By Stijn Mitzer
En güzel deniz: henüz gidilmemiş olandır. En güzel çocuk: henüz büyümedi. En güzel günlerimiz: henüz yaşamadıklarımız. Ve sana söylemek istediğim en güzel söz: henüz söylememiş olduğum sözdür – The most beautiful sea, hasn’t been crossed yet. The most beautiful child, hasn’t grown up yet. Our most beautiful days, we haven’t witnessed yet. And the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you, I haven’t said yet. (By Nazım Hikmet)
Dear everyone,
I had always imagined ‘penning’ this farewell someday. You see, the journey of Oryx took a different path than its intended purpose. What Oryx was meant to be initially was a remedy for my teenage boredom at the age of 17. Back then, I was still in high school, and the manageable workload along with my recent departure from playing football left me with an abundance of spare time. An interest in the Arab Spring, in particular the Libyan and Syrian Revolutions, led me to spend more and more time scouring the internet for updates. As the Syrian Revolution evolved into protracted civil war, I decided to create a Twitter account to more closely monitor the unfolding events.
One of the accounts I followed was that of Eliot Higgins, who began reporting on the Syrian Civil War on his Brown Moses Blog. After asking him one day if he was going to report on the use of Italian-upgraded T-72 tanks in the war, I remember telling myself that if a ”high-school dropout who knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner” was able to write these articles, so would I probably. That evening, I created a blog, picked a name (Oryx for the majestic animal, and Spioenkop, Afrikaans for ‘spy hill’, as a place from where one can watch events unfold around the world) and published my first article on Syria’s T-72 MBTs. (For those interested, the article can be read here).
It was the 16th of February 2013, and little did I realise that the next decade would transform Oryx from a remedy for boredom into a project that would consume the majority of my time and energy. I can still recall the joy I felt when the T-72 article garnered 520 views in just several hours, contributing to a total view count of approximately 3500 for the entire blog that month. Fast forward ten years, and Oryx now achieves an average of 250,000 daily views. In the months following my inaugural article, I continued to write about Syria, a country that held my focus until 2017. However, a desire towards greater challenges was always present. My motivation thrives on challenges. Offer me the most difficult subject to analyse. Upon mastering the subject’s intricacies, I seek out the next challenge.
I ultimately discovered my greatest challenge in the analysis of North Korea. Back in the early 2010s, the scarcity of photographs and videos emerging from the country, in stark contrast to the flood of visual content available now, intrigued me. The limited information available, coupled with the abundance of misinformation, arguably made it the most challeng
