Dark Videos, a ‘Hereditary Succession’ and New Travel Plans

Hello subscribers!

Yesterday I uploaded a new post on to the DT Blog. It has two distinct parts. The first part is about two series of short documentary videos produced by the French-German joint cultural TV channel ARTE, to which I was alerted by someone in the station’s English department. So I was given the links to the versions with English subtitles. Both series thematically overlap with dark tourism, so I binge-watched the lot late one evening and decided to pass the links on on the DT blog as well as here.

The first series, entitled “Toxic Tour” consists of six 5-8-minute videos about some environmentally damaging or polluted sites in Europe, from Spain’s Rio Tinto to Chernobyl in Ukraine. There is some stunning footage and a cool electronic background soundtrack to be admired. Recommended!

The other series is called “Red Urbex” and is about so-called ‘urban exploration’ (a slightly misleading term, as half of the sites covered are outside any urban city context, but in fact rather remote), namely in various locations in the former communist Eastern Bloc (hence the “Red”). And this is probably even more up a dark tourist’s street. There are eight episodes and three of these are about places also covered on my main website, plus a few I’ve seen similar examples of. All of this will appeal especially to fans of abandoned places (confusingly known in German under the pseudo-Anglicism ‘Lost Places’, whereas in actual English that means places that really no longer exist … and my website has a section about such no-longer existing sites.) Again, there’s plenty of cool footage and a superb soundtrack by the same composer/‘sound designer’. Also recommended!

The two series are freely available to watch online on the ARTE website until the end of 2024. But if you’re interested don’t put it off. They’re really well made and quite addictive to watch (as long as you are into such things, of course).
  

The second part of the latest DT Blog post was inspired by the surprising news that Turkmenistan suddenly has a new president … with the same name as the old president! It’s been a ‘hereditary succession’ of sorts: the country’s president and de facto dictator of the past 15 years, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov (what a wonderfully polysyllabic name!), a couple of weeks ago announced he would resign to make way for someone younger, and in a snap “election” had his 40-year-old son Serdar Berdymukhamedov elected president (though he only managed to secure ca. 75% of the votes, unlike his Dad’s usual 98%).

This news made me think back to my November 2010 trip to Turkmenistan, and so I decided to illustrate the remainder of the post with a selection of photos I had taken on that trip. Enjoy!
  

AND: I’ve been making travel plans myself again. A few weeks ago already, my wife and I booked flights to the UK … horrifically expensive at the moment (for a halfway decent connection at least), but since we hadn’t seen my wife’s family properly since Xmas 2018, we swallowed that bitter pill.

Last weekend, then, we also booked (much more affordable) flights to Albania’s capital city Tirana. And this will be a full-on DT research trip. I visited Tirana for a couple of days as part of my longer trans-Balkans trip back in 2011, and over the years since then I’ve learned about more and more changes in Albania, with more and more major dark attractions opening, so that a return visit became seriously overdue. If all goes to plan, this time we will have five full days at our disposal in which I hope to close all the relevant gaps. And afterwards I guess I will have to rewrite the entire set of currently existing chapters about Albania, and add several news ones to be drafted from scratch.

The photo at the top of this Newsletter shows the so-called Hoxha Pyramid in Tirana (which also features in the “Red Urbex” video series) – a modernist structure designed by Albania’s late dictator Enver Hoxha’s own daughter that was to serve as a Hoxha museum. But before it could come to that, communism was also swept away in Albania in the early 1990s and the pyramid has been largely abandoned ever since. However, there may be plans for new uses in the pipeline ... which naturally is also something I will have to check out when I get there.

And finally we also booked our flights to Namibia, for our twice-postponed trip there that had already been fully planned and largely paid for in 2020 and then still couldn’t go ahead in 2021 because of the ongoing pandemic. So fingers crossed that it will be a case of third time lucky (and that no nasty escalation into a Third World War or new virus variants get in the way).

So much from me for now. Take care and stay safe.

Best,

Peter