Hello There!

Thanks for dropping in to my page; 'tis nice of you to visit :-)

Hmmm ... where to start? Let's see. I'm guessing that, like most people who arrive here, you already know me in one way or another. So I'll skip the usual autobiographical stuff, and tell you why this page exists. Basically, Ranting Manor is a partial record of my thoughts and adventures over the past eleven years, as promised to various people before I left Australia in 2005 to spend a year teaching English in Russia. That move abroad turned out to be just the first step in a much longer journey, and hence 'The Manor' has survived ... and grown far beyond its originally intended size.  

There are some travel stories here, a bit of classroom-related stuff, and other random thoughts about the odd corners of the world I've ended up in at various times.

Btw, regarding my present whereabouts: I'm currently working in a summer camp in Finland, where I've spent six of the last ten summers (or at least, parts of summers). It's one of my favourite places in the world - in fact, whereas Finns themselves tend to unwind by escaping to a summer cottage or hiding in the sauna, their whole country achieves basically the same result for me. So by all means read on if ... well, if that sounds like it might be worth reading about :-)

Huge Cocoons and Tiny Stars

Hello!

It’s a funny word, "cocoon", don't you think?

I ask that because I’m sitting in one now. 

Today is one of those brutal travelling days that your mother warned you about ... or at least, she would've done if she'd been a hippie backpacker in the 60s, who'd spent several years trekking through Asia and Africa and possibly some time on a kibbutz. If not, then she probably focused her warnings on other stuff like running with scissors. 

But anyway, it is (brutal, I mean).  

I only managed about two hours' sleep last night, and the journey started at 6:15 this morning when I left my flat in Almaty. There’s a hotel room in Athens with my name on it, but that room (and more importantly, the bed it hopefully contains) is still more than ten hours away – four and a half of flying, an hour on the Athens metro, and about five hours of sitting around in airports like this one in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

So far, my five-hour transit stop at Heydar Aliyev airport has been about as much fun as a transit stop can be – which is to say “not that much, really, but there have at least been a few entertaining moments to leaven the boredom”.

ZVJOZDOCHKA
(larger than actual size)

The first of those moments happened shortly after we landed, while I was unloading my pockets to walk through the security screening thingie. Inspecting my minutiae, one of the staff there noticed with some delight that I had a zvjozdochka in amongst my keys and loose change. 

The word zvjozdochka  translates as sth like ‘tiny little star’. Ex-Soviet peoples use it to refer to a miniature tin of kampfa (a.k.a. 'tiger balm'), which comes emblazoned with a bright yellow Communist star on the front. 

When she saw it, the security guard let out a little gasp, grabbed the tin and opened it. She held it up to her nose and inhaled, savouring the kampfa smell. And I got the distinct sense that this was a nostalgic moment – as if the zvjozdochka was something she remembered from her childhood but hadn’t seen for a long time, and taking in its aroma was sending her back in time.

That in itself fascinated me, because the zvjozdochka is one of those things that’s absolutely ubiquitous in the ex-Soviet countries I’m familiar with – especially in Ukraine, where babushkas sell them in the street. In my mind, it almost qualifies as a symbol of those countries. 

But Azerbaijan, since it frantically boarded the escape pod and jettisoned itself out of the imploding USSR in 1991, has turned more towards the Turkic world. It was a natural move – both Turkey and Azerbaijan are Eurasian Muslim nations, and their languages are closely related (the Azeris speak a language often called ‘Azeri Turkish’, and just reading signs in the airport was enough to see the striking similarities). I suspect there may also be a kind of ‘enemy of my enemy’ type bond between them, given that both countries have what you might euphemistically call a 'rocky relationship' with neighbouring Armenia.

It's also done better economically than most of its former ‘sister republics’. To an extent, I imagine this has made it possible for the Azeris to throw off the old trappings of Soviethood – and perhaps the poor zvjozdochka has been a casualty of that process.

Anyway ... I offered the little star as a gift to the security guard, but she declined with a smile, even after my second attempt. 

I guess her unwillingness to accept gifts from passengers in the security screening area could be seen as a good sign for Azerbaijan, too :-)

I then arrived in the transit lounge, where my first concern was to find the smoking area. After that, I took a wander to acquaint myself with the space where I was going to be spending the next four hours. It was then that I spotted the words  “cocoon area” on a sign, right under “toilets” and “worship room”, with an arrow pointing diagonally left.

Obviously, this was a sign that I had to follow.

A minute later, I was surrounded by these rather unusual things:

COCOON CAFE - Heydar Aliyev Airport, Baku, 20.06.16

Basically, what you've got here is a bunch of two-storey oversized cubby houses, a couple of them with cafes or shops inside and most with seating upstairs and downstairs. They're in a rather large hall with an ornate patterned skylight, a few scattered trees and some songbirds. 

Now, I'm not going to say this is the greatest architectural masterpiece of our age, but I do think it's quite nifty. When you've got an airport building, you can either make it a series of bland rectangular halls, or you can, y'know, do something interesting.

Obviously the second one is preferable. And the coccoons are kinda cool – they're playful, 'organic' in style, and interestingly, a little Islamic-looking at the same time.

And this brings me onto a theme which I think I'll be exploring a little bit this summer: modern style.

See, I've had several conversations this year with people who wanted to attack modern art, architecture etc. etc. And I say to those people: sorry, but you get no sympathetic nods of agreement from me at all. 

Let me repeat that: NONE AT ALL.  

The word is packed with people who carry around an irrational dislike of modern style in their heads. Here's why I think this is the case:

1.         The styles of the past look impressive to us partly because they're
            different, and partly because all the bad examples of pre-modern style
            have been destroyed and/or forgotten. It's the same as when people
            talk nostalgically about music of, say, the 60s, while showing a disdain
            for contemporary music: they haven't quite got the point that we're
            hearing the whole gamut of contemporary music, from the best to the
            worst, whereas we only ever hear the best of the 60s stuff.

2.         Right from earliest childhood, we're conditioned to an idea of beauty
            that leans towards the classical. If you're paying attention, you can see
            this bias in nearly every school curriculum and in every travel brochure.
            And it makes no sense at all, for one simple reason: we don't live
            in classical times. We live now.  

            Travel guides are particularly good at re-inforcing this bias. Open any
            edition of the Lonely Planet, and read their descriptions of buildings.
            They reflexively praise almost anything baroque or neoclassical,
            however samey and derivative it is, and provided (in the neoclassical
            case) it wasn't commissioned under Stalin. At the same time, they just
            as reflexively trash almost anything built after 1920 – especially
            if it happens to be Soviet. It's like they're trying to win Round Two of the
            Cold War, one bad review at a time. 

3.         Although I am a fan of classical architecture (don't get me wrong here),
            the same can't be said of classical painting. Monet leaves me cold;
            van Gogh I couldn't care less about; Cezanne bores me so much I
            want to cry. 

            Please, don't think for a moment that I'm saying these guys were
            bad. They were very obviously the opposite of bad. I'm saying that,
            as a person born in the late 20th Century, living in the early 21st and
            not particularly well-schooled in the history of art, their work simply
            doesn't speak to me. I'll take a huge walk-through installation made
            entirely of lemons, filling an enormous hall, with the sounds of
            chickens clucking in the background, in preference to any of those
            artists. That's not a condemnation of their work - it's just my
            preference. The installation means more to me; I can make more sense
            of it. Plus it's just way more fun and interesting. 
Modern architecture should speak to us too, and I think it often tries to – but, for some reason, many people don't hear it. Or if they do hear anything, they largely don't enjoy it. 

In many cases, the problem lies with the design itself – be it of an individual building or an entire public space. For instance, you can find endless examples of poorly designed urban environments which do more to alienate people than to encourage identification and appreciation. That much is indisputable. 

(Btw, there's a great TED rant on this topic, in which the architect James Howard Kunstler angrily dissects the architecture of "Places not worth caring about" in America. It's really enjoyable, and it will introduce you to the wonderful phrase "technosis externality clusterfuck", among others. 

You can watch it here: Kunstler's Master Rant.)

However, there's also another problem: the clients. 

Think of your typical client for a major development project. Four hundred years ago, it was usually a regent of some kind. A hundred years ago, it was generally a government. Now, it's most likely a corporation. They don't care if the project glorifies them or reflects some ethic they have about how society should develop. They want it to come in under budget, and with all health and safety regulations adhered to. 

Ask a client like this if you can make the building a bit more interesting, and they'll go "We don't have the budget – but can you add another five stories of penthouse apartments?" or "Can we have more retail space?". That's where bland, ugly buildings come from. 

The practical upshot is this: effectively, the very same suits who, if you asked them, would probably complain about the ugliness of modern architecture, are themselves largely responsible for it. 

This is one of the reasons why I have so little time for people who don't like modern design. If they stopped to think about it for a minute, they'd probably realise that there are infinitely more architecture graduates nowadays than there ever were back in the times when kings and queens commissioned most construction projects. That means there's a frikkin' legion of architects just waiting for the chance to try out great, innovative and beautiful designs – but we live in a world of project managers and bean counters, and they stop it from happening most of the time. 

If you're one of those people, and I ever hear you complaining about modern architecture, expect to receive some physical pain. If you're not one of those people, but you hate modern design, just consider what it could be like if today's enormous pool of talent were used properly.

Of course, the analysis above is oversimplified, and it leaves out important stuff like the Bauhaus movement of the 1930s, and the cultural preference in some places for functional simplicity (see my entries on Finland). But at least in the former case (Bauhaus), we're largely over that now. There are also a few anomalies like the U.A.E., where the powers-that-be seem intent on using architecture to demonstrate to the world that new money is always tasteless. 

Still, those caveats aside, I think that what I'm saying holds water. If modern architecture doesn't inspire you, I think in most cases you can blame the suits, not the architects.

Meanwhile, Baku's airport offers a nice (though modest) example what happens when you step back and give the designer some latitude. You don't always get functional concrete monstrosities. Sometimes you get big fun coccoons.

That's all I have to say about this for now. Sorry to get ranty on you.  

The other cool thing about today is that it's the first of 58. I'll be visiting half a dozen countries, working in two of them, staying with friends in another, and no doubt collecting some tales to tell along the way. So I'll no doubt be ranting wildly over the next 7-8 weeks.

Hope you'll join me for some, if not all, of the journey :-)

Bye!

The World's Most Unpronouncable Sentence

First night in Warszawa, and I'm spending the last part of it in a little wine bar on a very stately avenue called Marszalkowska.

I've been to Poland's capital twice before, but both times I was just passing through and had no time to look around. Now I've got a week to 10 days to acquaint myself with the city.

It's gonna be GREAT!

I don't quite know how the conversation got started, but I've been chatting on and off with a lovely, bespectacled waitress here, and the subject of the Polish language has come up.

Polish is one of the most beautiful languages I've ever heard (though you wouldn't guess it from the written form, which looks like an enormous flock of 'z's has crashed recklessly into another language and knocked all the vowels out of formation). But it's also one of the most difficult to pronounce. So we started talking about difficult words, and the angelic waitress has just handed me a Polish tongue-twister which she wrote on a little slip of paper.

Here it is:

w Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

It means sth like "In small villages, crickets chirrup in the long grass". And if it looks completely and utterly unpronouncable to you, you're not far wrong. I've been trying for several minutes, and I'm still a couple of hundred attempts away from getting it.

However, the angel has told me that this sentence is extremely difficult for Polish people to say, and that if a foreigner can crack it, that will be "Something really unbelievable!"

Obviously, at this point, I have no choice but to try.

You can try too if you like. Just bear in mind these one or two simple rules:

- w sounds like English 'v'
- sz sounds like English 'sh'
- cz sounds like English 'ch' (as in "cheese")
- rz after another constant sounds like the 's' in pleasure
- y sounds like being hit in the chest, but not too hard
  (kind of a gentle 'ugh!' sound)
- ie sounds like "yeah"

That's the first two words dealt with! Easy, isn't it?

A lot of these sounds crop up later too (e.g. in chrząszcz you've got another sz and another cz), so you can re-use the same rules.

But chrząszcz has a few extra sounds you need to know, like ch. In Polish, it sounds like it does in Gaelic - think of the word Loch, for example. Then there's the ą with a little tail. It's a tricky beast - if the consonant after it is voiced, it sounds like 'arm' (in a British accent), but if the next consonant has no voicing, you say 'arn' instead. So here, the word should be read like 'chrzamszcz'. One assumes that's the sound of the insects.

Then to do brzmi, just remember your rz rule, and when you come to the last word, watch out for the c on its own. That sounds like 'ts' - the sound of a hi-hat cymbal on a drum kit.

Ok ... got that? If so, you're ready to crack the Polish tongue-twister. Good luck, and let me know how you go :-)

Meanwhile, I'll be sure to report back on every little thing that happens in Warszawa.

See you!
 

Old Moats

I'm on a train with wi-fi. No doubt those of you who live in developed countries are thinking "Yeah? And?". But for me this is a first, and quite fun :-)

I mean, I've seen signs before that say there's wi-fi on the train, and even on coaches that I've been on. But I figured it was one of those things that's only real in Norway, and never actually works anywhere else. Apparently I was wrong ... cool!

Anyway ... we're speeding towards a town called Ostrava, about 30kms from the Czech-Polish border. Here I'll start the next leg of my cycling journey.

The last couple of days have essentially been rest days. I pitched up in the town of Olomouc on July 30th, very curious to see it for myself; as I mentioned in the previous entry, it's garnering a reputation as a bit of an 'undiscovered jewel'.

So is it?

Well ... er, yeah, I think so. I mean, it's not likely to knock Vienna or Prague off the top of a few million tourist itineraries, but it certainly has some pretty parts.

Btw, just in case you're wondering, the town's name is pronounced roughly as o-la-MORTS. Before I came here, I found it useful to think of the phrase "old moats" to help me remember the pronunciation.

Sadly there aren't any old moats in Olomouc - that would've been great! But it is a very likeable place; one of those European 'regional capitals' where poky laneways abound, and where, if you're near the centre, you usually spy something grand and a bit monumental if you peer down the lane to the next big street or open space.

TAKE THE TINY LANE TO THE GIANT CHURCH ...

Olomouc, Czech Republic, 31.07.15

It also has this wacky thing - known as a 'plague column' - in one of its central squares. I'd never seen or even heard of plague columns before, but apparently this is the biggest one you'll find anywhere in Central Europe. Kind of an intriguing concept.

THERE'S NO PLAGUE ON US!

Olomouc, Czech Republic, 31.07.15

You can only see the bottom half of the column here, because it's enormous. A bunch of Moravia's most exciting architects designed and built it in the early 18th Century, to celebrate the end of plague in the region - but as an expression of local pride, the ordinary citizens of Olomouc helped out with its construction. Now, it just sits in the middle of the square, all baroque and massive and happy-about-the-lack-of-plague.

The town has quite a studenty, artsy vibe, with lots of street art and so on. This little piece decorates the wall of one little underpass, near the city museum.

UNDERPASS ART

Olomouc, Czech Republic, 01.08.15

But probably my favourite bit of 'public art' in Olomouc is the astronomical clock on one side of the old Town Hall.

If you live and/or have travelled in Europe, you know these things pop up fairly regularly in large European cities. And let's face it: they're incredibly kitschy. Usually they entail a bunch of Jesus' disciples, a Wise Man or three, and a crowing rooster, whirring out from behind little wooden doors on the hour, amidst a show of bells and other 'special' effects. And sadly, tourist crowds gather round these clocks well in advance, waiting for them to do their thing, as though this cheesy little spectacle is worth the price of the plane ticket.

What makes the one in Olomouc so different is that it isn't the work of some 16th Century watchmaker; it was created during the Communist era, and its design seems, as much as anything, to playfully pisstake the whole astronomical clock concept.

POCKET-SIZED SOCIALIST HEROES GREET THE HOUR

  Olomouc, Czech Republic, 01.08.15

It also seems (rather bravely for its time) to thumb its nose a little at the cliched 'socialist heroes' who were the artist's constant subject during the Socialist Realist period (whether the artist liked it or not). Here they take the place of disciples et. al., parading out of their little doorways - farmers, athletes, scientists and the whole Socialist pantheon, all looking utterly plastic and fake and caricatured. I'm actually surprised that the artist got away with it.

At the same time, there is a certain elegance to the mosaic portion of the clock - and once again, a playfulness that was very noticeably missing from most Socialist art. Rather than showing Holy Days, like your 'traditional' astronomical clock, the dials here rotate to show Lenin's and Stalin's birthdays, as well as Communist holidays like International Workers' Day. It's really funny, and kinda brilliant :-)    

But while Olomouc doesn't disappoint for either quirkiness or architectural splendour, it does lack one crucial ingredient: life. It's weird; I mean, I definitely prefer a medium-sized European city with a laid-back atmosphere to a huge, crowded capital (see my comments last year re beautiful, chilled-out Antwerp vs. ridiculously packed and slightly repugnant Brussels). But here, in Olomouc, you often find yourself wondering "Where are all the people?" 

A STRANGELY EMPTY SQUARE

Olomouc, Czech Republic, 31.07.15

I don't quite know why there are so few folks here, either locals or tourists. Maybe it's the heat - we almost reached 40 degrees this week, which would certainly encourage me to stay home if I was a local! Or maybe there's a cool part of town that I don't know about, where all the students go. Don't think so, though: I think this intense quietness actually pervades the entire city.

At times I find it quite pleasant, but at other times it's almost eerie - especially late at night, as empty trams rumble along the dimly-lit, cobbled ring road at the Old Town's edge.

JULČA'S MEAT CUP

Olomouc, Czech Republic, 01.08.15

Anyway, now I've said goodbye to Julča (a cute tabby kitten who lives outside the very Soviet-looking hotel where I stayed, and who is spoiled every morning with leftover processed meat from the breakfast hall), and I'm heading east to begin the next leg of the cycling tour.

I'll cross into Poland tomorrow, arriving in the city of Cieszyn. From there I'll head to Bielsko-Biala, at the edge of the southern Polish / northern Slovakian Tatra mountain range - a place where I've considered working more than once. Finally I'll go north to Oswięcim, better known by its Germanic name "Auschwitz", before hopping a train to Katowice and then to Warszawa (Warsaw).

As usual, I'll let you know how if anything noteworthy happens along the way.

See you!

Underneath the Republic

Hello!

Today I visited a limestone cave.

If you’ve been reading The Manor for a while, you’ll be about as surprised by that as you would be by me jumping out from behind your sofa going “Huzzaaah!”at a time we’d carefully pre-arranged. It’s a thing I tend to do from time to time (meaning the caves, not the sofa thing. Though now that’s got me thinking ...).

MMMM ... THERAPY

Blansko / Skalni Mlyn,Czech Republic, 29.07.15

The caves were about 8km from a town called Blansko, where I was staying. I decided to walk back rather than take the bus, because about half of the journey was along a quiet road that wound through an über-green and shady forest, and I was hoping for a bit of Forest Therapy.

As I was walking along, reflecting upon the nature of stuff, an odd thought occurred to me: since I left Prague six days ago, at least half of the things I’ve seen in the Czech Republic are not actually in it, so much as they're under it.

Not sure how that happened: just me and my weirdass pre-occupation with all things dark and hidden, I guess.

The first of these underground spectacles was the twisted Sedlec Ossuary near the town of Kutna Hora. I arrived there on the evening of my second cycling day, but not before I'd had a chance to do quite a lot of swearing. This resulted mainly from being stuck for about 8kms on a highway where I couldn’t ride, thanks to the lack of a shoulder and wall-to-wall enormous trucks coming at me from both directions.

Not my best day of cycling – but I s'pose it was a good chance to purge out some of the angst left over from working in Turkish universities for two years, using a stream of expletives as the cleansing medium ;-)

MERRY GARLANDS OF DEAD FOLK
Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic, 25.07.15

Btw, if you've never been to an ossuary (and I certainly hadn’t), it’s basically a place where the bones of dead folks are stored and sometimes displayed. In Kutna Hora, the earliest of the bones in question seem to date back to the 14th Century and to a thing called 'The Hussite Wars'.

These so-called Hussites are one of those groups that I'd heard of, but I had no idea who they were or what they were doing. (Well done if you spotted the Spinal Tap reference there, btw.)

Turns out their leader was a guy called Jan Hus, a cleric who started one of those religious reform movements that are all about cleansing the church of its corruption, its inappropriate opulence and so on (though mostly not using expletives). His ideas had huge uptake in this part of the world, and they became quite a threat to the church establishment – so naturally, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States of Catholicness (a.k.a. the Pope) declared a 'Crusade' against the Hussites. 

Going back a few centuries earlier, we know that the Muslims who were the main (but far from the only) victims of the First Crusade had no clue what to expect when the Pope's rabble of stinky bandits arrived in their lands, led by a cadre of bloodthirsty robber barons. In the early days, there was an awful lot of “Hey guys, come on in! We’ve got Jews, we’ve got Christians, we’ve got tons of delicious flat bread ... would you like a bath with fragrant salts?” and so on.

It took quite a bit of massacring and making-the-streets-run-red-with-blood to shake some parts of the Islamic world out of Welcoming Hospitality Mode, and get them to the point of "Right, that's it: these infidels are a bunch of asshats. Let's chase 'em out, and keep our frikkin' bath salts for people who don't, y'know, try to cut our heads off all the time."

It wasn’t like that with the Hussite crusade, though. Jan Hus’s followers knew exactly what sort of bloodbath the (still-unbathed) Armies of Big Papa tended to unleash on anyone who incurred their reeky wrath, so they prepared to give as good as they got. The ensuing battles were huge by the standards of the time, and they involved quite a lot of splitting people’s heads open with swords, flails, maces and the like.

According to some accounts, the bones of as many as 10,000 soldiers who fought in the Hussite Crusade ended up at Sedlec. Looking at some of their skulls, you can see the devastating wounds they sustained in battle. Amazingly, some have two large holes, which usually meant the soldier survived his first catastrophic head wound and had to be re-killed later. On the earlier wound, you can see how the bone was healing itself, stitch-by-patient-stitch.

HEAD WOUNDS

Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic, 25.07.15

Later on, some 30,000 plague victims joined the soldiers. Their bones were put here at Sedlec because it was considered hallowed ground, after some adventurer had been to a site in the 'Holy Land', grabbed a handful of earth, brought it here and sprinkled it about the place. (Why don't you ever see that on 'Home and Garden' shows?) Eventually a church was built here to accompany the dead as they rested for eternity (or for a while, at least). 

But see, when all that stuff happened, the bones weren’t arranged into frilly chandeliers et. al., as they are today. For centuries, they were just buried here in mass graves. Then they were retrieved and transferred to a crypt – a job which must have delighted whoever was asked to carry it out.

("Sorry, you want me to dig up how many skeletons?!? Yeah, right. I think I'll just stay at home and trim my toenails with a comb.")

Then in 1870, a rich Habsburg family bought the whole site. They employed a local woodcarver, and presumably told him to "Go utterly batshit crazy" with the decoration of the church. Clearly, he followed their instructions. The result was ghoulish – and yet, somehow weirdly beautiful.

SELF-SATISFIED CHERUB

Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic, 25.07.15

Having said that – and just as I mentioned in the last entry about Prague Castle – some of the religious imagery here is a wee bit troubling.

There are candelabras in the middle of the chamber, with a skull watching over each candle. In itself, I find that quite an elegant look – but why is there a plump and smug-looking cherub sitting at the top of each candelabra? That seems to me a little twisted. So do the crucifix behind the main chamber, with places in front of it to light candles and pray for elderly relatives, missing dogs and so forth, along with the fact that a few skulls have been positioned in a way that seems to say “Throw coins at me for a better afterlife”. 

DOES THE AFTERLIFE TAKE VISA?

Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic, 25.07.15

Elsewhere, the bones are piled up in huge mounds, almost touching the beautiful ornate ceilings. And near the entrance, they’ve been artfully fashioned into lamps.

The ceilings are entirely strung with bones as well, which for me is one of the most ghoulish details of all. The way they hang is slightly festive, and almost reminiscent of the rows of little flags you might see inside a town hall at a political pep rally. 

The intention of the ossuary, of course, is to scream “Memento mori!” at every visitor. But beneath the screaming – and despite the building's age – I also detected a very modern message at Sedlec. It was kind of a low whisper;that went like this: “Look at all the banal stuff we spend our time coveting: designer lamps, chandeliers, artsy candle-holders. What are they all actually for? Is this what you call ‘life’?”   

SPRING CATALOGUE LAMPSHADE

Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic, 25.07.15

That, for me, was the spookiest part of the ossuary. In the moments I spent there, I felt like the craven human impulse to own stuff and surround ourselves with 'beauty' was almost being parodied.

Of course, that was just one person's reaction on one particular day. A thousand others could visit the ossuary and come away with a thousand other impressions – as I'm sure they have. 

A couple of days after I'd met the bones, I pitched up in the town of Jihlava, a rather pretty place that I’d read about and was quite excited to visit. Under the town there are about 25kms of catacombs, a small portion of which you can visit on a tour.

Like Sedlec, these catacombs have quite a long and varied history. Built in the 14th Century, they’ve served all kinds of purposes at various times, from storing beer and non-potable water to supply the town's fountains to hiding the local Gestapo headquarters during WWII.

SUBTERRANEAN CORRIDOR

Jihlava, Czech Republic, 27.07.15

That was all cool, but I was particularly interested in one specific part of the complex.

If you've been to any 'underground attractions', you're familiar with the moment when the guide turns the lights off and you get to experience real, total darkness. It's quite a moment, the first few times you do it. Strangely calming, and powerfully absolute, are two phrases I'd be tempted to use.

However, there's a small corridor in these catacombs where that doesn't happen, because when you turn the lights off, a strange glow appears. The glow comes from the walls, and the longer you stay down there, the brighter it appears to get.

There have been a ton of theories about this over the centuries. It used to be widely believed, for example, that the spirits of prisoners-of-war who'd been detained in the catacombs and died there had decided to haunt the place. Then there was the idea that phosphorous from the bones of Capuchin Monks buried above the corridor was seeping down through the rock and causing the weird glow (a completely disproven theory, but one that I really like for its sheer creepiness value).

There's even an Italian website which claims to this day that the corridor is a 'portal to the lost kingdom of Agarti'. It supports this idea with a whole bunch of that hokey numerological detail which you find in books on kabbalah and other forms of western mysticism; again, not remotely convincing, but kinda fun to read if you're in the mood.

Meanwhile, science has a theory too. Scientists have analysed the chemical compound in the rock, and it's one of those exotic ones that

a) has a bunch of initials and subscript numbers in its name; and
b) has the ability to 'store' light energy and emit it later in the form of luminescence.

Standing in the damp little corridor, about 5 metres under Jihlava's main square, surrounded by these sparkly luminescent particles that are illuminating the darkness, was a very cool sensation. But even cooler was what happened next: the tour guide grabbed a little boy and put him against a side wall of the corridor. She then borrowed a flash camera and took a photo of the kid.

When he stepped away from the wall, you could see luminescence all over it, except in the place where he'd been standing, which was totally black. So the effect was as if the boy's shadow had been burned into the wall. Amazing – I'd never seen anything remotely like it.

LUMINESCENT ROCK

Jihlava, Czech Republic, 27.07.15

Obviously this wasn't the ideal location in which to take photos, and most of mine were a total waste of effort. But I did snap this one of the guide holding a black light against the ceiling. It's  horrendously blurry, but you can see the luminescent compound reacting to the light source, which gives you a vague idea (I hope) of what it was like down there.

(Btw, this is Photoshopped a little to bring out more of the rock, but I haven't enhanced the green beyond its natural intensity. This is what it really looked like.)

Then finally, there was the cave in Blansko.

A bit of background here: caves are one of my absolute favourite things in the world, going right back to my childhood. Let me try to explain why in as brief a way as possible.

Basically, when I was 11 or 12 years old, my parents took me and my sister on holiday to a place called Jenolan, which is nestled at the very bottom of a deep, deep valley in south-eastern Australia's Blue Mountains.

Jenolan is at the centre of an absolutely enormous system of about 300 caves. Over several tens of millions of years, calcite-rich water has flowed and seeped through the system, and the small deposits that this water leaves behind have built up into mighty decorative formations. So what you've got there today is a series of underground galleries that are simply mind-bending to see.

I don't think my mum and dad realised what they were starting when they took me to Jenolan. For them, it was just a nice (and, since it's quite close to Sydney a fairly obvious) place to go on holiday. But for me, it was a revelation. I'd never even suspected that anything quite as beautiful as these caves existed. I just couldn't fucking believe it.

Since then, I've made an effort to visit caves as many countries as possible, from the small Danyang system of South Korea to the sacred Maori caves of Waitomo in New Zealand, and the 'fairy grottoes' of Germany.

(Btw, in case you're wondering, the Postojnska Jama in Slovenia is the best I've seen – it blew my mind several times over. Several of the caves at Jenolan would come in equal second. You can read my entry about Postojnska Jama here.)

So that's why I was here today at the 'Punkva Cave'. I just have to see them from time to time, or else I go into cave withdrawal.

To be honest, the first half of the tour was slightly disappointing. I mean, the cave was beautiful without a doubt ... but as you now know, I'm a bit of a connoisseur, and it wasn't on a par with many others I'd seen.

BOTTOM OF AN ABYSS (PEOPLE ADDED FOR SCALE)

Punkva, Czech Republic, 29.07.15

Then, as we were walking along a smallish tunnel, heading (so I thought) to another gallery, daylight suddenly happened. We emerged at the bottom of a 150-metre high 'abyss', with a tiny, lustrous blue lake at the bottom of it.

Kinda didn't expect that. Pretty impressive :-)

The third section of the tour was a boat ride through an underground lake ... and here again, if you know my fascination with caves, you know that this could hardly fail to make me a very happy Word Nerd. It was gorgeous; the crisp cold emanating from the cave walls perfectly complemented the ornate formations overhead and the deep green water below, which was 40 metres deep in places. I've seen plenty of underground lakes before – always the green ones that spring up as part of these limestone karst systems – but I never get tired of them :-)

Anyway, so that was my day. I'm in elegant Brno now, enjoying the charms of a little wine house in a street behind the main square.

I've chosen Georgian Saperavi as my medicine of choice, and it's definitely helping to numb the pain of the blisters on my feet ... which may or may not mean that this entry will need to be extensively re-edited once I see it through sober eyes ;-)

Tomorrow I'll head to Brno's Museum of Romany Culture (which has great reviews, and which I'm really looking forward to seeing). After that I'll go east to Olomouc, a student town that's billed as the 'undiscovered  gem' of Moravia. I'll let you know whether or not it lives up to the tag.

See you!

Anthony.

George The Irrelevant

Hello!

The late great author and contrarian Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying that “There are no secular gothic cathedrals”. Hitchens was a vocal atheist – one of the ‘Four Horsemen of The New Atheism’, no less – but he was happy to acknowledge the role which religious faith has played in inspiring some of the world's greatest architecture.

I’ve been thinking about that this week as I wander around beautiful Prague, looking up and going “Ooooh” at its architectural elegance. Prague is often called “the city of a hundred spires” (though I'm sure the total number is a lot higher), and the pic below demonstrates why. If you took away those spires, along with the buildings they’re attached to, there’s no doubt that you’d impoverish the cityscape –  and a good many of them were built for 'devotional' purposes. 

Still, although Hitchens definitely had a point, in my view religion isn't the only thing that spurs architects on to greatness. You can point to any number of 'secular buildings' around the world to support that idea.  

One building which definitely doesn't support it, though, is Prague Castle.

According to the Guinness Book of A Few Significant World Records and A Whole Bunch of Ridiculously Marginal Ones, Prague is home to the largest castle complex in the world.

Large it may be, but inspired, it is not. I don’t think I’ve ever been dragged through such a perfunctory ensemble of meaningless architectural puff. It was truly dull.

I think part of the problem is that the architects here basically kept the trappings of monumental Christian architecture, took their deity out of the equation, and simply replaced him with a monarch. I’m sure it doesn’t strike every visitor this way, but for me, the whole "Here's our king's house, and he's so awesome that we made it look like the house of a god" theme resulted in a crude and hollow emptiness.

Architects, please don't do that. It's tacky.

Also part of the castle complex is a church called St. Vitus Cathedral, occupying the courtyard adjacent to the main building. Like the castle, it seems a bit phoned-in, though it has all the stuff that a gothic cathedral is supposed to have – imposing height, ornate buttresses, gargoyles and so forth.

As you round the cathedral and encounter its side wall, things go from 'just ok' to 'Oh dear, that's a bit tragic!'. The wall was modified at some point and a huge door added, because one of the Czech kings had asked for a special entrance, so that he could feel like a VIP whenever he came in. (I think the king in question was Charles IV, but I can't remember and it's not interesting enough to look up.)

Here again, you've got this devotional style mixed with the veneration of an earthly person, and again it falls flat.

To make matters even worse, the painting over the entrance shows Jesus determining the fate of souls on Judgment Day. Our guide told us that the intention here is to remind us that “Only God can judge people. If another person tries to judge you, you can tell him to get lost.” 

Not a bad message on one level, in terms of discouraging people from being judgemental towards one another – except that, when St. Vitus was built, it wasn't only God passing sentence on people in Europe. It was God's 'representatives on Earth', namely the Catholic Church. And it was also any monarch who conferred Divine Right upon themselves, which was basically all of them, including (no doubt) the guy who commissioned this horrible bit of 'art'.

All of this stuff put me in kind of a sour mood, especially as the temperature was over 35C and the guide insisted on lingering outside to point out every little thing in the whole complex and beyond. So when, in the centre of the yard, I spied a statue of St. George slaying the dragon, I knew that a rant on The Manor was pretty much inevitable.

See, the whole St. George myth has always kind of annoyed me. My objection is partly intellectual / theological, but much more than that, it's visceral. And it comes down to this: I do not want to see dragons being triumphantly slain. Sorry; I just don’t. 

I mean, even if a dragon has done something particularly terrible like, say, devouring a young maiden or stealing livestock, how can anyone get off on killing it? It’s just being a dragon, ffs, as surely as the crocodile who makes supper out of a German tourist unwisely skinny-dipping in a northern Australian river is just being a crocodile. Can we really get any satisfaction from 'punishing’ or ‘getting revenge’ on either of them, when both were simply acting in accordance with their natures?

Besides, if you put yourself in the path of a hungry dragon, that pretty much defines you as an idiot, doesn't it? I mean, when it’s known that a certain area of coastal water is infested with Great Whites, what people generally do is this: they go away and swim elsewhere. In most versions of the myth, St George and/or the people in the community he was ‘rescuing’ could’ve quite easily done exactly that (or found another solution, as we'll see in a sec). The fact that they didn't just makes them all eligible for Darwin Awards.

And as for George himself ... well, dragons are beautiful, primal creatures, to be admired and respected, whereas George basically seems to have been a big strong guy with a glorified kebab skewer. He’s the Steve Irwin of his day, courting the world's attention by chasing fierce, giant-toothed beasties and deliberately trying to piss them off. Excuse me if I find it difficult to admire such a desperate bid for celebrity. 

PICK ON SOMETHING YOUR OWN SIZE, GEORGIE BOY

Prague Castle, 21.07.15

Aside from which, one might legitimately ask "What the heck is he doing in Prague anyway? Or in the Christian story at all, for that matter?"

I mean, depending on your preferred interpretation, that story is about the words and deeds of either a Palestinian Gandhi or a sort of revolutionary Jewish Martin Luther. Where does this other medieval guy fit in, sitting on his horse and poking his spear into a dragon's belly?

Short answer: he doesn't. He's a sprig of English parsley garnishing a sumptuous Middle Eastern mezze: marooned in a foreign context that leaves him utterly irrelevant, and arguably in as much need of 'rescuing' as anyone.

Sorry ... where was I? Oh yeah, Prague :-)

So the tour ended with a little river cruise and a brief wander through the Jewish quarter, both of which were quite enjoyable.

Afterwards I grabbed some dinner and then headed off to my new favourite bar just outside the centre (downmarket but friendly, working wi-fi, and a smoking section – shine on, you crazy bar!). Sitting with my bottle of Finnish cider, I kept coming back to this whole St. George thing. A certain amount of googling happened, and at the end of it, I had a bit more of an idea of where Mr. Irrelevant had come from, and how he'd insinuated himself into so much statuary and stained glass across Europe and elsewhere.  

So just for you, here's the lowdown ...

George seems to have first appeared in stories around the seventh century AD in Georgia*. He was initially conceived as just a soldier who served under the Emperor Diocletian, and some writers attribute to him noble actions like tearing up an edict from the Emperor which instructed Romans to burn down Christian churches. 

References to George's dragon-slaying habit don't come until a few hundred years later, when they appeared in both Georgia and Turkey's Cappadocia**. However, his first encounter with the dragon didn't happen in either of those places – it happened, randomly enough, in Libya.

The story goes like this: the dragon lived in a lake just outside a city called Silene, and the people there found they could placate it by feeding it sheep. But then, one black day, the sheep supply ran out. Soon after that, the townsfolk also exhausted their supply of spare children, who they'd been using as substitute dragon food while they waited for the sheep drought to be over. 

At this point – aside from a kind of general Old Testamenty bloodthirstiness – there really doesn't seem to be much connecting this tale to Christian theology, does there? Not to worry, though ... it's coming in a minute.

So with all the sheep and all the kids gone, the King of Silene was forced to send his own daughter to the lake, where the ravenous dragon awaited with a napkin tied around its neck and silver cutlery in its scaly hands. But just at the point where the young maiden was about to be eaten, George happened past on his horse.

Observing the terrible scene, he blurted out "What's all this, then?", like a London Bobby in a Monty Python sketch (or at least, that's how I picture it). A fight ensued, he wounded the dragon with his kebab skewer, and then he led it into town, where he promised to kill it for the townsfolk's entertainment. There was one condition, though: everyone in Silene has to convert to Christianity.

So you see ... there is a link! And what a logical, rational one it is, eh?

At this point, I think it's pertinent to remark on just how freakin' weird people were in those days.

To illustrate, imagine this for a second. You're coming home from work one day, taking a shortcut which leads through a sports oval. As the oval comes in sight, you notice there's a giant squid lying in the middle of it. Next to the squid is a guy dressed in protective clothing, sitting at the driver's seat of a small crane. Obviously he's somehow caught or acquired the beast, subdued it and transported it here.

The guy motions you over to him and asks you a question:

"Hey bro, have you accepted Jesus Christ into your life as your personal Lord and Saviour?"

"Er, well not in so many words. I mean, I'd probably consider myself a spiritual person, but as far as organised relig-" ... 

"Well", he interrupts, "If I murder this enormous squid, then will you accept Jesus?".

You know how we'd react to this in the 21st Century. The guy would arrested and charged, he'd enter an insanity plea in court, and he'd spend the rest of his life heavily medicated in a psychiatric facility.

In the world of early and medieval Christianity, though, his fate would've been rather different. If you could come up with a stunt like the giant squid capture back then, you had a good chance of effecting a mass conversion to whatever religion you happened to believe in, and possibly even becoming a hero whose insignia people would choose to put on their flags centuries later.

As I said: weirdos.

Amazingly, though, even this tableau of bizarreness – the original St George & Dragon story, I mean – wasn't enough for later storytellers. They had to make it even more strange and random, by inserting a magical orange tree. 

Yep, that's right. In a prominent later version of the story, the dragon is bigger and fiercer, with scales that act as armour plates and can shatter spears on contact. (In some renditions, it's actually the dragons disgusting toxic spit that shatters armour – which seems to me a bit more fun. But anyway ...).

When George fought this dragon he was wounded, but by rolling under a Magic Orange Tree that just happened to be nearby, he became completely impervious. While lying there on the ground he spotted a newly ripened orange and decided to pause for a quick snack, at which point he underwent some kind of instant healing process and was restored to full strength.

(Amazing that no orange juice company has managed to weave this into an advertising campaign yet ... don'tcha think?)

Then, feeling all re-invigorated by his mystically enhanced Vitamin C hit, Mr. George manages to get the upper hand in the fight, and he subdues the dragon.

There's a problem, though: the dragon's innards are also highly toxic, and unbelievably copious. When George finally slashes its belly, the earth around them both becomes "drenched in the moisture that exploded from the monster's venomous bowels" ***.

It seemed like the bowel goo would never stop coming ... and yet, as we know, George did eventually drag himself out of the river of dragon gore and into the popular imagination.

Historians disagree on exactly how he managed to do that. Some say that the story of the dragon chimed in well with pagan stories native to England and other European countries, and/or with the Greek myth in which Perseus slays a Sea Monster; others say that the dragon represented the Emperor Diocletian, since he had a bit of a beef against Christianity.

To me, though, none of these things cancel out the irrelevance or George, or persuade me to forgive him for slaying the dragon.

The people of Silene always had options, and a true hero would've pointed that out. They could've gone, for example, and negotiated with the dragon (who, in most accounts, can understand human language). Just explain: "Look, we've got a bit of a sheep shortage, but we're gonna sort it out by buying some sheep from neighbouring settlements. You might have to make do with chickens for a couple of weeks, though." Easy.

On the other side of the argument, not every community and not even every 'hero' can be counted upon to make the best decisions all the time. So maybe I'm being tough on George here. Arguably, it's not his solitary act of brutality that's so horrifying; rather, it's the fact that a) he became a saint partly on the strength of his dumbass dragon-slaying; b) dozens of countries saw it as sufficiently heroic to warrant having a St George feast day every year (which many still observe); and c) he still turns up in places like the Prague Castle Complex, sticking a giant fork into a dragon's belly for reasons which most people aren't even aware of.

And with that, I think I'll finish my little George and The Dragon rant. 

Tomorrow I’m leaving Prague behind and heading off into the wilds of Moravia. Well, the quasi-wilds at least. I’ve bought a bicycle, which was a whole fun process in itself, and I’m planning to ride it most of the way to Warsaw. I’ve only got 15 days to get there and start the process of applying for visas at two separate embassies, so I’ll undoubtedly do some train-hopping to help me keep to schedule. But I’ll cycle as much as possible. 

The next few entries will probably either be about Bike Love or Truck Hate; those are bound to be big themes in the coming days. Until then ... take care!

Anthony.
  

(* In an entry I wrote earlier this year, I wondered why we use the name Georgia, given that the country's actual name is Sakartvelo. Now I know – but I still think Sakartvelo is much cooler!)

(** kind of an odd coincidence for me, 'cause I've visited both of those places this year, and in each one I've had conversations about the other.) 

(*** source: http://www.blackdrago.com/slayers/stgeorge.htm)