Iceland completed, Artsakh empty, Israel full of horror

Hello subscribers!

Happy (or not so happy) Friday the 13th …

Going in reverse order of the title of this Newsletter, there’s first and foremost Israel – or rather the Middle East. You will all have seen the shocking news coverage of the surprise attacks by Hamas on Israel, not just with an unprecedented barrage of missiles fired from the Gaza Strip to as far as Tel Aviv, but also of the incursions by militant fighters into Israeli territory, the massacre at a music festival, the abductions … all just sheer horror. And Israel’s retaliation against the Gaza Strip is hardly any less difficult to stomach. Whether they support Hamas or not, the civilian population of this already overly troubled little piece of land are bearing the brunt of the counter-attacks … It just has to be hoped that the whole thing doesn’t escalate even further.

Anyway, with Israel being in the headlines all over I was again thinking of happier times and past travels, this time to my short trip to Israel in August 2006 (although back then another conflict was ongoing, namely in the north with Lebanon). And so I made a somewhat nostalgic new DT Blog post about Israel. Like the previous one about Artsakh it’s primarily a photo essay, but also comes with background info and a few intriguing anecdotes. Do go and take a look.
  

Artsakh/Nagoro-Karabakh has meanwhile emptied. Following the “victory” of the Azerbaijani military last month, practically the entire ethnic Armenian population of Artsakh has fled to Armenia, with little to no hope of ever being able to return to their homeland. The capital Stepanakert is now a complete ghost town … just like Agdam was in the 1990s after Armenian forces drove out the Azeri population and made that city the world’s largest ghost town. Meanwhile Azerbaijan has reclaimed Agdam and it will be repopulated (and hence it’ll drop out of the list of dark-tourism destinations). What will happen with Stepanakert, in contrast, remains completely uncertain. In any case, the Armenian and Azeri sentiments and mutual enmity seem to be impossible to overcome … much like the situation in the Middle East, really.
  

On a more positive, personal note: I’ve meanwhile managed to complete everything for Iceland on my main website. The base chapter for Iceland has been much edited and expanded and comes with an enlarged photo gallery. The chapter for Heimaey has completely changed, it’s basically an all-new chapter, and its photo gallery has been much expanded too.

And then there’s a whole string of 100% new chapters:

One is about Eldheimar, the volcano museum on Heimaey, which has as its centrepiece an excavated house ruin that had been completely covered by ash and tephra in the disastrous 1973 volcanic eruption on the island.

More volcanic chapters include the one about the Reykjanes Peninsula volcanoes, which produced the latest of Iceland’s frequent volcanic eruptions, starting in March 2021, again in 2022, and most recently from 10 July to 5 August 2023. You’ll remember from this previous Blog post that I narrowly missed out on witnessing the eruption proper during my recent trip to Iceland.

Yet more volcanism is the topic of the LAVA Centre in Hvelsvöllur, while the Lava Show in Vik revolves around lava melted in a backstage furnace and then flowing into a special contraption inside an auditorium for tourists to get to see real lava indoors in a safe environment. Both now have full-length chapters on my website too.

The new chapter entitled Inside the Volcano is basically an expansion of this previous Blog post, also with yet more photos in the associated gallery.

I also added a stand-alone chapter for Iceland’s capital city Reykjavik, which for many visitors is a useful base for day trips (including to the Reykjanes Peninsula), while it doesn’t have so many points of interest for dark tourists in itself.

Finally, there’s now also a separate chapter about the uninhabited interior of Iceland – a barren wonderland of lunar landscapes, glaciers and geothermal fields with a unique middle-of-nowhere atmosphere you won’t find anywhere else in Europe and indeed most of the rest of the world. For me this desolate scenery is the pinnacle of Iceland’s many natural wonders.
  

So, this week has been quite a mix of horror and hopelessness on the one hand, and much happier reminiscing about fabulous Iceland on the other.

By the way, the photo at the top (already featured in this older Blog post) was taken on Heimaey and shows a concrete water tank destroyed by the 1973 lava flow. I found it quite symbolic now, standing for crushed hopes and incursions as well as for Iceland’s displays of the raw forces of Mother Earth …

Have a good, or at least better, next week!

All the best,

Peter