What's rich to him
That has made a great peacock
With the pride of his eye?
William Butler Yeats [1]
I have seen a great deal of peacocks in my life, and they have always been present in my life. My earliest memories, however, are not of peacocks as such, as I might have seen them during a visit to the zoo, but rather of reports I saw as a child in the yellow press. These reports dealt with the Peacock Throne [2] in Persia, with the Shah of Persia, Soraya [3], and Farah Pahlavi; the tabloids called Soraya the "German on the Peacock Throne" because she had a German mother. Once, my family and I were watching an Edgar Wallace crime movie, a black and white movie, on television when my mother remarked, which was supposed to be set in London: "Ah, that's Peacock Island [4]!" And then we heard the calls of the peacocks. Now, these Edgar Wallace movies [5] were the German equivalent of B-movies. They were actually more amusing when viewed with some distance from the time of their shooting. And I remember peacocks that you could see and hear at Meerbusch-Ossum, near the hospital, where I worked as a heumatologist. I was walking through a small thicket when suddenly a peacock stood in a clearing and spread its tail feathers. It squawked and then ran off.
We speak of peacocks, but peafowl would be the correct term; in German, this isn't so noticeable, because there it's called "Pfau" (peacock). Peacock is the masculine form and peahen the feminine form of peafowl, but colloquially, people say "peacock." The Latin pava comes from the Greek taos, which was handed over from the Persian tavus (طاووس), which came from the Tamil word tokei (I've found mayil / மயில் instead) [6]. Peacocks were already mentioned in the Bible, specifically in connection with King Solomon [7].
I made three trips to Sri Lanka in the 1970s and didn't see a single peacock. This surprised me greatly, as we saw peacocks in all the parks — in trees or displaying their plumage — and also at various tourist attractions and historical sites. We visited Wilpattu National Park, Minneriya Park, the vast Yala National Park, and Bundala Park, which is particularly rich in birds, with around 200 species. We saw the Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus), also known as the blue peafowl, which is native to the Indian subcontinent and thus also to Sri Lanka. Since it has also been introduced to other parts of the world, I even spotted one on the balcony of my hotel in San Pedro de la Atacama, Chile.
What fascinated me most about peacocks on this trip were the warning signs along the highway, cautioning drivers to beware of peacocks crossing the road. Incidentally, over 40 years ago, there were no highways in the south of the country. A road network existed, but the roads were narrow and the busses slow. During the trip, someone had mentioned the book "The Peacock" by Isabel Bogdan, which I read afterwards [8]. I enjoyed it very much, and I've now found another book, "The Peacock Garden" by Anthony Weller [9], which I might read. In any case, the peacocks in Sri Lanka were very interesting and have stayed with me for quite some time, and will continue to do so. I just discovered that the Sri Lankan airline has a peacock in its logo — well, Lufthansa has a crane.
Links and Annotations:
[1] From: William Butler Yeats [1a]: The Peacock.
https://allpoetry.com/The-Peacock
[1a] William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats
[2] The Peacock Throne (تخت طاووس) was a throne made of gold and reportedly 26,733 precious stones, belonging to the Mughal emperors of the Indo-Islamic Mughal Empire in northern India. This Peacock Throne was lost, but the name remained as a synonym for Persia.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfauenthron
[3] Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary (ثریا اسفندیاری بختیاری) was Queen of Persia from 1951 to 1958 through her marriage to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; she lived from 1932 to 2001.
Soraya grew up in Berlin and Isfahan; I love both cities.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soraya_Esfandiary_Bakhtiary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soraya_Esfandiary-Bakhtiary
[4] Peacock Island with Peacock Island Palace is located in the Havel River in southwest Berlin and, since 1990, has been on the list of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, along with the palaces and parks of Sanssouci in Potsdam and others.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfaueninsel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfaueninsel
[5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar-Wallace-Filme
But please read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Films_based_on_works_by_Edgar_Wallace#German_Krimi_adaptations
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_peafowl
[7] In the First Book of Kings: “For the king had a fleet of ships of Tarshish at sea with the fleet of Hiram. “Once every three years the fleet of ships of Tarshish used to come bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks.” 1 Kings 10:22
https://biblehub.com/esv/1_kings/10.htm
[8] Isabel Bogdan: Der Pfau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2016, ISBN: 978-3-462-04800-1.
Isabel Bogdan: The Peacock. Translated by Annie Rutherford. Voland & Quist, Berlin 2021. ISBN: 978-3-863-91293-2.
[9] Anthony Weller: Der Pfauengarten. Translated by Doris Styron. Lichtenberg Verlag, München 1997. ISBN: 9783785281031.
Anthony Weller: The Garden of the Peacocks. Da Capo Press, New York 1998. ISBN: 978-1569246962.
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