strange heat it was, the summer of 1399. The kind of heat that presses down on the land and makes the air thick with waiting. You could feel it in the quiet of the fields and the low murmur of…...
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Japanese Archery By Aleksander Wat (in Marcin Malek poetical interpretation) 1The hand to the bowstring speaks:Bend to me, yield.The bowstring to the hand replies:Strike bold, be steeled.The bowstring whispers to the shaft:O arrow, flee!The arrow to the bowstring calls:Unshackle me!The…
There is a moment before the shot, when the world folds into silence, taut as the string between limb and nock. It is not hesitation. It is not doubt. It is the brief, unbearable stillness before intent becomes action, before…...
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The dimly lit, rain-soaked cinemas of 1980s Soviet life provided brief but significant havens. Among the films, Sergei Tarasov's 1985 Чернaя стрела (The Black Arrow) stood out not only as entertainment but also as an event—an artefact of a society struggling with its paradoxes. Under the heavy shadow of a collapsing Soviet ideology, this rendition of Robert Louis Stevenson's story connected as both metaphor and adventure, a revolt against the ordinary disguised as historical epic.
Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince—his name, steeped in ink as dark as a storm-laden sky, calls forth images of a knight both magnificent and terrible, a figure who rode the tangled path between chivalry and carnage. The chronicles recount…...
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Horseback Havoc: Sarmatian Archery They are a people who vanish like shadows, whose arrows strike before their forms are seen; the Sarmatians, riders of the endless winds.— Tacitus, Annals The Sarmatians, like whispers carried across the boundless steppes, traversed the…...
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* Rising, Sinking and Resurrection * By Marcin Malek This is a revised and expanded edition of an article of the same title published in the 14th issue of TIFAM, December 2022 Also available as an audio Podcast on YouTube…...
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