travelphotography – wanderwarbler

October 1, 2018October 10, 2018

Montenegro: The Price of Salt

When by September the last tourists have left and the little Adriatic republic of Montenegro has fallen into peaceful slumber again, another kind of yearly visitor arrives. Thousands of migrating birds on their way to the African sun stop-over at the country’s lakes and rocky shores, but most importantly at the Ulcinj Saltpans, a lagoon at Montenegro’s Southern tip, bordering Albania.

Salt pans are an ideal nesting and resting spot for birds. They offer a unique salty fauna, plus amphibians and reptiles, to their avian guests: a win-win situation for local economy and ecology; or, in other words: the ideal cohabitation of humans and birds. For without the pumps and machines, not enough salt water would reach the lagoon and therefore the bird habitat.

Samphire – the salty flower of the saltpans – has risen to fame since Jamie Oliver recently introduced it into his modern cuisine.

The Ulcinj salt pans, created in 1934 for salt production, have since attracted millions of birds. Today, however the pumps stand still. The dried pans are left in dire need to be flooded with sea water, but the machines and salt-factories dilapidated and forgotten, a but a surreal setting for the flamingos, the Dalmatian Pelicans, spoonbills and many other waders – whose future is as uncertain as that of the salt factory.

Problems began when the salt pans were sold to a private company with the permission to turn the land into a hotel and golf resort. However, following protests by wildlife NGOs, the young state of Montenegro declared the saltpans an environmentally protected area in 2012, thereby thwarting any hotel plans. As a result, the private owner declared bankruptcy in 2013, stopped salt production, and sued the young Republic of Montenegro for breach of contract. A coincidence or probably not, the saltpans have also fallen prey to various acts of vandalism, pumps and flamingo nests were destroyed, water ways clogged.

While the situation still seems unclear today, as bankruptcy proceedings are apparently not settled, the saltpans have been turned into an open-air museum for birding tourists in 2014 – with three hides and educational signs at the path surrounding the pan. Not unlike the factories, though, the signs stand forgotten and bleached by the Mediterranean sun.

But there is hope. Nature and birds are resilient, and despite their run down state, the pans dazzle the visitor’s eyes with a sparkling display of colors and birds. Within the past years, awareness among the locals has risen, and with the support of various NGOs, efforts have taken place to reinstall salt production.

The price of salt doesn’t seem so high in Montenegro. For salt comes with the birds, which makes it all the more worth it.

March 23, 2018March 23, 2018

Namibia: Two Leaves, Cannot Die

In 1859, the Austrian physician and passionate botanic Friedrich Welwitsch travelled to the then Portuguese colony Angola, where he came across a large, marvelous plant he had never seen before. He was amazed.

“I could do nothing but kneel down and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination,” he wrote to Joseph Dalton Hooker of the Botanic Garden in Kew, England, in a letter accompanying a specimen. Hooker, upon seeing the plant, said the following:

“It is undoubtedly the most wonderful plant ever brought to this country, and one of the ugliest.”

And, since he was in a position to name things, he named it after its discoverer: Welwetschia Mirabilis.

For all we know, the Welwetschia itself could not care less about any names. Before Hooker, the locals called it n’tumbo, just “stump”. The Hereros in neighboring Namibia called it onyanga, “the desert onion”, then baked and ate it. So Weletschia Mirabilis is not the worst of all names. In Afrikaans the plant is called Tweeblaarkanniedood, which is the least inspired but most descriptive name of all: Two leaves, cannot die. For a Welwetschia really grows only two leaves, and lives up to 2000 years. From a human point of view, it is practically immortal.

Welwetschias were around 65 million years ago already. They survived ice age. They outlived fires and pests, they watched insects come and go, and viruses, parasites, animals, humans, roads and wars. If you ever come across a Welwetschia, honor the moment. You are looking into eternity.

A male Welwetschia somewhere in Damaraland, Namibia

Other than the rare specimen sent to England, the Welwetschia is endemic to Angola and Namibia, to most arid land. Welwetschias make ends meet with as little water as possible by sprouting deep taproots into the sand below. They grow slowly, with both leaves pushing out like dark green tentacles up to four meters long, their ends curled up and frizzled out. Like human hair, uncut and uncombed. Indeed, the Welwetschia Mirabilis is not a beauty. It is, however, a tree. Its very short trunk also likes to split into several lobes, which makes the Welwetschia look like flotsam, a giant starfish stranded on the beach. Only the beach is not a beach, but the dry Namib desert.

Like humans, Welwetschias are dioecious, with separate male and female plants. Fertilization is up to insects, flies and bugs. But the real specialist in Welwetschia Sex Life is the Odontopus sexpunctatus. Nomen es omen, you might think, but the bug was really named for the six dots on its back. (Not by Hooker, though).

Dandago, a Damara, showed me his homeland.

Dandago led me through his native land, Damaraland in North Western Namibia. The Damara people has lived in the Namib desert for thousands of years, long before the Hereros, the Portuguese, or the Germans came. They call the Welwetschia Nyanka. But don’t even try to say that loud. The language of the Damaras knows four different click sounds – unpronounceable for anyone not born a Damara – twisting the tongue like Welwetschia leaves.

Damaraland is of captivating beauty. A vast, ragged land, where wild animals like elephants, giraffes, rhinos and zebras still roam freely. It hasn’t rained in four years, however, and the animals, and the Damaras themselves face hard living conditions. The Welwetschias will live on. For unlike us humans, they cannot die.

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.