Category: Turkey

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Artsakh Lost?

First of all, to explain: Artsakh is the Armenian name for the region that is more widely known in the rest of the world as Nagorno-Karabakh. This has been in the news recently, for very disturbing reasons, now that Azerbaijan appears to have achieved its mission of “reintegrating” the territory, which had been a self-declared republic since 1994, fully back into Azerbaijan. The latest aggression by Azerbaijani military forces, in violation of the peace deal brokered in 2020, seems to have sealed the fate of the Armenian population living in the region. In recent

25 September 2023 2 Comments

Cyprus

A week ago today I returned from my 12-day trip to Cyprus. I’m still busy processing all my photos, but I’ve picked a small preselection to use here in a first blog post about Cyprus. This is just a taster and brief overview of what I did on the island in terms of dark tourism. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll prepare more blog posts about specific places, and of course I will also have to substantially expand the current short stub chapter about Cyprus on my main website and add individual chapters about the various specific dark destinations within the country. For my book Atlas of Dark Destinations it is

18 January 2023 4 Comments

Nagorno-Karabakh in Trouble again

There has been extremely worrying news the last few days from a little-visited region in the Caucasus that was included in my trip there ten years ago – Nagorno-Karabakh. Apparently the ‘frozen conflict’ over this contested region has flared up again and escalated into military confrontation and fighting, with already over a hundred dead, so it’s worse than the last time around in 2016. Moreover, now Azerbaijan is receiving open backing by Turkey, while Armenia is banking on support from Russia. So this has the potential to spiral into a full-on proxy war (as nearly happened in Syria a few years ago).

A little bit of background: Nagorno-Karabakh was a

1 October 2020 No Comments

Dark Tourism and Bridges

This beautiful and highly iconic structure is of course the fabled Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, USA. And what’s its dark secret? This very deadly one: it’s one of the world’s top suicide hotspots. Thousands have jumped off this bridge to end their lives, how many exactly is impossible to tell, but some 1600 bodies were recovered. Yet many others will have drifted out into the Pacific with the tide never to be found.

As a place to top oneself and simply vanish, this was an almost ideal spot. The height of the bridge, 70m above the waterline, more or less guarantees death on impact through

29 July 2020 2 Comments
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