Cyprus Archive - Dark Tourism Blog

Dark Tourism & Graffiti

This is the theme that in the latest poll, as at the bottom of this post, narrowly came second, beaten by just one vote by DT & Bullet Holes, which became the previous Blog post. As I would have voted for Graffiti myself I then decided to compose and post this now without another poll. But I won’t let themed polls become forgotten again. There’ll be new ones before too long. Promise.

So now to this post’s theme of DT & Graffiti – but first I have to

18 July 2024 1 Comment

Dark Tourism & Doors

This time I’d like to revive a tradition that somehow got lost on this Blog over two years ago (well, they’ve been two quite troubled years, so maybe that explains it). What I mean is the “themed posts” we used to have on here quite regularly between mid-2020 and until early 2022. These themes added an often unexpected and occasionally even light-hearted angle to the topic of dark tourism. Today I’ll pick up that tradition again and give you a similar post – now one that is all about doors. And as before this will mostly be a photo essay.

How can doors be dark? Well, the first thing

19 May 2024 24 Comments

Cyprus and Ethiopia developments

After the past few more topical posts here comes a current-affairs one once again. Just a shorty, though, as I have to carry on preparing for my upcoming Iceland trip (see previous Blog post!).

For one thing Cyprus, where I went in January this year (see especially this older Blog post), has been in the news again last week, repeatedly in fact, in close succession and for very different reasons. The most important

26 July 2023 No Comments

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

A Surprise Arrival, New Media Feature, Cyprus Complete

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

10 March 2023 No Comments

A Dark Anniversary, Cyprus Progress, Interview

The media are awash with special programmes and articles about the first anniversary of the start of Putin’s war against Ukraine, so I thought I can’t leave this sad day unmarked either.

My initial devastation and panic in the first few weeks of the war (or “special military operation” in Putin Newspeak), especially with the first of his nuclear threats, has somewhat

24 February 2023 No 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

Cyprus

A week ago today I returned from my 12-day trip to Cyprus. I’m still busy processing all my photos, but I’ve picked a small preselection to use here in a first blog post about Cyprus. This is just a taster and brief overview of what I did on the island in terms of dark tourism. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll prepare more blog posts about specific places, and of course I will also have to substantially expand the current short stub chapter about Cyprus on my main website and add individual chapters about the various specific dark destinations within the country. For my book Atlas of Dark Destinations it is

18 January 2023 4 Comments

All Caught Up Again & Austrian History

For only the second time in the ca. 15 years since I started writing for my main website, I’m all caught up, i.e. I’ve completed and uploaded all the chapters that I had material for from my own travels. (The first time I had come to that point was earlier this year.)

First I finished the remaining chapters for Namibia, namely about Swakopmund and its local museum. And then I still had a substantial chapter to write about a relatively recent addition to the museum portfolio of the city I live in, Vienna, namely the House of Austrian History (“Haus der Geschichte Österreich” in the original German, or HdGÖ for short), housed in

8 December 2022 No Comments

Category: Cyprus

Categories