Most of what we think of as Ancient Greece sits in modern Turkey or on sovereign Greek islands that sit only a few miles off the Turkish coast such as Lesbos, from which the word “lesbian” derives, because of the poet Sappho, from whom the word “sapphic” derives. In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a fire-breathing mythical monster with the front of a lion, the middle of a goat, and the rear of a dragon. It was slain by the hero Bellerophon, who rose in the ancient city of Corinth and rode the winged horse Pegasus. Chimaera, however, is the site of a mountain that sits in modern-day Turkey, near where the Mediterranean coast turns upward. On the top of the mountain, methane leaks from deep in the Earth and, possibly sparked by some forest fire or lightning eons ago, burns eternally like a divine Weber. Ancient mariners used its light at night as a waypoint, and they must have filled in the stories. My friend Andrew and I drove by several years ago, and he insisted we sweat our way up the mountain with some Cubans, whereupon we were able to light the cigars with the ancient natural flames, with only minimal hand burns.

Today, the word “chimeric” means two things, both derived from the monstrous myth. Because the monster is an amalgam of animals, a chimera can mean something made of mixed parts. Or it can mean something illusory and wished for, a dream. It’s a bit like the word “Byzantine,” which means highly complicated, because in the city of Byzantium (now Istanbul) once existed the most complex bureaucracy the world had ever seen. More problematically, the verb to be “shanghaied,” meaning to be screwed over underhandedly, derives from the Opium War, when men were drugged, abducted, and forced into service as sailors on naval ships that were often bound for Shanghai.