In the latest theme poll – at the bottom of this previous Blog post – the theme garnering the most votes in the end was ‘DT & Shadows’. So that will be this post’s theme. Let’s kick off with an example of shadows that are an almost symmetrical “mirror image” of what’s casting the shadow, in this case a set of fire escape stairs outside a warehouse in the harbour of Riga, Latvia (which is a prime
On my recent trip to northern Germany, which was mainly for visiting friends and family, I nevertheless managed to slot in a visit (on the 1st of May – Labour Day!) to the vast memorial site at the former concentration camp of Neuengamme on the edge of Hamburg.
Far less well known than, say, Dachau or Buchenwald, Neuengamme was still one of the largest camps within the Third Reich, both by area size and by the number of inmates. About
Yesterday I returned from my two weeks’ long trip to Bosnia & Herzegovina. I had been before, but that was back in 2009 and only for a few days in Sarajevo and Mostar. On this trip I had a lot more time and also went on several tours that took me out of the cities and to some quite off-the-beaten track locations.
As before, I give you a quick photo essay Blog Post based mostly on photos taken with a
This is the theme that in the latest theme poll came second in the vote, and, as indicated in the winning theme’s post, I’ll now bring you the runner-up without a new poll.
Here’s a photo of one of the most gruesome places involving beds, namely a bed frame in a torture room of the infamous Tuol Sleng (aka S-21) prison in Phnom Penh in Cambodia. It was on beds like this that the decaying and ghastly mutilated bodies of the final victims of the Khmer Rouge were found by the liberators (the
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,
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, aka “Auschwitz Day”, as it was on this date, 27 January, that in 1945 the Soviet Red Army arrived at Auschwitz and liberated the camp, after the SS had largely “evacuated” it already and sent most of its inmates on death marches, to camps further away from the westward-moving front line in a WWII that was already de facto lost for Germany.
It also so happened that a little earlier this month I revisited the memorial sites at Auschwitz as part of a six-day trip to Kraków and Oświęcim, planned at short notice. So I decided to do another Auschwitz Day post (see also
here’s a Blog post about the Sered Holocaust Museum, which I visited in late October this year.
The museum is housed in the original barracks of what was Sered’s labour/concentration camp in the Holocaust in Slovakia during WWII.
As is often the case on this Blog, the post is primarily a short photo essay with just essential information.
There were in fact several labour camps for Jews in Slovakia from ca. 1941 onwards. After the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944, which was quickly and brutally crushed by Nazi Germany (see Muzeum SNP), these camps became proper concentration camps, now run by the SS, and also
This past week I had a parcel delivered to my door that I hadn’t expected. Inside I found three copies of the book depicted in the featured photo above. Readers who’ve followed this Blog for some time will instantly recognize the design of the book’s cover. I had no idea that this was in the pipeline, but yes, this is the newly released Slovak version of my book Atlas of Dark Destinations! It also surprised me that such a
I’ve finally finished processing the many photos I took in August in Namibia. Most were taken in RAW format so required a lot of developing/processing (white balance, exposure, etc.) so that was quite a bit of work, but that’s now done. In this new post I’ll give a general overview and a few taster photos (15 in total) – naturally with an emphasis on dark-tourism-relevant aspects.
One of the very darkest chapters in Namibian history was what is widely regarded as the 20th century’s first genocide, namely against the Herero and Nama peoples at the hands of the German colonial military, the so-called “Schutztruppe” (‘protection force’). This took place (mostly) between 1904 and 1907. One particular place
And here comes the second of the themed posts (after last week’s “DT & hands”) that featured in our most recent poll, which didn’t have a clear result. So for this time I’ve picked furniture.
The photo below was taken at the DDR-Museum (‘GDR museum’) in Berlin and shows a reconstruction of the furnishings of a typical East German 1970s/early 80s living room – note in particular the
On (or around) this day, 77 years ago, on 23 July 1944, the concentration camp of Majdanek was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. They found only a few hundred weak and ill prisoners left. The rest had already been “evacuated”. The SS retreated with such haste that they didn’t destroy much evidence of their deeds here, so the
On this Day it’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date was chosen because it was on this Day 76 years ago that Auschwitz was liberated. The above photo shows what is perhaps the most iconic item of the whole memorial site today, the sign “Arbeit macht frei” above the main gate to the “Stammlager”, Auschwitz I. The photo was taken in 2008, so it was still the original. In 2009 it was stolen (see below), but recovered. But after
This theme was not decided on by a poll, but just by myself, and the link to today’s significant date should be obvious.
But let’s start at the beginning. So, what kind of stars feature in dark tourism? For one thing there’s the old communist or Soviet five-pointed red star, like these:
As decided in the most recent poll, and announced on Monday, today we come to the theme “dark tourism and clothing”:
You could be forgiven if you think this is a really exotic theme within the wider subject of dark tourism. But items of clothing do actually come up quite often. And the ones featured below are only a selection.
Perhaps the most predictable case of clothes with a dark association is those iconic and infamous striped
As decided in the latest poll, the theme of this post is ‘dark tourism and cars’. It won by two votes ahead of ‘dark tourism and clothes’, so that will be entered again in the next poll. And since several people said that their second choice (and close contender) was ‘dark tourism and spheres’ I’ll give that another chance next time too. NPPs will have to wait a little longer, but as that is one of my personal favourites it is bound to pop up at some point as well (whether in another poll or independently I can’t say yet).
But now to cars. Searching through my archives I found
The idiomatic phrase ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ is probably being used a lot in these weird times– as something that is hoped for, the end of a crisis. Alas, with regard to the current pandemic, that light remains very faint at best, if it’s discernible at all. There’s still no cure, no vaccine, no clear outlook of what’s yet to come.
These thoughts inspired me to look through my photo archives searching for images of tunnels with lights at their ends, and indeed there have been some on my extensive travels. Here we go, the first one is