poll Archive - Dark Tourism Blog

Dark Tourism & Hands

The most recent theme poll didn’t have any winner by last Sunday, but one vote came in late and nudged ‘Hands’ ahead of the other three. So I’ll feature this theme first, but the others will come up here at some later stage as well.

The first photo – featured above – was taken at Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which features plenty of beautiful Gothic elements, but this pretty hand with cobwebs, a detail of a full-body statue, is one of my favourite hand photos of them all! Beautiful and a bit spooky at the same time.

Another favourite is this next one, taken at the fabulous

30 September 2021 2 Comments

A Dead Musician and a New Poll

On this day, 51 years ago, Jimi Hendrix died. Arguably one of the most influential virtuosos on the electric guitar, his sudden death came as a great shock to the world of rock music at the time.

On the morning of 18 September 1970 Hendrix was found unconscious in his London hotel room by his girlfriend. She called an ambulance and he was taken to hospital, but all reanimation attempts failed and Hendrix was pronounced dead by midday.

He had been

18 September 2021 8 Comments

Poll Result & this Day in History

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

23 May 2021 No Comments

Ethiopia & new poll

The war and humanitarian crisis in northern Ethiopia (Tigray) have been a topic on this blog before (in this post). Things have hardly improved since then, if anything they’ve got even worse. It’s one of the most dire situations anywhere in the world at the moment, with hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people living in shelters that can’t cope with the numbers, sanitation is extremely poor and there’s scarcity of water and food. Moreover,

16 May 2021 24 Comments

Dark Tourism & Broken Glass

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

23 February 2021 4 Comments

Dark Tourism & Spheres

As announced in the latest newsletter, our recent themed-post poll ended in a draw, so I decided to feature both winners, one after the other, starting with spheres today, to be followed by DT & lakes next week.

This structure, a steel globe containing the experimental Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR), is also sometimes referred to as “the sphere”, or alternately “the golf ball”. The reactor inside was one of the first to supply power to the British National Grid but was taken offline in 1977 and is currently undergoing decommissioning (while

12 January 2021 No Comments

New Year, new poll, and a little-known nuclear accident

Today is also the 60th anniversary of a nuclear accident that is rarely noted, yet it was the only reactor accident in the USA that directly caused fatalities. (There had been earlier accidents at the Los Alamos laboratories, including ones with fatalities as a result of lethal radiation doses, as well as accidents at other reactors where radiation was released, but without killing anybody outright).

The incident in question happened on 3 January 1961 at a reactor testing station in

3 January 2021 9 Comments

Dark Tourism & Clothing

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

28 October 2020 4 Comments

Dark Tourism & Cars

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

4 October 2020 2 Comments

New Flak Tower Photos – and a New Poll

Flaktürme, or ‘flak towers’, in Vienna’s Augarten park. In case you don’t know, “Flak” is short for “Flugabwehrkanone”, or ‘anti-aircraft gun’, and these towers were constructed to house batteries of big guns of that type during WWII. They were each complemented by another tower for radar/aiming technology. Hence the main towers were called “Gefechstturm” (‘combat tower’), while the smaller secondary tower was called “Leitturm” (‘directing tower’ or ‘lead tower’). Thus these installations always came in pairs. On the lower floors they additionally provided much needed air-raid-shelter space for civilians. But in their main military purpose,

27 September 2020 15 Comments

Switzerland and its Darker Sides

Just back from Switzerland this morning! It was a nice eight-day trip, mostly in the Alps, but also a bit of city (Zürich). The main emphasis was on the spectacular Alpine scenery. Around Zermatt this is indeed dominated by the Matterhorn, the planet’s most iconic peak.
As for the dark elements: well, the building of the Jungfrau Railway cost several workers their lives during the tunnelling. At the touristified complex at the summit one section commemorates those victims of the project (which took decades to complete from the late 1890s to the 1920s). Most names looked Italian. But there was also

30 August 2020 2 Comments

Change of Plans – More Travel – Poll Extended

My wife and I have another final week of this summer break left and spontaneously decided on our return from Venice (see previous post), to spend it in Switzerland. I wouldn’t have thought of Switzerland as a travel destination so soon, but – as with Venice – this may be a good time to go there, what with the absence of large international (esp. Chinese) tour groups. So we quickly booked our train to Zurich and a few hotels. In the country we’ll use the Swiss Travel Pass for maximum flexibility.

There’ll only be a few dark elements lined up, the main thing is to see the Alps, esp. the Matterhorn, which I have so far

21 August 2020 3 Comments

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