In ancient Rome, augury was the major kind of divination. This included watching the sky, thunder and lightning, but most importantly the auspices, watching the birds. Eagles and vultures were Jupiter’s most important messengers.
Nothing was decided without consulting an augur, a priest who could interpret the flight, the song and dance of birds. Most notoriously, Romulus and Remus settled their dispute on where to found the city of Rome by an augury. Romulus, of course, had the better auspices. He spotted more vultures than his brother Remus, which also granted the former the right to fratricide.
The she-wolf that raised Remus and Romulus against a purple, thunderous Roman sky on the Capitoline Hill, where Romulus founded Rome.
The auspices was restricted to certain species, which are hard to come across in the busy city nowadays. Like in any other coastal city, giant gulls and pigeons seem to outnumber the rest of Rome’s avian population.
A giant gull over-looking his city from the Palletino, the power center of ancient Rome.
Since the Roman Empire extended over a vast part of Northern Africa, tropical birds were imported as sought-after pets. Emperor Nero famously owned an African Gray parrot, Pontius Pilatus’ wife, Claudia, kept lovebirds in a cage, who looked not unlike the Monaco Parakeet.
A Parrocco Monaco sneaking from behind a tree in the beautiful Borghese gardens.
Today’s most flamboyant Roman bird, the gregarious Monaco Parakeet, only arrived in Rome in the early 1970ies. The striking, green parrots have since seamlessly integrated into Italian lifestyle, not causing any harm to local Wildlife, according to the Italian Wildlife Fund. These bright flying jewels color the ancient buildings, which, when built, where not as marble-white, but painted in manifold colors.
Pigeons at the Tiber at sunset, Ponte Vittorio Emanuele in the back.
Opened in 1752, the zoo of Vienna is the oldest in the world. Mary Theresa of Austria had the zoo installed into the baroque gardens of her imperial summer residence of Schönbrunn, back then still in the outskirts of Vienna. Until 1778 only members of the royal family could wander among the cages to marvel at the elephants, giraffes, camels, bears, wolfs and exotic birds.
Today one of Vienna’s major tourist attractions, Schönbrunn with its zoological, botanical and baroque gardens as well as a lavishly decorated golden interior, was styled after Versaille in Paris. Mary Theresa sought the alliance of the Bourbon Empire to fortify her empire against her archfiend Frederick II of Prussia. On her court, French was spoken. To eternally strengthen the relationship between Austria and France, she further sent her youngest daughter, Maria Antonia, to marry the future king Louis XVI – against the teenager’s wish. However, the French empire did not last as long as the Austro Hungarian monarchy. As Queen Marie Antoinette, Maria Antonia was beheaded during the French Revolution of 1791.
At Schönbrunn castle, six year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played for Mary Theresa. Little Mozart did not have to go to school as other children his age had to: As citizen of the independent state of Salzburg and therefore no Austrian, obligatory schooling did not apply to him.
Mary Theresa, despite her well-groomed image as the warm-hearted mother to the peoples of her multinational empire, was an absolute and strict ruler, and it was only her successor, her son Joseph II, who talked her into a slightly more liberal thinking and therefore reforms, such as opening the zoo to the public. In fact, the citizens of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy might have seen life in catholic, narrow-minded Austria comparable to living in the cages of the zoo. Definitely her own children did.
An ardent catholic – the Roman Catholic Church is still state church in Austria – she believed her power to be god given. Mary Theresa controlled her own children the way she controlled her subjects: with an iron fist. She introduced compulsory schooling for all children between six and twelve. Other faiths than the Roman Catholic were not tolerated in her empire: Jews as well as Christians of protestant faith were dispelled from the country – as long as they did not weigh in when it came to financing her wars against Frederick II. Wars she kept loosing.
Today, 300 years after Mary Theresa, the Zoo attracts two million visitors per year. In its more than 250 years of existence, it has gone a long way from its first exhibitions in baroque cages and adorned follies. Waldrapps, or hermit ibis, a central European bird species that went extinct in the 18th century, was bred anew at Schönbrunn Zoo. A complex re-introduction program which involved glider planes taught the birds, born in captivity, to fly long distance and find their migratory routs to Tuscanny, Italy, where their free ancestors spent their winters. The population of these striking birds is still small – they are among the rarest birds worldwide. Yet they are alive and free again – ironically thanks to Mary Theresa’s Zoo.
Every body is beautiful. A Waldrapp at the zoo, soon to be released.
When her husband died, Mary Theresa had her bedroom wallpapered in grey silk. She had her jewelry given to her court ladies, dressed in black and wore a black veil for the rest of her life. Often she was found sitting at her late husband’s sarcophagus in Vienna’s capuchin crypt. After her own death, sixteen years later, a piece of paper was found in her prayer book, on which she had noted the duration of her marriage:
29 years, 6 months, 6 days, equals years 29, months 335, weeks 1540, days 10,781, hours 258,744.
Mary Theresa, sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Galicia and Lodomeria, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma had been lucky to marry the man she loved.
To her father, Emperor Charles VI, she had been a disappointment. He had wished for a son, a heir to the throne. And while he had her raised to become a lady of the court – Mary Theresa was excluded from education and contemporary erudition, but trained in painting, dancing and the French language, he still did everything to ensure she and the husband he would chose for her would follow on his throne. He chose Francis Stephen of Lorraine, by pure coincidence the man Therese loved.
At the age of 23, after her father’s sudden death from poisoned mushrooms in 1780, Mary Theresa stepped up, literally.
Detail of the Vienna Burgtheater, the most important german speaking theater. It was built under Mary Theresa.
By the time of her coronation, she had been married for four years, pregnant and mother to three. The empire she inherited was run down and bankrupt, the army non-existent. On top, a female reign was considered a liability by the adversary powers. The empire was attacked right away. Yet, Mary Theresa proved herself an astute leader. She charmed other nations into supporting her.
While she negotiated successfully to have her husband crowned Holy Roman Emperor – due to her gender Mary could not be crowned Empress herself – she did not grant Francis I, as he was now called, a say in leading the Empire. On the contrary, Mary Theresa led the country as a matrone, a mother figure. Soon the country prospered under her leadership and Mary Theresa honed her image of a generous, warm mother, who loved her people as much as she loved her own off-spring. She had sixteen children. The fourth was a boy, the later Emperor Joseph II.
Bella Gerant Alii, Tu Felix Austria Nube. – Let others wage wars, thou, happy Austria, marry.
While Mary Theresa did not dispose of a powerful army, she used her 16 children to set up agreements and deals. She wedded them off all over the continent to ensure coalitions, territorial gains or military support. Her children’s feelings or love interests were of no concern to her.
Mary Theresa was an ardent catholic. She believed her power God given, and her life style reflected a puritan and strict view of the world. Yet when it came to marrying off her youngest daughter to French King Louis XVI, she even negotiated the deal with the notorious Madame Pompadour, chief mistress on the French court, of whom she did not approved. Mary Theresa believed in absolute conjugal faith. Sadly, her husband, Francis I, did not.
tourists take in the sun by Mary Therese’s statue in front of the museum of art history, where her portrait in black is at display
To the children of the Habsburg Empire Mary Theresa was as strict a mother as to her own children. She introduced compulsory education to all between six and fifteen. Her relationship to her own sons and daughters was as distant as their geographic location: Mary Christina was married to Saxony, Mary Amalia to Parma, Mary Karolina to Naples, Ferdinand Charles Anthony to Modena, Maximilian Francis became bishop of Cologne, and Maria Antonia was beheaded as Mary Antoinette in Paris in 1793. But this Mary Theresa never learned.
She had died in 1780 already, wearing her beloved husband’s housecoat.
Today, Travnik is just a little town in central Bosnia. Once, it was a capital city. Once, it was hometown to Ivo Andric, the novelist awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1961, who set his most important novels there.
“Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn’t, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.”
Gabon is the forgotten name of the fortress of Travnik, seat of the Grand Vizier
For 400 years, Travnik was the capital city of the Ottoman province of Bosnia. The Grand Vizier, the governer, lived in a fortress overlooking the city, then a lively, multicultural trade hub: different ethnicities and religions lived peacefully under Ottoman rule.
In 1878, fourteen years before Andric was born, in 1892, Bosnia became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Travnik lost its standing as capital city.
Since then, Travnik, like the rest of Bosnia, has lived through a more than turbulent succession of varying regimes and violent conflicts. Ethnic wars seemed to be at the core of each chapter of its blood soaked history – yet it was not an innate adversity against each other that led to some of the most horrible genocides and war crimes in recent history. Ethnicities and religious groups were played against each other, became pawns, fall guys, for the strategic war fares of the great powers. An entanglement that started with the Habsburgian take-over of 1878 and saw its tragic climax during the Balkan Wars of the 1990ies – hopefully the last chapter in this brutal story. The scars are still visible in Travnik, and the rest of the country. But there has been, and still is, hope of reconciliation, of lasting peace.
I live to love you, sprayed on a wall.
Nowadays yet, in times of rising nationalism and war mongers, Ivo Andric is claimed as a representative of Croation, Serbian, and Bosnian literature. However, exactly because he was born in Travnik, he belongs to all three equally. His most famous book is called the Bridge over the Drina. Building bridges is key.
Boys arouse the pigeons’ attention while feeding fish at Plava Voda, Blue Water, a gurgling stream flanked by restaurants. In the old times, almost every Travnik household kept pigeons. Today, the city prides itself for its own pigeon breed, the Travnik short-beaked pigeon.
From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
In 1790, the English poet William’s Wordsworth visited the Alps, hiking Swiss mountain passes into Italy, and farther into France. He expressed his awe for the spectacular scenery of the Alps in a collection of poems, yet the beauty of the high mountains, and his veneration of the untamed Alpine Nature can be found in the entirety of his works.
So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive,
Would that the little Flowers were born to live,
Conscious of half the pleasure which they give;
How clear, how keen, how marvellously bright
The effluence from yon distant mountain’s head,
Which, strewn with snow smooth as the sky can shed,
Shines like another sun–on mortal sight
Praised be the Rivers, from their mountain springs
Shouting to Freedom, “Plant thy banners here!”
To harassed Piety, “Dismiss thy fear,
And in our caverns smooth thy ruffled wings!
More than 200 years later, while the world has changed completely, the Alps are still as untamed and aweinspiring.
There are no mountains in Austria’s most Eastern province, Burgenland. The “Land of Castles”, as its name is literally translated, is surprisingly flat. Here, the Puszta, the great Hungarian plane, spills into alpine Austria from the East. In fact, until 1922, Burgenland was part of Hungary. In exchange, Lake Neusiedl, the shallow lake, spills into Hungary, where it’s called Fertö.
In winter, the Siberian cold drifts into the flat land and turns it grey, cold and numb. In summer though, the Alpine mountains shelter the plane from the Western rains. From May to September it is hot and sunny, and the salty soil vibrant with flowers, with butterflies, dragonflies and bees.
A red-backed shrike blends in with field flowers.
Many migratory birds have chosen this corner of the world as their Northern breeding grounds. Lake Neusiedl is to a great extent a protected national park that features 360 species of birds: in short, a birder’s paradise. Thanks to the EU and the Schengen agreement visitors can drive, hike or cycle around the lake and its pittoresque scenery of reeds, fields and meadows without once flashing their passport.
A lapwing struts through a meadow in Burgenland. Lapwings hatch on the wet soil close to the lake Neusiedl.
By April the first birds arrive from Africa – those lucky ones that made the ten thousand kilometre-long, hazardous passage over the dire Sahara, over the bird-traps of Malta and Cyprus, and finally the Bosphorus. In fact, the number of migratory birds is on a steady decline. Biologists blame climate change, the loss of feeding grounds and the barbaric lime-stick hunting of songbirds that is sadly on the rise in Mediterranean countries. Bee-eaters are regarded delicatessen.
Bee eaters perch on branches, scanning the air for food: they eat any winged insect, not only bees.
The Bee Eaters are colorful, gregarious birds that shoot through the sky like bullets when chasing insects. They are most proficient hunters of not only, but most notoriously bees.
A bee eater shoots like a bullet when hunting.
While the bee-eaters were traditionally killed by bee-keepers and their eggs destroyed, National Park Neusiedlersee even maintains their breeding rocks, soft limestones in which they dig holes up to half a metre deep with their beaks.
The elegant Great White Egret sashays through the shallow water.
With a maximum depth of 1.5m, Lake Neusiedl offers ideal conditions for wading birds like herons, avocets, stilts and egrets. In the 19th century, the elegant Great White Egret was close to extinction as the bird’s flamboyant feathers were used by hatters to adorn ladies’ hats. However, the Audubon Society in the US, which was founded in order to prevent the egrets from vanishing from the planet, led a successful campaign that led to the abolishing of the feather trade. Two of the society’s members even lost their lives in this fight for the egrets. Since the trade of feathers was declared illegal in most of the Western world, their population has recovered, yet herons and egrets are highly susceptible to environmental changes and suffer from loss of habitat.
A Yellow Wagtail in a flowery field.
Songbirds are tiny, but their kaleidoscopic feathers color the Eastern skies and meadows like paint boxes. The Yellow Wagtail, thanks to its bright, warm color, has traditionally been associated with the sun. The little bird is said to have inspired the Ancient Greeks to their idea of the Phoenix, the bird that burns to ash and resurrects. True or not, the Yellow Wagtail, just like the storks, the geese and the rest of the migratory birds, abandons this land in September, and leaves it to die the cold death of winter, just to return in Spring, and kiss the still land awake with color and birdsong.
Geese crossing the evening sky on their celestial high way.
For the short period of 55 years, from 1884 when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to 1939 when the Nazis invaded, Prague was a home to a flourishing coffee shop literature, that brought about writers of lasting literary significance.
Café Slavia was the setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s first stories, published in Prague in 1899. It was also there that Franz Kafka famously could not stop laughing when he read the first draft of his Trial to his literary friends. At Café Arko Kafka crossed plumes with the likes of Franz Werfel and Max Brod. They and many other coffee shop literates had little in common as writers, were it not for the fact that they all wrote in German. Prague German, to be precise.
vestige of the Belle Epoque style of the turn of the century under the Habsurg Monarchy
It is largely forgotten that until 1945, German and Czech were equally spoken in Prague, albeit in two distinct parallel societies. Czech was the language of the working class. Prague German was spoken by the Upper class, the wealthy, intellectuals, the writers and actors. While the German-speaking literates nursed their coffees in the pompous inner-cities coffee shops, Jaroslav Hasek, who wrote the “Good Soldier Svejk” in his native Czech, downed his beers in the pubs of working class neighborhoods like Žižkov.
A beergarden in the working class neighborhood Žižkov
The Good Soldier Švejk, a down-to earth Czech, had to join the unloved Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI. A job he famously failed at, and a war the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy lost.
The book in its Czech original version at display in a Prague bookstore.
Rilke, himself born into a wealthy German speaking family, made the jarring gap and adversity between the German upper class and Czech working class the subject of his Prague Stories, written in Prague German of course. He also seemed to have been inspired to his later transcendental poetry by La Fée verte at Café Slavia. That’s what the highly alcoholic, and back then legal, green beverage Absinth was dubbed.
Café Slavia offered a view of the Vlatava and servings of Absinthe to the literates.
German was also the language of the Jews of Prague, or at least of the progressive liberals wanting to emancipate from the rigid orthodoxy of the Shtetl. In the Habsburg Empire, Jewish schools were forced by law teach in German, a means to suppress Jewish culture and language, the Eastern European Yiddish. Eventually German became the mother tongue of the educated. Most, but not all of the coffee shop literates were Jewish. Kafka was.
“What do I have in common with the Jews?” he asked, “I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”
Jewish Cemetery in Prague
Besides Prague German, it was a feeling of alienation the coffee shop literates shared.
“We are not born into our home. Rather it seems to me as if everything great is born in the desire to find a home somewhere, an open-armed home, waiting for our return,”
Rilke wrote before he left the city at 22.
Kafkaesque or unbearably light? A Czech street scene.
Kafka obviously did not feel too homely in Prague either, even though he never left.
“Prague won’t let you go, the little mother has claws,” he said.
“His own forehead obstructs his way.” (Kafka) Czech artist David Cerny built this revolving sculpture of Franz Kafka, It de- and reconstructs itself by whirling, an eternal search. The installation is set in front of a commercial restaurant in the city center.
Things were different for Franz Werfel. Born to progressive, German speaking Jews, he was raised and emotionally most attached to his Czech speaking, catholic Nanny Barbara. First drafted into WWI, like Švejk, then driven into exile by the Nazis, he died in the USA a successful and acclaimed writer. He outlived Kafka, Rilke and Hasek by over twenty years. But Prague never let go of him either. At the end of his life, in the 1940ies, he still wrote lovingly of Barbara, and of his native city in his “Ballad to Prague.”
Paddleboats floating in the Vlatava, Charlesbridge in the background.
When the summer’s heat turns Prague into an oven and the hot air dancing in the streets blurs the city like a mirage, it is better to wait for the night to venture through the old cobble stoned streets of the city.
Prague is beautiful by day. By night it is mesmerizing, a labyrinth of lights and shadows: the illuminated buildings of a once great empire set against the dark backstreets, where laughter and music drift from the open doors of beer houses or from open second floor windows.
Franz Kafka, the writer who spent his short life entirely in his native Prague, also preferred the tenebrious night to the bright day. He was an insomniac.
“Perhaps,” he said. “I am afraid that the soul, which in sleep leaves me, will not be able to return.”
Franz Kafka did his writing in the middle of the night with delirious concentration. In the silence and darkness, he found privacy from the world.
View of the Maly Strana – the small side – where Kafka spent his entire life, with the exception of his stay at the Austrian sanatorium before his death of tuberculosis in 1924.
Deeply lost in the night.
Just as one sometimes lowers one’s head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night.
All around people are asleep.
A little bit of playacting on their part. An innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on matrasses, in sheets, under blankets. In reality they have flocked together as they had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a people, under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsed where once they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the ground, breathing quietly.
And you are watching, are one of the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning stick from the brushwood pile beside you.
Why are you watching?
Someone must watch, it is said.
Someone must be there.
In 2015, the city of Vienna introduced new traffic lights. On 47 inner city crossings, the common stick figure was replaced by red and green couples that came in three different versions: lesbian, gay and heterosexual. The new traffic lights applied equally to all jaywalkers, regardless of their sexual orientation: walk/don’t walk, gay or not.
Initially, the traffic light couples were installed only temporarily as a marketing gag to support the annual Life Ball, a glamorous, celebrity-studded charity event to raise funds for HIV-research and anti-AIDS campaigning. Carried by a wave of enthusiasm after the bearded drag queen “Conchita Wurst” had won the Eurovision Song Contest the previous year, the city council attempted to place Vienna on the map of gay-friendly and liberal cities.
A Conchita Wurst-look a like at Vienna’s Pride Parade
The traffic lights caused a bigger stir than expected. Covered by media around the globe, the concept and design of the so-called Ampelpärchen were even sold to other cities like Munich. A relatively modest investment of purported 63,000.- Euros generated a much larger financial revenue and, of course, a large touristic benefit.
Horse carriages are a tourist attraction in Vienna, reminiscent of the glorious days of the Austro Hungarian Empire. This carriage at the Vienne Pride Parade caters to S/M inclined tourists.
Not surprisingly, the political right demanded the traffic lights couples’ immediate removal and threatened to sue the responsible politician, the green vice-mayor, for slander of tax money and/or moral decline. The vice-mayor defended the couples: Being novelties, she argued, they would attract more attention from jay-walkers, who were then more likely to obey traffic rules.
The Ampelpärchen stayed for good. Locals are mostly approving, or indifferent by now. The Viennese, law-abiding by nature, accept traffic signals of any sexual orientation, which does not make Vienna the gayest city in the world, but definitely one the safest.
Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey, owes its name to the Old Greek word for Sunrise: the country where the sun rises, at least from a Hellenistic view point. Yet, its central region, a white limestone landscape named Cappadocia, has more of a lunar feeling: wind and rain have sculptured the powdery volcanic soil into bizarre rock formations, so called fairy chimneys. The Cappadocians themselves have through-out their history displayed a certain affinity to the Underworld.
The ancient people of the Hittites, who reigned in Cappadocia from the 17th to the 12th century BC, carved their dwellings into theses fairy chimneys and hillsides. They also dug deep into the soft earth and built a network of underground tunnels for their trickery warfare, and caves multiple stories deep for the storage of perishable produce. The underground offered favorably cool thirteen degrees Celsius through the hot summers and the freezing winters.
The Hittites venerated twelve Gods of the Underworld, gods they depicted with curly hair and conical hats. Much later, under the Persian Empire, these conical hats reappeared on the heads of Sufis, the mystics of Islam, although they were meant to symbolize the Islamic tombstones then.
conical stones
In medieval times, and after the Hittites had long vanished, Cappadocia served as a refuge for the early Christians. Byzantine Christian monks took over the old underground dwellings, and refurbished them into colorful orthodox churches. The remains of these beautiful frescos are still vibrant today – owing to the conserving climate of the caves – even though the depicted saints’ faces have been erased, hundreds of years ago, by hostile attackers.
While the Byzantine Christians lived in the caves, they mirrored their cave-cities in the underworld by building underground cities, up to 60 meters deep, fully equipped with apartments, kitchens, baths, storage rooms and even prisons. When under threat, the Byzantines retreated into the Underworld and thanks to their sophisticated ventilation and intricate system of hallways, remained there for months on end – undetected by their attackers. The Byzantines disappeared from the Earth’s surface – and resurrected.
hot balloons rise with the sun
Tourism discovered Cappadocia only recently. Despite its underground history, most visitors like to see Cappadocia from far above. Hot balloons rise every sunrise – and shower the poor Anatolian region with foreign money.
The caves have turned into luxury hotels – but Cappadocia remains poor.
A couple of years ago, the Turkish have re-discovered the wisdom of the Hittites. The vast underground cities are used as storage space again. Produce is transported from all over Anatolia into Cappadocia.
A beergarden in the working class neighborhood Žižkov
