Byzantium Novum State of the Nation - October 2010

State of the Nation - October 2010

Greetings all,

October has been another good month for Byzantium Novum! It has now been eight months since our founding, and we currently have 114 official Citizens. This is an average of 14 new Citizens each month, which is quite good for a beginning micronational sovereignty project!

A reminder, our Citizen map is located at: http://www.communitywalk.com/byzantium_novum/map/543922 . Citizens are able to personalize their map point by adding a comment. If anyone is unsure of which point represents their location, just email us at ByzantiumNovum@aol.com.

As of this morning Byzantium Novum has 1,481 Facebook contacts on our page located at:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/ByzantiumNovum . For the past three months all new contacts have been from people finding us and sending friend requests, so our presence is getting out there! This has also been a great forum to broadcast information about our micronation.

Perhaps the biggest news of the month is that Byzantium Novum has started a public campaign to protest the destruction of the ancient Roman city and hospital archaeological site at Allianoi, in Turkey. This large site, which was populated well into the Byzantine era, is scheduled to be flooded for a backup reservoir in a local dam project. There has been no time to do proper archaeology at this site. Byzantium Novum has been publishing to many forums to ask people to write respectful letters to the Turkish Government and point out the value of this site, and how it can benefit Turkey more as a historical site than as a lake.

So far we have officially recruited 165 people to the protest cause, and have hopefully influenced many more people to email the Turkish Embassy in their country. This has been our nations first public project and even though the project schedule has left us little promotion time we have done very well!

In other news, the Byzantium Novum Senate has begun its first official vote. Vote topics include the establishment of a group to study the cultures around ancient Byzantium, including those cultures that were part of Byzantine Provinces, ratification of some of our founding documents, and organization structure of the provinces of Byzantium Novum. The Byzantium Novum Senate list archives are public and can always be viewed at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ByzantiumNovumSenate/

The only downside of this month is that it has been a very busy month for many of our Citizens, myself included. Traffic on our public forums has been slower than expected. Keeping these lists active is important not only for keeping our Citizens involved, but also to show visitors that our community is indeed active! I have been involved in some large projects that will end by the end of the month, and hope to do much more posting myself. Hopefully other Citizens will get some discussion going also. :)

Finally, I would like to once again thank all Citizens who have helped Byzantium Novum by continuing to list us on Craig's List. This has been hugely helpful in getting the word out and letting new Citizens find us! Thank you!!

Hopefully November will continue to be a productive month for Byzantium - and that our protest cause will be helpful in saving the archaeological site in Turkey.

Hail Byzantium !

-Marcus Cassius Julianus
Senator

Join Byzantium Novum in protesting the destruction of the ancient Roman Hospital of Galen!

Byzantium Novum has begun an international campaign save the archaeological site of the ancient Roman "Hospital of Galen" from destruction by the Turkish Government.

An article on this situation can be found here:

http://tinyurl.com/2fkmcj7


We are encouraging people worldwide to send a polite letter or email to the Turkish Embassy in their country, reminding them that this is not a sound financial decision. This well known ancient site is worth more money to Turkey than their proposed destructive public works project would be!

Byzantium Novum has started a Facebook campaign to get the word out:

http://www.causes.com/causes/532756/about?m=ba32d54d

And we are also asking people with a Facebook account to join this cause and forward it to their friends.

Please help Byzantium Novum stop this project! If it cannot be stopped forever, it should at least be halted until the proper archaeological study and preservation recommended by the scientific archaeological community can be done!