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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Pompeii & Herculaneum
As promised in the previous Blog post, with its overview of my recent trip to Naples, I now bring you a post that concentrates entirely on Pompeii and Herculaneum, both of which I visited from Naples as day excursions during that recent trip.
Both places were wealthy ancient Roman cities that were destroyed in a catastrophic two-day eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius in (probably) October 79 CE. The first phase of the eruption produced a gigantic column of pumice and volcanic ash, which, when it collapsed, began to rain down volcanic material mainly over Pompeii, whereas
Back from Naples
I’ve meanwhile returned from my eight-day trip to Naples, Italy, which I also used as a base for excursions to Pompeii and Herculaneum. As before I’ll provide a brief first overview and photo essay with shots taken by smartphone, while the photos taken with my proper dSLR camera still await processing. But the smartphone images are good enough for this purpose of a quick overview.
As a first image, here’s a panoramic shot of the city taken from a hilltop terrace next to Castel Sant’ Elmo – with Mount Vesuvius looming large in the background
Rapideum, or: DT and Football
This post features something in my adopted home city of Vienna. Recently I paid a visit to the “Rapideum”. That’s the name of the museum of the football club Rapid Vienna (official full name: Sportklub Rapid, hence the abbreviation SKR), originally a working-class club of western Vienna (Hütteldorf). I had read about this museum in a book about hidden gems in Vienna and when I learned that the museum doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of the club’s history, I was keen to go. I wasn’t disappointed. Read on …
Of course, much of the museum
Orford Ness
Orford Ness, a shingle spit off the coast of Suffolk in the south-east of England, had been a military testing and research site since just before WW1. But what makes the place most relevant to dark tourism is the legacy of its role in the Cold War as one of the main sites used by the so-called “Atomic Weapons Research Establishment” (AWRE) of the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Here all of the nuclear weapons developed by Britain were tested – not in the sense of actual nuclear tests (those were conducted in Australia, especially Maralinga, and later in the Pacific), but
The Channel Islands
This is the promised follow-up to the previous two posts (the one about my summer road trip through England and the other about yet more DT in London). So now to the Channel Islands, where I travelled to after London, first by train to Poole and then by ferry from there to Guernsey.
The ‘Channel Islands’ is a cover term for an archipelago of islands located in the English Channel (hence the designation) but geographically much closer to Normandy in France (to which they once belonged) than to Great Britain. The islands are British ‘Crown Dependencies’ and as such
Yet Another Return Visit to London
This is a follow-up post to the previous one, in which I reported on my DT-filled, four-week-long road trip through England. This ended in late August in London, where I dropped off my hire car at Heathrow Airport. After that I did not catch a flight, but took the Tube into, or rather: through London. I had a cheap hotel room for three nights booked far out east at the Royal Docks (named after Victoria, Albert and King George V). I picked that place not only