Dark Tourism BLOG

This page is intended to provide a more flexible and also more interactive element to dark-tourism.com, which is otherwise more static (more like an encyclopedia). The idea came about after the DT page I used to curate on Facebook was suddenly shut down by the company (full story here). So I’m continuing here – with regular blog posts, either featuring particular dark-tourism destinations or marking specific days in dark history and sometimes reacting to current affairs that are in some way relevant to this site’s topic.

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Dark Days

In these increasingly darkening days (both literally as we head into winter, but also in a figurative sense), I give you a reminder of a particularly dark event on this date in earlier times.

On 9 November 1938 Nazi mobs ransacked Jewish businesses and burned down synagogues in Germany and Austria in what then became known as “Kristallnacht” (usually rendered as ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in English), but these days more commonly and more accurately called “Pogromnacht”.

At a time when Jews around the world, including in Germany, are again increasingly targeted by hate and violence, as

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Nauru in 2024

Nauru is the world’s smallest independent island nation (and the third smallest of all sovereign nations). It’s located in an isolated spot close to the equator in the south-west Pacific far from any other islands. I first heard about Nauru as a teenager in school and was fascinated by its extreme rags-to-riches-and-back story. Back then in the late 1970s Nauru was still one of the richest nations on Earth, thanks to the mining of high-grade phosphate deposits on its central plateau. But even back then it was clear that the deposits would be depleted before too long. Indeed from the late 1980s/early 1990s mining declined to a mere

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Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Yesterday it was announced that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to “Nihon Hidankyo”. That’s a Japanese confederation of A-Bomb survivors (‘Hibakusha’ in Japanese) that has long been campaigning for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. This choice by the Nobel Committee was surely inspired at least in part by the repeated nuclear threats made by Vladimir Putin since his war of aggression against Ukraine started.

I’m now taking this Nobel Peace Prize choice as inspiration for a Blog Post about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities nuked by the

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Maralinga Nuclear Test Site

Maralinga was a dark-tourism highlight of my recent long trip to Australia, so much so that it deserves a separate longer post of its own. So here we go:
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There are two ways of visiting Maralinga, a) overland, with overnight camping or accommodation in Maralinga Village, and b) day return trips by small plane. Since driving all the way to Maralinga through the remote Outback is both demanding and time-consuming I opted for investing in a fly-in tour. For this

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Back from Australia!

On Wednesday I returned from my long trip to Australia (with side trips to Papua New Guinea and Nauru). In this post I’ll concentrate solely on Australia (the side trips will be given separate extra Blog Posts at a later stage) and will mostly let the images speak for themselves, as a photo essay, with only essential extra information given. Let’s kick off …
The first image may come as a bit of a surprise, as it’s not about anything that is particularly Australian. This photo was taken at the

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Dark Tourism & Graffiti

This is the theme that in the latest poll, as at the bottom of this post, narrowly came second, beaten by just one vote by DT & Bullet Holes, which became the previous Blog post. As I would have voted for Graffiti myself I then decided to compose and post this now without another poll. But I won’t let themed polls become forgotten again. There’ll be new ones before too long. Promise.

So now to this post’s theme of DT & Graffiti – but first I have to

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