International Women’s Day 2022

Just a short one for once … Today is 8 March, Women’s Day. And this has to be marked in some way.

Last year on this date I gave you a post featuring various more or less gigantic female statues.

One of them was the humongous titanium-clad Rodina Mat (aka Motherland Monument) in Kyiv, featured in the photo above. The statue is a staggering 62m tall (with the sword), combined with the plinth she towers over the city at a height of over a 100m.

The photo was taken when I was in the city prior to my second Chernobyl trip in May 2015. Also on that occasion I took a photo whose composition now seems strikingly evocative:

Rodina Mat against big guns

This was of course only a play with perspective. The WWII-era guns in the foreground were of a perfectly regular size and formed part of the larger war memorial complex around the giant statue. But from this perspective she looks a) small, and b) threatened.

Suddenly that has taken on a fitting symbolism for the current situation in Putin’s war against Ukraine … and I wonder if this Rodina Mat will actually be physically threatened at some point as this nasty conflict drags on …

.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

sign up to the newsletter!

Stromboli

As promised in the previous Blog post that gave an overview of my recent trip to Sicily, now here comes the more specific post about what was the definite highlight of that trip: seeing Stromboli erupt (below you’ll find several more photos of the natural fireworks show!). The guided hike to the 400m viewing point was actually the very first thing I booked for my Sicily trip and only then built everything else around this.

First you have to get to Stromboli, of course. I planned the trip in such a way that

Read More »

Back from Sicily

Late on Wednesday I returned from my 12-day trip to Sicily. When I say Sicily, though, I should clarify that I only scratched the surface of that large Italian island, having visited only its two largest cities, Palermo and Catania, as well as three of the Aeolian Islands, but saw nothing of the rest of Sicily other than the bits of landscape I was able to spot from the trains and ferries I used. In terms of dark tourism (DT), however, I almost exhausted what there is to do and see (as far as I am aware). The focus

Read More »

Dark Tourism & Toilets

At the end of the previous Blog post about the Ukraine war and how it has affected dark tourism (DT) I promised that I would find a less depressing topic for the next, this Blog post. And so I decided to revive the tradition of the themed post and picked the theme of DT & Toilets. That will have its lighter, even amusing aspects, though of course it’s still about dark tourism, and so must have its serious sides too. I’ll save the funnier ones for the end part of this post – so keep reading to the end!

Where to begin? Where can dark tourism and toilets overlap? Well, one thing you may

Read More »