Category: travel writing

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Prague: Deeply Lost In The Night

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.

(Night by Franz Kafka)

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Vienna: Go Gay


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.

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Cappadocia: Sunrise, Fairies and the Gods Of The Underworld

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.

Mashalla for the Gods of the Underworld.

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Crossing the Bosphorus

Istanbul straddles two continents. The city is divided by the Strait of Bosphorus, which connects the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, but separates Europe from Asia. The Istanbulites have built three bridges from stone, and many more through their music and poetry.

I woke up one morning.
The sun came up in me.
I turned into birds and leaves
which glittered in the springtime breeze.
I turned into birds and leaves.
My arms and legs were rioting.
I turned into birds and leaves,
birds
and leaves.

For migratory birds, the Bosphorus is the most important route on their way to their Northern breeding grounds. An estimated million of birds cross the Bosphorus annually. Big-winged soaring birds, like storks and predatory birds, depending on thermal convection and therefore avoiding sea crossings, have turned the city into a birding hot spot, benefiting from Turkey’s scenery of high mountains, marshlands and and humid forests. Camlika Hill, a favorite birding view point on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, was during the Ottoman empire a training ground for birds of prey, like falcons and hawks.

I listen to Istanbul, my eyes closed:
Now the birds are passing
In high clamoring flocks,
Nets are pulled in at the fisheries,
A woman’s feet graze the water;
I listen to Istanbul, my eyes closed.


Migration starts with a promise to return. Yet, many birds do not survive the trip to the distant shores. Feeding grounds are dwindling. And many more dangers lurk on their way: The stork was deemed holy by the Ancient Greeks – who punished the killing of a stork with death penalty – and the followers of Islam – they likened its migration to their pilgrimage to Mecca. It is considered a delicacy in Egypt, where it is trapped with nets and limesticks, and killed by the thousands. Little migratory songbirds, who feature on Mediterranean menus as pulenta a osei (Polenta with little birds) in Italy or ambelopoulia in Malta, are illegally trapped and hunted all over the Mediterranean.
  Formerly common birds are on the verge of extinction.

When you’re travelling,
the stars speak to you.
What they say
is often sad.

The Wander Warbler in Istanbul – photo by Karen Smit; poems by Orhan Veli Kanik
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Hüzün: The Melancholy of Istanbul

When Orhan Pamuk, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, remembers his childhood in Istanbul, he speaks of steamed up windows that veil the world in a mystical haze. Rather than facing his troubles and realities, he, like his fellow Istanbulites, liked to wrap himself in a softening, comforting mellowness, a melancholic, hazy state called hüzün.

The word hüzün has an Arabic root, huzn, which, according to the Koran, means the feeling of deep spiritual loss.  According to Sufi tradition, hüzün is the spiritual anguish one feels because they cannot be close enough to Allah in this world. It is therefore the absence of hüzün, which causes distress, not its presence. In Istanbul, to suffer from hüzün is an honor.


On cold winter mornings, Orhan Pamuk says, when the sun suddenly falls in the Bosphorus and that faint vapor begins to rise from the surface, the hüzün is so dense you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over its people and its landscapes. Hüzün is not the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together, of an entire city: Istanbul.

The traces of Istanbul’s glorious past are visible everywhere. The people of Istanbul carry on with their lives among these ruins – in a city so poor and confused, it can’t even dream of its former wealth, power, and culture. Hüzün rises out of the pain they feel for everything that has been lost, yet it gives their resignation an air of dignity.

For Hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and losses, but their principal cause. It’s not paralyzing, but it gives poetic license to be paralyzed. Defeat and poverty are not a historical end point, but a honorable beginning, fixed long ago before they were born.

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PARIS: Grandes Horizontales


Nineteenth-century Paris is famous for its Bohemia and its highly formalized system of prostitution. The demimonde, or half-world, was a world of luxury, hedonism and moral freedom. The term was coined by Alexandre Dumas fils, author of “La Dame aux Camélias,” a novel based on the life of his lover, the courtesan Marie Duplessis, which later inspired Verdi to his opera “La Traviata.”

Courtesans were socially, financially and most importantly sexually talented women, who entertained aristocrats, artists, and writers such as Dumas, Zola or Baudelaire, charging for their services. In post-revolutionary France, it was not considered despicable for a man to use the services of prostitutes. On the contrary, to keep a woman was a status-symbol, the more she paraded her fancy dresses and extravagant jewelry, exhibited her pompous house, the better: She was displaying her benefactor’s financial and sexual powers. Courtesans hence lived lavish life styles, they were socialites and trend setters with daring fashion and hairstyles.

Their opulent creativity and theatrical self-enactment inspired artists and writers. Courtisan Cora Pearl had herself served up on a silver platter, decorated only with parsley, or played cupid in Offenbach’s operetta Orphée aux enfers dressed in nothing but strategically placed diamonds. More restrained Apollonie Sabatier’s hosted a salon for Bohemian intellectuals, frequented by the likes of Charles Baudelaire, whom she inspired to write “Les Fleurs du Mal”, or sculptor Auguste Clésinger, who eternalized her in the throes of orgasm as the “Femme Piquée par un serpent”, at full frontal display at the Musée d’Orsay.

The courtesan at full frontal display at Musee d’Orsay

Called the Grandes Horizontales, courtesans offered conversation, beauty and status, but it was essentially sex they were selling. As were those many less fortunate women, whose sexual talents did not get them into the novels or paintings of the Second Empire.

The Lorettes were poor women, kept by one or more benefactors, who lived around the parish of Notre-Dame-De-La-Lorette. As the stereotype went, prostitutes were devout church-goers, probably to repent for their shameful lifestyle: They were also believed to be lazy and self-indulgent. Lorettes were mostly fallen women:  of a wealthy background but fallen into disgrace, or separated women. While it was easy to fall into the démi-monde, it was impossible to ever get out.

The Grisettes were even less fortunate. They did not have enough benefactors and had to pursue a side job, notoriously as seamstresses. Gris – French for grey – alluded to the cheap fabric of their dull dresses.

Cocottes, also called biches (dogs) or chaumeaux (camels) were considered more substantial, means more expensive, than the Grisettes, yet did not have the flamboyant status of the courtesans.

It was the courtesans privilege to choose her benefactor, which she did by setting her price according to the man’s wealth.

The career of a courtesan was for many – if not all – women the only access to education and an autonomous, independent life. But, unlike their benefactors, they were not respected, not even in the enlightened society of the Second Empire. Despite their allure, courtesans were considered decadent, conspicuous and scandalous. Once their beauty faded, they ended up in misery and poverty.

THey were forever exiled to the Demi-monde.

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PARIS: Grotesque

 

When Victor Hugo wrote the Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1830, he did so with the purpose of reminding his contemporaries of the importance of preserving Gothic Architecture.


 

“Notre-Dame de Paris”, the Gothic cathedral on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, was the novel’s real main protagonist. After the French Revolution of 1791 much of the cathedral’s religious imagery was damaged or destroyed.

 
Built around 1200, the cathedral featured on its façade a myriad of grotesques, of chimeas and gargouilles: monsters, creatures of hellish phantasies that, not unlike a comic strip, served to educate the illiterate population, illustrate the creatures of the Bible and of folkloristic lore, and instill fear of God and the Devil.

 
“The book will kill the building!” The arrival of the printing press and the aera of Enlightment however rendered the grotesques superfluous. Writers, Hugo complained, drove architects into oblivion. He believed that buildings were like books, recordings of history – until the arrival of the printing press. The foremost ideas of every generation would no longer be written on the same material. The stone book, so solid and lasting, would give way to the paper book.


 

Ironically, his novel, thanks to the printing press, became a bestseller. Doubly ironically, its popularity led to a revival of Gothic architecture. Renovations at Notre-Dame were undertaken, to which the cathedral’s current appearance is owed.

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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.

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Sarajevo Roses

25 years ago, on April 5th 1992, 24 year old Suada Dilberovic, a Muslim student at the faculty of Medicine, participated in a peace rally in Sarajevo. Up to 100 000 people of all Yugoslavian ethnic groups had gathered for this march, held in response to repeated attacks of Serbian paramilitary groups on multi-ethnical Bosnia and Hercegovina. As the marchers crossed the bridge over the Miljacka river, they were ambushed by Serbian snipers. Suada and her 34-year old catholic compatriot Olga Sucic were shot and killed: the first casualties of the siege of Sarajevo.

By the end of April 1992, the Serbian Army had encircled Sarajevo, positioning their tanks on the mountain tops surrounding the city, where a mere eight years before the Olympic winter games had been held. The Olympic bob sleighs and the ski jumping hills turned into killing fields from where mortars and artillery were fired. Machine guns aimed at bedroom windows and at the living rooms of the city below.

13,954 people died. The siege only ended on February 29 1996, a mere forty years after the horrors of WWII and the holocaust, and the world said: “Never again!” again.

25 years after the siege of Sarajevo, the scars are still visible. Some shrapnel grates were not repaired, but colored red, as a reminder, a memorial, a warning of what nationalism, war and hate do to people. They are called “Sarajevo roses”.

Visiting Sarajevo is not a fun holiday in the sun. It is an encounter with history and culture, impressive, thought-arousing, and captivating. Visiting Sarajevo means learning of history and human nature. And of the human capacity to overcome and reconcile: In 2007, Suada was awarded a posthumous Doctor of Medicine by the University of Sarajevo.

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Sarajevo Blues: So beautiful it hurts

 

Sarajevo is a scarred city.  There are craters from mortar attacks in the streets, and bullet holes in the facades of residential buildings. There are cemeteries at every corner it seems, most are Muslim, some Jewish, some are Orthodox, some Catholic, for faith could not stop bullets, neither during the Siege of Sarajevo 1992-1994, nor during WWII, nor WWI, which began in Sarajevo in 1914.

Sevdah is the traditional music of Bosnia, stemming from the time of the Ottoman Empire. The name Sevdah comes from the Arab word for melancholy, Sawda: Sad poems telling stories of love forbidden or lost, of grief and loss, of heart ache and pain, traditionally sung by women in the Arabic modal systems of Hijaz, as are the muezzin’s calls for prayers.

“Sevdah will be sung after any war,” Zaim Imamovic said, before he died in 1994 at the age of 74. He was to Sevdah music what Carlos Gardel is to Tango. Everybody in Sarajevo knows the words of the Sevdalinkas, the songs, and they cry as they sing, as they dance.