travel memoir – wanderwarbler

November 19, 2021December 26, 2021

5-YEAR RECAP

I started this website, wanderwarbler, in early 2017 not only to document my travels, but to contemplate and venture into terra incognita philosophically, by means of the books, the poems, the lores and legends of the places I visited. My research deepened my understanding of geography, biology, and of humanity as a whole, as art and abstraction always reveal the truth hidden underneath the banalities of travel schedules, or of daily life.

In the beginning I questioned the moral rightfulness of travelling in a world where travelling was a privilege reserved to a wealthy minority, yet equally a chance for the under-privileged to make a living in tourism-related jobs. I believed in respectful, openhearted and openminded travel, traveling beyond the pitfalls of mass tourism and neo-colonialism. The challenges and experience of travel no doubt made me a wiser, enlightened person. But would my tales and travels change this planet for the better?

My hope was to build an argument for cultural diversity in a world ever more McDonaldized, H&M-ized, Hollywood-ized. Wanderwarbler could make a case against Club Med, but support the family-run Beds and Breakfast’s. In short: emphasize the difference between tourism and travel, which means to respect and to treat every place as somebody’s home, and not a entertainment park.

For five years I kept travelling, learning, researching, writing, but not exclusively for my readers. I kept writing to come to terms with what was hard to bear, or witness: social injustice, scars of wars, the irreversibility of death.

*_{Great Zimbabwe, 2019: 1000-year old stonewall}* –

Obviously, I am not a war reporter. I shy away from war torn places, or countries in turmoil and civic unrest, and my destinations are those everyone could visit without fearing for their lives. Still, wherever I went, on or off the beaten path, I came across poverty and illiteracy, pollution and destruction, and screaming injustice. I held on to the thought that sharing my experiences could change the world for the better, at least on some homeopathic level. Five years later, the world has changed dramatically.

Five years – in terms of planet Earth are nothing, but in terms of social dynamics, a lot had changed. Demagogues – the Trumps, Orbans, and Bolsonaros of this world – scarred communities. Social media didn’t knit us into a tight fabric of humankind, but entangled us in alternative facts and half-truths, in the fake, misogynistic, beauty-filtered world of Instagram. The pandemic and climate collapse, and with it the rapid destruction of habitat and disappearance of wild life, and the commercial conquest of outer space, have widened the gap between rich and poor, between left and right, between those who will have the means to save themselves, and those who won’t.

*^{_{Franz and Innozent show off their Vogueing Poses in Maltahöhe, Namibia, 2018}}*

For the last two years, Corona travel restrictions have prevented me from travelling far. My trips nowadays are mostly restricted to neighbouring European countries, and to journeys into the past, again and again revisiting those moments that in their intensity, and sometimes in their perilousness changed my life. It’s the African episodes of my travels that keep springing to mind most prominently, like lessons for life.

I often remember Lovemore, whom I met in the streets of suburbian Johannesburg. A tall, lanky man in his early thirties, Lovemore worked as a 24/7 security guard in one on the richest neighbourhoods where the streets are lined with blue blooming jacarandas and the sweet air filled with bird song. He spent his days in his little hut outside an electrified wall, which blocks the view of the villa behind, the pool, the lush garden and the luxury limousines that park in the drive way. Lovemore himself lived in the notorious Vodaphone tower in the city center, a sky-rise that after the fall of apartheid had been taken over by squatters, lacking of electricity, running water, and garbage disposal: a stinking hell in the hands of armed gangs. But Lovemore smiled. On his phone with the cracked screen, he showed me photos of his children, his wife, his family. He talked about the brother- and sisterhood of all people. And how people are misguided, abused, by politics. I wouldn’t be like Lovemore, I thought then. In his shoes, I’d be Loveless. But Lovemore appeared happy. He seemed to live a fulfilled life. We are still friends on facebook and maybe, today, I believe, I love more.

And I remember a journey through remote Tanzania, the Landrover staggering along the dusty red dirt road when we passed by a funeral procession. My driver, Salim, a Muslim, and my birding guide, Emanuel, a Christian, stopped the car, jumped out and ran to hug the grieving family, then shouldered the coffin and helped to carry it along. When they later got back to the car, I asked them whether they knew the deceased. “No,” they said. “That’s what you do. You pay respect.”

Of course it was those moments that exposed the transience of life that challenged me most in my morals and responsibilities as a human being.

I remember the night I got lost in the Kruger Nationalpark in South Africa. Shaking with fear from lions and buffaloes, I had to walk back to the camp after our car broke down in the middle of the savannah. The Milky Way sparkled above me, a tiara of zillions of brillilant stars in the black of the night, as my feet kept sinking deep into the lose sand, slipping with each step on fresh elephant dung. And I remember, years later, fearing for another creature’s life, when I got to observe three regal lionesses stalking an antelope in the bush of Botswana.

I was transformed when I reached the camp in the Kruger unscathed, and I was transformed when I watched the antelope look the lionesses in the eye with defiance. The lionesses abandoned the stalk and lazily lay down in the sun. Life, I learned in the wilderness, is a brittle little thing, and yet it’s only this brittleness that bestows value on it. Only when it seems to slip away, we want to hold on to our lives. Some with fear, some with defiance.

If we all realized that the world as we have known it – a planet filled with animals and birds, with trees and snow-capped mountains – is slipping away between our fingers like desert sand, and if we realize this means our lives, our memories, our values and even our possessions, all we’ve ever owned, will fade as well, will we love our planet, hang on to it like to our lives, fight for it, with fear or defiance?

No matter where I travelled, I was never alone. There were always other beings around me, humans and non-humans, and I realized that we’re all sitting in the same boat, struggling through troubled water. We all belong to the same ecosystem: a system that’s changing for sure, as we do in a lifetime, and one that’s as brittle as our lives are, and as unique. It is after all the only eco-system in billions of years that brought about human life. Maybe, if I keep telling about the lionesses, whose families are as organized complicated as ours, about the elephants and wild dogs, who take care of each other with love and tenderness just as we do, or the birds, whose songbook exceeds the Bach-Werkeverzeichnis, will it be evident that we are all the same, but speaking in a different language.

*_{Family of Egyptian Geese, Tanzania, 2019}*

I had to travel to the other side of the world to realize that the life of dung beetle like Sysiphos forever rolling its ball is just as meaningful as mine. Travelling has taught me that I am just a tiny speck in this world, but that I am an important, essential part of it: That I am part of nature, part of humanity, part of every tribe in this world, part of every species. Everywhere is home.

September 28, 2020September 28, 2020

Le Mal D’Afrique |Zimbabwe

Due to the Corona pandemic I cannot migrate to the South this year. Missing Africa, I dwell in memories.

In the township

There is laughter. The joyful treble of children at play: The girls, skipping with an old elastic rope tied to their waists, are showing off their intricate foot work. The little boys are chasing each other, trying to ride an old cast-off tire, its rubber grey and worn off. White teeth, red lips, little bare feet against the dry orange soil. The children throw you hidden glances and when they see you smile at them, they scream in delight. Their laughter comes as a relief. They don’t hate you. You, who in your Goretex shoes and polarized sunshades, your high-tech camera gripped tightly in your hand, didn’t come from another country, or another continent, but a different world altogether.

Makokoba is a township at the outskirts of the South Zimbabwean town of Bulawayo. A township like so many other townships in Africa, installed by European colonists in need of work force but in fear of Africans. A place to keep the workers close by, to cultivate their fields, clean their clothes and wash their dishes, build their roads and houses and churches, but safely fenced off, separated from their roads and houses and churches. A township to keep the Africans out of sight. To send them back to Africa when night falls.

The main streets of Makokoba are paved, but they are potholed, and blanketed with thick layers of orange dust. A bitter stale taste that with every breath coats the inner of your mouth. A pale orange that clings to the children’s skin and the stray dogs’ shaggy fur, the scattered plastic trash that piles up at every corner, the bare bricks of the one-storied buildings, and the rubber sandals at the callused feet of the people of Makokoba. When you catch their eye, you wave at them: “Salibonani!, you call, which, as your guide told you, means “Hello!” in their language, Ndebele. An old woman – or maybe your age only, yet prematurely hunch-backed and brittle, clad in an apricot-colored head dress waves back at you. Her smile reveals bare toothless gums in a wrinkled face. A young man with bloodshot eyes keeps his gaze at his feet. His gait is unsteady as he passes you by. Still you smile at him. You grip your camera tighter. Not because you fear he might rip it from your hand, but because you feel just as unsteady. You feel out of place. You feel guilty.

The land, fertile and sunbathed, was given to the English immigrants, in exchange for coming to Africa. The land, fertile and sunbathed, was taken from the African tribes that had settled here before. The Ndebele people were relegated to the barren land, far off the water lines, not living from their land anymore, but working for the landlords.

“Salibonani!” A woman in a yellow T-shirt and a skirt of a green leafy pattern wants to show you her garden. She has used discarded tires as beds to plant vegetables. Water is expensive here, you learn, she has to buy it a high price by the barrel, back there, at the manually operated iron cast pump. The rubber tires keep the water from dissipating in the sandy soil. Her plants are thriving: full leaved cabbages reaching for the cloud covered sky. She poses for a photo with a sunny smile.

Makokoba is an enchanting word. Within the century of its existence, the township has gathered fame as a place where African culture has thrived amidst all the poverty and oppression, a place that has brought about music, dance, and literature. A symbol of how a bitter root can bear the sweetest fruit. But still, Makokoba is a poor, disadvantaged African township, where unemployment and poverty lead to gangsterism and alcoholism. A place forever at the margins.

At the market, in the midst of terracotta pottery, bowls and pans neatly aligned, and hand-carved drums, lined up by size and tuning, among iron headed spears and glass pearl-chains and silver bangles, among dried herbs in cardboard boxes with Chinese labels, sits the sage woman. Her face weathered and serious, her eyes piercing. She knows of all the illnesses and their cure, your guide tells you. And you want to buy from her, but you don’t speak the language. You can’t spell the illness. “Salibonani,” you say instead. You smile. But she looks back at you, empty handed. She doesn’t have the cure.

January 31, 2019February 1, 2019

Lesotho: Drained

High up in the Drakensberg riff sits the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. It is home to Africa’s highest mountain, the Ntlenyana at 3482m, and some of the continent’s highest waterfalls. The small republic is completely surrounded by the state of South Africa, for which it has always held a special attraction. Lesotho has something in abundance its single next door neighbor desperately wants: water.

A Sotho boy in typical outfit. Photo by Karen Smit

Upon visiting the mountainous land one is touched by its picturesque scenery and the traditional life style of the Basotho people (Lesotho means: land of those who speak Sotho). Climbing the steep slopes in rubber-boots or high up a horse – they are expert riders – clad in their traditional and super warm blankets, they appear taciturn, withdrawn like so many mountain peoples. But most striking to the visitor is the fact that tap water is unsafe in this country. It’s sad but true: 25% of the population have no access to clean drinking water.

Lesotho has known a troubled past. While independence from the British came peacefully in 1966, the small and bitterly poor republic has since been depending on South Africa – for obvious geographic reasons. The big neighbor has always dominated the region economically, but also has never shied away from armed interventions when it came to securing to economic advantages, like: access to the fresh water of Lesotho.

In 1986, South Africa and Lesotho under its South Africa-backed leader Major General Lekhaya (who came to power by a means of a coup d’etat, which many believe was sponsored by South Africa) signed the Lesotho Highlands Water Treaty. Lesotho – would supply Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the whole of Gauteng, South Africa’s arid heartland, with fresh drinking water. For water, it was was believed, Lesotho would always have plenty.

Financed by South Africa, the now functioning Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) consists of a series of dams – most importantly the Katse dam in central Lesotho – that trap water in deep mountain valleys, as well as canals and tunnels that transport water North to South Africa. This way, Lesotho makes US$45 million each year: a significant amount in one of the world’s poorest countries. So much, that the LHWP has in fact become a symbol economic integration, of national identity and pride.

But the project came at a high cost. Dams flooded the land, turning fields into water wastelands, drowning trees, leaving the local farmers struggling. Instead, profits went towards a small numbered elite in Lesotho’s modern capital, Maseru. South Africa has always protected their “Water Castle”, as they came to call Lesotho. A notorious incident occurred in 1998, when after political unrest in Maseru, a South African military intervention left 13 Lesotho soldiers dead at the Katse dam.

Things got worse for the Lesotho farmers when the effects of climate change hit the country. Increasingly unstable weather conditions and frequent droughts, most importantly the severe drought 2014 to 2016, took a terrible toll on the Basotho. The country went dry.

A Sotho woman preparing thatching for the traditional huts

There are no irrigation systems in Lesotho. Crops failed. Cattle had no grass to graze. With the drought came poverty – almost a million of Basotho were left in need of emergency food programs – and the fierce fight for survival. The number of school drop-outs soared, as did HIV rates, especially among adolescent girls, who increasingly relied on prostitution to support themselves. With lack of sufficient sanitation services the risk for diarrhea increased, threatening most of all young children. Still, the Basotho had to watch their waters flow towards South Africa.

The mighty Matsunyane falls – a tourist attraction. Lesotho also attracts skiers in winter and adventurous drivers on its steep mountain passes. Yet, tourism is not strong enough to support the country – yet!

Lesotho is not only a victim of climate change. Lesotho is an example of what happens when a country turns water into a commodity.

One doesn’t know the worth of water, until the well runs dry.

November 28, 2018November 29, 2018

Tanzania: Mtu Ni Watu or: The People United

In 1964, three years after President Julius Nyerere had peacefully walked the former Eastern African colony Tanganyika out of British colonial rule, he united his country with Zanzibar. This archipelago in the Indian ocean just off the African East coast was by the time an even younger democracy: it was two weeks since the end of the Sultanate.

Three syllables, Tan(ganyika), Zan(zibar) and Ia (the Swahili ending for together) melted into one new word, into one new nation: Tanzania.

Children playing in the harbor of Stone Town, Zanzibar

120 separate tribes with distinct languages had for centuries lived in Tanganyika, due the vastness of the land in relative peace and tranquility. It was colonialism that drained the soil and wildlife, and left cracks in society.

First it was the slave and ivory trade by European and Arab merchants that turned not only elephants, but humans into cheap and abundant merchandise. Unspeakable misery was cast over the land. When the Germans colonized and shamelessly exploited the country, rebellions against their ruthless regime ended in more bloodshed and tears. In WWI, enlisted as soldiers for their colonial powers, Askaris (as African soldiers working for their colonial powers were called) were made to kill their own neighbors, their own cousins even, in the name of Germany respectively Great Britain, or the colonies of German East Africa and Malawi. And after WWII, the new colonial power Great Britain tried to use the land as a granary to stave off a famine in their war torn homeland. The notoriously unsuccessful Groundnut Scheme afforded the UK a loss of 49 million pounds, and turned the land into a useless dust bowl.

When Great Britain finally dismissed Tanganyika into liberty, it was mainly because they had failed to draw enough profit out of a land that had been drained for too long. The Tanganyika Julius Nyerere took over was one of the poorest places in the world.

But the man had a plan. First, he re-united the estranged tribes by one common language: Kiswahili, a hybrid language that had formed in the run of centuries by mixing Arabic and tribal languages, was promoted through literature, drama, and poetry. It was also made official language and installed as educational language in the schooling system. For Nyerere also introduced obligatory schooling from the age of six.

Nyerere’s plan was a socio-economic system he called Ujamaa , family in Kiswahili, or commonly called African Socialism. Emancipation from colonial rule, pride and solidarity as a nation were paramount, economic self-reliance and cultural independence the goal.

But unlike other socialist economies, he didn’t build massive factories. Instead he villagized the economy and put family and solidarity into the center of attention. His policy showed success. Infant mortality dropped, life expectation rose, as did literacy. The Tanzanians called Nyerere The Father Of The Nation.

a man lugging two logs, an incidental cross. There is religious freedom in Tanzania. While Nyerere was a devout catholic, the language and culture of Swahili is muslim. Christians and Muslims live peacefully side by side in the villages.

But Ujamaa could not withstand the pressures of capitalism and neoliberalism. In 1985 Tanzania was still among the world’s poorest nations. Nyerere resigned and the chapter of Ujimaa
was forever closed.

On the beach. Also the proud Massai people, who have preserved their customs and dress codes for centuries, speak Swahili

Lately, it has been Safari tourism, nature and wildlife that brought Tanzania and its economy back into the game. Especially since the unrest in neighboring Kenya, hitherto a number one Safari Tourist destination, Tanzania has known an influx of upscale tourism. The secret is the social peace and stability that Kenya, which never unified its country under one language, lacks.

Tanzania’s current economic upswing is still owed to Ujamaa. Let’s hope it will continue – despite today’s different political and economic system. The current president of Tanzania, John Jospeh Magufuli, also has a nickname: The Bulldozer.

Fishermen in the Kilombero river. The people of Tanzania are still poor, but working hard on a brighter future.

October 20, 2018

South Africa: Come Back, Mama Africa

A dress with Miriam Makeba’s famous Drum cover at Neighbourgoods Market Johannesburg

Ten Years ago, on November 7th 2008, the South African Singer and human rights activist Miriam Makeba collapsed after a performance. She was immediately taken to a hospital, but died from cardiac arrest. Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, issued a statement, saying that the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation. She was the mother of our struggle.”

Nelson Mandela smiles on his Rainbow nation on a mural in central Johannesburg

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was a fearless emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system. She was a symbol of integrity and pan-Africanism, singing in any language from her own Xhosa to Swahili, from Portuguese to Yiddish. Her love songs and lullabies, party songs and calls for unity spoke of a joyful tenacity, of a will to survive: a deep cultural memory. She stood not only against South African apartheid, but for a worldwide movement against racism. She was Mama Africa.

In 1967, Miriam Makeba was also the first black woman to have a Top-ten world hit: Pata Pata. She had produced the song in the USA, as she was exiled from her native South Africa and her music banned. But in her heart South Africa lived on. “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”

Pata Pata is a Xhosa word, her native language, and means Touch, Touch. In the 1950ies, when Zenzile Miriam was young, an aspiring singer, it was a popular dance in the shebeens of Sophiatown.

Apartheid had just been installed in South Africa, but the Johannesburg suburb of Sophiatown was still spared segregation. Africans of all tribes lived door by door with Indians, Chinese, Jews, and Mulattos. Mansions and quaint cottages stood next to rusty wood-and-iron shacks ignoring race or class structures. There were gangs in Sophiatown, the Tsotsi – modelled themselves after the American Zootsuits, and Miriam was a gang member, too. She performed as a singer in the shebeens – illegal drinking dens.

Bhanzi, a dancer and performer from the Johannesburg township of Tembisa in Tsotsi style.

Music thrived in Sophiatown – giving birth to its own South African Jazz, Marabi, a mixture of American Bebop and African traditional grooves, with Hugh Masakela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Kippie Moeketsi and Dolly Rathebe starting their careers. Black intellectuals flocked to Sophiatown to talk, listen and dance to recordings of the newest jazz. And Drum Magazine, the only black magazine, covered this bubbling scene, with photographers Bob Gusani and Ernest Cole, and artist Gerard Sekoto.

Fra Stompie has been playing in the old days in Sophiatown, and does so again.

“For Africans it was the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, the home of writers, artists, doctors and lawyers. It was both bohemian and conventional, lively and sedate.” Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography. He too, a young lawyer, had come to Sophiatown. For music and political resistance went hand in hand in South Africa. That’s how Miriam and Nelson met.

In 1955, the governing National Party (NP), sent two thousand policemen armed with guns and rifles. Influential musicians, writers or activists were exiled or imprisoned, 60 000 inhabitants removed. Sophiatown was flattened by bulldozers.

Nowadays, long after the fall of Apartheid, and a cultural organization is trying to preserve the legacy and memory of the once vibrant suburb, and revive its grooves by organizing jazz workshops and concerts.

For her last concert, Miriam Makeba had come to Naples to participate in a charity held in solidarity with the writer Roberto Saviano, whom the Camorra threatened with death. Her last song was Pata Pata.

The real Pata Pata Dance

October 11, 2018October 11, 2018

Dubrovnik: For No Gold Freedom Shall Be Sold

The terracotta roofs of Dubrovnik, the Old Town surrounded by thick walls.

In 1416, as one of the first countries in history, the Republic of Dubrovnik banned slavery. The decision of the Grand Chamber stated that none of our nationals or foreigners, and everyone who considers himself or herself from Dubrovnik, can in any way or under any pretext buy or sell slaves or female servants, or be a mediator in such trade. Then they coined a slogan, Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro – For no gold can Freedom be sold – and literally wrote it on their banners, or at least its abbreviation: Libertas – Freedom became the flag of the republic of Ragusa.

Freedom loving citizens of Dubrovnik. Slaves were 80% female, kept for domestic work or sexual pleasure.

Ragusa, as Dubrovnik was then called, was founded in the 7th century, when invading barbarians wiped out the Roman city Epidaurum, and the surviving inhabitants took refuge on a rocky islet. The islet was naturally hard to access, nevertheless they built a protective wall around it, for those were turbulent times. The Eastern Adriatic was a battle ground for the superpowers: the Serenissima Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire as the remaining Roman Empire, the Ottomans, and finally all got spiced up with the arrival of the Slavs – not to mention the pirates that haunted the Adriatic sea. Yet, Ragusa, the rocky islet, fared well.

It teamed up with the neighboring Croat settlement called oak forest, or Dubrovnik, and the city-state prospered. It was not warfare, however, but the city-state’s extraordinary gift for deal-making, for trading and money-making, that ensured safety and wealth for everybody. Soon the city-state turned its precarious location as a borderland into an asset, by trading goods with all the surrounding powers, who granted Dubrovnik free trading rights. Spices, copper, textiles and of course slaves passed through the city and Dubrovnik flourished. All the city-state had to do in exchange, was accept sovereignty. And so they did.

In the run of the centuries they became part of the Byzantine empire, the Serenissima Republic of Venice, of Hungary, of Hungary-Croatia, of the Ottoman Empire, of France, Austria, Yugoslavia and finally Croatia. All the while the citizens lived in peace and did what they did best: they made money.

It was in 1416, after their sovereign Venice had been defeated by Hungary and had to pass on the complete Dalmatian coast, and Dubrovnik searched to be integrated into the Ottoman Empire – for trading rights in the Orient – that slavery turned out to be a problem.

Marin Drziz – the Renaissance poet and writer. Tourists like to rub his nose.

In the middle ages, both Christians and Muslims happily engaged in slavery as long as their slaves would not adhere to the same religion. Accordingly it was a perfectly fine for Christians to keep Muslim or pagan slave. Or for Muslims to keep Christian, or a pagan slave. In fact, slaves were so frequently stolen or bought from the Slavic tribes of the Balkan hinterland that the word slave derives from the word Slavic, and not the Latin word servus. Being Christian under Muslim rule, the city-sate first had to make sure that its citizens would not get enslaved by their new sovereign. So they came up with a genial solution. They simply banned slavery.

The corniche of Dubrovnik and the azure Adriatic sea.

The following years were of unequaled growth and wealth for Dubrovnik. Trade provided safety for everybody, from aristocrats to lower social classes benefited. And in safety, the arts bloomed, operas were composed, and poems, by men and women alike. Those were the heydays of literature and science in Dubrovnik. For Freedom for everyone meant freedom for the mind – and the religions: also the Jewish community thrived. And last but not least, Dubrovnik built fabulous ships from oak wood, galleons called Karaka in Dubrovnik or Argusy abroad, which sailed not only the Adriatic Sea, but the oceans. Dubrovnik famously delivered their goods to London, and much later they crossed the Atlantic and sailed to New York. For Dubrovnik was among the first nations to recognize the independence of the United States of America.

Nowadays it’s Americans that travel to Dubrovnik by the millions and swarm in the old town. But it’s not a courteous return visit, nor Dubrovnik’s breathtaking history that attracts them.

The gate to the Old Town is clogged with tourists.

It’s Game of Thrones, the popular TV series, which used Dubrovnik as a setting for its fantasy plot. And of course, the citizens of Dubrovnik, shrewd business people as they have always been, won’t pass out on a deal: Practically every room in the city seems to be a hotel, a BnB or Airbnb. The streets are thronged with Game of Throne-tours of local TV savvies. The tables in the restaurants and cafés are taken to the last corner. Every summer, Dubrovnik bursts at the seams. Could it be that after two thousand years of navigating proudly through changing times and powers, the people of Dubrovnik have finally sold out?

July 29, 2018July 30, 2018

Vienna: Salt and Pepper

The Saliera, the only work of art undoubtedly attributed to the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini

In 1544, the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini sculptured an intricate little salt table, saliera in Italian, which, for different reasons, went on to become one of Vienna’s most famous works of art. The Saliera is insured for the breathtaking sum of 60 million Euros. And good that it is…

Created for Charles I of France, the Saliera is a virtuoso piece in the then fashionable style of Mannerism. While in Renaissance art natural beauty, symmetry and balance were enhanced, Mannerism exaggerated these qualities to an extent that artworks appeared asymmetric, artificial. Mannerism addressed intellect rather than emotion – complex and sophisticated, with style and technique outweighing beauty and – meaning. A characteristic that some might find quite suitable to Viennese etiquette and manners…

Made of ivory, gold and enamel, the Saliera depicts a man and a woman: an allegory to the Sea and the Earth. A small vessel next to the man holds salt, a temple-shaped box next to the female figure pepper. On its base it even has a set of roles, for convenience at dinner parties and banquets – or for pure appreciation.

Charles son, Charles II, gave the Saliera to the Habsburgers as a present to Ferdinand II of Tyrol, when the former married Elisabeth of Austria. The Habsburg emporers and archdukes were avid collectors of exotic and uncommon materials, like precious stones, ostrich eggs, shark teeth and their likes – many of which were believed to hold magic powers – and were turned into works of art by chosen artists.

The Vanitas Group – An Allegory of Transcience is another famous oeuvre at display at the Kunstkammer. Sculptured in Medival Ages by (most likely) Michel Erhart, it contrasts the chaste beauty of Youth with the frivolity of age. The world was in the tight grip of catholic chastity back then…

The Kunstkammern – arts and natural wonders rooms – were collections that attempted to represent the erudition of their time. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna was completed in the 19th century, the Saliera was transferred to Vienna, and has been at public display, well protected, since the Museum was opened in 1891. The Kunstkammer at KHM, Vienna, is still considered the most important of its kind in the world.

The Saliera sat idly among other spectacular, delicate or bizarre statuettes, clocks or automatons – until 15th years ago, on May 11th 2003, when during a renovation the museum covered by a scaffolding, the salt dish was stolen. No alarms went off, the Saliera was simply gone.

The KHM – Kunsthistorisches Musem – Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna – after renovation and without scaffolding.

The museum offered a reward of one million Euros for its recovery. Without success. It was in January 2006 only that the Saliera was discovered, buried in a forest 90km North of Vienna. The thief – one by occasion rather than training – had turned himself in. He had been caught by surveillance cameras and recognized by his friends.

Ever since then, the Saliera is the most popular piece of art in Vienna.

The Saliera advertised on Banners in Vienna.

August 24, 2017February 9, 2021

Travnik: I Live to Love You

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.

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.

August 8, 2017August 8, 2017

The Alps/Les Hautes Alpes: My Heart Leaps Up

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.

May 1, 2017June 12, 2017

PARIS: La Petite Mort at Père Lachaise

Victor Noir was a hero. A journalist writing for “Le Marsaillaise”, a newspaper critical of the reign of Napoleon III, he dueled with “Le Prince Imperial” Bonaparte. The prince, loyal to Napoleon III, had insulted the journalists of another magazine, with whom young Victor, only 22, felt solidary.

At 14:00 on January 10th 1870, a single shot was fired.

Victor Noir collapsed, dead.

History avenged Victor. While Le Prince Imperial Bonaparte perished seven years later in the Zulu wars in far-away South Africa, Victor’s burial at the Père Lachaise cemetery was attended by 100,000 people. His tombstone, sculpted by master Jules Dalou, is a bronze replica of Victor’s dead body as it lies stretched out peacefully: his high hat next to him, a pink dahlia in his hand, his crotch bulging in the manner of a true hero.

Victor Noir quickly turned into a sex symbol, a posthumous Casanova. Women who kiss his bronze lips, or rub his crotch, nose or feet will have their sex life spiced up, or so the lore goes. And it shows – in the past 140 years, his bronze crotch, nose and feet have been polished shiny – to the extent that in 2004 his grave was fenced off to prevent further damage. One is left to wonder: is the sex-life of Parisians so depressing that they have to take to rubbing or even straddling a bronze statue, or is it extra exciting because they are doing exactly that?

The fence has been taken down in the meantime – supposedly following protests of the female half of the population of Paris. Nothing should stand in the way to a blissful sex life!

“What if all this is not true, but every time someone rubs his crotch, Victor has an orgasm?” K says to me as we pay our respect at his grave.

“Then he went to heaven.” I say, rubbing his crotch, just to be on the safe side.

Victor, the grand hero, has died La Petite Mort.

La Petite Mort, the little death, was a term used to describe the brief state of loss of consciousness before the word orgasm was invented. There is however another bronze sculpture at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, which eternalizes the passed-away not in a state of peaceful sleep, but in this moment between joy and pain, where feelings are so intense that time is suspended: eternity.

The cemetery of Père Lachaise was opened on 21 May 1804 under Napoleon I and under the premise that “every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion”. And so, in this vast cemetery, where the graves of so many celebrities are found, there are little innocent angels next to Victor Noir, and fallen soldiers, and grieving virgins and mothers, and even a chair.

There is a heaven for all of us.