Tribes and Origins, for a Friend

I had been corresponding via IM with a young man born in 1989. I've gotten so old that it took me quite a while to realize that someone born in 1989 today would be 19 years old! The young man and I didn't chat long, as I didn't fit his idea of someone worthwhile talking to, but he did tell me something interesting about himself. He had mentioned that he had very dark hair and very light blue eyes. It would be sort of hard to track where those features might come from, as among Slovaks, the Dutch, the Greeks, and so on among people who are more dark-featured, every once in a while there is an instance of blue eyes.

Blue eyes that are very light in color are very rare anywhere, and are somewhat impractical as eyes of such a light color have a tendency of developing cataracts. In fact, people with blue eyes in general have a very tough time with cataract problems as they age. For myself as a diagnosed diabetic, I need to be very careful with my regimens and my eyes, and will likely have problems with my eyes no matter how well I handle my self.

I had met the young man at an Internet forum that I'm forbidding myself, so I can't talk to him directly. However, he mentioned that his mother had told him a story that his father's family originated in Romania. He also mentioned that he had once had a dream about a name called, "the Dragescu." I talked to him several times, and no longer speak to him, but as it turns out I turned up something with my research skills.

"Dragescu," certainly has a Romanian ring to it, as the, "sc," syllable, which is a harsh expressive, "shh," sound transliterated into English is quite common in the Romanian group of languages. However, I assumed the young man had simply turned the name up in a book of vampire fables, or in some ridiculous roleplaying game corebook. Still, I had been toying with searches, and there was an article that mentioned this small city north by northeast of Ivanovka called Maeraza and the surname, "Dragescu," on the Internet on the same page.

I had heard music performed by the Kronos Quartet by a female composer from Azerbaijan two years or so ago, and so I was not totally unfamiliar with the name. Apparently Azerbaijan is very Turkish in character, yet also has a Slovakian-European element to its character. As with the Slovakian region in general, this small locality has a fierce concept of its own identity, and is now apparently recognized as a sovereign nation amidst the now quite fragmented nations of that region. The area sits with Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and then Iran to the south.

I am not going to contact the young man again, but the information did kind of interest me, even though the information I had was so limited. Perhaps, "Dragescu," is a common surname in the region. I guess what got me thinking was that the young man had a Romanian father, and that his little tidbit about this, "dream," did in fact turn up a relationship between the surname and a region fairly close to Romania in geography. Perhaps the young man was growing nearer through these tales to finding his own tribe.

I'll be back indirectly, and then we'll have more to discuss, eh?