Peter, Autor bei Dark Tourism Blog

Dark travel videos and a surprise change in Turkmenistan

Last week I was contacted by someone in the English department of the Franco-German co-operation TV channel ARTE. I was alerted to two series of short video productions (with episodes of between 5 to 8 minutes in length) on topics that include, or at least overlap with, dark tourism themes. (Find the links to the programmes below!)

The first one is called “Toxic Tour” and has six episodes, each about

29 March 2022 No Comments

Russian Reflections

This photo was taken in St Petersburg and shows a reflection of one of the most iconic sights in this city, namely the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood … what a name in the current circumstances! (But its name is actually a reference to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.)

Secondly, I know in the West all eyes are currently on Ukraine and especially the Ukrainians, who are suffering the most in this ongoing war, and I naturally feel for them too. But my heart also bleeds for Russia – for various reasons I will

20 March 2022 No Comments

Fear-mongering vs a feel-good discovery

on the news yesterday were reports about a sensational discovery in the Antarctic waters. An expedition managed to track down and photograph the wreck of the Endurance, the ship of the Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-16 Antarctica expedition, also called “Endurance”. The ship hit pack ice early on, got stuck in it and was thus immobilized. As the ice increasingly crushed the vessel, it had to be abandoned by the crew who camped off-board on the ice. The ship eventually sank on 21 November 1915.

After that,

10 March 2022 No Comments

Easter Island escapism

Easter Island can be regarded as a dark-tourism destination only in a more symbolic way, making a link between its dark past of environmental overexploitation and the current threat to the whole Earth’s global biosphere – to quote my own book’s final chapter, which is about Easter Island: “[the islanders] had to learn the hard way that there was no other island they could evacuate to, just as the people of planet Earth must learn – to quote an often-used slogan at climate-change demonstrations – that there is no planet B.”

9 March 2022 1 Comment

International Women’s Day 2022

Just a short one for once … Today is 8 March, Women’s day. 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 over a 100m high.

The photo was

8 March 2022 No Comments

Babyn Yar

As the brutal war that Putin’s Russia has launched against Ukraine continues, there has been another clash with the world of dark tourism too.

On Monday there was a missile strike on the Kyiv TV Tower, once the world’s tallest steel lattice structure. The link to dark tourism is this: the TV Tower is directly adjacent to a very dark site of the Holocaust, Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar in Ukrainian spelling, a massacre site and mass grave. During the

3 March 2022 No Comments

Nuclear Threats

Sunday’s announcement that Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on “high alert” really knocked me off balance. You see, I’m a child of the Cold War … I came of age in the early 1980s, at the very height of the Cold War, one of its most dangerous phases, in fact. I became increasingly aware that any minute could be my last. I’m somewhat reminded of that feeling now. Although there are significant differences: for one thing,

1 March 2022 No Comments

Very Dark Times for Ukraine

I’ve been struggling for words over these past three days. But slowly they are coming back.

And I thought I just have to speak out in some way rather than just staying silent. So I decided to throw my otherwise self-prescribed political neutrality on this blog overboard and make a statement.

In a way that’s partly because now it’s personal. Putin’s

26 February 2022 4 Comments

42 years since the military coup in Suriname

On this day, 42 years ago, on 25 February 1980, the so-called “Sergeants’ Coup” took place in Suriname, led by the later military dictator Dési Bouterse.

Suriname is the smallest independent country in South America and is rather little known in the outside world – except in the Netherlands, where there is a sizeable Surinamese expat community. That’s because Suriname used to be Dutch Guiana, the

25 February 2022 No Comments

Post from Moscow!

I don’t mean that I’m in Moscow and posting this on my Blog from there. No, I’m still in Vienna, Austria, but I had a parcel from Moscow delivered to my door by the Austrian postal service this morning. I had to pay a delivery fee of 6 EUR – so I was tempted to entitle this post “From Russia – not with love but a fee” …

Here’s a photo of the

23 February 2022 No Comments

Dark Tourism in the Literally Dark – Vienna’s Central Cemetery by night

Last Saturday I joined an exclusive guided group tour of the grand Central Cemetery (‘Zentralfriedhof’) in Vienna that took place after dark. I had visited this vast burial ground several times before and cover it extensively on my main DT website. Now I was able to add another, even literally darker element to it. On the basis of that I’ve amended my website’s entry for the cemetery a little and added a few extra photos to the photo gallery.

Here on the DT Blog I can give you a fuller report and a much more substantial photo essay – here we go:

18 February 2022 2 Comments

Another Dark Valentine’s Day

Today is 14 February, Valentine’s Day! Last year I marked this date with a post featuring a photo of a dark bas-relief by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland plus photos of a few more works by the same artist on public display in Frogner Park in Oslo, Norway.

For today I searched through my archives looking for other things that could be related to Valentine’s Day, like hearts, flowers and other symbols of love – but with a dark-tourism-relevant connection, of course. I did

14 February 2022 No Comments

Another revelation: Warth Mill & Hutchinson Camp

this same week I also came across another revelation of yet another dark chapter of British history that I had not been aware of in this form before: the mass internment of Germans and Austrian as “enemy aliens” in 1940 and the horrendous conditions the early places of internment came with.

Most of the internees were refugees from the Third Reich who had found a safe haven in a welcoming Britain, including many Jews who had fled the

5 February 2022 No Comments

Indonesian revelations

The large archipelago nation of Indonesia has been in the media lately for a couple of unexpected revelations – for me at least.

For one thing, the country’s capital city Jakarta will soon no longer be the capital city!
Indonesia is about to go the Brazil/Myanmar way, as it were, with a purpose-built new capital in the very centre of the archipelago, namely in the province of East Kalimantan, on the

2 February 2022 No Comments

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is one of the most significant international remembrance days, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on this day in 1945. It’s impossible to cover every Holocaust-related dark-tourism site in a single post. But what I can do is give one photo each from all the main concentration camps and death camps, i.e. the main places where the Holocaust played out (in addition to

27 January 2022 2 Comments

Dark Tourism & Flames

As indicated at the end of last week’s blog post about the “Stans”, I now give you a themed post next, namely DT & Flames. It’s a topic that ran a couple times in the theme polls over the past 18 months (here, here and here) but never won. Now I’m just posting it anyway. And that’s because it follows on so neatly from the parts about the Darvaza flaming gas crater in Turkmenistan that was featured in last week’s post, and included photos like

19 January 2022 No Comments

Trouble in the Stans

“The Stans” is shorthand for the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia whose names all end in -stan, that is: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (but not Pakistan and Afghanistan!).

All of these have been in the media for more or less unsavoury reasons over the past few decades, but Kazakhstan seemed to be the calmest and least

13 January 2022 No Comments

6 January, Book Feature

How time flies – today it is already a whole year since the 6 January 2021 attacks on the Capitol building in Washington D.C.
The other reason I’m uploading a second post today (after this one, just posted) is to alert readers to a rather big feature about my book Atlas of Dark Destinations in the Mail online, the digital counterpart of the Daily Mail newspaper in the UK. This tabloid may have had its

6 January 2022 No Comments

2022

climate change and all that rarely features in dark tourism (DT), probably because DT is predominantly about dark pasts, not about the future. Moreover, climate change symptoms already in evidence rarely produce visitable concrete tourist sites. But there are a few exceptions, most notably retreating glaciers.

Most glaciers in the world are shrinking due to global warming. And occasionally the shrinkage is marked by signs on tourist walking routes. Here’s an example I spotted in Norway en route to the Briksdalsbreen

6 January 2022 1 Comment

Dark Tourism & Boxes

Today is the day after Christmas Day, referred to in Britain (and some of its former colonies) as “Boxing Day”. Last year around this time (on Christmas Eve) I brought you a post about “Dark Tourism & Christmas”, and that more or less exhausted the theme so I can’t do that again. But with a bit of lateral thinking applied, I derive from “Boxing Day” another unusual theme: Dark Tourism & Boxes. Here we go:

The sort of thing some of you may think of first in the

26 December 2021 2 Comments

Dark Tourism & Mining

This is another theme post, and again not the result of a poll but half promised in the previous blog post and then requested in a comment in response to that post. So here we go.

In terms of dark tourism, one of the prime places associated with mining has to be Butte in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, USA. It became a boom town in the 18th and 19th century thanks to its rich deposits of

15 December 2021 2 Comments

Dark Tourism & Ash

This is a theme that featured a couple of times as a candidate in theme polls on this blog (namely here and here) but failed to win on both occasions. I decided to feature it now anyway – inspired by the latest news and dramatic images from Indonesia, where there’s been a major ash eruption of Mt Semeru volcano on the populous island of Java (see e.g. this article from Sunday, more on Volcano Discovery).

I’ve been to Mt Semeru,

7 December 2021 2 Comments

Patarei prison

I’ve just finished the last updates on my main website for Tallinn, Estonia. The last significant chapter to go up was this one for Patarei prison, based on my visit to the place at the end of July this year. I already featured a couple of Patarei photos in this general Baltics post on this Blog that I uploaded in August. However, Patarei is such a photogenic place that it really deserves another post of its own. See also the

2 December 2021 No Comments

Atlas of Dark Destinations promo

It’s now nearly a month since my book came out internationally. So here’s an update and some promo material I received from the publishers. I would also like to urge you, my readers, to help spread the word. In doing so you’d help to support the upkeep of this blog and my main website. On the latter I’ve also expanded the book entry. For that I used the publishers’ promo images.

They had some beautiful taster photos taken specifically for

25 November 2021 No Comments

9 November

9 November 1938 was a day of infamy, when throughout the Third Reich (by then including Austria) Nazi mobs attacked and humiliated Jews openly, destroyed Jewish businesses and desecrated and burned down numerous synagogues. This is now officially referred to as the November Pogrom(s), but is still commonly also known as “Kristallnacht”, typically rendered in English as “Night of Broken Glass”. The older term, and especially its longer form “Reichskristallnacht”, are now avoided as they

9 November 2021 2 Comments

A Momentous Milestone & Other Developments

Another cause for celebration: yesterday I uploaded the One Thousandth Destination Chapter to my main website. What a breakthrough! I think it’s fair to say that this has to be the biggest milestone in the history of dark-tourism.com. It certainly sounds more momentous than one hundred destinations, and even if I make it to two thousand that won’t sound quite so momentous as hitting four figures for the first time … and I

6 November 2021 No Comments

1 November – Cemetery Day!

Here in Vienna, Austria, All Saints’ Day is a public holiday, but a much more low-key affair compared to Mexico. Many people visit graves of relatives in the various cemeteries of the city and lay flowers, wreaths or light little red candles. It’s the one day in the year when the city is very quiet while the cemeteries are at their busiest. I’ve never visited any cemeteries on All Saints’ Day, though some of the official ceremonies might be interesting to see. But it’s mostly a private affair and I don’t want to be intruding on that. I also prefer cemeteries quiet, ideally

1 November 2021 No Comments

Personal and National Celebrations

So here it is, the big day, the date when my book (photo of the title page above) is finally launched globally. In Germany it had already been available for a few weeks. But now that it’s out internationally it’s cause for celebration!

It so happens that this date is also Austria’s “Nationalfeiertag”, literally ‘National Celebration Day’. I could say: that’s nice, so the whole nation is celebrating with me. But

26 October 2021 3 Comments

The 100th Blog Post!

Another reason to celebrate. With this one there are now exactly one hundred posts on this blog!
Now, how to mark this? When it was the 1st anniversary, exactly one year after I started the blog, I selected 12 photos (one for every month) for this post marking that watershed and asked for votes as to readers’ single most favourite. This also turned into the most popular post of them all so far, going by interaction, i.e. primarily by the number of comments.
So what are my favourite photos since then?

25 October 2021 6 Comments

Dark Tourism & Nuclear Power Plants

And here comes the fourth and final theme from our most recent poll. In my archives I don’t actually have photos of that many nuclear power plants (NPPs), but included are some of the historically most significant ones – and the darkest! Because of the security issues revolving around the nuclear industry, often photos are only possible from a distance, more or less zoomed in, but I also have some closer up and even a couple of interior

20 October 2021 10 Comments

Dark Tourism & Reflections

And here comes the third of the four themes of our most recent poll (which didn’t have a winner, hence all four are fielded). So now for reflections – and I mean that literally, mostly, though a little bit of reflecting in the figurative sense will also feature. But this is primarily a visual blog post.

I like photographing reflections! I’m always on the lookout for reflections wherever I travel. Hence I have loads of such photos that accumulated over the years. So the

13 October 2021 4 Comments

Dark Tourism & Furniture

And here comes the second of the themed posts (after last week’s “DT & hands”) that featured in our most recent poll, which didn’t have a clear result. So for this time I’ve picked furniture.

The photo below was taken at the DDR-Museum (‘GDR museum’) in Berlin and shows a reconstruction of the furnishings of a typical East German 1970s/early 80s living room – note in particular the

7 October 2021 No Comments

31 Years of German Reunification

Today is the 31st anniversary of the official reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990. I already marked this last year on the 30th anniversary with a special post that recycled four posts from my purged Facebook DT page taken from my archived version. Today I won’t repeat that. Instead I’ll give you a few photos from different corners of Germany that illustrate the diversity of the country and its dark-tourism portfolio.

I’ll begin with

3 October 2021 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Hands

The most recent theme poll didn’t have any winner by last Sunday, but one vote came in late and nudged ‘Hands’ ahead of the other three. So I’ll feature this theme first, but the others will come up here at some later stage as well.

The first photo – featured above – was taken at Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which features plenty of beautiful Gothic elements, but this pretty hand with cobwebs, a detail of a full-body statue, is one of my favourite hand photos of them all! Beautiful and a bit spooky at the same time.

Another favourite is this next one, taken at the fabulous

30 September 2021 2 Comments

Two Reasons to Celebrate

on this day, 23 September 2021, my book is already being released in Germany, Austria and Switzerland! Whereas the release date in the UK and the US remains at 26 October. When I saw the date on the German Laurence King website I initially thought it must be a mistake, as I had assumed the October release date was the one to wait for in general. But I was then informed by my contacts at the publishers’ base in London that Germany will indeed be ahead on today’s date. It’s got something to do with

23 September 2021 2 Comments

A Dead Musician and a New Poll

On this day, 51 years ago, Jimi Hendrix died. Arguably one of the most influential virtuosos on the electric guitar, his sudden death came as a great shock to the world of rock music at the time.

On the morning of 18 September 1970 Hendrix was found unconscious in his London hotel room by his girlfriend. She called an ambulance and he was taken to hospital, but all reanimation attempts failed and Hendrix was pronounced dead by midday.

He had been

18 September 2021 8 Comments

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