Dark Tourism BLOG
This page is intended to provide a more flexible and also more interactive element to dark-tourism.com, which is otherwise more static (more like an encyclopedia). The idea came about after the DT page I used to curate on Facebook was suddenly shut down by the company (full story here). So I’m continuing here – with regular blog posts, either featuring particular dark-tourism destinations or marking specific days in dark history and sometimes reacting to current affairs that are in some way relevant to this site’s topic.
sign up to the newsletter!
42 years since the military coup in Suriname
On this day, 42 years ago, on 25 February 1980, the so-called “Sergeants’ Coup” took place in Suriname, led by the later military dictator Dési Bouterse.
Suriname is the smallest independent country in South America and is rather little known in the outside world – except in the Netherlands, where there is a sizeable Surinamese expat community. That’s because Suriname used to be Dutch Guiana, the
Post from Moscow!
I don’t mean that I’m in Moscow and posting this on my Blog from there. No, I’m still in Vienna, Austria, but I had a parcel from Moscow delivered to my door by the Austrian postal service this morning. I had to pay a delivery fee of 6 EUR – so I was tempted to entitle this post “From Russia – not with love but a fee” …
Here’s a photo of the
Dark Tourism in the Literally Dark – Vienna’s Central Cemetery by night
Last Saturday I joined an exclusive guided group tour of the grand Central Cemetery (‘Zentralfriedhof’) in Vienna that took place after dark. I had visited this vast burial ground several times before and cover it extensively on my main DT website. Now I was able to add another, even literally darker element to it. On the basis of that I’ve amended my website’s entry for the cemetery a little and added a few extra photos to the photo gallery.
Here on the DT Blog I can give you a fuller report and a much more substantial photo essay – here we go:
Another Dark Valentine’s Day
Today is 14 February, Valentine’s Day! Last year I marked this date with a post featuring a photo of a dark bas-relief by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland plus photos of a few more works by the same artist on public display in Frogner Park in Oslo, Norway.
For today I searched through my archives looking for other things that could be related to Valentine’s Day, like hearts, flowers and other symbols of love – but with a dark-tourism-relevant connection, of course. I did
Another revelation: Warth Mill & Hutchinson Camp
this same week I also came across another revelation of yet another dark chapter of British history that I had not been aware of in this form before: the mass internment of Germans and Austrian as “enemy aliens” in 1940 and the horrendous conditions the early places of internment came with.
Most of the internees were refugees from the Third Reich who had found a safe haven in a welcoming Britain, including many Jews who had fled the
Indonesian revelations
The large archipelago nation of Indonesia has been in the media lately for a couple of unexpected revelations – for me at least.
For one thing, the country’s capital city Jakarta will soon no longer be the capital city!
Indonesia is about to go the Brazil/Myanmar way, as it were, with a purpose-built new capital in the very centre of the archipelago, namely in the province of East Kalimantan, on the