Category: Sperrgebiet

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Dark Tourism & Beds

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

14 February 2025 3 Comments

Dark Tourism and Bullet Holes

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

8 June 2024 1 Comment

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 8 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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