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
Just a short one for once … Today is 8 March, Women’s day. Last year on this date I gave you a post featuring various more or less gigantic female statues.
One of them was the humongous titanium-clad Rodina Mat (aka Motherland Monument) in Kyiv, featured in the photo above. The statue is a staggering 62m tall (with the sword), combined with the plinth she towers over the city over a 100m high.
The photo was
Another reason to celebrate. With this one there are now exactly one hundred posts on this blog!
Now, how to mark this? When it was the 1st anniversary, exactly one year after I started the blog, I selected 12 photos (one for every month) for this post marking that watershed and asked for votes as to readers’ single most favourite. This also turned into the most popular post of them all so far, going by interaction, i.e. primarily by the number of comments.
So what are my favourite photos since then?
And here comes the third of the four themes of our most recent poll (which didn’t have a winner, hence all four are fielded). So now for reflections – and I mean that literally, mostly, though a little bit of reflecting in the figurative sense will also feature. But this is primarily a visual blog post.
I like photographing reflections! I’m always on the lookout for reflections wherever I travel. Hence I have loads of such photos that accumulated over the years. So the
On this day it’s International Women’s Day, so I’m marking this by posting some photos of really big women sculptures. Above is the very biggest of them all, the largest female statue ever built. This is the Rodina Mat, aka “The Motherland Calls”, statue on Mamayev Hill in Volgograd, Russia. She’s the central part of the memorial complex for the Battle of Stalingrad. This is Soviet monumentalism at its most monumental! The figure is 52m tall from head to toe, with sword even 85m. At the