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A super piece of art that can't be photographed in its entirety because the alley way is so narrow. Artwork by Ant Steel
Cette photographie montre le paisible jardin japonais du parc Planten un Blomen à Hambourg, avec un étang bordé de rochers et un pavillon de thé traditionnel sur la gauche. En arrière-plan, la tour de télévision Heinrich-Hertz s'élève au-dessus de la végétation luxuriante sous un ciel bleu parsemé de nuages.
この写真は、ハンブルクのプランテン・ウン・ブローメン公園にある穏やかな日本庭園を写しており、左側には岩に囲まれた池と伝統的な茶室があります。背景には、雲が点在する青空の下、緑豊かな植物の上にハインリヒ・ヘルツ・テレビ塔が立っています。
This photograph shows the peaceful Japanese garden in the Planten un Blomen park in Hamburg, with a rock-lined pond and a traditional tea house on the left. In the background, the Heinrich-Hertz television tower rises above the lush vegetation under a blue sky dotted with clouds.
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We spent about a month in Bulgaria this summer. We were there once before--in 2019, also for about a month--and instantly fell in love with the country. That summer we hiked the Bulgarian National Trail, the Kom Emine, which coincides with the E3, crossing Bulgaria from Kom Peak in the West to Cape Emine on the Black Sea in the East. That trail had some awesome scenery but was somewhat more of a cultural experience, since it had almost no foreign tourists and crossed through extensive stretches where people were engaged in shepherding, forestry and agriculture.
While we were there we made friends and learned of the Five Mountains Trail, which coincides with the E4 and crosses Bulgaria from Sofia in the north to the Greek border in the south. It is a more developed, heavily traveled, and rugged alpine trail. We knew we would return to do that some day, and when the opportunity presented itself this summer we jumped at it.
In about 250km the trail passes through five mountain ranges: Vitosha, Verila, Rila, Pirin and Slavyanka. There are many peaks and passes over 2000m, and the scenery in Rila and Pirin rivals that of much more famous European ranges. The trail also boasts a very well developed hut system so that you can end most days with good food, drink, company and shelter, which is usually what we chose to do.
Mrs. Orca on the first day of the E4, near the top of Cherni Vrah (2290m), Vitosha Mountains, Bulgaria.
I've noticed that the beauty comes in stages; first the daffodils followed by the dandelions. then comes the lovely purple stalks of flowers that the bumblebees find delicious. Those are followed by the delicate tiny buttercups that dot the whole mountain from clearing to clearing. My husband refuses to mow until the pollinators have their fill. The buzzing of the bees and songs of the birds are carried on the mountain breeze as it rushes up one side of the mountain, then plunged down our side and across the ridge down into the hollow.
We started the day a bit below freezing with a mix of fog and sun. Mrs. Orca and I made some rounds and didn't see a great deal of note except this frost beard, or hair ice. It occurs only in a unique combination of circumstances, specifically when freezing temperatures force water out of the pores of rotten broadleaf timber (in this case alder) that has been colonized by the fungus Exidiopsis effusa. The process has only been understood for about a decade. I won't pretend that it is understood by me, but somehow this specific fungus interacts with the ice in such a way that it cannot recrystalize into a crust. Instead it grows as hair from a follicle in these very fine 0.02mm filaments. Frost beard at McLane Creek Nature Trail, Olympia, WA.
Mrs. Orca heading into Pirin on the way to Yavarov Hut, Five Mountains Trail (E4), Pirin Mountains, Bulgaria.
youtu.be/L0bcRCCg01I?feature=shared
Storm At Sea
© Amar Qamar
CRASHING waves... SMASHING seas...
Bringing sailors to their knees.
As they struggle to save their lives,
Hoping and praying help arrives.
The stormy seas as dark as coal,
Preventing the sailors from reaching their goal.
Battered and bruised, but still they fight...
Staring ahead into the dead of night.
Rocking and rolling as they try to stand...
Hoping against hope that they soon reach land.
Bleary eyed from lack of sleep.
Down in their cabins, huddled like sheep.
As they're rocking and rolling down beneath,
Weary sailors above resist with gritted teeth.
Hours later, as the storm starts to dissipate,
It leaves a calm tranquil sea in it wake.
The veteran sailors know the battle is over and they have won...
As they contemplate other storms yet to come...
As monasticism in the form of the Rule of Saint Benedict spread across medieval Europe, ascetic religious life soon fell victim to its own success. In a deeply religious society that combined high mortality with great anxiety about the afterlife, both nobles and commoners sought whatever assistance they could find in achieving a better outcome, both in this life or the next. Seeing the virtuous lives of the monastic communities, and hoping to gain favor with God by giving to His devotees, they contributed land and wealth to the monasteries, for instance paying the monks to perform masses for their deceased souls. In short order, communities that had been founded on the principles of an ascetic life of prayer and labor grew immensely rich and powerful. Seeing this, nobles who did not wish to divide their estates sought to place their sons and daughters who would not inherit in positions of wealth and power, and so sent them into the monastic life. Monasteries, in turn, demanded that entrance into the community of monks required an endowment, and so grew richer still, while also becoming distinctly aristocratic. In theory, individual monks and even their abbots were poor, owning nothing as individuals. In practice, they became an allied branch of the nobility, collectively owning huge tracts of land worked by vast numbers of serfs and/or rent-paying peasants. Or in other words, far from pursuing a Christlike life of asceticism, the monks combined with the nobility--from whom they were now drawn--to exploit the remaining 90-95% of humanity.
Periodically, zealous reformers would seek to return monasticism to its ascetic roots by stamping out monastic excess and corruption and returning the monastic life to its original ideal. In the tenth century the Cluniacs in France won admiration and influence for their strict adherence to the Rule of Saint Benedict. They attempted to separate themselves from aristocratic influence by placing themselves directly under the government of the Pope, and soon they were sent out to reform other monasteries and establish new ones under strict observance of the Rule. But in a cycle that would be repeated again and again, the admiration these reformers won attracted generous donations, which soon translated into great wealth and power and a movement away from ascetic life, renewing the cycle of corruption.
At the beginning of the 12th century, the Cistercians, like the Cluniacs before them, sought a return to the Rule of Saint Benedict. But their initial strict observance won them, too, great wealth and power. Those who had sought a return to ora et labora, in fact, became mighty landowners. They recruited lay brothers, uneducated monks without equal rights and drawn from the commoners, to do the manual labor of the monastery. This may have been an attempt to prevent the order from becoming the lords of great serf populations and to create a system in which monks did, in fact, perform the labor required for their own support. But in practice, it merely reproduced the hierarchies of the greater society. Cistercian monasteries operated according to a class system in which educated "choir monks," drawn from the aristocracy, sat in the choir and sang the liturgy during services. They lived and prayed separately from the lay brothers, who performed the manual labor of the abbey's vast landed estates and could not participate in the government of the abbey.
In the 13th century the Franciscans attempted to break the cycle all together. They were a mendicant order who, rather than live a cloistered life, wandered among the towns and cities preaching to the common people, or even, famously, to the birds. Significantly, members owned nothing either individually or collectively. But their popularity with the common people, combined with their radical philosophy, eventually threatened the established order, both religious and economic. Because they embraced poverty as the Christian ideal, but lived in a world in which wealth and power were conjoined in both church and state, Franciscans were accused of heresy, and of promoting heresy and revolution. In the end, the Catholic hierarchy forced them into accepting provisions that their founder, Saint Francis, pretty clearly detested. They would not technically hold property, but the Pope would hold it for them and for their use. Much like the distinction between owning property individually vs collectively, this amounted to a distinction without a difference.
Predictably, in the 17th century, a branch of the Cistercians sought to reform the order after it grew rich and lax in its adherence to the Rule. These reformers, who came to be called Trappists, sought a return to the strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict, with the notable exception that they maintained the distinction between choir monks and lay brothers. Even so, they failed to persuade most Cistercian communities to return to more rigorous strictures, and in time they separated from the Cistercians. In 1965, after Vatican II, both the Cistercians of the Common Observance and the Trappists abolished the distinction between choir monks and lay brothers.
The choir of the 12th century Abbey Church of Heiligenkreuz, at Heiligenkreuz Abbey, the oldest continuously occupied Cistercian abbey in the world, near Vienna, Austria.
Mrs. Orca looking over Dalgoto Ezero (2310m) toward Vihren and Kutelo Peaks, on the Five Mountains Trail (E4), Pirin Mountains, Bulgaria.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIHyAqrUVsI
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy …
John Keats
A coach trip to London and we immediately got a tube and a bus out of central London to visit Strawberry Hill House, lots of photos taken but a bit tired now so here's a couple of phone snaps to be going on with
Sanahin and Hagphat were both founded during a particularly rich period in Armenian history known as the Armenian Renaissance. After centuries of Arab and/or Byzantine control, in 885 the Armenian Bagratids became the recognized rulers of large parts of present day Armenia (as well as other regions beyond its current borders). The monasteries were founded in the tenth century with the patronage of that dynasty and quickly became important centers of teaching and learning. A kind of medieval university operated at Sanahin, with learned priests teaching courses in theology, philosophy, and science. Above, the Academy Hall at Sanahin, which seems to have been a sort of lecture or seminar hall. Notice the isles of nooks where scholars could sit while they listened, debated and studied. Also notice the elaborately-carved khachkars, or stone-crosses, at the end of the hall. They are a ubiquitous and uniquely Armenian art form. The Academy at Sanahin, Armenia.
The concept for this Soviet Era megaproject dates to the 1920s, but construction only began fifty years later. It is a kind of grand staircase and gardens linking downtown Yerevan with Victory Park atop the higher section of the city. Construction was not yet complete at the time of the 1988 earthquake and the Soviet collapse. It is now mostly usable, with escalators and an art museum on the inside and gardens and water features on the surface, but there is still a huge section near the top of the complex that is currently just a pit with foundations, as one or more terraces of the cascade between the victory monument and existing structure have still not been completed. To reach the victory monument, from which fine views of Mount Ararat can be had on a clear day, you must divert off the complex to a side street then climb up an improvised stairway/scaffolding to come out on top. At the bottom (above) there is also a pretty whimsical sculpture garden. The Cascades, Yerevan, Armenia.
We spent three nights in the small town of Sanahin visiting its monastery and the neighboring monastery of Hagphat, which is on the other side of Debed Canyon but connected via a scenic day hike. While they likely had early medieval antecedents, the current complexes date to the tenth century when they became centers of scholarship under the royal patronage of the Bagratid and (later) Zakarid dynasty. Both complexes are Unesco World Heritage sites and are extremely well preserved with interesting buildings such as churches, gavits, scriptoriums, bell towers, refectories and spring houses. There are however no evident traces of dormitories for the hundreds of monks who once lived here, which must have been built of more ephemeral materials. Above, the Church of St. Amenaprkitch, built in the second half of the tenth century, Sanahin, Armenia.