Peter, Autor bei Dark Tourism Blog

Dark Tourism and Electricity!

I finished the reconstruction of the posts on my purged Facebook page for the year 2017. And noticed that it had been a good year, especially for themed weeks of successive posts with a common topic or keyword.

Some of those were rather unusual and probably unexpected for most readers, such as ‘dark tourism and animals’, ‘dark tourism and ash’, ‘dark tourism and bridges’, etc. – and perhaps the most exotic one was ‘dark tourism and electricity’. I reproduce it here (with some adaptations):

15 July 2020 13 Comments

The Thing and the Deepest South

Yet another post featuring a photo with glacial ice! But this time it is for a different reason than suggesting virtual cooling off. Rather it is about chilling in another, more figurative sense … read on … it is going to get very chilling!And more photos will feature as well further down.

Yesterday’s news included that Ennio Morricone had died, aged 91. He had still been very active, producing music and touring until late 2019. He was best known as a film music composer, although he also did other sorts of music, the full gamut, from avant-garde modern to

7 July 2020 No Comments

Another Arctic Escape: Greenland

In today’s post I’m not only offering you another respite from the mid-summer heat in terms of virtual travel, but I’m also featuring a country that doesn’t even have an entry (yet) on my main website: Greenland. There is one photo from there to be found on the website, and those readers very familiar with the site may have seen it. It’s in the ‘about’ section and functions like a kind of profile photo. It was also used for a similar purpose by the publishers of an academic book I contributed to. It is

3 July 2020 No Comments

A Virtual Escape into the High Arctic

In the northern hemisphere we’re at the height of the summer right now, and many of us have to deal with hot temperatures and sometimes humid conditions. So I decided to provide some respite by directing today’s “virtual travel” exercise, which I think these blog posts can be seen as, far north, beyond the Arctic Circle: to Svalbard. So you can cool off a bit, in travel dreams …

I’ve only ever been north of the Arctic Circle once, namely on my summer 2012 trip to Norway, including a few days on Spitsbergen, and Murmansk in the northwesternmost part of Russia.

The Svalbard archipelago, with the main island Spitsbergen, is

1 July 2020 No Comments

An Ex-Yugoslav Underground Airbase Inside a Mountain

Yesterday’s post mentioned the fabled underground airbase of Željava, located now on the border between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I said it would be worth a post of its own. So here we go. Why delay it.

It’s a very cool site, especially in terms of ‘urbexing’ and it’s visually extremely appealing, provided you like it dark, dank and even a bit scary 😉

As it happened, though, a different

26 June 2020 No Comments

Balkan Belligerents

On this day, 29 years ago, on 25 June 1991, both Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves independent, marking the first proper secessions from the Yugoslav Federal state. This happened amidst rising tensions between different ethnicities and especially between Serbs and Croats, which eventually developed into war.

Slovenia got off comparatively lightly, with a military intervention by the Yugoslav army that lasted only 10 days and cost “only” 65 or so lives, before the country was reluctantly but effectively released into independence. The above photo shows a relic from that short war, namely a piece of wreckage of a Yugoslav helicopter that is on display in the generally excellent modern history museum in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana.

In Croatia, on the other hand,

25 June 2020 No Comments

Juneteenth – and the topic of slavery in dark tourism

Today is the 19th of June, celebrated as “Juneteenth” in the USA. Narrowly defined it commemorates a declaration of emancipation/freeing of slaves in Texas in 1865 on that date, but is now more generally celebrated to mark African Americans’ civil rights and freedom. Amidst the current Black Lives Matter protests, this date has been given an extra boost.

Regarding the subject of slavery, this also features in dark tourism. Sites related to the

19 June 2020 No Comments

17 June

This date has historical significance for various reasons. E.g. it was the day when the last public execution by guillotine took place in France, as late as in 1939. The following year the three Baltic states fell under Soviet rule; while in 1967 China detonated its first thermonuclear test device on this date. But in Germany, the date is primarily remembered for the 1953 Uprising in the GDR, especially in East Berlin, which was brutally crushed by the Soviet military, even involving tanks, and was followed by mass arrests and dozens of executions.

In East Berlin, one of the main demonstrations took place outside

17 June 2020 1 Comment

38 Years since the End of the Falklands War

On this Day: 38 years ago, on 14/15 June (read on!) in 1982, the Falklands War ended with the surrender of Argentina.

The photo above shows an abandoned Argentine position near Wireless Ridge, north-east of Mt Longdon, not far from the islands’ capital Stanley. This position is comparatively well preserved. My guide even pulled out some hidden personal items left behind by the soldiers.

After showing me this

15 June 2020 No Comments

Iconoclasm versus Interpretation

The photo above shows a plaque in Vienna commemorating Joseph Stalin’s short sojourn in this city as a young man. I’ve been reminded of this by the recent images on the news from the USA, where protesters are disfiguring or toppling monuments to former proponents of slavery and such like, in the wake of the unrest caused by the killing of George Floyd by police. Now, how do the topics of Stalinism and the Black Lives Matter movement go together, you may ask. Let me explain:

Make no mistake, I do understand the outrage of the protesters about the

13 June 2020 1 Comment

Anne Frank’s birthday

On this Day, 12 June, it is Anne Frank’s birthday. She would have been 91 today, so could quite possibly have been still alive now had she not been discovered, deported and eventually killed during the Holocaust.

Until August 1944, Anne and her Jewish family had been living successfully in hiding in Amsterdam, but were somehow betrayed, so that the SS did find them after all and deported them first to the transit camp of Westerbork, then to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot were later transported to Bergen-Belsen, where both died, most likely

12 June 2020 No Comments

The Nuclear Landscapes of the Polygon, Kazakhstan

A few years ago I had an extended exchange with a guy in Canada who did an intriguing project about the Polygon/Semipalatinsk Test Site (STS) in Kazakhstan, the place where the Soviet Union carried out the majority of its nuclear tests. The project was part of a master’s thesis in Landscape Architecture, at the University of Toronto, and proposed a number of structural “interventions” at the site, so a kind of commodification for visitors. It was envisioned that

10 June 2020 No Comments

Scaled-down D-Day Commemoration Ceremonies This Year

On this Day, 76 years ago, on 6 June 1944, the biggest ever amphibious landing operations, popularly known as D-Day, took place in Normandy, France, and gave the Western Allies the foothold they needed to begin the fight against Nazi Germany on the Western Front in WWII. The whole plan was code-named ‘Operation Overlord’.

Beginning here, the Western Allies slowly pushed back the Nazi occupiers out of France and eventually

6 June 2020 No Comments

Dunkirk 1940

On this day, 80 years ago, on 4 June 1940, the last of the Allied evacuations from Dunkirk took place, and the next day Nazi Germany declared victory in the Battle of Dunkirk.

It was the first major confrontation on the ground between British and German troops in WWII within France. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had been deployed to France after Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war on Germany. When the

4 June 2020 No Comments

Operation Blue Star

36 years ago, in early June 1984, the Indian military launched an attack on the Golden Temple (aka Harmandir Sahib), the holy of holies of the Sikhs, in order to “flush out” the extremist religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers who, on invitation by a Sikh political party leader, had taken refuge in the temple complex and fortified it. The group had been critical of the dominant social and economic conditions at the time and felt Sikhs were being discriminated against. This had already

3 June 2020 No Comments

A surprise reappearance

Not long ago I found that an article that was published in March, based on a telephone interview I had done with the author in January, featured the above photo of me. This is indeed one of the VERY few selfies I’ve ever taken, at a time when that word ‘selfie’ didn’t even yet exist, or at least wasn’t so widespread yet, namely in November 2010, at Darvaza, Turkmenistan.

And, it is the photo that I had used as my profile picture for my

2 June 2020 No Comments

Illuks, Sri Lanka – a remote, leech-infested mountain retreat

This was the last photo I was still able to put on DT’s Facebook page before it/I was purged. I’m reusing it here (see original post text below), however, for a different reason, namely because I’ve been thinking about Sri Lanka a lot more recently. And the reason for that is this: last week I “attended” (at home) an online ‘Zoom’ meeting that was organized by the travel company ETG (whom I’ve used several times for my travels in Asia, including Sri Lanka). This featured a presentation by travel author John Gimlette, who wrote

1 June 2020 2 Comments

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