I have already written that the iconography, that is, the system of representations of the Ethiopian church, living isolated at the edge of the Christian world, had evolved in a separate way, and developed many pictorial formulas that are apocryphal to other Christian churches.

Such as the prominent role of the seven archangels in the church frescoes. The Ethiopian monastery churches of Lake Tana are circular wooden constructions, with square-based stone sanctuaries inside. On each of the four sides of the sanctuary, a gate opens (or, more precisely, is closed to the ordinary believer), and on their double doors are painted a pair of archangels (and on the doors of the fourth gate, the seventh archangel and the Virgin Mary).




Who can name all seven archangels? Probably not many of us. In fact, the Bible mentions only two or three of them by name, depending on confession. Michael, who pushes down the rebellious angels with a fiery sword, and Gabriel, who forwards the divine message to the Virgin Mary with a white lily in hand, are known to everyone. And the Catholic Bible also includes the book of Tobit, which is not accepted in the Jewish and Protestant scriptures, since it was not known in a Hebrew original, only a Greek version was known. In this, a third archangel, Rafael, accompanies the young Tobiah from Nineveh to Media – to Ekbatana/Hamadan, a significant Jewish settlement at that time, the later funeral place of Queen Esther and Mordecai, to connect it also to today’s Purim celebration.

At the same time, apocryphal or not, this is the book which establishes that seven is the number of archangels. In its final part, the archangel reveals himself: “I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand in the glorious presence of the Lord, ready to serve him.” (Tob 12:15) The idea of the seven archangels – the lords of the seven planets – was taken over by the Jews from the surrounding peoples, especially from the Zoroastrian religion, where it first took shape, during the Assyrian-Babylonian captivity, when Tobias’ story also takes place. The Yezidi Kurds preserved from the same cultural milieu the cult of the seven archangels, for which they are now being massacred by the extremists of ISIS. This cult was also popular with local Christians in the first centuries, so much so, that the Council of Laodicea of 363 (Article 35) had to expressly prohibit the worship of the angels, and allow only their veneration. The Latin church limited this to the three archangels known by name, while the Orthodox church has preserved to this day the veneration of the seven archangels, celebrated on 8 November in a special feast called “the gathering of the archangels” (Σύναξη των Αρχαγγέλων), “the gathering of Archangel Michael” (Собор Архистратига Михаила), or “the gathering of the bodiless” (Σύναξη των Ασωμάτων). At this meeting, the seven archangels hold a council at the end of time, just before the last judgment.


Especially remarkable among the Ethiopian representations is the figure of Raphael, who always stabs a big fish with his spear. In the Book of Tobit, Raphael and Tobias wandering together catch a big fish from Tigris River, whose heart and liver are later used to expel the demon Asmodeus, and its gall to heal the blind eye of Tobit, the father of Tobias. We might think that the Ethiopian pictures of Raphael also show the fish of the Book of Tobit. It is peculiar, however, that we always see a small chapel beside the fish or on the fish’s back, with people praying inside. What’s that?


The answer is given by an Ethiopian source. The 14th-century Synaxarium Aethiopicum, the collection of the biographies of the Ethiopian saints, ordered by feasts, celebrates on 8 September the feast of Archangel Raphael, about whom it tells, amongst others, the following miraculous story. The Coptic Patriarch St. Theophilus (385-412)

“…built many churches, and among them was the church, which was on the island outside the city of Alexandria, and was dedicated in the name of the glorious Archangel Rufa’el (Raphael); and Abba Theophilus the Archbishop finished the building thereof and consecrated it as it were this day. And whilst the believers were praying in the church, behold the church trembled, and was rent asunder, and it moved about. And they found that the church had been built upon the back of a whale of the whales of the sea, on which a very large mass of sand had heaped itself. Now the whale lay firmly fixed in its place, and the treading of the feet of the people upon it cut it off from the mainland; and it was Satan who moved the whale so that he might throw down the church. And the believers and the archbishop cried out together, and made supplication to the Lord Christ, and they asked for the intercession of the glorious Archangel Rufa’el. And God, the Most High, sent the glorious angel Rufa’el, and he had mercy on the children of men, and he drove his spear into the whale, saying unto him, “By the commandment of God stand still, and move not thyself from thy place”; and the whale stood in his place and moved not. And many signs and wonders were made manifest, and great healings of sick folk took place in that church. And this church continued to exist until the time when the Muslims reigned [641], and then it was destroyed, and the whale moved, and the sea flowed back again and drowned many people who dwelt in that place.”

In this story, we can recognize two “Wandermotive”, traveling motifs. One is the big sea fish which is thought to be an island, but which, after a while, swims away or merges in the sea. Its best known example is read in the sea travels of the 6th-century Irish abbot St. Brendan, where the abbot and his companions moor at night on an island. However, when in the morning they read Mass, and then set fire, the island moves, and slowly swims away. The companions flee back in horror to the ship, where they hear from St. Brendan:

“God has last night revealed to me the mystery of all this; it was not an island you were upon, but a fish, the largest of all that swim in the ocean, which is ever trying to make its head and tail meet, but cannot succeed, because of its great length. Its name is Iasconius.”


The other traveling motif is the subjection of the great fish / water monster. This story often appeared in various creation stories in Mesopotamia, where the Book of Tobit was also written: the deity (Ninurta, Marduk, Hadad etc.) overcomes the great fish / snake / dragon living in the ancestral sea of chaos, and creates from it / builds upon it the world. This myth was also taken over by the Jews at the time of the Babylonian captivity, and although later they replaced it with the two creation stories now read at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, its traces were retained in the Bible. For example, in Job 40:25-32, where God reminds Job of His greatness with references to the former struggle: “Can you pull the Leviathan with a fishhook… will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life?” or in Psalm 74, which briefly summarizes the creation myth to illustrate God’s greatness:

“It was you who split open the sea by your power; you broke the heads of the monster in the waters. It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan, and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert. It was you who opened up springs and streams; you dried up the ever-flowing rivers. The day is yours, and yours also the night; you established the sun and moon. It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter.” (Psalm 74:13-17)


The Ethiopian legend of Raphael bears a great resemblance to this creation story. The archangel, at the command of God, stabs the great fish, so it serves as a solid foundation for the house of God. Is it possible that the Ethiopian tradition has retained something from the Jewish myth, in which, perhaps, the Archangel Raphael fulfilled the subjugation of the ancient water monster at His command, just as the rebellious angels were pushed out from heaven to the underworld by the Archangel Michael in His name?

This is justified by a motif that was unintentionally left in the Book of Tobit. Known as the “Tobias’ Dog Problem”, it has excited the fantasy of commentators at least since the age of confessional debates. It is about the dog that appears twice in brief mentions without any antecedents, and then disappears again in the Book of Tobit:

“So the son and the angel departed, and the dog went after them.” (Tob 6:2)

“They both arrived, and the dog went after them.” (Tob 11:4)



According to the analysis of Naomi S. S. Jacobs (What about the dog? Tobit’s mysterious canine revisited, 2014), the dog remained in the Book of Tobit from a more detailed folk narrative, written – as it is indicated by its Greek vernacular – as an entertaining and teaching Midrashic story. In the original narrative, it might have been the helper of Raphael who subjugated the great fish / water monster, just as in similar myths, the evil-chasing dog helps the deity overcoming the water monster / dragon. In the final version, it appears at the two key points of the fish story: before the catching of the great fish, and when Tobias and Raphael heal the blind Tobit with the fish gall.

It is thus conceivable, that this unique motif of Ethiopian iconography, Archangel Raphael stabbing the big fish and firmly founding the house of God on it, as well as the Book of Tobit, written in the 3th century BC in a Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora of Mesopotamia or Egypt, preserved the memory of the most ancient “third creation story” on these two edges of the Jewish and Christian religions, where the authority of the official Book of Genesis, redacted in Judea in the 6th century BC, had not yet completely pushed the original myth into oblivion.



In any case, the fish scene is well suited to the monasteries built on the islands of Lake Tana. The frescoes of the nearly two-dozen monastery churches willingly reach back to those biblical or apocryphal scenes, where the holy figures catch or eat fish, thus blessing and elevating up to a higher sphere the most important daily food of the islands’ inhabitants.

The adventures begin in Budapest. I arrive late at the airport, the Turkish check-in closed an hour before departure. I go up to the office of Turkish Airlines to buy a new ticket to Istanbul in the afternoon. “What is your final destination?” “Diyarbakır.” “What, Iraq?” the Hungarian clerk asks with trepidation. “No, Diyarbakır. Kurdistan.” The Turkish office manager, with a head like an egg, who nests in the depths of the office like a sleepy owl, pushes his head forward. From the front, it is also regular like an egg. “Diyarbakır is in Turkey, not in Kurdistan”, he says. And I had been gentle on him, since I could also have called it West Armenia.

It is due to this messy terminology that this post gets such a complicated title, and not a short fitting one like our previous minute-by-minutes, Ethiopia,Armenia,Iran,Odessa or the Berlin Wall.


Diyarbakır’s old town is encircled by a wall erected of huge basalt blocks, with four gates and several bastions, which here proved very necessary. The city was known by the Assyrians as Amida, as it also is by its shrinking modern Christian Assyrian population. This name was first read on the blade of an Assyrian sword, which the city, in spite of its walls, has thoroughly come to know. Its most famous siege is reported in detail by Ammianus Marcellinus, who himself was among the Roman defenders when, in 395 AD, the Persians occupied the city. Then, in 1895 and 1915, the state itself put the sword to its own citizens. The 70,000 Armenians living in and around Diyarbakır were completely massacred, and a few of the Christian Syriacs survived only because they rose up in armed confrontation with the Turkish army and Kurdish marauders. And one hundred years later, Kurdish rebels were bombed here by the Turkish army.

In the 1930s, the city began to demolish the walls and open the narrow streets of Diyarbakır to the world. However, after blasting and clearing some six hundred meters of the tough basalt blocks, fatigue set in, and they simply left it in that state. The area between the zigzag line of the bastions and the straight highway is today a park, where a large part of the inhabitants picnic throughout the day. To the south, around Mardin Gate, there is even a liquor store – a rarity here, in the conservative East –, where we buy some bottled beer and join them.



The center of the old town’s north-south main street is Hasan Paşa Hanı, the large caravanserai built in 1572. Everyone who moves around the city pops in here eventually, not spending all day sitting in front of his usual café. The lower level has an excellent Kurdish restaurant; the courtyard and the galleries have cafés, pastry, antique and jewellery shops. In front of one, we are greeted by a young salesman, Hüseyn. His shop has been in the same family for one and half century. They sell both antique pieces and works of modern silversmiths. Diyarbakır has been the center of Armenian and Syriac silver work for centuries, and today’s Kurdish masters carry on their traditions. Hüseyn also sprinkles out some antique coins from a silver box onto the display case. These have been found out in the land by peasants and nomads. Others will also report about such findings later. Their multitude indicates how lively the trade could have been on the frontier of the empire.


Hüseyn’s silver coin container is of Yezidi origin: a peacock angel is engraved on the bottom. The Yezidi Kurds – who have recently become widely known as one of the main targets of ISIS – live in and around North Iraq, including Southeastern Anatolia, and follow a late version of the Zoroastrian religion of Iran. They believe that God entrusted Melek Tawus, the Peacock Angel, the leader of the seven archangels, with the rule of the world. His figure is the supreme symbol of the Yezidi Kurds, and they carve it on their houses and graves, as we will see later.


Another bird from Hüseyn’s collection is the owl of Athens. Minerva’s sacred animal adorned the silver tetradrachma during the greatness of Athens for almost a hundred years, from the victory over the Persians at Plataia (479 BC) to the defeat by the Spartans (406 BC). The coin was a symbol of Athens’ wealth and influence, and the popular proverb γλαῦκ'εἰς Ἀθήνας, “to bring owls to Athens”, which has an English equivalent in “carrying coals to Newcastle”, suggesting that the bringer has brought something unneeded to a place where it is abundant. Because of its constant silver content and its long circulation period, the tetradrachma has become the most important international currency of antiquity, the ancient dollar. Whether this owl came here, to Amida, the heart of the then Persian empire, in a merchant’s, a mercenary’s or a spy’s clothes, we will never know.


I have already written that aşıks, Anatolian wandering singers were regular guests of the turn-of-the-century cafés in Istanbul. They’ve long since disappeared from Istanbul, but I have read that they can still be met in Eastern Anatolian cities. I ask Hüseyn about them, who directs us to the dengbêjs. The dengbêjs are the Kurdish equivalent of aşıks, wandering singers performing long epics, folk songs and their own compositions. They have regular performing evenings and competitions. In 2007, the Dengbêj House was established in Diyarbakır with EU support, where some well-known dengbêjs perform every afternoon, and they are listened to, recorded in video and interviewed by a knowledgeable audience. The scene in a traditional merchant’s house in the old town resembles a cellar club, with masters and spectators coming and going, chatting between two songs, sipping tea. As we, guests from the far West, enter, the masters are waving us by their side. Lloyd sits there to record better, but I’m staying at the door so I can make a video of them from the front.



The masters also practice in the courtyard. The old gentleman in the first video is also having tea here, he calls us, chats with us. Four days later we meet him in front of his main street clothing store. He warmly greets us and invites us for a tea.



To be continued

I have already written about the synagogue of Łańcut, the fantastic treasure trove of the Hasidic visual world. The most conspicuous motifs of the frescoes, completed in 1761, are the prominently placed lions, deer, griffins and bears, which also populate Hasidic cemeteries, and the bima with its scenes from the Scriptures, where the heads of the people are covered with foliage to prevent sacrilege, and the ceiling of the bima is adorned with the Leviathan.


But the whole decoration of the synagogue is an inexhaustible gold mine. Among other things, the frieze running at the height of the ledge depicts the twelve signs of the zodiac, like in many other Galician Hasidic synagogues, implying the continuity of Jewish festivities throughout the year. Here, in Łańcut, however, four alien animals mingle among the celestial figures on the entrance wall. If you do not recognize them at first sight, their labels will identify them: כנמרka-namer,“like the tiger”, וקל נשרve-kal ka-nesher “and light as the eagle”, רץ כצבrats ka-tsvi,“running like the deer”, וגבור כאריve gibbor ka-ari,“and hero like the lion”.





The four figures are repeated with the same labels in the small hall of the synagogue’s lobby, which was the workroom of the first and greatest rabbi of Łańcut, later Rabbi of Lublin, Jakub the Seer. Judging by its more recent, less Baroque, rather 19th-century style, the Rebbe may have painted these later, as a constant warning to himself.


The four figures and the text of their labels refer to a moral maxim well-known in Talmudic education. Its source is the Mishnaic book Pirkei Avot,“Teaching of the Fathers” (5:20), which attributes it to Judah ben Tema, belonging to the tannaim, the great 1st to 2nd-century rabbis. The saying goes like this: הוי עז כנמר, וקל כנשר, ורץ כצבי, וגבור כארי לעשות רצון אביך שבשמים“Be bold as the tiger, light as the eagle, run like the deer, and be strong as the lion, to do the will of your Heavenly Father.”


What better could we wish for for the year of 5780, set to begin tonight? Shana tova.

The Повѣсть времѧньныхъ лѣтъ,“Chronicle of Bygone Times”, composed in Kiev in 1113, in which its author, the monk Nestor, summarizes the history of the Eastern Slavs from the Tower of Babel to his own time, states that the apostle Andrew, during his missionary journeys, also visited the Eastern Slavs, from the later Kiev to the later Novgorod. Here he saw, among many other miracles, that pecular institution of the Slavs, the bath.

“Wondrous to relate, what I saw in the land of the Slavs. … I noticed their wooden bathhouses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, they take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually inflict such voluntary torture on themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment.”

The art of Slavic self-torture has not changed much since Saint Andrew, or at least Nestor. In the hot chamber of the bath, water is poured on the heated stones, and in the intense steam they lash themselves with veniks, thin branches cut from birch, oak, or, more recently, eucalyptus tree, to stimulate blood circulation. When they sweat well, they bathe in cold water – in a lake, river or in the cold chamber of the bath – or roll in the snow. Then they take a break until the next sweat-lashing, spent over tea, beer, conversation or chess. The traditional bath is one of the most important scenes of Russian social life.




However, the palaces for this traditional art have largely disappeared during the past century. On the one hand, the Soviet system tried to restrict these centers of uncontrolled social life, and on the other, they were replaced by the bathrooms that had appeared in most apartments. In Odessa, where at the turn of the 20th century there were more than 400 community baths, now there is but one traditional bath still active, and since 1861: Bath Number Four at the edge of Moldavanka, at 6 Astashkin Street.




At the end of a courtyard overgrown with grapes, beneath the stairs leading up to the bath, young men are standing and chatting. “Shalom”, they greet us: apparently, foreigners here automatically means a former compatriot coming back from Israel. We reply in Russian, and social life immediately starts. They draw our attention to the black marble plaque on the courtyard wall. This commemorates “Karabas”, the local mafia boss shot in 1997 here, “on the stairs, as he was coming down from the bath”, they point out. “He was like Mishka Yaponchik”, they say with reverence, although they were not personally directed by him, they only heard of him from their older colleagues. Mishka Yaponchik, the Jewish gangster boss of the early 20th century, who was the model for Isaak Babel’s Benya Krik, the “King” of Moldavanka, in his Odessa Tales, lives so fresh in the memory of the posterity of Moldavanka, to an extent that we, readers of Odessa Tales, would never think.


The courtyard wall of the bath is made of glass brick to provide light inside, and the top row’s first glass brick has been knocked out, so you can see who’s out there. The botched equipment of the downstairs boiler room, by which the bath is heated, evokes the golden years of socialism. Pushed among the hot surfaces, oak branches are being dried. In the courtyard, an elderly man is tying the branches for the bath. “Jó napot”, good day, he greets us in Hungarian. After so many previous similar cases, I ask him straight: “Did you serve in Hungary?” “Yes.” “Where?” “In Tamási, between 1962 and 1964.” “What was it like?” He lifts his eyes in nostalgic reverie to the vine tendrils covering the courtyards. “Heaven.” I should interview the Soviet soldiers who served in our land, while they are still alive.

At Odessa Airport, a multilingual greeting welcomes the traveler: Peace with you. In most of the languages featuring here, this greeting is not colloquial, so probably this is the same situation as in the previous post: that in Odessa, “foreigner” means “Israeli”, and their שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶםshālôm ʻalêḵem is translated into the other languages.

In most languages this is fine, at least on the level of raw translation. Except for Arabic. Here, the eye accustomed to Arabic writing sees a startling mishmash instead of the correct السلام عليكمas-salāmu ʻalaikum. If you start to spell it, you will soon find out what happened: someone typed the letters of the greeting one by one, and they did not join together in the usual cursive writing. Each letter displays the “stand-alone” form from the four possible (initial, medial, final, stand-alone). And what is even worse: it all is from left to right.


It is likely that someone typed the greeting in an Arabic word processor, and the file was then read in Odessa in a Russian/Ukrainian word processor, which isolated the letters, and turned the text from left to right. That no one ever bothered to check it, is the shame of the airport.

In another city of Ukraine, in Lemberg, the large café on Ruska Street has the word “coffee” written in a different language above each window. The Yiddish version – קאַוועkāve– was written with the same mistake: not only was it written in reverse, but the patah, the small line under alef, indicating the vowel “a”, was typed as a separate letter. Probably due to a similar word processor incompatibility error. By now, someone has alerted them, so the word figures now right-to-left and with the patah under alef, but the sunlit traces of the old mistake are well visible on the frame of the window.



The actuality of the problem is illustrated by a very current cartoon. Here, Erdoğan, dressed in ISIS uniform, who has marched into northern Syria to commit genocide, is about to cut the throat of a female figure symbolizing the Kurdish people, whose face is borrowed from the Syrian Kurdish politician Hevrin Khalaf, executed two days ago by the pro-Turkish militia. Meanwhile, Putin is washing his hands, Trump turns away, and the EU puts its head in the sand. The smallest problem with this constellation is that the name of the region represented by the Kurdish figure is written on her chest in the same mistaken way, with separate letters, and moreover incorrectly, as Kudristan, instead of the correct form:

The Villa Romana del Casale in the center of Sicily, a few kilometers from Piazza Armerina, is one of the largest preserved mosaic ensembles of the ancient world. The senatorial owner of the Roman villa from the early 4th century adorned his huge mansion with over 3,500 square meters of first quality mosaics. Since the villa, built away from all settlements in a wooded valley, was first and foremost an elegant hunting lodge where the owner and his friends or clients retired to refresh themselves from Roman political life, most of its mosaics depict hunting. The floor of the guest suites displays hunting for local game, so the guests can dream about them before they pick up the compulsory hunting equipment at dawn and go to the woods. And on the floor of the large common space between the suites of the guests and of the dominus, mosaics depict hunting for exotic African and Indian beasts which the dominus probably dreamt of, or perhaps he also procured such animals for the Roman Circus.

All of these will be discussed in a future post. Now I just want to talk about the scene decorating one of the dominus’ suites. To be exact, the antechamber of the domina’s bedroom (marked with a red dot on the floor plan). This mosaic shows a story that you do not want to dream about. It is the episode from the Odyssey where the Greeks venture into the giant cave of the one-eyed Polyphemus – which is known to have been in Sicily –, and the terrible cyclops begins to devour them. Then Odysseus walks up to him, offering him a large jug full of night-colored wine, and, having made him drunk, puts out his single eye with a sharpened and heated stick.


Obviously, the terrible scene is made suitable for the antechamber of a bedroom by the soporifer, dream-bringing nature of wine. It is also conceivable that in this room the domina had wine with the dominus before bedtime. More to the point, this antechamber leads not only to the one-person female bedroom, but also to a cubiculum to the left, whose function is made clear by the scene in the mosaic floor.


This depiction is special not only because of its explicitly erotic nature. But also because the woman here wears a bikini just like the female athletes in the villa’s fitness room or the sea goddesses in the Arion room, which are the oldest bikinis documented in Europe. And that it also offers a clue to the scholarly problem of cultural history as to which intimate garment was first removed in ancient Rome.



But every honey runs out once, as the Italian proverb holds. The villa, already devastated by the Vandals, Arabs, Byzantines and Normans, was covered by mud in a landslide in the 12th century. This layer of mud preserved the mosaics until excavations began in the 1920s. The survivors of the disaster moved to the nearby mountain, where they took with them, too, the name of the village established around the villa, Platia (palatina,“belonging to the palace”).


The new settlement, Piazza (since 1862, Piazza Armerina) inherited not only its name from the villa. The little town strives to extract all the benefits from the World Heritage site belonging to it. Hotels, restaurants, public buildings are decorated with replicas of the ancient mosaics. Clothes shops are highlighted by the bikini pictures, bus stops by the female figures of the relay race. And the cheap pub in the main square obviously uses the scene of the drunk Polyphemus as a signboard.



However, the message of the signboard is ambiguous. It can refer to the excellence of the wine offered by Ulysses, but also to its unpleasant consequences. The polyphemi gravitating around the pub door – as in the above photo – uncomfortably reinforce the latter impression.

(Homer, Odyssey 9, translated by Samuel Butler)

(Homer, Iliad, 18, translated by Samuel Butler) 

The tours of río Wang grew out of this blog at the request of our readers. For the eighth consecutive year, we have been organizing tours to regions that we know well and love, and which are not to be found in the repertoire of tourist offices; or even if they occasionally are, they do not delve so deeply into the history and everyday life of these places, the tissue of little streets, interior courtyards, cafés and pubs frequented by the locals: to the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Iran, the Far East. Our journeys are no package tours, but rather the excursions of friends. Almost always there is someone who admits to never having wanted to take part in a package tour, but could not resist the call of the blog. And in the end he/she recounts with relief that it has absolutely been no package tour. We consider it a really great compliment. For fresh news, sign up for our mailing list at wang@studiolum.com! About myself: Dr. Tamás Sajó, art historian, translator, blogger. I live in Berlin, from which I organize my tours. I speak and translate in fifteen languages. I have worked at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Central European University in Budapest. In fact, the tours I organize are also peripatetic university lectures.

Our 2020 tour calendar has taken shape through the conversations during the previous trips and blog meetings, and all of the subsequent correspondence about them. The participants have told us where they would prefer to go, and their votes on the first proposal, which was sent out in a circular letter, has decided which tours to actually organize. Meanwhile, for some trips the maximum number of participants – 9 or 18 persons, the capacity of a small bus – has been also reached. So if, in the future, you want to take part in the shaping of the tour calendar, and want to be sure you do not miss out on the most popular tours, sign up for the mailing list at wang@studiolum.com.

In previous years, there were many tours we organized only once or twice, while the interest in them was increasing. This is why we announce many familiar trips again this year. Once again we visit Rome, Sicily, Andalusia, Lemberg, Istanbul, Berlin, Sarajevo, Albania. May, as always, is Caucasus month, when we travel through Georgia’s and Armenia’s still largely unknown sights. At the end of September, we repeat our Jewish heritage tour to Odessa through the shtetls of Galicia and Podolia, and in October the Toscan tour following the traces of Antal Szerb’s cult novel Journey by moonlight, as well as the tea-horse-road in China’s Yünnan province. Besides, we are planning new, exotic tours to Ethiopia, Morocco, Southeastern Anatolia and Saint Petersburg, as well as to the North Russian monastery region, Kizhi and Solovki.

I regularly hold presentations, historical and art historical lectures and travel reports on our tours, which are announced in the afore mentioned newsletter. Be sure to subscribe!

You can register for the tours or request information about them using the same wang@studiolum.com address. In response, I will send you a detailed program with all pertinent information.

Usually, each participant pays for the flight ticket out of their own pocket, and everything else concerning the tour is organized by me. Participation fees usually include one bed in a double room (breakfast included), rented bus and my services as guide; if any other expenses accrue, I will specify them. If you prefer a single room, ask me about the surcharge. Where I only indicate the participation fee approximately, it will depend on the number of participants and the corresponding final costs of the bus and hotels.


2020

Sicilian round trip, 21-28 January. To bring spring forward, we begin with a few tours to warmer climes. During the one-week Sicilian round trip, we visit the most important sites of the island of many cultures – almost all World Heritage sites –, Catania’s fish market, Siracusa’s Greek old town and Jewish quarter, the valley of Agrigento’s ancient Greek temples, Cefalù’s Norman port and basilica, the Norman basilicas of Palermo and Monreale, decorated by Arab and Greek artists, the Greco-Roman theater of Taormina, and much more. • Travel by 9-seat minibus, participation fee 700 euros. • Full, but we will repeat it in March and December.

Marrakesh and the road of the kasbahs, 18-25 February. From Marrakesh, Morocco’s former southern capital, thousand-year-old caravan routes lead through the river valleys of the High Atlas to the gold mines near the Equator, and these routes are bordered by majestic Berber clay fortresses, kasbahs, and fortified towns, ksars. In three days, we traverse the valleys of the Ounila, Draa and Ouarzazate rivers, and visit several kasbahs and ksars, paying special attention to the neighborhoods and legacy of the “Berber Jews” who lived here as merchants and silversmiths until the 1970s. The kasbah tour will be completed by a few days of sightseeing in Marrakesh, where the palaces, museums and other sights of the city will more deeply reveal the history of this region of many colors and cultural layers. • Participation fee 700 euros. • Full, but, due to over-registration, we will repeat it in December.

Rome, from piazza to piazza, 2-6 March. Following our previous successful tours in Rome, we explore in detail the old town of Rome over the course of five days, including the most important ancient, Renaissance and Baroque monuments, also addressing some more “exotic” scenes, such as the Jewish quarter, the self-sufficient world of Trastevere, and the beautiful garland of ancient and medieval churches in the Caelius Hill. We acquaint ourselves with the city from square to square, street to street, so that it will offer many interesting details and secrets even to those who are already lovers of Rome. In addition, we visit the huge Raffaello exhibition, organized on the 500th anniversary of the master’s death. Our accommodations will be in the heart of the old town, in the Trastevere. For details, check our posts on Rome. Participation fee 500 euros. • Full, but if there are enough additional registrations, we will repeat it at the end of March.

Sicilian round trip, 7-14 March. During the one-week round trip, we visit the most important sites of the island of many cultures – almost all World Heritage sites –, Catania’s fish market, Siracusa’s Greek old town and Jewish quarter, the valley of Agrigento’s ancient Greek temples, Cefalù’s Norman port and basilica, the Norman basilicas of Palermo and Monreale, decorated by Arab and Greek artists, the Greco-Roman theater of Taormina, and much more. • Travel by 9-seat minibus, participation fee 700 euros. • Full, but we will repeat it in December.

Istanbul, beyond the bazaar, 15-19 March. We penetrate the many layers of the city’s two-thousand-year history, from the Roman and Byzantine period through the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey. We explore in detail the most remarkable monuments from the Hagia Sophia to the Suleymaniye Mosque, walk through the self-sufficient neighborhoods from Galata to Kadiköy, and discover a lot of hidden places, small restaurants, Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Ottoman monuments. It is recommended that you read our posts on Istanbul and Turkish culture.• Participation fee 450 euros.

Berlin scenes, 2-5 April. A long weekend to explore Berlin’s iconic sites and unknown parts, contemporary architecture and exotic neighborhoods. We visit the historic heart of the city as well as the recently built centers, the subcultural neighborhoods and little hidden worlds. We pay special attention to the cultural flourishing of Berlin of the 1920s with its Eastern European and Jewish immigrants, the post-war divisions, and the alternative scene of the 80s and 90s. • Participation fee 500 euros.

Lemberg, 19-22 April. Lemberg/Lviv/Lwów is one of the most beautiful cities in Eastern Europe, and one which has not been demolished in the vicissitudes of the past hundred years. Several nationalities – Poles, Armenians, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, Hungarians and others – have enriched it and made it one of the most colorful cities of the old Austrian Monarchy. Its architecture was as great during the Renaissance as it was during the Art Nouveau period. We visit this city over a long weekend. On the last day, we make a bus excursion to the Baroque town of Drohobycz, the birthplace of Bruno Schulz, and the Jewish cemetery of Bolechów, one of the most beautiful and best-preserved Hasidic cemeteries in Galicia. • Participation fee 450 euros.

Georgia round trip, 11-19 May. Every year we go to Georgia in May, when the mountains are already emerald green, and have not yet faded from the summer heat. Over the period of a week, we travel through almost every beautiful region of this extremely diverse country, from Svaneti, the northernmost valley of the Great Caucasus, and the fifteen-centuries-old residential towers of Ushguli through the medieval quarters of Tbilisi to the monasteries of the Kakheti wine region. Here we have collected our posts on the Caucasus. • Participation fee 600 euros. • This tour can be complemented with the following one into one large Caucasian round trip:

Armenia and Karabakh, 18-25 May. We start from Kutaisi, and, turning south at Tbilisi, we enter Armenia through the northern mountains. By following the route of our Armenian tour of four years ago, we visit above all the wonderful Armenian monasteries, from Haghpat and Sanahin at the Georgian border through the churches along Lake Sevan to Tatev in the south and Khor Virap at the foot of Mount Ararat, and, on the way back, to Bjni. We will see particular cemeteries, from the Armenian Noratus through the Jewish Yeghegis to the Molokan Bazarchay. We pass into romantic Karabakh, where we stop at hidden medieval churches as well as in Shushi, the former capital of the region. After sightseeing in Yerevan, we return to Kutaisi. Here we have collected our posts on Armenia. See also the diary of our first travel to Armenia.• Participation fee 600 euros. • Due to the large over-registration, we may have to lead this tour twice; if so, then the second one will be from 4 to 11 May.

Southeastern Anatolia from the Assyrian monasteries to Mount Nimrod, 27 May - 6 June. The Turkish part of Northern Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, is a vast mosaic of languages, religions, cultures and former empires from the Assyrians, Arameans, Persians and Greco-Romans to Syriac Christians, Armenians and Yezidis to today’s Kurds and Turks. Starting from the three-thousand-year old city of Diyarbakır, we take a bus tour through the white-stone medieval cities of Mardin and Midyat, the Assyrian monasteries of Tur Abdin, the supposed sites of Abraham’s life in Urfa and Harran, the largest museum of ancient mosaics in Gaziantep, and one of the wonders of the ancient world, the gigantic statues of King Antiochus’ tomb on Mount Nimrod. The diary of our exploration tour can be read here.• Participation fee ca. 1000 euro.

Catalonia, the cradle of Romanesque art, 11-18 June. We start our first Romanesque tour in Barcelona, with the exploration of the fascinating Romanesque frescoes and carvings collected in the National Museum. Then we go by bus to the Pyrenees, the valley of Boí, where every town and church is a World Heritage site. From there we cross the mountain to South France, the medieval pilgrimage church of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. • Travel with nine-seat minibus, participation fee 700 euro. • Due to over-registration, we will repeat this tour in July.

Round trip in Scotland, 20-28 June. We tour the country by minibus from Edinburgh and back. We will visit fortresses, cathedrals and Renaissance castles, prehistoric stone circles and islands, whiskey distillers, we will sail on Loch Ness, and drive along one of the world’s most beautiful panoramic route, the North Coast 500. • Participation fee 800 euro. • Due to over-registration, we will repeat this tour in July.

(Next year) St. Petersburg, end of June 2021, five days. Originally, we wanted to organize a St. Petersburg tour this year, but it turned out that in St. Petersburg there the good accommodations are so few and the tourist period is so short – only a few months – that for a larger group we have to book a year in advance. This is what we will do now, awaiting your registration for the year of 2021. Over five days, we do a thorough tour in the Northern Russian capital, from the memory of Peter the Great and Catherine to the architecture of Russian Art Nouveau and the Avantgarde, and we will also have an overview of Russian history, literature and fine arts embodied in the city. • Participation fee ca. 500 euro. • The sightseeing can be also linked with the following tour:

(Next year) North Russian monastery region, Kizhi and Solovki, early July 2021, one week. We wanted to organize this tour for 2020, too, but the lack of good accommodations and the narrow period of visitation are especially true for the Russian North, while there is a great domestic and international interest in the monasteries. Therefore we also organize this tour a year in advance, looking for your registrations for 2021. From St. Petersburg, we take a bus across Karelia to the White Sea, the Solovetski Island, one of the holiest monastery complexes of Russian orthodoxy, which until recently was an inaccessible closed area. Along the way, we visit Old Ladoga, one of the centers of ancient Rus, as well as the wooden monasteries of Kizhi, on the island of Lake Onega. Meanwhile we get an overview of the history of Russian orthodoxy and monasticism, Russian religious art and icons. • Participation fee ca. 900 euro. • For the two Russian tours, send your application before 6 February 2020, because then I will go there to negotiate and book.

Photo tour in Kevsureti, 29 June – 5 July Khevsureti is the northernmost, closed region of Georgia, along the Georgian military road, where, according to many authors, you can still find the descendants of the Frank crusaders who supported medieval Georgian kings. After the other “roofs” of the Caucasus – Ushguli,Tusheti,Xinalik,Dadivank– now we lead a small photo tour here. From Tbilisi, we go up with an off-road vehicle to the fortress of Shatili on the Chechen border, from where we traverse this beautiful region of the Georgian Caucasus, accessible only in the summer. • Participation fee 1000 euro. • Full

Adventure tour in Georgia, 6-13 July. In contrast to the Georgian round trip in May, in which we travel comfortably by bus through the most beautiful regions of the country, on this tour we invite our more adventurous readers. From Tbilisi, we take off-road vehicles up to one of the most archaic and least accessible regions of the country, the valleys of Tusheti under the Chechen-Daghestani border mountains of the Greater Caucasus. Here, we visit the archaic fortified towns on horseback, but if you want, you can also come with us on jeeps. Then we go rafting on Rioni river from Ambrolauri almost to Kutaisi. To participate, you need no previous training in riding or rafting, we will get and learn everything necessary locally. Here you can read our travelogue of Tusheti, and here our collected posts on Georgia and the Caucasus.• Participation fee, which includes all equipment and full provisions, 700 euro.

Catalonia, the cradle of Romanesque art, 14-21 July. We start our first Romanesque tour in Barcelona, with the exploration of the fascinating Romanesque frescoes and carvings collected in the National Museum. Then we go by bus to the Pyrenees, the valley of Boí, where every town and church is a World Heritage site. From there we cross the mountains to South France, the medieval pilgrimage church of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. • Travel by nine-seat minibus, participation fee 700 euro.

Round trip in Scotland, 23-31 July. We tour the country by minibus from Edinburgh and back. We will visit fortresses, cathedrals and Renaissance castles, prehistoric stone circles and islands, whiskey distillers, we will sail on Loch Ness, and drive along one of the world’s most beautiful panoramic route, the North Coast 500. • Participation fee 800 euro.

Subotica Art Nouveau, 13-15 August. In one of the most important centers of Hungarian Art Nouveau (now in Serbia), we visit one of the most beautiful synagogues of pre-war Hungary as well as the gorgeous town hall – both chef d’oeuvres of the Marcell Komor - Dezső Jakab architectural duo–, and the entire old town, which, in late 19th century, became one of the most exciting architectural centers of the country. On the way there, we stop at the most beautiful old Hungarian library, of the Archdiocese of Kalocsa, where I did research for many years, and on the way back, in the Art Nouveau Spa of Palić, whose buildings were also designed by Komor and Jakab. See our posts on Szabadka/Subotica here.• Travel from Budapest by bus, participation fee 250 euros.

Long weekend in Sarajevo, 16-19 August. The original Persian-Ottoman name of Sarajevo, located in the high mountains of Bosnia, is Saray Bosna, “the Bosnian caravanserai”, and it really feels like time has stopped since the centuries of the Ottoman Empire. In the vast bazaar and in the tortuous streets of the mountain slopes, full of small mosques, Ottoman cemeteries and old houses, the atmosphere of the Ottoman period is still so present, to an extent which persists not even in Turkey. At the same time, during the period of the Austrian Monarchy, a beautiful Art Nouveau district was added to the old town, and the city was one of the intellectual centers of the former Yugoslavia. Today, Sarajevo has largely recovered from the destruction of the siege of 1992-1996, and it is considered to be one of the most important centers of contemporary architecture in the Balkans. During our long weekend, we explore this unique ensemble, and make a one-day bus trip through the wonderful valley of Neretva River to Mostar. • Participation fee 350 euros.

Unknown Albania, 22-29 August. In this unexplored country, we first visit the least known – because it has only recently been provided with an asphalt road – part, the northern mountains, the valleys of Theth and Valbona. We sleep in traditional farm houses converted into modern family pensions, and we make a long boat tour on the Drin river among the mountains. We visit the Ottoman merchant town of Berat, and the ancient Greek settlements of Byllis and Apollonia. We make a detour to Kosovo, to the beautiful Serbian monastery of Dečani and the Ottoman town of Prizren, and finish our journey at the pristine bay and beach at Vlora, next to the monastery of Zvernets. Our Albanian posts are available here. Participation fee 600 euros.

Iran’s historic cities, 4-14 September. We have postponed our spring Iranian tours, due to the tense political situation, but we hope that by autumn, peace will be restored in the Middle East. Therefore, you can register for the two autumn Iran tours on the condition that you will send your final decision at the end of May, in light of the actual political situation. First, as in every year, we travel along the axis of the most important historical cities, from Kashan through the formerly Zoroastrian town of Abyaneh, Isfahan, Pasargade and Persepolis to Shiraz, from where we return by domestic plane to Tehran. • Participation fee 1200 euro. • This tour can also be linked with the following one:

Iran, the ancient desert settlements, 15-21 September. The Iranian desert, as we wrote, is not dead at all, but a particularly beautiful region of the country. Thanks to the underground water channels, it is permeated by dense networks of thousand-year-old settlements, caravanserais and trade routes, which have played an important role in the history of Iran. We follow this network in the triangle of the historical towns of Kashan, Yazd and Isfahan, by visiting ancient Zoroastrian and Jewish settlements, clay fortresses of imposing height, and sleeping in lonely caravanserais in the middle of the desert, under a seldom-seen starry sky. This tour greatly contributes to the understading of how the Iranians see their own country. • Participation fee 900 euro.

(Next year) Ancient monasteries of Ethiopia, end of September 2021, ten days. This year, there have been not enough participants to stage this trip, so we announce it for next year to provide ample time to consider it. Ethiopia was among the first countries to embrace Christianty as a state religion, and, beginning in the sixth century, the Abyssinian highlands developed a rich monastic life. We primarily visit these ancient monastic regions, from the islands of Lake Tana through Axum, showing the impact of Egyptian culture, and the cave monasteries of Tigray, to the magnificent monastic complex of Lalibela, carved deep into the rocks. But we also go to see the Renaissance capital in Gondar and the villages of Ethiopian Jews, and trek in the fascinating Simien Mountains (almost all World Heritage sites). Here we reported about our first, preparatory Ethiopian trip, and here we wrote about the iconography of the Ethiopian churches. • Participation fee ca. 1300 euro, which also includes several domestic flights.

Odessa and the South Galician world of the shtetls, 23-30 September. The great tour de force that we do every other year, inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated. A three-day trip by bus through the important – and partly still living – Jewish settlements of the former Polish-Russian region, Czernowitz,Kamenets-Podolsk,Uman, Mezhibozh, the cradle of Hasidism, and many other Hasidic towns and cemeteries, down to Odessa, where we discover, in the wake of Isaac Babel, the sophisticated culture of the “Paris of the South” and the memories of the former Jewish gangster’s world in the Moldavanka. From Odessa, we return home by plane. We have collected our posts on Odessa here, and our writings on the Jewish heritage here.• Participation fee 600 euros. • If you wish, on the way back we can stop for a day’s sightseeing in Kiev.

The route of Journey at moonlight from Venice through Umbria to Tuscany, 3-10 October. In this one-week tour – which on its first being announced in 2016, was considered as the best Río Wang tour of the year – we follow the path of Antal Szerb’s 1937 cult novel, considered by Nicholas Lezard as “one of the greatest works of modern European literature.” From Venice, we travel by bus through Ravenna, Urbino, Umbria and Tuscany, Gubbio, Assisi and Arezzo, the centers of early Renaissance art, to as far as Siena and San Gimignano. During the journey, like the figures of the novel, we encounter the surviving traditions of the pre-Christian world, the many thousand-year-old Oscan towns built on hilltops, the magnificent view of the Apennines, and the renowned “Sienan primitives.” • Participation fee 700 euros, including several dinners.

Tuscan round trip, 10-17 October. We have followed several times with great success the route of Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight from Venice through Urbino and Umbria, Gubbio, Assisi and Arezzo to Siena, individually identifying the sites of the novel. This year, we follow our route westward, to get to know what Mihály would have seen, had he not given up wandering at the end of the novel. We will see Etruscan and Roman monuments, hilltop towns, fascinating examples of early Renaissance painting, and magnificent views of the Tuscan hills. • Participation fee 700 euros.

A long weekend in Florence, 17-21 October. A detailed art historical and historical tour in the capital of the Renaissance and the cradle of the Medici House. We visit the most important monuments in the triangle of the Duomo, the Signoria and the Santa Croce and beyond, the left bank of Arno, the churches, palaces, squares and historical sites, everywhere explaining in detail the history and history makers, art and artists. • Participation fee 500 euros.


Journey along the tea-horse-road in Yünnan province, China, 30 October – 8 November. Three years ago, we started with this tour to explore China, with whose language and culture I have been engaged for a quarter of a century. In 2017, this was our most successful tour. Our road leads through one of the most beautiful and most archaic regions of China, rich in historical monuments and natural beauties, the region of Yünnan under the Tibetan mountains, homeland of Chinese tea, and the towns of several ethnic groups. Picturesque tea lands and rice terraces, deep canyons and still untouched historic towns (check the photos of my Yünnan guide, purchased there about ten years ago). Read the description of our 2018 tour here.• Participation fee 1300 euros.

Sicilian round trip, 28 November – 5 December. During the one-week round trip, we visit the most important sites of the island of many cultures – almost all World Heritage sites –, Catania’s fish market, Siracusa’s Greek old town and Jewish quarter, the valley of Agrigento’s ancient Greek temples, Cefalù’s Norman port and basilica, the Norman basilicas of Palermo and Monreale, decorated by Arab and Greek artists, the Greco-Roman theater of Taormina, and much more. • Travel by 9-seat minibus, participation fee 700 euros.

Marrakesh and the road of the kasbahs, 9-16 December. From Marrakesh, Morocco’s former southern capital, thousand-year-old caravan routes lead through the river valleys of the High Atlas to the gold mines around the Equator, and these routes are bordered by majestic Berber clay fortresses, kasbahs, and fortified towns, ksars. In three days, we traverse the valleys of the Ounila, Draa and Ouarzazate rivers, and visit several kasbahs and ksars, paying special attention to the neighborhoods and legacy of the “Berber Jews” who lived here as merchants and silversmiths until the 1970s. The kasbah tour will be completed by a few days of sightseeing in Marrakesh, where the palaces, museums and other sights of the city will more deeply reveal the history of this region of many colors and cultural layers. • Participation fee 700 euros.

Historic cities of Andalusia, 17-21 December. Andalusia is one of those special sites of the Mediterranean, on which many great cultures left their mark. Starting from Málaga, we go through the historic cities of Seville, Córdoba, Granada and Ronda, getting to know in detail their Roman, Arabic, Jewish and Christian past, monuments and still living traditions. • Participation fee 700 euros.

Whenever we announce a tour in detail, and when we include a new tour in this calendar, we will also send out a circular e-mail, for which it is worth signing up at wang@studiolum.com.

This term was used by Umberto Eco for those still flourishing nationalist authoritarian regimes, whose distinguishing characteristics were summarized by him in fourteen points. I, however, use it now more specifically for the visual legacy of the Italian fascist ideology of 1922 to 1945, which is still visible in the public spaces of Italy.

Sicily is a graffiti paradise. Movements, religions, ideologies both generously and creatively use this medium to promote their messages. Walking the narrow streets of Palermo, Siracusa or Catania, you have the feeling of attending an endless poster exhibition.


Among the contemporary messages, ghost signs also appear here and there, whose sell-by date – theoretically – has long since expired. In the main square of Monreale near Palermo, in front of the Romanesque cathedral, a neatly framed, carefully typographed inscription can be read on the firewall. The left side is still relatively legible, while the right side has already faded into the background. However, the existing fragments allow the whole text to be googled:


«L’Italia è un’isola che si immerge nel Mediterraneo. Se per gli altri il Mediterraneo è una strada, per noi italiani è la vita.»

“Italy is an island embraced by the Mediterranean Sea. While for others, the Mediterranean Sea is a route, for us Italians, it is life itself.”

This quote is from Mussolini’s Milan speech of 1 November 1936, one of those “great historic speeches”, which, writes Eco, “marked all my childhood, and whose most significant passages we memorized in schools.” This is just one of those passages.


This quote delivered a well-calculated message of foreign and domestic policy. On the foreign front, it reflected on Foreign Minister Ciano’s visit to Germany a few weeks earlier, where Ciano and Hitler had agreed on the joint struggle against the Spanish Republic and Bolshevism, and Hitler pledged support to Italy against British ambitions in the Mediterranean Sea, declaring that “the Mediterranean is an Italian sea”; and Hitler also recognized the conquest of Ethiopia by Italy in the spring of that year. Mussolini, in his speech, echoes Hitler’s formula, and introduces for the first time the concept of a “Berlin-Rome axis”, which was also sketched on the front page of the published speech made available to the simple folk. On the other hand, he still seeks some compromise with the British, for whom, he admits, the Mediterranean “is a route, or rather a kind of shortcut” to their Far Eastern colonial empire through the Suez Canal (“the idea of which, I note only in parenthesis, was first raised by an Italian, Negrelli, who was at that time called insane by the English”). However, the Monreale inscription emphasizes two phrases that are digestible for the domestic public (and which originally stood far apart from each other, in different contexts), thus reinforcing in them the imperialistic idea of Mare Nostrum and nationalistic pride. The festive podium stood obviously here, in the main square, facing the cathedral, and the message of the respective speakers was raised high and woven into a national-imperial context by the quote of the Duce hovering above them.

One hundred fifty kilometers to the east, in the main square of Nicosia, on the wall of Bar Antica Gelateria, are the remains of a similar inscription. The central part of the five-line inscription painted on the plaster has been cut off. It does not look as if it was done with the purpose of destroying it, but rather that something was mounted there, and its straight contours cut out the center of the text. I can reconstruct the top line for a while from the top of the letters: “Il popolo italiano ha…”.


I go in Diana Bar, and while asking for a coffee, I ask the barista whether he knows what was written there. “The professore knows it for sure”, he leads me enthusiastically and respectfully to one of the small, round marble tables, where a small, round gentleman is reading his newspaper. The professore puts on his glasses, looks far into the deep well of the past, and dictates:

«Il popolo italiano ha creato col suo sangue l’impero. Lo feconderà col suo lavoro e lo difenderà contro chiunque con le sue armi.»

„The Italian people created the empire with his blood. He will fertilize it with his work, and will protect it against anyone with his weapons.”

This famous passage, frase celebre, is from Mussolini’s Victory Day speech of 9 May 1936 in Rome, where he announced the end of the Ethiopian War and the birth of the Italian Impero. Once again, this is a speech of major foreign political importance, demanding a place for Italy alongside the great powers, while, on the other hand, it also sends a message to the people concerning what the empire expects of them. In its time, the passage was popularized by many public works and inscriptions throughout Italy, including this mural still standing today in via Roma in Trento, from which Mussolini’s name was later carved off (by leaving its outlines):


Apropos of the Nicosia text, I cannot help but mention that a few meters away we can also read a molto più celebre inscription. If you ascend the steep steps between the two bars to the “hill of the twenty-four barons”, the nest of the noble palaces of Nicosia, the text on the south wall of the tower of the hilltop Church of the Savior, enlarged each year from the early 1700s on, perpetuate the day and month of the arrival of the first swallows to Nicosia. During our recent visit, the church was closed, so I cannot attach a picture of the inscription, just the view of the old town from the church square, with Etna in the distance. Down there, to the left of the Norman Romanesque church of St. Nicholas, converted from an Arab mosque, is the main square with the inscription of 1936. The other church in the background, on the top of the other hill, was the church of St. Nicholas of the pre-Norman Greek population, which gave the name Nicosia to the town. As in the St. Nicholas Day processions the Greek and Catholic believers regularly clashed with each other, this church was renamed the Church of the Assumption, to celebrate its feast and procession in the summer, on 15 August instead of 6 December.


A third memorial helps us to understand why post-war systems have left the public decorations of fascism more or less untouched. Thirty kilometers to the west, at the foot of the Madonia Mountains, a marble sign on the town hall of the mountain town of Gangi announces:


«18 Novembre 1935 XIV. A ricordo dell’assedio perché resti documentata nei secoli l’enorme ingiustizia consumata contro l’Italia, alla quale tanto deve la civiltà di tutti i continenti.»

„18 November 1935, XIV[th year of fascism]. In eternal memory for centuries of the attacks and of the terrible injustice against Italy, to which the civilization of all continents owes so much.”

The attacks and the terrible injustice were the sanctions of the League of Nations against Italy for invading Ethiopia. These sanctions, by the way, were diluted by Britain and France, the leading powers of the League, for the sake of good relations with Italy, and thus Mussolini was able to occupy Ethiopia without any problems. However, the incident provided an opportunity to blackmail Brussels the League of Nations to the people of Italy, which, despite being the eastern bastion of Europe for centuries the torch of civilization for Europe (and other continents, including Africa) for thousands of years, was neglected and humiliated by the new nations that grew fat at the cost of his sweat.

The key to the survival of these inscriptions is offered by the small copper plate that was placed underneath the marble plaque obviously long after the end of the war:


“A marble plaque reminiscent of the historic era of fascism and a related event, the sanctions against Italy. It was exhibited in November 1935, and it was removed immediately after the end of the war (1945). Its restoration to the original place serves reflection and the civil confrontation of ideas. «FACTS DO NOT CEASE TO EXIST BECAUSE THEY ARE IGNORED.» (A. Huxley)”

This latter frase celebre could also stand in the place of the often renamed, demolished, destroyed, relocated Eastern European memorials, plaques, street signs. Although it would be much better if it stood underneath the originals left in place.

The Kumbaracı yokuşu, that is, “Bombardier descent” runs down to the always crowded İstiklal Avenue at its end near the sea, not far from the Passage Oriental, which housed the Café Lebon, the once famous café built in Art Nouveau style by the Istanbul-born French architect Alexandre Vallaury, not long after returning home from his studies in Paris. There were several similar passages on the İstiklal, the former Grand Rue de Péra, the main avenue of the European quarter of Istanbul from the Galata Tower up to Taksim Square, some of them are still open nowadays.


But if you also wander into the small streets and alleys opening from the İstiklal, you can find other, more neglected heralds of old Istanbul, a world gone almost a hundred years ago. On the Kumbaracı, not far from the fountain of Miralem Halil Ağa built as a pious gift in 1729, there is an interesting fin-de-siècle house. Arriving from the İstiklal, the French inscription on the left side of the doorway catches the eye first: “Fabrique et dépôt de meubles”, furniture factory and depot. The inscription on the right side is indecipherable, but the ones on the street front are mostly still there, defying time and weather, advertising the wares of the former owner in three languages and three different scripts.



The one on the left side seems to be the most interesting of all of them. The script is Armenian, but the language is Ottoman Turkish: ՄԷՖՐՕՒԶԱԹ ՖԱՊՐԻՔԱՍԸ mefroizat fabrikası, in modern orthography mefruşat fabrikası,“furniture factory”. It may sound strange today, but Ottoman Turkish was often written with Armenian script until the alphabet reform in 1928, after which the Latin script has been used for Turkish – even the very first Turkish novel, the Akabi’s story was published in Armeno-Turkish script in 1851. For most people it was easier to learn and the language itself could be rendered more precisely than in the otherwise used Ottoman Turkish script, a modified version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Precision depended on the language user him/herself too, however. In the inscription of the furniture factory two peculiarities can be observed: first, the ՕՒ oi standing in ՄԷՖՐՕՒԶԱԹ mefroizat instead of the properly used Ու u, which seems to be an influence of Greek. Then, the use of Ք k in ՖԱՊՐԻՔԱՍԸ fabrikası is quite uncommon as it usually stands before front rounded vowels. Before back vowels its almost mirrored counterpart, a Գ should be used (the difference between the two might be more palpable if one looks at their counterparts in the Ottoman script: ك and ق‎, respectively).


The other inscriptions are much easier. In the middle and on the right the owner’s name can be read in French and Greek: A. Loucrezis / A. ΛOUKPEZHΣ. Between the two, under the window on the right the hardly legible Greek inscription reads as ΕΡΓOΣTAXION ΕΠIΠΛΩN, “furniture factory”. If there was a similar inscription under the window on the left, it has by now disappeared, the red graffiti in Turkish and English is much more recent.


As the blog Painted Signs and Mosaics– which is the only one reporting about this inscription in detail – puts it, it is obvious that Loucrezis tried to reach as many of the potential local customers as possible: the European residents of Beyoğlu (it seems to be more than a mere coincidence that it is the inscription written in French which can be seen first, coming from the main avenue) as well as the locak Greek and Armenian communities. And maybe even the Turkish one, since many people arrived in the Tophane quarter from Anatolia since the beginning of the century. Unfortunately, there isn’t any information on Loucrezis or his factory except these signs. Aside from the blog post, even the inscriptions are mentioned only by the the French historian Étienne Copeaux as an illustration to one of his articles, based on the post by Painted Signs and Mosaics.


There aren’t any traces of Loucrezis in the thorough almanac of the trades and craftsmen of Istanbul, the Annuaire oriental du commerce, at least not in the volumes accessible to me. He is not yet mentioned among the furniture manufacturers in 1891 and 1896/7 and is no longer there by 1930, therefore he should have flourished sometime between 1897 and 1930. Maybe he fled the City already in the first half of the 1920s, in the shadow of deportations– the Greeks of Istanbul were less stricken by them, they had to leave thirty years later–, maybe he died not so long after and there was no one to take over the business. Based on the Annuaire of 1930 it seems sure that there wasn’t any furniture manufacturer under the name Loucrezis in any of the towns of Greece. After all, who would need a Greek furniture tradesman from Istanbul in Athens or Saloniki? The refugees from the Pontus? Or the local Greeks of the Peloponnesus? Both seem unlikely. What remained is a shadow of shadows only, a few ghost signs in three languages and three different scripts in a lonely alley which runs to the sea, not far from the always crowded İstiklal.

Happiness is in the center of Saint Petersburg, at the corner of Malaya Morskaya Street and St. Isaac’s Cathedral Square. Three of its ground floor windows overlook the square, and two Malaya Morskaya Street, but on this side it also shines on the adjoining house – before the Revolution, the seat of the famous Marks publishing house, and today the Rolls-Royce showroom in Saint Petersburg –, because its entrance opens from there.


People are weird. Just as God’s address is not widely known, so the seat of Happiness is famous for something completely different. The white marble plaque stands in quite absurd contrast to the happily shining golden name of the pub.


Hotel Angleterre/Англетер, in whose room no. 5 Yesenin hanged himself – or, according to some unlikely conspiracy theories, was killed – did not always bear this name. Napoleon Bocquin, who built it around the middle of the 19th century, openend the hotel in his own name. In the first photo of the area, made in 1859 from the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, it still bears this name.


In the next photo, of 1908, the main entrance was moved to the façade in Isaac Square, and the place of today’s Happiness Bar is occupied on the corner by I. Grote’s bookshop and the signboard for the St. Isaac Pharmacy. And the hotel is already called Angleterre, taking that name in 1876, when Theresa Schmidt bought it. For a short while it was called Angliya, then Schmidt-Angliya, but it was soon replaced with the more elegant French version. After the revolution, it was renamed “Internatsional”, but in 1925 it was again renamed Angleterre, just in time for Yesenin to die and to immortalize the hotel under that name.






In the 1920s, in the NEP era, it was mainly a hotel for Western guests, along with the neighboring Astoria Hotel. In this period the renowned poet, children’s book author and translator Samuil Marshak wrote a poem mocking racist bourgeois money bags, which was the second reason to make the hotel widely known.

„Мистер Твистер, Бывший министр, Мистер Твистер, Миллионер, Владелец заводов, Газет, пароходов, Входит в гостиницу «Англетер»”, etc.

„Mister Twister former minister, Mister Twister, millionaire, who has plenty of factories, ships and newspapers, enters the hotel Angleterre.”

You can see the whole poem here as an animated film. However, in this post-WWII film, the hotel cannot be identified, for since 1948 it was called Leningradskaya, and it only returned to its original name in the early 1990s.


Renaming, however, was not the beginning of a new life, but the definitive ending for the old one. During the decades of socialism, the hotel decayed to such an extent that it only functioned as a low-cost worker hostel. The new investors found it impossible to save. Although there was a mass demonstration and a lifeline against its demise, it did not help. In 1991, the hotel was completely rebuilt with a façade imitating the old one, now part of the neighboring Astoria Hotel.



Room no. 5 does not exist any more, as no longer does the other room where Yesenin first met his femme fatale, Isadora Duncan, who stayed here in 1921.


In the room, Yesenin left a short farewell, one of his most poignant and well-known poems:

До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья. Милый мой, ты у меня в груди. Предназначенное расставанье Обещает встречу впереди. До свиданья, друг мой, без руки, без слова, Не грусти и не печаль бровей, — В этой жизни умирать не ново, Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

Goodbye, my friend, goodbye, my dear, you are in my heart. It was preordained we should part, and then be reunited again. Goodbye: no handshake, no word, no sadness, no furrowed brow – there’s nothing new in dying in this life, though living is no newer, of course.

Below, I also include its Hungarian translation with the beautiful musical version by Kaláka Ensemble, which drew inspiration from Orthodox church funerals:


Yessenin: Ég veled, barátom– Kaláka. From the LP Fekete ember: Dalok Szergej Jeszenyin verseire (Black Man: songs on Sergei Yesenin’s poems)

Ég veled, barátom, Isten áldjon, elviszem szívemben képedet. Kiszabatott: el kell tőled válnom, egyszer még találkozom veled.

Isten áldjon, engedj némán elköszönnöm. Ne horgaszd a fejedet, hiszen nem új dolog meghalni a földön, és nem újabb, persze, élni sem.

Of course, like all great Russian poems, this one also has a well-known Russian musical version. However, its text is not quite the same as Yesenin’s original. The melody comes from Alexander Vertinsky, the great magician of pre-WWII Russian chanson, and he found it more suited to his genre if he paraphrased the original poem with a hint to Yesenin’s memory:



Alexander Vertinsky: Последнее письмо– The last letter. Sung by Zhanna Bichevskaya (1st version) and by Vertinsky himself (2nd version)

До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья. Мне так трудно жить среди людей. Каждый шаг мой стерегут страданья. В этой жизни счастья нет нигде. До свиданья, догорели свечи… Как мне страшно уходить во тьму! Ждать всю жизнь и не дождаться встречи, И остаться ночью одному. До свиданья, без руки, без слова… Так и проще будет и нежней… В этой жизни умирать не ново, Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

Goodbye, my friend, good bye, it’s hard for me to live among people. There’s no happiness in this life anywhere, every step just prolongs my suffering. Goodbye, the candles burned to the stump, how terrible to enter the darkness! to wait for a meeting for a lifetime and finally to stay alone in the night. Goodbye: no handshake, no word, it’s gentler this way and easier for me – there’s nothing new in dying in this life, though living is no newer, of course.

“В этой жизни счастья нет нигде” – “There’s no happiness in this life anywhere”, says Yesenin in Vertinsky’s paraphrase. But reality disproves it. After all, where is Happiness? In Saint Petersburg, at the corner of Malaya Morskaya Street and St. Isaac’s Cathedral Square.

Ludovic Duchadeau Texier’s name is not recorded in Moroccan photography. No photos of him can be found on the internet. Still, his pictures are the most moving among the many recently browsed photo albums of Morocco.


He publishes his pictures not in an album, but in a public exhibition, in the very heart of Marrakech’s old town, on a plank surrounding the location of a demolished house, whose original decoration announces that a skateboard court is being built behind it. On this he has put up the twenty pictures representing the work of twenty years from 1999 to 2019, one for each year.


The photos were apparently taken in a single family. It is nice to see the kids growing up, or the young head of family becoming a worn-down, but loving old man.



Moroccans notoriously dislike being photographed. Even village children protest, shouting when they see the camera. In order to take such beautiful pictures of these five or six persons, it was really necessary for the photographer to have an intimate relationship with them, which he obviously had, so he could follow the changes and constancy of their lives for twenty years.