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Die Doppeltürme des Liebfrauendoms, die Mariensäule und ein Seitenturm des Neuen Rathauses - München / Marienplatz
The twin towers of the Cathedral of Our Lady, the Marian Column and a side tower of the New Town Hall - Munich / Marienplatz
Google Pixel 8 Pro
ISO 1145
113mm KB
The Trans-Caucasian Trail is a trail in development. Based on our short experience with its most developed section-- between Dilijan and Sanahin, where we met only one other pair of hikers in four or five days' walking-- there are long stretches of reasonable route finding punctuated by some very idiosyncratic trail design choices and gnarly bushwacking through head and chest high brush. There are people doing the Armenian and Georgian section in its entirety, but I think for most long distance hikers it would be best saved for a later date when the trail is a bit more established. Mrs. Orca making her way up one of the passes between Dilijan and Sanahin, Trans-Caucasian Trail, Armenia.
We camped the first night of the E4 on the slopes of Vitosha next to the abandoned Smilyo Shelter, then woke up very early for the eight hour walk to Klisura. This stage is the lowest of the whole hike (around 1000-1400m), as it crosses the Verila Mountain range, bridging between the Vitosha and Rila Mountains (the high ridge in the distance). The first half of the day was beautiful meadow walking with lots of wildlife, but on the whole this was the only somewhat tedious stage of the hike, mainly because it grew very hot on that day and there is little or no water on this stage of the trail. Mrs. Orca crossing the Verila Mountains between Smilyo Shelter and Klisura, Five Mountains Trail, Bulgaria.
"The Tsar's Fortress," Veliko Tarnovo's acropolis during the Second Bulgarian Empire. The hill was ringed by defensive walls and towers, enclosing many churches, residences and the Bulgarian Tsar's palace. The citadel was destroyed by the Ottomans in 1393, but partially rebuilt during the communist era to encourage nationalist patriotism. At night there is a popular but very strange sound and light show, where the buildings are illuminated in psychedelic colors and shoot laser beams across the night sky while a disembodied voice narrates Bulgarian history. I took this photo during one of the rare, subdued moments of more natural illumination. Tsaravets Fortress, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.
When I was cleaning up after the raccoons I picked up a rock and found this underneath. I've seen them in the forest nearby, but never before in the yard. Mrs. Orca and I have been planning to put in a small pond designed specifically for the tree frogs to breed in, but this discovery adds new urgency to do so. Rough-skinned newt, backyard Olympia.
Note (10.24.25): I turned over a rock in the course of some yardwork today and found another, or (less likely?) the same. It appeared to be in a state of torpor or hibernation, but it's hard to tell as they are slow movers in the best of times. Our frog and newt pond is in and just needs to be planted. Hopefully in a year or two we start to see their numbers increase.
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.