in the Real College Capizzi di Bronte, from which he fled twice, and in the Naval College of Brindisi from which he was discharged in May 1938, ie expelled but regularly graduated, to have challenged a commander to a duel that during the traditional festival of MAK N 100 it was allowed to call bastard one of his countrymen.

Enrolled in Law at the University of Catania, he was a pupil of Moscati and Majorana and a disciple of Guglielmo Sabatini, who was so esteemed that he was able to wait for his thesis on criminal law and the Italian positive school when he was still in the second year, even if then the prof. Scarano, who succeeded Sabatini, did not want to confirm it in 1954, because he was a follower of the technical-legal school. In those early years he also wrote for the theater and published two novels: Tormenta d'anime in 1942 and Nitcevo in 1944.

In 1943 he was forced to abandon his studies and to go underground to avoid responding to the call to arms, until the Allies arrived and could give himself to the liberation struggle of the island from the Italic yoke. His small essay "Carte al mano", which appeared next to "La Sicilia ai Siciliani" by Antonio Canépa, gave the opportunity to the publisher Battiato to point it out to readers as the first work of "one of the most worthy and prepared young people of our island" ". Sicily to the rescue, Sicily martyr and red Sicily, were the clandestine sheets that then directed, printed and disseminated along with many other comrades.

In the two-year period 1944-45 he was in charge of propagandizing and organizing Indipendentism in the provinces of Catania, Enna, Caltanissetta and Agrigento, and although constantly stalked and persecuted by the police, he managed to contact and speak to thousands of fellow countrymen and engage them in the struggle. In 1945 he also carried out delicate missions for the E.V.I.S. and held a close correspondence with the three deportees of Ponza.

At the epilogue of the struggle with the attainment of Autonomy, in 1947 he emigrated abroad (Spain, England, Austria), remaining there until 1953, when he returned to Catania to graduate, in 1954 with 66. He then followed courses for two years. Romans of the School of Improvement of Criminal Law and of the International Institute of Criminology directed by Filippo Grispigni, but to professional activity he preferred his beloved studies of law and history and life in the countryside, until 1971.

In those years of buen retiro he did even a whole cycle of audacious works of land transformation, but they were promptly thwarted by the system that, since the day after Autonomy, had already started to destroy the primary economy of the island and every yearning of revival of the Sicilians. Forced to re-enter the field for the same survival, from November 1972 to April 1983 he wrote more than 25,000 pages, that is, 205 degree theses in ancient, medieval and modern history; in regional, constitutional, penal, ecclesiastical and banking law; in philosophy, pedagogy and teaching; in Latin literature, ancient Christian, Sicilian, Italian, French, English, German and American; in Germanic and Romance philology; in psychology and psychoanalysis; in social and political sciences and in economics and commerce. "Works on commission", if you want, but for the stylistic commitment and the seriousness of the research have been imposed at least to the attention of those 77 "speakers" who had to read and illustrate.

His main work, however, is still today that "History of the Sicilian Nation", designed in 4 volumes and of which only I was released in 1972 in Catania and the second edition of the same in 1979 in Caracas, while the II, III and the fourth conclusive volume, entitled "The century of current domination" was completed in 1981 and, as it could not be published by the CSSSS (of which he was founder along with Turi Lima and others holding the office of President until his death) the financial burden they entail, await the well-planted and nonconformist publisher who is willing to print them. In 1982 he also wrote an essay entitled Da Hegel to Al-Gaddafi. State theory and direct democracy in the Green Paper. In 1983 he published the Essence of the Sicilian Question published by the Sicilian Social and Historical Studies Center of Catania.

This was the man, the historian and partly the politician. But it is obvious that he was "unitarily" considered an outsider by the official and regime culture, for his robespierreana moral correctness, for the orthodox



CHRISTMAS TURKISH Historiograph in Catania Sicilia




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