The 100th Blog Post!

October 25, 2021

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? Hmmm, here are five clear candidates:

The first one featured in the post about Majdanek and shows a scene at this concentration camp memorial taken in March 2008 in wintry weather:

*watchtower and barracks at Majdanek in winter*

Also among my more recent favourites is this photo from Belchite, which featured in the Blog post about the Spanish Civil War:

*looking through a bomb hole in the roof of a Belchite church*

In the celebratory Blog post from 23 September this next photo is amongst my favourites, certainly of those taken on actual planned photo shoots and out of those I manipulated afterwards:

Another candidate for my favourite photo in recent months is this one, which featured in the Blog post “A medical theme”, and which was taken inside the maternity ward of an abandoned hospital in Pripyat:

And the featured photo of the recent Blog post “Dark tourism & hands” has to be included here too, in my view:

*cobwebbed hand of a statue in Recoleta cemetery, Buenos Aires*

Even more recently, the blog post “Dark tourism & reflections” had numerous favourites of mine. If I had to pick just another five it would be these:

*a “mirage” on the horizon at the Uyuni salt flat, Bolivia*

*reflection of the Motherland Statue in Volgograd*

*“arty-farty” reflection photo taken in New York*

*rusty mirror and reflection at Marienborn, Germany*

So this has become a rather visual blog post. Amongst my favourite posts content-wise overall, these spring to mind: the recent post about Sobibor, the one about the Spanish Civil War, the theme posts “Dark tourism & food”, and “Dark tourism & animals” as well as “Light at the End of Dark Tunnels”.

But I think I’ll leave it at this. See if you can guess what tomorrow’s 101st blog post will about …

And if you have a particular favourite out of the examples given above (either photos or contents of specific posts), feel free to comment below!

6 responses

Philip Groves says:

26 October 2021 at 14:28

I always love the reflection shots, soo much extra thought has to go into taking the picture

Reply
1. Peter says:
  
  26 October 2021 at 16:24
  
  indeed – and I love taking those.
  
  Reply
Daniel Nash says:

31 October 2021 at 09:43

The cobwebbed hand of Recoleta – you have a great eye for those little details!

Reply
1. Peter says:
  
  31 October 2021 at 10:07
  
  thanks!
  
  Reply
Sally Claire McMullen says:

31 October 2021 at 10:15

It’s difficult to pick just one photo as there are several candidates in this small selection, but I guess for personal reasons I have to go for the Fountains Abbey one! Content-wise, for me, it has to be the blog posts about Sobibór – both September’s post about our recent visit to the new memorial museum and last year’s post to mark the anniversary of the escape on 14 October.

Reply
1. Peter says:
  
  31 October 2021 at 10:24
  
  good choices!
  
  Reply

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Dark Tourism & Books

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,

Dark Tourism & Trains

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

Dark Days

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