photography – wanderwarbler

December 27, 2018January 28, 2019

Austria: Chronicle Of A Death Foretold

As of today it’s official: The Austrian Roller is extinct. According to the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, there are no breeding couples of European Rollers in areas they thrived in only a few decades ago. The death of a species doesn’t come unannounced. For years, NGOs and even the EU have warned of the imminent loss of the strikingly beautiful bird. In vain.

Coracias garrullus was a gregarious bird, as its name suggest, and flamboyantly colored, its turquoise feathers glittering like emeralds. Together with its close relatives, the bee-eater and the kingfisher, it was one of the few birds that brightened up the otherwise monochrome Austrian bird world. The vibrant group’s evolution can be traced back to the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. Yet it took only thirty years to wipe them from their traditional breeding grounds in Eastern Austria.

European Rollers are loyal to their homes. They return from their South African wintering grounds with unbelievable exactitude – a field, a bush, or a tree the monogamous bird and their mating partner will defend as their territory. If they come back, that is, for this year only non-breeders made their way home.

Fallow grassland in Hungary, where rollers still are abundant.

The bird’s patriotism has not been reciprocated by Austria. Intensive agriculture has eaten away their habitat – there are hardly any shrubs left, bushes or fallow grasslands the rollers need as hunting grounds. Dramatic drop in insect population due to wide spread use of pesticides and the fierce weather condition of the past five to ten years has further reduced chances of survival for the young. Finally, add illegal bird hunting in the Mediterranean – their migration route – to the equation. Life was in deed tough on Rollers.

A lonely kingfisher – the last one of its kind in Vienna…

Despite their challenges, Austrian Rollers stayed picky when it came to mating. They didn’t mingle. DNA research suggests that Austrians never even interbred with their next cousins in neighboring Hungary. But as Austrians they should have known better. The history of Austria and Habsburg Empire has proved: incest leads to decreased adaptability and ultimately extinction. The Austrian royal family practically eliminated themselves by means of genetic deficiency.

Sadly, the current Austrian government not only denies a nation’s need for diversity, but climate change as a whole. European Rollers won’t be the last species we will loose.

To be fair, it is not only in Austria that European Rollers have gone extinct. The birds no longer breed in Scandinavia, Russia and Germany. While their numbers are declining in North Eastern Europe, in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria they are still very common, in countries like Italy or France even increasing – due to conservation efforts like the installation of nest boxes or collaborative programs with farmers.

In Eastern Austria. Rollers and farmers aren’t nemesis. The former actually needs the latter as farmers dig up the beetles for them. It’s industrialized agriculture and the use of pesticides that’s the problem.

In 2015, Birdlife Austria issued a statement demanding immediate action. Rollers, as well as the buntings and shrikes, are under imminent threat of extinction. The NGO pointed towards € 40million that were provided by the EU for Austrian conservation programs but were never put to action. No single politician found the strength to stand up against agricultural lobbies in Austria. The reasons for this lack of political will or courage lie in the conservative make up of Austrian society. Agriculture symbolizes traditional values that, especially in the rural communities, still go unchallenged in Austria.

The red-backed shrike, once common, is also near extinct in Austria.

In 2013, the Albertina, one of Vienna’s most prestigious museums, lent Albrecht Dürer’s highly acclaimed water color Wing of A European Roller to the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It is one of the major nature studies in Art History.

In 2012, Birdlife International called for political action as there are only six breeding pairs of Rollers in Austria left.

In 2010, because the bird was so beautiful and oh so rare – only breeding in one little community in Burgenland, Eastern Austria – the Republic issued a stamp celebrating the bird.

In 2008, the European Union issued the Species Action Plan with the goal to restore the European population of rollers to a favorable conservation status.

In 2005, Birdlife international changed the status of European Rollers from LC – least concern – to NT: near threatened.

In 1520, Albrecht Dürer painted the Wing Of A European Roller. The bird is abundant in Europe and the painter mesmerized by its beauty.

Epilogue:

Please visit the Albertina in 2019, when from September on, the Wing Of A European Roller will be back to Vienna and on display in a special exhibition about Albrecht Dürer’s nature studies. Can’t say Austria doesn’t value its treasures. It practically excels in the art of preservation.

https://www.albertina.at/ausstellungen/albrecht-duerer/

Epilogue 2:

The reason why the wanderwarbler is quite enraged by the extinction of the roller is not only but also that contrary to what the name suggests, the bird in the logo is actually a European Roller.

December 21, 2017December 21, 2017

Rome: The Best Of Days

The Forum Romanum. The Saturn Temple at the base of the Capitol Hill

When days were shortest and darkest, the Roman poet Catulla found them the best of days. For a week in the end of December, the law courts closed in Rome, and the schools. No business could be transacted and to commence a war was regarded impious. People offered little presents, mostly wax figurines, to the children and the poor, and decorated their homes with greeneries and lights.

The streets of Rome were governed by a general spirit of merriness. Public gambling was allowed, and foolish tricks were played. People dressed in loose, colorful gowns instead of their white togas, and wore cone shaped hats. All of them! Slaves, freedmen, citizens suddenly were indistinguishable. “Io, Saturnalia!” The crowds exclaimed.

From December 17 to 24, the Saturnalia, the festivities to honor the God Saturn, were held in ancient Rome. Saturn had reigned the worlds in the Golden Age, when humans still enjoyed the earth’s bounty without having to work for it. Therefore Saturn was considered the God of agriculture and the Saturnalia were celebrated as a kind of harvest-home; by December the hard work in the fields was completed and people brought evergreens and lights into their homes.

Citizens, freedmen, slaves were indistinguishable for the week of the Saturnalia.

That the Saturnalia were held at the time of the winter solstice was not a coincidence: Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, was returning to enlighten humankind again. The migratory aspect of the sun’s trajectory and the seasons was reflected in much older myths that had Saturn down as an immigrant from Greece. As can be learned from the writings of Ovid and Virgil, Saturn was dispelled by his own father, Jupiter, an expulsion that ended the Golden Age and left humans waiting for Saturn’s return.

Until then, the Saturnalia brought a short comic relief. Social roles were reversed. In fact, slaves were not only exempted from their chores and toils, but were served by their masters, granted freedom for a week.

The Colosseum in Rome, where gladiators fought for their lives – as a sacrifice to Saturn. Wealth, Ops, only followed Lua, destruction.

While the Romans considered Saturn a liberator who brought with him wealth and peace, they also recognized his ambiguity. He was two-faced. Saturn’s wife, Ops, incorporated abundance and resources – but he also had a first wife, Lua, the goddess of destruction. It was for her that in the beginning of times, human sacrifice was offered during the Saturnalia, in form of dead gladiators. It took a hero, a shining light, to come along and end this inhuman rite, it is told. This savior was, of course, Hercules.

Hercules, the savior, through the eyes of a Pope (bronze statue at Vatican Museum.)

October 28, 2017October 29, 2017

Rome On Ecstasy

This month 500 years ago, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther published his 95 theses and thereby started the Protestant Reformation. He called for purification of the church, who in the run of the centuries had turned into a self-serving system of greed, nepotism and decadence. Christians should have faith in God and the Bible alone, Luther declared, and not in the army of angels and Saints, nor “immaculate” Mother Mary and least of all the Pope.

An angel fighting off vice – or killing a Protestant. Interior Chiesa San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome

The Catholic Church stroke back: in arms (the bloodthirsty Thirty Year War broke loose) and arts. In a meticulously planned propaganda campaign (conspired at the Council of Trent 1543-63) they called for artists to flock to the eternal city and create buildings, paintings and sculptures that were so formidable and awe-inspiring they’d resurrect faith in Angels and Saints and Mother Mary, and most of all the Pope. But above all, they should instill fear of hell and punishment into an illiterate people. And so Baroque was born. Mesmerizing to this day.

Ceiling Fresco inside Villa Borghese, built around 1600 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an admirer, collector and protector of Caravaggio

The world’s biggest church was built, St. Peter’s Basilica, in honor of the first Pope. Michelango was bullied into adorning the ceiling with formidable depictions of God’s grandezza. Michelangelo grumbled – he was a sculptor, not a painter, after all – but gave in.

Caravaggio self portrait as decapitated Goliath. ( David and Goliath Vienna KHM)

By the end of the 16th century, the Church found another Michelangelo, whose realistic and detailed depictions of beheadings and other pains very much satisfied their need for intimidation. On the downside, the guy was unpredictable and prone to outbursts of violence. Worse, he was a murderer. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, but he went by the name of Caravaggio.

St. John the Baptist hugs a ram. Caravaggio 1602, at Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome

Caravaggio first rose to fame through extremely realistic depictions of delicious fruit baskets and boys. The Cardinals, whose predilection for youth was well known and documented (The insider account Il puttanismo Romano was published anonymously) went crazy for both the painter and his canvases. Caravaggio himself, however, was also leaning towards women. While he complied with the church’s demand to glorify Mother Mary, he did so by using full-busted, sensual courtesans as models, and not thin pale nuns. It was a problem with him – women in the Catholic Church of course had to be chaste. Raped, if anything, but not lascivious. Finally, they had him paint old men as dying Saints, paintings they could display in their chapels. The martyrs of St. Mathew and St. Peter were immediate block busters: The contrasts of light and dark, the depth of field, the intensity, the drama were breathtaking, and still are, 400 years later.

A busted Mother Mary steps on a snake – the model was a well known courtesan, the painting, despite commissioned by the Vatican, was finally not accepted.

The council of Trent had outlawed any worldly pleasure. Dances and carnivals were forbidden, books banned and priests were asked to spy on their parishioners. (Easy, they had to confess anyway.)

Art became a surrogate for bodily desires and should channel them into spirituality. Saints and martyrs were shown in the moment of rapture, in the throngs of ecstasy. Ex Stasis meant the experience of being taken outside of oneself, to where one catches a preview of heaven, the moment when one is united with the beloved, with God. A little Death, as it was later called. Or: orgasm.

The church enlisted architects to turn the city into the shape of a star and sculptors Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona to beautify it with sculptures, fountains and staricases.

Pope Innocent X commissioned Bernini, whose sculptures were ummatched in expression and elegance, to design the famous Fountain of the four Rivers at Piazza Navona. The four rivers represented Rome also a colonial world power. Innocent X himself went down in history for his greediness – and for his even greedier sister-in-law and lover Pimpaccia. Pimpaccia was said to pull the strings behind Innocent. Their residence, Palazzo Doria Pamhilj, by coincidence at the Piazza Navona, is a vestige of their insatiable greed.

Detail of Fountain 4 Fiumini at Piazza Navona, Rome

The fountain was of course constructed on public expense – during the great famine of 1646-48 – and not surprisingly it was not met with much enthusiasm by the starving people. Riots lay in the air. Under cover of the night, protesters stuck posters on the stone blocks, so called Pasquinades:
“We do not want obelisks and fountains. It is bread that we want. Bread, Bread, Bread!”
In a spirit of Christian compassion, Pope Innocent X had the protesters spied out and arrested.
The fountain was built, but Pope Innocent X met a terrible end. While he lay on his death bed in Palazzo Dori Pamphilj, Pimpaccia robbed all his money and fled the city. His agony lasted three days, three days of ecstasy for Innocent X, 200 years for Rome. Then, the era of Baroque was over.

Splendor and Passion: Bernini’s sculptures attract tourists from around the world. At Galleria Borghese

October 10, 2017

Rome: Watching the Sky

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.

September 8, 2017September 10, 2017

Vienna: Tu Felix Austria, Nube

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.

July 7, 2017July 12, 2017

Prague: Mother Tongue

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.”

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.”