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 …

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Dark Tourism & Books

The title of this post is the theme that in the recent theme poll of the previous post (and DT Newsletter) was the winner, leaving the theme DT & Beds in second place. But I may turn the latter into a post at some point too.

So, for now let’s kick off with DT & Books:

And let’s get the most obvious book to feature here out of the way right at the start. It’s possibly the historically darkest book ever,

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Dark Tourism & Trains

With this Blog Post I’m reviving the tradition of having “themed” posts (the latest previous one was this) as well as reader polls about future themes (the last poll was at the bottom of this post). If you already want to know now what the new poll’s four choices are, scroll down to the bottom of this post, cast your vote, and then come back here.

For this post I randomly picked “trains” at the theme. Once again it will be mostly a photo essay with only the most essential background explanations.

The first thing about trains with a dark connection to spring to most people’s minds will be

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Dark Days

In these increasingly darkening days (both literally as we head into winter, but also in a figurative sense), I give you a reminder of a particularly dark event on this date in earlier times.

On 9 November 1938 Nazi mobs ransacked Jewish businesses and burned down synagogues in Germany and Austria in what then became known as “Kristallnacht” (usually rendered as ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in English), but these days more commonly and more accurately called “Pogromnacht”.

At a time when Jews around the world, including in Germany, are again increasingly targeted by hate and violence, as

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