Category: Volgograd

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Russian Reflections

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

Dark Tourism & Flames

As indicated at the end of last week’s blog post about the “Stans”, I now give you a themed post next, namely DT & Flames. It’s a topic that ran a couple times in the theme polls over the past 18 months (here, here and here) but never won. Now I’m just posting it anyway. And that’s because it follows on so neatly from the parts about the Darvaza flaming gas crater in Turkmenistan that was featured in last week’s post, and included photos like

The 100th Blog Post!

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?

Dark Tourism & Reflections

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

Dark Tourism & Pianos

As promised in the previous theme post, I now bring you the other one of the joint winners of our latest theme poll.

So in what ways can pianos be associated with dark tourism? A pretty unique example is this, a piano-shaped tombstone:

The Thornton grave used to have an open lid on the stone piano too, but that got destroyed by vandals. Maybe it’s

Women’s Day

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

Stalin

On this Day: on 18 December 1878 a certain Iosep Besarionis dze Dzhugashvili was born in the Caucasus town of Gori in Georgia. This man is of course better known to the world under his self-adopted name: Stalin (meaning Man of Steel).
On my travels in the East, I’ve come across Stalin in images and statuary in various places, and so I can give you a little Stalin-themed photo essay here.

Let’s begin at the beginning, as it were, in