Category: forbidden zone

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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

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

Elizabeth Bay

This is the third and final blog post about the diamond-mining ghost towns in Namibia (after the earlier ones featuring Pomona and Kolmanskop). This time it’s about the largest of the three: Elizabeth Bay. And again this post is primarily a photo essay.

The name comes from the actual Elizabeth Bay on the Namibian Atlantic coast where the town and diamond mine were established in the 1920s. The bay was given its name by the British in the mid-nineteenth century, during the German colonial era it was known as “Elisabethbucht”. Locally the name

1 November 2022 4 Comments

Pomona

As promised in the previous Blog post about the famous ghost town of Kolmanskop, I now bring you another photo essay about a far less well-known ghost town in the south of Namibia: Pomona.

This desolate place lies deep inside the “Sperrgebiet”, i.e. the ‘forbidden zone’, the restricted-access diamond-mining area stretching from Lüderitz all the way to the Orange River at the border with South Africa. A special permit is required to gain access to this vast area, and plenty of strict rules apply. But there are

20 October 2022 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
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