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#Gallery365Daily Prompt. Possibly the way my mind works is a bit obscure, but I saw that middle name "Shadow" and thought of possible shades (ghosts) in the churchyard
This (formerly Lenin Square) was the centerpiece of Tamanian's vision. The very prominent neoclassical building is the Government House, and the building to the right is the Post Office. These and many other important buildings in Yerevan are made from the very attractive pink tuff which, along with abundant basalt, obsidian and pillow lava, are all remnants of Armenia's extensive volcanic history. Republic Square, Yerevan, Armenia.
This very elegant Baroque church belonged to the now dissolved Order of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Captives (or Trinitarians for short). They were founded in 1198 with the specific purpose of ransoming Christian captives in Muslim lands. The most immediate cause of the order's foundation was probably the fall in 1187 of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin, after which perhaps 20,000 residents who could not purchase their own freedom were sold into slavery (in 1099, when the Crusaders first captured Jerusalem, they had infamously slaughtered thousands of its Muslim and Jewish residents). But all of the various Crusades in the Middle East and on the Iberian Peninsula (the Reconquista) inevitably led to large numbers of European Christians being taken captive in war. The royals, nobles, and commoners who donated to the order did so because it provided a system by which captives could be repatriated, and the donors hoped the Trinitarians would bring their people home. By rule, the order devoted one-third of its income to the monks' support, one-third to the poor, and one-third to ransoming captives. This last service was a very dangerous mission, as they had to gather up wealth and travel with it to hostile lands, where they negotiated for ransom of European Christians and often served themselves as hostages for payment of agreed ransoms.
The scale of the problem only increased with expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the 14th through 16th centuries. The Ottomans consolidated control over the Middle East and much of North Africa, and expanded rapidly across the Balkans and into Central Europe, seizing parts of Hungary and threatening Bratislava and Vienna. In fact, in 1529 the neighborhood in Bratislava (then Pressburg) where this church now stands was demolished by city leaders in an effort to make the city more defensible against an expected Ottoman siege. Now it was not just Europeans who went as pilgrims or crusaders to the Holy Land who might fall captive. Instead, corsairs seized Europeans from Mediterranean ships or coasts, and European cities were falling to the Ottomans.
This church was consecrated in 1727, a few decades after the tide of Ottoman expansion had been turned and the Ottomans were expelled from Hungary. Soon, the growing power of European states and the declining power of the Ottomans made the Trinitarian mission less urgent. In 1782 the order was suppressed in Habsburg lands as part of a reform program by Joseph II. Over its lifetime, the order had ransomed tens of thousands of European captives, the most famous of whom was Miguel de Cervantes, a soldier in the Habsburg-Ottoman wars who was captured, held captive for five years, and ransomed by the Trinitarians in 1580. He later incorporated some of these experiences into his famous novel, Don Quixote.
The Trinitarian Church in Bratislava, Slovakia.
In the buildup to the Second World War, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, seizing Czech lands, partitioning the country, and supporting a German-aligned regime in Slovakia headed by Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest whose government actively supported the Nazi war effort and the Holocaust. In 1944, as German defeat began to look more likely, a coalition of communists, liberals, nationalists, and those guided by a mixture of ideological and pragmatic concerns rose up against the Tiso government and against German occupiers sent to secure Slovakia to the German side. Ultimately the rebellion was defeated militarily, but the uprising was an important event for Postwar Slovakia, both broadly, insofar as it helped Slovakia assert a moral claim to its role in the war, and more specifically to the postwar communist regime, insofar as it presented Slovak communists as anti-fascist freedom fighters who had opposed Nazism.
Above, the very interesting Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, completed in 1972. It is a single pylon cable-stayed bridge that spans the Danube with no other supporting structures. There is a pedestrian/bicycle path below the autodeck (zoom in to see). That circular structure at the top, some 85 meters high, is actually a restaurant (we did not go up), and also the source of its unofficial name, the UFO Bridge. The design is reminiscent of other futurist architecture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, such as the Space Needle in Seattle or the Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria.
The bridge was built to connect the Old Town of Bratislava to the neighborhood of Petržalka (background), a massive socialist era housing development with the characteristic prefabricated apartment buildings so common in Eastern Bloc countries. Unlike some of these developments elsewhere, it is, in fact, a very livable neighborhood, with immense public green spaces filled with walking and bicycling paths. I don't know if this is universal in Slovakia, but in the cities we visited (for example, Sturovo) these developments were all painted warm and inviting colors, a phenomenon that I believe followed the fall of communism.
Unfortunately, the bridge and its highway cut right through Old Town Bratislava, passing mere meters from Saint Martin's Cathedral. The construction of the highway destroyed good parts of the Old Town, including the Jewish Quarter. Today this creates a fair bit of noise pollution, separates the Old Town from Castle Hill, and significantly compromises the aesthetics of the city. Signage we encountered there suggests there is an ambitious plan in the works to cover that section of highway, turning it into a kind of a tunnel with walkable park above. The Slovak National Uprising Bridge, the Danube River, and the Petržalka neighborhood, taken from Bratislava Castle, Bratislava, Slovakia.