Before the Macedonian Wars pitted Rome against the Illyrians and Greeks, the Illyrians and Greeks had a long history of clashes with each other, both in the territory of Greece and what is now Albania, and on the Italian Peninsula. Much of the southernmost of Italy was colonized by these groups. Puglia, Italy, rendered in English as Apulia, was founded by the Iapyges, an Illyrian tribe that sailed across the Adriatic. The place was known as Iapygia in antiquity, and the name passed through the languages of Illyrian>Greek>Oscan>Italian on its way to being known as it is today. A number of historians and linguists have pointed out the similarity to the name of another Illyrian tribe, the Iapodes, that lived east of the Adriatic, in the territory of what is now Croatia and Montenegro. The Iapyges weren’t the only Illyrian tribe that settled in Italy, the Daunians, Messapians, Sicels did so as well, and on and on. The Illyrian language in antiquity is actually better attested by documentation from the Italian Peninsula than from the eastern Adriatic. Of course, what wasn’t Illyrian in the south of Italy, was Greek for the longest time, long enough that the region became known as Magna Graecia, and there are at least two regions still speaking Greek in the southernmost of Italy to this day.

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I was born September 2nd, 1993. This means I was conceived something like 6 weeks after my mother’s only sibling, her younger brother died in a crane accident while performing regular maintenance welding on a barge on the Mississippi River. It’s how come I have his first name as a middle name. It also means my birthday has often fallen on the first or second day of the school year, making me as much as a year older than a fellow student.

Again, I didn’t have any formal schooling until the age of 13, when I entered fostercare. Four of my siblings and I were placed in a foster home the second week of November 2006. We decided pretty quickly that we liked Lord of the Rings, which we had never seen before. I had never seen a film in a theatre either. Our foster father took us along with his family to see Rocky Balboa, which was released for the Christmas season, so about six weeks or so after joining their family.

He started calling me Noah Balboa, which was the first nickname that I thought of positively. I didn’t look like Sylvester Stallone, but my father and a couple of my older brothers bore more than a mere passing resemblance to the actor. Stallone’s father was born in Puglia, Italy, not far from Bari, near the western coast of the Adriatic.

My foster father was genetically half German and half Czech/Slovakian. He was a conflicted man, and prone to mocking his half Polish wife for her ethnicity. She took it in stride. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a more patient woman, someone who tackled life with the grace that she could conjure up. I can’t recall ever seeing her angry. She rarely raised her voice, especially without very good reason.

My foster parents became my adoptive parents. It was called “adult adoption”, done once I turned 18, so that the few benefits to being in the fostercare system wouldn’t be lost once I became an adult, namely college aid. I was under the impression I was simply taking their last name, that the term “adult adoption” was fanciful. I kind of liked their last name, it reminded me of my great grandfather Bill Olsen’s surname, it sounded a lot like the word “silent”, the household was generally peaceful as I remember it. Looking it up, the data that had documentation stated it came from a Swiss surname that originated in Basel. Who doesn’t like the Swiss?

Until the last 1200 years or so, most of Switzerland was speaking a Latin language. It was not until the conquests by Charlemagne that the place now called Switzerland started on the path of becoming Germanicized, especially linguistically. Interestingly enough, the language spoken in Switzerland never underwent the German Romanticism movement, that purging of the German language of loans from other languages kickstarted by August Zeune. This is the same man who applied the word “Balkan”, a Turkish word for “mountain”, to a region that spoke primarily Greek and Slavic languages, as the “Balkan Peninsula” (which is not actually a peninsula either). The German homophone “Balken” means “bar, barrier”, and has a close relation to the English word “Balcony”.

It is because the Swiss didn’t become enthralled with the products of nationalism to the degree that most countries did, that their language has retained Latin loans, enough that a young Sotiris Bletsas, a Latin-Greek from Trikala, Greece found himself understanding words spoken by a Swiss tourist. This led him to see the benefit of his mother tongue, and in the summer of 1995, to pass out a European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages pamphlet that outlined that a Latin language has historically been spoken in a giant chunk of Greece. He was fined the 2023 USD equivalent of $2600, arrested, charged and sentenced to 15 months in prison for this action. He was acquitted after international intervention.

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The name Siler comes from German “Seiler”, meaning “one who works with rope”. It is coincidence that it looks and sounds somewhat like the word “silent”. On the other hand, the Latin word for “actively silent”, that might be applied to describe a ninja, is “Sileri” or “Silere”. I found this early on in my research when I was thinking about taking the name as my own. There are numerous examples of Italian families dropping the vowel at the end of their name to pseudo-”anglicize” their surname, for instance, Carell, from Carelli and Caroselli. It just so happens “Sileri” is an Italian surname, originating in Rome. I also learned this among my earliest research.

It wasn’t long after I took my foster parents last name that I learned I had been legally adopted by them. I wasn’t aware I’d be getting a new birth certificate, but when I saw it, my biological parents names had been removed, and replaced with my adoptive parents. I wasn’t thrilled, but what can you do. Not much longer after this, my foster father threatened to disown me.

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The Plymouth Brethren broke off from the Anglican Church, the Church of England, in the early 19th century, with influence from Protestant Reformation movements such as Anabaptists, the movement that gave the world groups such as the Mennonites and the Amish. Like these earlier groups, the Plymouth Brethren sought to follow the example of the early church, and behave like the early Christians. Plymouth Brethren require women to have their heads covered while in the church building. They practice a form of shunning, much like the Amish. They prefer to sit in a kind of circle or semi-circle while taking part in “communion”, the remembrance of Christ’s death, represented by the drinking of wine and the breaking and eating of bread. During these services, there is no formal pastor guiding the discourse. Each man, and only men, can speak as the spirit leads, to pray, to admonish, to recite scripture, to call out a hymn, even to present a brief sermon. As a sect, they are also obsessed with the end times, and prone to adherence to "young earth creationism". Probably the best known among their movement is George Muller, the German missionary who moved to England and famously started an orphanage, and equally famously relied strictly on faith and prayer to meet his needs and those of the orphanage.

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If it hadn’t been for the testimony and legacy of George Muller, my foster parents may very well never have taken us in to begin with. And I am grateful they took us in. It was a monumentally better situation than the household and circumstances we were in under our mother. On the other hand, there are a number of situations where the response, particularly from our foster father, was appalling. You could search the world over for a perfect person, and it would be a giant waste of time, because the only perfect people are the ones in stories.

My brother from my foster family, 8 months my junior, was also a confusing person. Tom seemed to me like he was an actor, just a constant facade, which to be fair, everyone is doing constantly, and especially in a pseudo-fusion of different families, there’s going to be a lot of walking on eggshells. He and I figured out pretty early that we would each have to give each other a lot of distance, because if we allowed ourselves to compete with each other, we’d just constantly be at each other’s throats. It was a good thing that we stopped playing sports against each other early on.

My sister, the one closest in age to me, shared much of the same friend group as Tom. Tracy hung out with the “popular”, i.e. closer to the attractive end of the spectrum, girls from church and youth group. Tom had a thing for at least one of them. Whether he had a thing for her or not, he engaged in a physical relationship with my sister.

I don’t know the extent of it, and I don’t want to. But this was discovered by my parents, and my sister was effectively shunned, called a “whore” at least in spirit, and Tom got off scot free. He blamed her, she didn’t stand up for herself, before then, or during. I was unaware of any of this at the time.

Why she later went through with the “adult adoption” as I did, I don’t know.

And then I think, in some ways, so I could feel her pain, she told my foster parents that I’d had sex with my high school girlfriend, or the closest thing I had to one. I told her this in confidence. So I was then threatened with disownment for having premarital (private, protected, consensual, heterosexual) sex.

In order to appease my adoptive parents, I married that girl in a small ceremony in her grandmother’s back yard. I liked her enough. She and I didn’t really think much of marriage at the time, it was a piece of paper from the government. We were only together for about a year after, year and a half at most.

After we separated, I was formally disowned by my adoptive parents. I was told I was unwelcome at their house, told not to talk to their kids, told not to come to them with any conversation that didn’t have to do with Jesus.

A couple years earlier, I had attended a kind of pastor/missionary seminary for the Plymouth Brethren, for a year at my adoptive father’s requirement. This gave me college credit, that was effectively worthless at any public university. But we went quite in depth into studying the Bible, how it was constructed, where, who wrote what and in what language, the history of the gospels, outside sources that attest to the existence of the character of Jesus Christ and on and on. I was very familiar with the guy actually, and had little to say.

When my adoptive father formally disowned me, I seriously considered changing my last name to Sicuro, just come right out and cosplay as an Italian. I hadn’t seen any of the gangster films or series yet, Godfather, Sopranos, etc. I just knew an Italian man stood up for himself.

I didn’t take the surname. But looking into it later, I found it originated in Lecce, Puglia, with what are effectively Latinized Greco-Illyrians west of the Adriatic. I have no idea where I first saw that surname, but I thought it was cool, and I wouldn’t even have to change my signature.