Category: abandoned

Categories

Varosha

In previous posts I more or less promised a photo essay Blog Post about the fabled ghost town of Varosha in Northern Cyprus, which I visited in January. I am now fulfilling that promise. I’ve selected 20 photos to illustrate the atmospheric ghost-town-ness of that place. This is basically just a visual post, a photo essay, without so much text. For the historical background as well as the controversial and contested status of this ghost town please

29 March 2023 2 Comments

Mitsero mines

A couple of readers have expressed an interest in seeing more from those mines near Mitsero that were briefly mentioned in the previous Blog post about Cyprus in general. So as a first single-topic Cyprus post I picked this. It’s primarily a photo essay, but also with a bit of a story and some background info.

It’s actually about two locations and comprises three types of mines, all not far from the village of Mitsero (ca. 18 miles/30 km south-west of Nicosia), so they are subsumed under that short name here, for simplicity’s sake. They are “ghost mines”, i.e.

2 February 2023 4 Comments

Kolmanskop

This is the most fabled of Namibia’s ghost towns, in fact one of the most photographed ghost towns in the world. And indeed it is immensely photogenic. Hence this Blog post will essentially be a photo essay (as promised in the previous Blog post). But first here’s just the briefest of summaries of the history of Kolmanskop:

The town owes its existence to diamonds. In 1908, so during the German South-West-Africa colonial era, a railway worker who had previously had a job at Kimberley Mine, South Africa, discovered a diamond while clearing desert sand off a railway track. He showed the find to his German foreman, soon more more diamonds were found and before long a veritable diamond rush ensued. The whole

9 October 2022 2 Comments

Beelitz & a new poll

Today is World Tuberculosis Day. The date was chosen because it was on this day in 1882, 139 years ago today, that Dr. Robert Koch of the Berlin Institute of Hygiene announced his discovery of the Tuberculosis (TB) bacillus that causes the disease. At that time TB was raging through Europe and America, killing millions, especially amongst the working classes living in

24 March 2021 18 Comments

Sisian – and a new poll

After the previous, rather text-heavy post, this time I picked something more visual, and while the previous post was newly-created original material, this time it is again something from the archives. Just over a year ago I posted a series of photos on my now purged Facebook page that were taken in the little town of Sisian in south-eastern Armenia. This followed one of the quiz questions I used to put up there regularly on Fridays. The photo above came with the question “a fun-less funfair, abandoned, overgrown and slowly rusting away … Where is this?”. I had half expected that

17 October 2020 8 Comments
© dark-tourism.com | Peter Hohenhaus 2009 - 2024