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
Today it’s the fifth anniversary of this Blog, i.e. five years to the day since the very first post appeared here. To mark this occasion, I’ve selected five of my favourite photos ever to have featured on the Blog (and made sure none of those featured in the Blog post on the first anniversary four years ago are repeated). For the new poll, scroll to the bottom …
I’m particularly fond of this first photo, taken from the
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
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,
With this Blog Post I’m reviving the tradition of having “themed” posts (the latest previous one was this) as well as reader polls about future themes (the last poll was at the bottom of this post). If you already want to know now what the new poll’s four choices are, scroll down to the bottom of this post, cast your vote, and then come back here.
For this post I randomly picked “trains” at the theme. Once again it will be mostly a photo essay with only the most essential background explanations.
The first thing about trains with a dark connection to spring to most people’s minds will be
In these increasingly darkening days (both literally as we head into winter, but also in a figurative sense), I give you a reminder of a particularly dark event on this date in earlier times.
On 9 November 1938 Nazi mobs ransacked Jewish businesses and burned down synagogues in Germany and Austria in what then became known as “Kristallnacht” (usually rendered as ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in English), but these days more commonly and more accurately called “Pogromnacht”.
At a time when Jews around the world, including in Germany, are again increasingly targeted by hate and violence, as
Nauru is the world’s smallest independent island nation (and the third smallest of all sovereign nations). It’s located in an isolated spot close to the equator in the south-west Pacific far from any other islands. I first heard about Nauru as a teenager in school and was fascinated by its extreme rags-to-riches-and-back story. Back then in the late 1970s Nauru was still one of the richest nations on Earth, thanks to the mining of high-grade phosphate deposits on its central plateau. But even back then it was clear that the deposits would be depleted before too long. Indeed from the late 1980s/early 1990s mining declined to a mere
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
This is the winning theme from the latest poll (see previous Blog post), which is also the one that had come second in the poll before that (see this post) and was thus eligible for another chance. And it narrowly took it.
An especially famous bullet hole is one of the dark star attractions at the Military History Museum here in Vienna (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum – HGM): it’s in the bloodied uniform worn by Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he was assassinated at the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo in 1914 (which was the trigger for WW1) – the bullet hole just below the collar is marked with a little arrow
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
Yesterday was VE Day (‘Victory in Europe’) in the West, i.e. the anniversary of the end of WWII, when Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in a ceremony culminating in signing of the relevant documents in Berlin in 1945 on that day 78 years ago today … or not? In the East, the date of this celebratory day is a day later, i.e. today, on the 9th of May (if you don’t know why there is this date discrepancy, see
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
Last week I was contacted by someone in the English department of the Franco-German co-operation TV channel ARTE. I was alerted to two series of short video productions (with episodes of between 5 to 8 minutes in length) on topics that include, or at least overlap with, dark tourism themes. (Find the links to the programmes below!)
The first one is called “Toxic Tour” and has six episodes, each about
This photo was taken in St Petersburg and shows a reflection of one of the most iconic sights in this city, namely the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood … what a name in the current circumstances! (But its name is actually a reference to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.)
Secondly, I know in the West all eyes are currently on Ukraine and especially the Ukrainians, who are suffering the most in this ongoing war, and I naturally feel for them too. But my heart also bleeds for Russia – for various reasons I will
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
Today is one of the most significant international remembrance days, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on this day in 1945. It’s impossible to cover every Holocaust-related dark-tourism site in a single post. But what I can do is give one photo each from all the main concentration camps and death camps, i.e. the main places where the Holocaust played out (in addition to
Today is the day after Christmas Day, referred to in Britain (and some of its former colonies) as “Boxing Day”. Last year around this time (on Christmas Eve) I brought you a post about “Dark Tourism & Christmas”, and that more or less exhausted the theme so I can’t do that again. But with a bit of lateral thinking applied, I derive from “Boxing Day” another unusual theme: Dark Tourism & Boxes. Here we go:
The sort of thing some of you may think of first in the
9 November 1938 was a day of infamy, when throughout the Third Reich (by then including Austria) Nazi mobs attacked and humiliated Jews openly, destroyed Jewish businesses and desecrated and burned down numerous synagogues. This is now officially referred to as the November Pogrom(s), but is still commonly also known as “Kristallnacht”, typically rendered in English as “Night of Broken Glass”. The older term, and especially its longer form “Reichskristallnacht”, are now avoided as they
So here it is, the big day, the date when my book (photo of the title page above) is finally launched globally. In Germany it had already been available for a few weeks. But now that it’s out internationally it’s cause for celebration!
It so happens that this date is also Austria’s “Nationalfeiertag”, literally ‘National Celebration Day’. I could say: that’s nice, so the whole nation is celebrating with me. But
Today is the 31st anniversary of the official reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990. I already marked this last year on the 30th anniversary with a special post that recycled four posts from my purged Facebook DT page taken from my archived version. Today I won’t repeat that. Instead I’ll give you a few photos from different corners of Germany that illustrate the diversity of the country and its dark-tourism portfolio.
I’ll begin with
On this day, 85 years ago, on 17 July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started with the rebellion, led by right-winger Nationalist Francisco Franco, within the military against the left-wing Republican government, first in Morocco, but soon also in the Spanish homeland.
In 2015, just before the 79th anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict, my
This is a date mostly associated with Independence Day in the USA. So I decided to dip into my archive and put a cluster of 4 July posts together here, plus some extras. Note, though, that US Independence is not the only historical event marked on this date – there are also other, and darker, incidents that fell on it, such as the one
It was exactly on this day, precisely one year ago, on 28 May 2020, that this blog went live and the first post went up. To mark this first anniversary, I went through the entire blog and picked twelve of my favourite photos used on the blog so far, one for each of the twelve months I’ve been here, as it were.
Here are my 12 choices … in no particular order:
Today’s date features repeatedly in the history annals, and some of that has relevance for dark tourism too.
On this day in 1915, Italy joined the Allies in World War One. While The Somme, Ypres and Verdun on the Western Front are household names in this context, Italy’s contribution to the “Great War” is less well known, at least in the anglophone world. Much of the fighting took place in the mountains, such as on the Isonzo front. Some of this is now in Slovenia and parts of
As decided in our most recent theme poll, I now bring you the winner, DT & toys. It was probably the oddest of the choices, the biggest juxtaposition, and hence the most intriguing. In any case it was a very clear win far ahead of all the other choices.
So what kind of dark do we get with toys. Well, for starters there are war toys, like model planes, tanks, toy guns and whatnot. In fact, one of the
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
About a year ago we went into the first lockdown here in Austria. Corona was still very new, and back then we had no way of knowing that it would continue to have such a grip on the whole world for so long.
Anyway, I thought this was a good point to look back and go on a little time-travel excursion here. So I’ve lifted the series of Corona-related posts I had on my DT page on FB at the time of the first lockdown from the Facebook-posts archive that I
Today, 3rd of March, is World Wildlife Day (as proclaimed by the United Nations in December 2013). So I decided to make today’s post one on the theme of dark tourism and animals!
Now, in what ways can animals be ‘dark’? Well, for one thing it could be because a kind of animal may be dangerous to humans. And indeed quite a few animals are
Our latest theme poll had a clear winner so today I give you the requested one of broken glass (DT & bullet holes came second, and I may field that again in a future theme poll).
The photo above is what I consider one of the most appealing images of broken glass in my archives. It’s a close-up of a large war ruin I discovered in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina, in 2009. Here’s a
On this day, 78 years ago, on 18 February 1943, two very dark events in Germany’s darkest history coincided on this same day.
One was the arrest of siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, who as members of the White Rose resistance group at the university of Munich were distributing flyers, in which they harshly criticized the Nazi regime and
The topic of this blog post was decided by the most recent theme poll, where it sailed to a clear victory over all the other options by a huge margin (as reported in last Sunday’s newsletter). So here we go.
As a couple of commentators noted, the word ‘bars’ is of course lexically ambiguous, and exploiting that double meaning had been my intention all along. So let’s begin with the darker side of bars – those you sit behind in prisons and similar institutions.
The first
In 1989 it was on this date that the Berlin Wall “fell”. In actual fact it was just that the border crossing points between East and West Berlin were opened, but soon after people began hacking at the Berlin Wall. A bit later the Wall was actually dismantled systematically. And so the most iconic symbol of the Cold War, the most fortified and secured stretch of the Iron Curtain, disappeared. Almost all of it, that
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:
Today it’s “Nationalfeiertag” (literally ‘National Celebration Day’, or just ‘National Day’ for short) in Austria, the country I reside in. It’s another good opportunity to dig out from my archives the photos and texts I posted on my DT page on Facebook until it got purged. I’m reproducing them here in reverse chronological order, i.e. starting with last year’s post first: