Part One: The Novel
Before I read The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, I thought that there was only one way a book could be “bad”, and that was if it exhibited bad writing in some form or other. Hideous mangling of the English language, unbelievable or miraculous turns of events, bad characterization, stilted dialogue; these are the things which usually cause me to direct my wrath toward some volume. I am pleased, if that’s the right word, to report that The Fountainhead has given me the need to invent a second category of “bad”, since purely literary qualifications cannot completely explain my dislike of this book. It is true that there is one literary aspect of the book which I look upon with the utmost contempt, but that part can only explain at most half of my aversion to the novel.
The book is a long runner, and it would be quite difficult for me to express my opinion in a few sentences, so I decided to review it, in two parts. The first is purely my opinion of the novel as a novel. This is what I think the best literary criticism is: purely personal opinion and evaluation, rather than an exhaustive and as in so many, many cases, misdirected analysis. The second part is my consideration and criticism (lots of that) on Mrs. Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, as set forth in The Fountainhead. This part will, I fear, be quite a technical piece of work, in that a reader not versed in basic philosophical terms and concepts will probably find himself or herself lost in it. You have been warned. You are also warned that this review assumes that you’ve read the novel, since I will be discussing characters and events therein, although I will try to remain as vague as I can.
The novel’s protagonist is a young man named Howard Roark, recently expelled from an architectural school for refusing to conform to its “old-fashioned” ideas. While all the other architects in the book are worshipers of the accomplishments of past architects (the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance Italians, and so on), Roark believes that each individual building or project should be a unique and unrepeated phenomenon. The plot concerns his struggles against the establishment and its clientele as he tries to succeed by doing nothing that anyone has ever done before. His adversaries in the struggle are the traditionalist architects, as well as a critic named Ellsworth Toohey, who pit their full might against him and his ideas. In the end, Roark rises like the phoenix triumphant, his foes are cast down and trampled beneath his feet, and he gets the girl.
As a novel, then, I found The Fountainhead to be functional, and in many respects quite good, with one or two howling exceptions. I should like to emphasize once more that this paragraph is the last time you, dear reader, will hear me say anything good about the book. Mrs. Rand is at her best in her descriptive prose; she has a poet’s knack for using adjectives in strange and unfamiliar ways, and the good sense not to overuse this particular technique. The dialogue is, for the most part, quick and snappy, although towards the end of the book certain characters, particularly Roark, have a tendency to give long, cumbersome speeches lasting some 10 paperback pages or more.
There is one main criticism I should like to make of the novel as a reader, and that is my broad dislike of the characters, both in terms of their qualities and their development. Briefly speaking, all their qualities are repugnant and they do not develop. None of her characters, not even the protagonist, are likeable in any sense, a lack of quality which is especially striking in the protagonist. Howard Roark is an egotistical, uncaring man, as blunt as a sledgehammer; he lacks the wit which makes the antihero (Captain Jack Sparrow and all of his prodigious relations and progeny) so popular in our day and age, and any relationship the reader thinks that he or she has with Roark is usually dashed a few pages after the reader forms the idea. Roark is aware of his repugnance, it seems, and he reminds others that he doesn’t ever give a damn about what they think. In fact, Roark’s emotions are truncated to dislike, and nothing more. He is incapable of feeling love, affection, or any other emotion which connects him to his fellow human beings. He is a separatist in and of himself.
The other characters are hardly more likable. They are either the villains of the piece, with no redeeming qualities (Ellsworth Toohey and his ilk, who are all straw representations of novelists, painters, playwrights, and other artists), or they are those who aspire to be like Roark in all his supremely detached glory, but fail because they still retain the human (dare I say altruistic) connections which Roark so gleefully disdains. Not one of them can be liked. I am an altruist, and yet I found none of the altruists likeable, although I attribute this to their incredibly skewed characterizations, which cause them to revert to the other end of the spectrum as selfish bastards. Thus, the struggles between characters, which is the important part of any novel, comes down to those who are selfish and who acknowledge it, and those who are selfish and don’t acknowledge it.
It’s even a struggle for me to talk about the men and women that populate The Fountainhead as characters rather than as cardboard cutouts, because you would be hard-pressed to call them anything other than the slightly stiffer cousins of paper dolls. They do not develop in any way at all. They remain the same as they do when they are introduced, without even a qualm of reconsideration in times of dire need. This is not how real people behave! Real people struggle with their beliefs; they have, as Saint John of the Cross puts it, “dark nights of the soul”, when all is despair and there is no light at the end of the tunnel because Satan has absconded with it. The people of The Fountainhead do not change one iota in their beliefs from when they are introduced to us, to when they are shuffled off the novel’s mortal coil. They are like Newtonian billiard balls, bouncing off each other and the walls of the story in entirely predictable fashions. They are not interesting at all. They are not likeable, and they are not human.
The characters are what ultimately turn The Fountainhead from what would have been a perfectly enjoyable tale of the swashbuckling hero partaking in struggles against the establishment into a perfectly hateful novel. This is magnified by the character’s strange vulnerability to possession by the author, which causes them to give long philosophical speeches which in no way relate to their positions as they have expressed them earlier in the book. This strange phenomenon occurs only in the last 100 pages of the book, and it was what in the end clinched my decision. Before then I had hopes that Roark would be touched by the milk of human kindness, and undergo some kind of character development before the book’s climax and outworking. These hopes were dashed against the cliffs of despair when Roark embarked on a long, out-of-character monologue, and I put down the book to utter a howl of despair. But I shall speak more of this philosophical firestorm in my next installment.
In summation: The Fountainhead might have been enjoyable, if its characters had not been so utterly hateful and repugnant. Any person who believes in a God of any kind, and any person who believes that we should care about our fellow human beings, will read this book and enjoy it up until the last 100 pages, when it abandons being a novel for being a megaphone for Ayn Rand to blare her philosophies into our ears. I do not encourage you to read it, unless you wish to do so only to understand exactly what she believes. I have found that Atlas Shrugged, which is much the same as The Fountainhead but far less subtle and far more idiotic, is one of the best-selling American novels ever written. Such things boggle the mind, but perhaps one day I shall be brave enough (or drunk enough) to read Atlas Shrugged. Until that fateful day, I take a solemn vow to forswear Ayn Rand, except as an object of my most severe emnity.
-John Ashley
Friday, June 5, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Croatian Chronicle (Part II)
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 (Day Four)
Much of my suffering during this day could have been avoided had I known how hot Dubrovnik is, and thus taken appropriate precautions such as a hat, sandals or flip-flops, and enough water to drown a thirsty camel. The heat climbed into the high 90s today, something I in my casual Innsbruck outfit (button-down shortsleever, jean pants, and comfortable brown casual shoes) neither expected nor was prepared for. Couple that with carrying around a camera back and bulky backpack, and you have a recipe for pure and unrelenting misery. Despite this, I still think the day was a good one, and well-spent, but had I known what I was getting into I think I would have enjoyed it much more.
Day began at around 5:30, with my disgruntled and reluctant awakening, followed by a truly glorious buffet breakfast at 6. The hotel provided eggs scrambled with ham, sausages, thick rashers of bacon (each no less that a quarter-inch in breadth), plus all of the usual Continental staples, all washed down with freshly squeezed orange juice and strong black coffee. I was feeling understandably pleased when we took the ferry back to the port of Dubrovnik, followed by a bus to the outskirts of the old town. This feeling vanished promptly when the sun climbed high into the sky, the clouds vanished, and the stones began to warm to the day’s beginning.
Our time in the Dubrovnik old town began with a history lesson, followed by a walking tour, then lunch, then a tour of the city walls, then more free time, then a lecture, and finally our return to the island. Since I assume that you, dear reader, are pleasantly unaware of the history and layout of Dubrovnik, allow me to inundate you with that information like a bucket of cold water poured over the head.
Dubrovnik began its life as a Greek colony, Epidoros, which was taken over by the Romans in the 1st century BC and Latinized to Epidaurum. It was at this time that the city began to acquire its first Croat inhabitants in the form of native workers hired to help expand the city. It acquired Christianity in the 4th century AD, and evolved over the course of the Dark and Middle Ages into the Republic of Ragusa, which was not really a republic, more of an oligarchy, and a maritime trading power which rivaled Venice and Genoa. The city acquired its fortifications at this time: thick city walls and moats, two fortresses built into the walls, and two outside the walls. In the 17th century an earthquake leveled most of the buildings inside the city, which were rebuilt in the Baroque style. At about this time, Ragusa reached the height of its power, its dockyards churning out warships and merchantmen, and its trading fleets reaching far into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
Like so much of Europe, Ragusa was snatched by Napoleon, and after the end of the Napoleonic Wars was assigned to the hegemony of Austria. It was later integrated into Croatia, and became part of that nation in the late 19th century. It fell under siege during the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s, when the Serb army occupied the mountains nearby and bombarded it with rockets and artillery fire for about four months. The city’s fortifications, though, remained steadfast throughout the ordeal, and Dubrovnik was never captured, while the Serbian army withdrew to shell Sarajevo and massacre Bosnians.
The old town of Dubrovnik is limited on all sides either by its walls or its harbor. The walls are immense, although not constructed on quite such an epic scale as those of Valletta in Malta. The walls and battlements of Valletta are easily three times as thick as those of Dubrovnik, but Dubrovnik’s are respectable set of fortifications nonetheless. Ragusa had the good sense to remain neutral the conflict between Europe and the Ottomans, and thus never needed to repel a Turkish expeditionary force of tens of thousands.
The interior of the city is laid out in a grid, with an east-west axis of the main street. There are three squares, several churches, and an infestation of overpriced restaurants and souvenir shops. All in all Dubrovnik’s old town reminded me strongly of Malta, especially Valletta, although the stone used in Dubrovnik is white rather than the Maltese tan.
Our tour began outside of the western gate, then crossed over the bridge and drawbridge and into the forecourt, where we inspected a map of the damages caused by the Serbs during their siege. Then we were through the forecourt and into the Square of the Fountain. The fountain here dispenses cool drinking water for all comers, an amenity I was to take advantage of throughout the day. Nearby is the main street and a Franciscan monastery which is now a museum. It wasn’t yet open, so we walked down the main street to the Square of Orlando, so named after a large statue of the legendary knight erected on a column in the center of the square. If this is confusing, it’s only because a map is a wonderful guide to understanding, and it’s impossible to communicate a map through the written word. I’ll try to include one in the webalbum for the day.
Our tour went down the main street, to the Column of Orlando, a place where in medieval times criers would stand to proclaim the news, and to which heretics were tied to be burned. Nearby the church, and our next destination, is the Church of St. Blaise, the patron saint of Dubrovnik. It’s said in local legend that in the Middle Ages St. Blaise appeared to a local priest in a vision, warning him that the Venetians had launched an invasion fleet. The priest went to the town governor, who readied Dubrovnik’s navy, which then defeated the Venetians in a bloody battle. Thereafter the city of Dubrovnik was dedicated to Blaise.
After the Church of St. Blaise we visited the Cathedral, a tolerably Baroque structure, which nonetheless pales in comparison to similar churches like the Innsbruck cathedral. The Dubrovnik cathedral contains an impressive collection of relics and reliquaries, which was assembled over the centuries by Ragusan traders, priests, and monks. Highlights include the requisite piece of the True Cross, the arm and leg of St. Blaise (naturally), the jawbone of St. Ursula, and the swaddling clothes of the infant Christ.
Next stop was the harbor, followed by the Jesuit Church. This church is built at the top of a staircase remarkably like the Spanish Steps in Rome, because the Dubrovnik Jesuits hired the same architect to duplicate the steps in the local stone. The church itself was built by Andrea Pozzo, the architect of the Jesuit Church in Rome, and the two share a great deal of similarities: the same size, same facade, same ornately decorated interior. Apart from that, nothing much to remark upon, except for the church’s relieving, cool interior (the result, along with a moisture problem, of a reservoir built underneath the church).
The last stop on the tour was the Franciscan monastery I mentioned earlier. Only the cloister, its frescoes, and the pharmacy museum are open to the public. This last is contained in the space where Dubrovnik’s first apothecary was located. Some of the old apothecary has been preserved: two work-desks, shelves full of porcelain jars, old instruments of alchemy (alembics, retorts, calcinators, and so on), and the window through which customers would name their symptoms and receive the appropriate cure.
This was the end of the first phase of the tour. We had a half-hour, which I spent eating ice cream in the shade of a tree near the fountain. The second phase of the tour wasn’t so much a tour as it was a walk around the city walls and fortifications. As I’ve said before, the defenses are not quite as impressive as those of Malta, but they are rather better preserved. The walls encompass all of Dubrovnik without exception, dipping in elevation along the length of the harbor but otherwise remaining at a towering height. They are punctuated by two fortresses, the fortress of St. John on the edge of the harbor, and a tower whose name I didn’t catch on the one fully landward corner. Each wall is built in the fashion of 17th and 18th century citadels: not particularly tall, but thick and massive, to resist cannon fire. The walls are punctuated, periodically, with bastions for artillery.
Of the tour of the walls, I’ll not speak overmuch. I did take a goodly deal of pictures, but since I was quite dehydrated and hot I don’t actually remember much of it. I’m content to let the pictures speak for themselves.
The rest of the day after the walls was a period of mostly free time, with an interruption around 3 to hear an elderly Croatian diplomat talk about the history of Croatia. Most of the details I already knew, having researched them for my paper, but it was nice to ask him some of the questions I hadn’t been able to answer for myself in the course of my work.
After the lecture I read for awhile in the shadow of the fountain, and then returned to the island for a lot of water, a shower, and dinner. I wrote for awhile in this very journal, and then went to sleep.
Thursday, May 21, 2009 (Day Five)
A day of blessed relaxation, although you’d not have guessed it from the way I spent it. I rose late, at around 8am, breakfasted, then hiked around the island of Koločep until 4. It was a long and at times grueling hike, made worse by poorly marked and inadequate trails. Once again, I’m going to let my pictures do the talking, since they can explain the stunning beauty of this place far, far better than I can.
Friday, May 22, 2009 (Day Six)
Another day, another crushingly early wake-up time. We got the ferry back to Dubrovnik, then took our bus north along the coast toward Split. All the students fell asleep as soon as they settled into their seats, much to the disappointment of my history professor who wanted us all to experience the landscape. We all woke up when we reached Split at about 11:30am. Split (don’t ask me to explain the name, I don’t know) is an ancient city dating back to the late Roman Empire when the entire city was the palace of the Emperor Diocletian. After he died, the locals took over the palace and inhabited it, gradually expanding outwards and building their own apartments, palazzos, and houses, although the palace walls remain as they were, along with the Mausoleum (now a church) and the Temple to Jupiter (now a baptistry). The city was under Venetian domination for a long while, which explains much of the Italian architecture in the newer parts of the city.
We took a tour which lead us through the basements of the palace, then through church and baptistry, in and out of the maze of streets which join the former palace to the city, and finally back to the waterfront. One thing I did find quite pleasing about Split was that the city seems to have amassed a collection of sculpture by Ivan Mestrović, a 20th century Croat sculpture who taught at Notre Dame for a great deal of time. The most impressive sculpture by far is that of Bishop Gregory of Nice, which is at least 20 feet tall and terribly imposing. The good bishop seems to look more like Gandalf the Grey than a Catholic cleric.
The next part of the journey ran us up along the coastline to Opatija, the last stop. Opatija is a tourist town, plain and simple. It began that function under the dominion of the Habsburgs and continues in the same way today. It is filled with hotels, bars, and restaurants, all over-priced with a tendency to seediness. The hotel we stayed the night at rather unwisely boasted its two-star rating (goes to show you the opinion ND has of the Innsbruck students), a badge whose existence was swiftly validated by the hotel’s bland, tasteless food, rooms which smelled alternately of cigarette smoke or sauerkraut, and a horde of visiting Russian youths who seemed to think that it was a capital idea indeed to consume large quantities of vodka and smokes, and then shout and sing all night so as to blast their voices into the next millennium. I will not dignify the hotel with further description, save to say that I shall never set foot within its premises again.
Saturday, May 23, 2009 (Day Seven)
The last day. We woke up at the usually early time, broke our fast on the expected bland mix of granola, bread, and lunchmeat, then drove north all day. We stopped once or twice in Italy, but made good time nonetheless, and arrived back in Innsbruck at 4:30.
Much of my suffering during this day could have been avoided had I known how hot Dubrovnik is, and thus taken appropriate precautions such as a hat, sandals or flip-flops, and enough water to drown a thirsty camel. The heat climbed into the high 90s today, something I in my casual Innsbruck outfit (button-down shortsleever, jean pants, and comfortable brown casual shoes) neither expected nor was prepared for. Couple that with carrying around a camera back and bulky backpack, and you have a recipe for pure and unrelenting misery. Despite this, I still think the day was a good one, and well-spent, but had I known what I was getting into I think I would have enjoyed it much more.
Day began at around 5:30, with my disgruntled and reluctant awakening, followed by a truly glorious buffet breakfast at 6. The hotel provided eggs scrambled with ham, sausages, thick rashers of bacon (each no less that a quarter-inch in breadth), plus all of the usual Continental staples, all washed down with freshly squeezed orange juice and strong black coffee. I was feeling understandably pleased when we took the ferry back to the port of Dubrovnik, followed by a bus to the outskirts of the old town. This feeling vanished promptly when the sun climbed high into the sky, the clouds vanished, and the stones began to warm to the day’s beginning.
Our time in the Dubrovnik old town began with a history lesson, followed by a walking tour, then lunch, then a tour of the city walls, then more free time, then a lecture, and finally our return to the island. Since I assume that you, dear reader, are pleasantly unaware of the history and layout of Dubrovnik, allow me to inundate you with that information like a bucket of cold water poured over the head.
Dubrovnik began its life as a Greek colony, Epidoros, which was taken over by the Romans in the 1st century BC and Latinized to Epidaurum. It was at this time that the city began to acquire its first Croat inhabitants in the form of native workers hired to help expand the city. It acquired Christianity in the 4th century AD, and evolved over the course of the Dark and Middle Ages into the Republic of Ragusa, which was not really a republic, more of an oligarchy, and a maritime trading power which rivaled Venice and Genoa. The city acquired its fortifications at this time: thick city walls and moats, two fortresses built into the walls, and two outside the walls. In the 17th century an earthquake leveled most of the buildings inside the city, which were rebuilt in the Baroque style. At about this time, Ragusa reached the height of its power, its dockyards churning out warships and merchantmen, and its trading fleets reaching far into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
Like so much of Europe, Ragusa was snatched by Napoleon, and after the end of the Napoleonic Wars was assigned to the hegemony of Austria. It was later integrated into Croatia, and became part of that nation in the late 19th century. It fell under siege during the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s, when the Serb army occupied the mountains nearby and bombarded it with rockets and artillery fire for about four months. The city’s fortifications, though, remained steadfast throughout the ordeal, and Dubrovnik was never captured, while the Serbian army withdrew to shell Sarajevo and massacre Bosnians.
The old town of Dubrovnik is limited on all sides either by its walls or its harbor. The walls are immense, although not constructed on quite such an epic scale as those of Valletta in Malta. The walls and battlements of Valletta are easily three times as thick as those of Dubrovnik, but Dubrovnik’s are respectable set of fortifications nonetheless. Ragusa had the good sense to remain neutral the conflict between Europe and the Ottomans, and thus never needed to repel a Turkish expeditionary force of tens of thousands.
The interior of the city is laid out in a grid, with an east-west axis of the main street. There are three squares, several churches, and an infestation of overpriced restaurants and souvenir shops. All in all Dubrovnik’s old town reminded me strongly of Malta, especially Valletta, although the stone used in Dubrovnik is white rather than the Maltese tan.
Our tour began outside of the western gate, then crossed over the bridge and drawbridge and into the forecourt, where we inspected a map of the damages caused by the Serbs during their siege. Then we were through the forecourt and into the Square of the Fountain. The fountain here dispenses cool drinking water for all comers, an amenity I was to take advantage of throughout the day. Nearby is the main street and a Franciscan monastery which is now a museum. It wasn’t yet open, so we walked down the main street to the Square of Orlando, so named after a large statue of the legendary knight erected on a column in the center of the square. If this is confusing, it’s only because a map is a wonderful guide to understanding, and it’s impossible to communicate a map through the written word. I’ll try to include one in the webalbum for the day.
Our tour went down the main street, to the Column of Orlando, a place where in medieval times criers would stand to proclaim the news, and to which heretics were tied to be burned. Nearby the church, and our next destination, is the Church of St. Blaise, the patron saint of Dubrovnik. It’s said in local legend that in the Middle Ages St. Blaise appeared to a local priest in a vision, warning him that the Venetians had launched an invasion fleet. The priest went to the town governor, who readied Dubrovnik’s navy, which then defeated the Venetians in a bloody battle. Thereafter the city of Dubrovnik was dedicated to Blaise.
After the Church of St. Blaise we visited the Cathedral, a tolerably Baroque structure, which nonetheless pales in comparison to similar churches like the Innsbruck cathedral. The Dubrovnik cathedral contains an impressive collection of relics and reliquaries, which was assembled over the centuries by Ragusan traders, priests, and monks. Highlights include the requisite piece of the True Cross, the arm and leg of St. Blaise (naturally), the jawbone of St. Ursula, and the swaddling clothes of the infant Christ.
Next stop was the harbor, followed by the Jesuit Church. This church is built at the top of a staircase remarkably like the Spanish Steps in Rome, because the Dubrovnik Jesuits hired the same architect to duplicate the steps in the local stone. The church itself was built by Andrea Pozzo, the architect of the Jesuit Church in Rome, and the two share a great deal of similarities: the same size, same facade, same ornately decorated interior. Apart from that, nothing much to remark upon, except for the church’s relieving, cool interior (the result, along with a moisture problem, of a reservoir built underneath the church).
The last stop on the tour was the Franciscan monastery I mentioned earlier. Only the cloister, its frescoes, and the pharmacy museum are open to the public. This last is contained in the space where Dubrovnik’s first apothecary was located. Some of the old apothecary has been preserved: two work-desks, shelves full of porcelain jars, old instruments of alchemy (alembics, retorts, calcinators, and so on), and the window through which customers would name their symptoms and receive the appropriate cure.
This was the end of the first phase of the tour. We had a half-hour, which I spent eating ice cream in the shade of a tree near the fountain. The second phase of the tour wasn’t so much a tour as it was a walk around the city walls and fortifications. As I’ve said before, the defenses are not quite as impressive as those of Malta, but they are rather better preserved. The walls encompass all of Dubrovnik without exception, dipping in elevation along the length of the harbor but otherwise remaining at a towering height. They are punctuated by two fortresses, the fortress of St. John on the edge of the harbor, and a tower whose name I didn’t catch on the one fully landward corner. Each wall is built in the fashion of 17th and 18th century citadels: not particularly tall, but thick and massive, to resist cannon fire. The walls are punctuated, periodically, with bastions for artillery.
Of the tour of the walls, I’ll not speak overmuch. I did take a goodly deal of pictures, but since I was quite dehydrated and hot I don’t actually remember much of it. I’m content to let the pictures speak for themselves.
The rest of the day after the walls was a period of mostly free time, with an interruption around 3 to hear an elderly Croatian diplomat talk about the history of Croatia. Most of the details I already knew, having researched them for my paper, but it was nice to ask him some of the questions I hadn’t been able to answer for myself in the course of my work.
After the lecture I read for awhile in the shadow of the fountain, and then returned to the island for a lot of water, a shower, and dinner. I wrote for awhile in this very journal, and then went to sleep.
Thursday, May 21, 2009 (Day Five)
A day of blessed relaxation, although you’d not have guessed it from the way I spent it. I rose late, at around 8am, breakfasted, then hiked around the island of Koločep until 4. It was a long and at times grueling hike, made worse by poorly marked and inadequate trails. Once again, I’m going to let my pictures do the talking, since they can explain the stunning beauty of this place far, far better than I can.
Friday, May 22, 2009 (Day Six)
Another day, another crushingly early wake-up time. We got the ferry back to Dubrovnik, then took our bus north along the coast toward Split. All the students fell asleep as soon as they settled into their seats, much to the disappointment of my history professor who wanted us all to experience the landscape. We all woke up when we reached Split at about 11:30am. Split (don’t ask me to explain the name, I don’t know) is an ancient city dating back to the late Roman Empire when the entire city was the palace of the Emperor Diocletian. After he died, the locals took over the palace and inhabited it, gradually expanding outwards and building their own apartments, palazzos, and houses, although the palace walls remain as they were, along with the Mausoleum (now a church) and the Temple to Jupiter (now a baptistry). The city was under Venetian domination for a long while, which explains much of the Italian architecture in the newer parts of the city.
We took a tour which lead us through the basements of the palace, then through church and baptistry, in and out of the maze of streets which join the former palace to the city, and finally back to the waterfront. One thing I did find quite pleasing about Split was that the city seems to have amassed a collection of sculpture by Ivan Mestrović, a 20th century Croat sculpture who taught at Notre Dame for a great deal of time. The most impressive sculpture by far is that of Bishop Gregory of Nice, which is at least 20 feet tall and terribly imposing. The good bishop seems to look more like Gandalf the Grey than a Catholic cleric.
The next part of the journey ran us up along the coastline to Opatija, the last stop. Opatija is a tourist town, plain and simple. It began that function under the dominion of the Habsburgs and continues in the same way today. It is filled with hotels, bars, and restaurants, all over-priced with a tendency to seediness. The hotel we stayed the night at rather unwisely boasted its two-star rating (goes to show you the opinion ND has of the Innsbruck students), a badge whose existence was swiftly validated by the hotel’s bland, tasteless food, rooms which smelled alternately of cigarette smoke or sauerkraut, and a horde of visiting Russian youths who seemed to think that it was a capital idea indeed to consume large quantities of vodka and smokes, and then shout and sing all night so as to blast their voices into the next millennium. I will not dignify the hotel with further description, save to say that I shall never set foot within its premises again.
Saturday, May 23, 2009 (Day Seven)
The last day. We woke up at the usually early time, broke our fast on the expected bland mix of granola, bread, and lunchmeat, then drove north all day. We stopped once or twice in Italy, but made good time nonetheless, and arrived back in Innsbruck at 4:30.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Croatian Chronicle (Part I)
Sunday, May 17, 2009 (Day One)
Today marks the first day of the Innsbruck Program’s academic field trip to Croatia. I will admit, this trip was one of the reasons why I signed on to the program. I couldn’t miss a chance to explore my ancestral homelands in the Balkans.
Our trip is a seven-day affair, which began today with a bus ride from Innsbruck to Zagreb, followed by a reception given by the students and professors of the Philosophical Faculty of the Society of Jesus at the University of Zagreb. Tomorrow, day two, will consist of two lectures given by the Faculty and a tour of Zagreb, punctuated by free time in the early afternoon and evening. Tuesday, day three, is another day of travel. We go south by bus to the medieval fortress-city of Dubrovnik, stopping along the way at Plitvića National Park. Days four and five will be spent in Dubrovnik and its environs. Day six is the first step of the return journey to Innsbruck, as we travel by bus from Dubrovnik to Opačije (a town on the Croatian-Slovenian border) via the city of Split. Day seven is a day of unrelenting travel through Slovenia and Italy back to Innsbruck.
To chronicle this odyssey, I’ll be keeping a journal of sorts on my computer, to be posted to my blog when I get back to Innsbruck. So, I begin.
Today began at the uncomfortable crack of dawn, with our departure from Innsbruck at 6:00am. I arose at 4:30, showered and breakfasted, made a last-minute check of my luggage, then walked to the arranged meeting-point. We traveled by charter bus, as we will this entire trip, a necessity when one realizes that well-organized railways (our program director’s favorite means of travel) do not exist south of Hungary.
The bus ride proceeded by several stages. The first was from Innsbruck to a rest stop located somewhere in Styria (one of the provinces of Austria), then from there to the city of Maribor (known as Marburg in German). We took an hour and a half to wander through the city and idly pass the time throwing bread to the ducks in the Drau River. I’ve seen the Drau at a point near its source in the Austrian Alps, and while it was there a rushing torrent, it is in Slovenia a fat, slow, and disgustingly brown body of water.
Our final leg of the journey took us through Slovenia and into Croatia, through a landscape which started out looking much like the Appalachian Mountains, but slowly became more and more like northern Indiana/southern Michigan. We finally came to a halt in front of the Philosophical Faculty building in Zagreb at 4:45pm. It is located in one of the nicer parts of the city, and is itself quite a new building, its exterior built of plain tan stone and the interior furnished with sleek metal and polished Slavonian oak. We had some time here for refreshments, as well as to meet the students enrolled at the faculty. It was for me a bit surprising, since all of them study philosophy, and I’ve not spoken to other fellow philosophy student since I left the US all those months ago. The conversations were pleasant, as all of them were fluent in English, as well as German, so a middle ground could easily be reached.
At 6pm, we repaired to the auditorium for a series of presentations by the students of the Philosophical Faculty to showcase Croatian culture and talent. A pair of singers performed a duet from a Croatian opera; a string quartet played a piece by a Czech composer written for a wealthy Croat in the 18th century, and one student performed as a mime. These pieces were coupled with a presentation about Croatian culture, and the usual addresses of overture by various potentates of the Faculty.
Directly afterwards was dinner, a pleasant buffet affair which lasted until 8:45, with singing and music by three students playing guitar. I met and talked with more students of the Philosophical Faculty, discussing various things under the general order to have a “cultural exchange.” After the dinner, we boarded our bus which took us to our lodgings, a convent and spiritual center outside Zagreb, where I sit now writing this.
Thus is the first day concluded. Good night to you all; I shall furnish further reports when there is more to report.
Monday, May 18, 2009 (Day Two)
Our second day in Croatia was also our only full day in Zagreb, and as such it was packed to the proverbial gills. I rose once more at dawn’s break (6 am in this particular case), and breakfasted with the rest of my group, a simple, continental affair of bread, spreads, cheeses and meats, washed down with coffee and a sweet raspberry tea. We left our lodgings at the convent at 8:45, arriving in Zagreb at 9:30 outside the Philosophical Faculty building, where we were to have our first lecture. This was on the economy of Croatia, and was given by the Dean of the Zagreb School of Economics and Management. His English was not what might be called the best, filled through with forgotten articles and a thick Slavic accent. He was fortunately assisted by a graduate student who spoke English with a pronounced American accent, certainly a strange thing to hear after all of my time in Europe.
The presentation was an overview of the Croatian economy since 1945, but it was designed with an audience of economic students in mind. The students of economics number two in our group, which made for some amusing moments as the lecturer would declare “as you have learned in your macroeconomics classes”, a phrase which would invariably be followed by a stream of financial technobabble which might have been uttered in Swahili for all of the understanding I had of it. Still, when it was not enveloped in technicalities, the lecture was enlightening enough to make it worth its while. I recently gave a presentation in my Economics class in Innsbruck on the very same subject, so it was very nice to hear the matter treated by experts in the field, rather than a student of philosophy who doesn’t know the difference between macro- and micro-economics, and who couldn’t care less.
This lecture was followed by a walking tour of Zagreb, or at least of the older parts (the “upper town” as it is known to the locals). We began at the Cathedral of Saint Steven and the Assumption of Mary, standing outside to hear a lecture in art history which I have known for three years now, and then a more interesting tour of the church itself. The cathedral has been through many different phases of architectural existence: it started out as a basilica. That burnt down and was replaced by a church in the Romanesque style. That too burnt down, and was replaced by a Baroque church. That one fell down in an earthquake and was replaced with the present neo-Gothic building. As is to be expected from any cathedral of a capital city, the Zagreb cathedral contains the tombs of various Croatian heroes and holy people, along with relics, copious small chapels and altars, and tour groups.
After the cathedral we walked through the city market, which was redolent with the smell of fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s much like a US farmers’ market, although perhaps somewhat cheaper. We then walked down a small alleyway crammed with the tables and umbrellas of its cafes, to find ourselves on a street which was built over a river which once flowed through Zagreb. It marked the border of the old “Bishop’s Town” and the “Duke’s Town”, that part of Zagreb which was given a charter (and hence tax-free status) by its local ruler sometime in the 14th century, as I recall. Our route into the Duke’s town took us through the old eastern gate, now a shrine to Mary which is often frequented by the townspeople, who on their way past stop to offer a quick prayer and bow. The interior of the gate is covered with stone plaques hung by the faithful in thanks for prayers heard and assistance granted.
We then arrived in the main square of the Duke’s Town, which contains the church of St. Mark, a building much like the Stefansdom in Vienna in construction, with a roof made of brightly lacquered tiles. Unlike the roof of the Stefansdom, the roof of this church displays not the black eagle of Austria but the coats of arms of Croatia and Zagreb on a red and white checked field.
This square also holds Zagreb’s government offices and the building of the Croatia Parliament, and it is here in front of the cathedral that the president takes his oath of office, an act done in commemoration of the square’s medieval functions as place of declaration and execution. Next to the square is the Jesuit Square, which holds Zagreb’s Jesuit Church (an essential to any properly Catholic European city) as well as the buildings which held the novitiate and the Jesuit-run high school, both established in the very early 17th century.
Nearby is a panoramic view over the “Lower City”, that part of Zagreb which was built during the 19th centuries. In the centuries before that the ground of the “Lower City” was a field which was often the sight of great battles as the Croats clashed against the invading Ottoman empire. Now it is a place where skyscrapers and the revived architectural styles of the 19th century rub shoulders and hobnob amid a profusion of cars, pedestrians, and streetcars.
Our way down from this panorama lead us into Trg Bana Josipa Jelačića, or, in English, Josip Jelačić Square. It is named after Josip Jelačić, a 19th century Ban (or governor) of Croatia, who lead the Croats to victory over the Hungarians in 1848. A statue of Jelačić now resides in the square, depicting the general astride his charger with sabre pointed at the invisible ranks of his adversaries. The statue, when originally built, pointed northwest toward Hungary, but it was removed when Yugoslavia was created. It was restored in the 1990s after Croatia’s independence, but Jelačić now levels his gaze southwards, toward Serbia, as a reminder of the Croatian War of Independence.
Here our tour ended, and we were given 3 hours’ free time to explore Zagreb. I and some friends repaired to the nearest ice cream store, and having refreshed ourselves walked southwards into the “Lower City”. We passed by the National Theater, and several other galleries and buildings of pompous presentation, before turning east at the Botanical Gardens. We walked east for about 10 minutes before coming to a halt at a park much like the Mall in Washington D.C. in its form. We rested in the grass at the base of a monument depicting King Tomislav, the 6th century ruler who was also the first king of the first independent Croatian state.
After resting for a goodly while we turned northwards and walked back to the square in front of the cathedral, where our bus was waiting to pick us up an return us to the Philosophical Faculty. When we arrived we attended a lecture given by our philosophy professor from the University of Innsbruck. The lecture was the first of three he will give this week, all on the subject of Political Ethics. While I personally found the subject matter fascinating, the lecture was over before my professor could satisfactorily get to the point, although I’m told that he will continue the lecture in my next philosophy class on Tuesday the 26th.
After the lecture we went into Zagreb again, to enjoy a glass of beer and some food with the students at the faculty. The point of this time was supposed to be to “build cultural connections”, although most of my conversation with the Croatian students was spend roundly abusing Serbs, Slovenians, and all other nationalities who spoke ill of Croatia. It seems that the famous Balkan pride is still alive and quite vigorously well.
At 8:30, we got back on our bus and traveled to our lodgings for our last night in Croatia. Here I’m going to end this day, since I have to wake up at 4am tomorrow morning, a prospect which I find wonderfully dreadful.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 (Day Three)
If I wasn’t writing this on Wednesday evening, I would say that Tuesday was the most grueling day of the trip so far. Fortunately, if that’s the right word, it wasn’t, but it gives Wednesday a run for its money. The day started when I slept through my alarm, to be awoken ten minutes before our bus left for Dubrovnik. I had had the foresight to pack the night before and to lay out my clothes for the next day, so I threw those on, almost forgot my watch, toothbrush, and toothpaste, and bolted out of the building, stopping briefly to turn in my room key and thank the nuns in hurried German (the only language in which we could communicate). I got on the bus, found a seat, and settled in for a 10-hour bus ride to Dubrovnik. I felt rather like Bilbo at the beginning of his adventure, rushing out of the front door without pocket-handkerchief, coat, or especially breakfast.
Like all of out bus rides, this one was broken up into stages, three of them in this case. The first was a stop at Plitviča National Park, which I would not have missed for a mint of money. I could best describe it as a canyon filled with uncountable waterfalls, but broad enough for the water to form a series of small, fjord-like lakes, each connect to each other by yet more waterfalls. The lakes were clear as fine glass, and where the water did not sit placidly it rushed out and into open space. I made, then and there, a resolution to come back with a few days’ time at my disposal rather than ninety minutes.
The second phase of the trip was made up of reading and napping, and I awoke from my nap to find that our bus was traveling not through the Michigan-like countryside of northern Croatia, a landscape full of fields and forested hills. Our highway wended its way through a countryside that looked like Wyoming highlands, a desolate place filled with stark low mountains, sparse clumps of buildings, and the Croatian equivalent of sagebrush. We stopped at a rest stop in the middle of this expanse, and the heat that met me as I left the bus hit me like a punch, and then roasted me like an oven. My travail was alleviated by cool water and a sit-down in the shade, followed by a walk to a breezy promontory overlooking a startling blue lake. It was quite large, and I think connected in some fashion to the Adriatic, for I could see from my vantage point docks and wharves crowded with sailing ships and yachts too large for a mere lake.
The third leg of our journey took us through this desolate country, up and down and through the mountains, on a small two-lane road which seemed to cling with all of its strength to the mountainside. From it we could see the new, four-lane highway which is under construction, and which traverses the distance much more easily with a series of long tunnels through the mountains and longer bridges over the valley.
This third phase ended when we crossed into Herzegovina. This might sound a bit strange, but the interlocking of Croatia and Bosnia/Herzegovina means that there is a small, three kilometer stretch of Bosnia which cuts straight through Croatia to the Adriatic. It is a relic from the 15th century, when Dubrovnik (which owned the land at the time), was in fierce commercial and even military competition with Venice. While Dubrovnik was impervious from the sea, it was somewhat less invulnerable on its landward sides. Thus, the city rulers gave a small piece of their land to the Ottomans (who controlled much of the Balkans at that time), a piece of land which was in between Dubrovnik and the Venetian-controlled region of Dalmatia, the same piece which we drove through. Thus, if the Venetians wanted to march an army down toward Dubrovnik, they would have to land in Venetian-controlled Dalmatia, and then march through Ottoman territory to reach Dubrovnik. The Ottoman Empire would not have taken kindly to a large body of armed men gallivanting through its territory, and thus did the buffer zone function. It remained part of Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout the rest of history, up to the present day, where it represents a tiresome delay on the drive to Dubrovnik, although I hear that Croatia is building a series of bridges between outlying islands in order to route the new motorway I spoke of around this strange little Bosnian interjection.
Our passage into Bosnia was lax and straightforward, without even so much as a passport check. We rested in Bosnia for half an hour, then drove back into Croatia and along the coast to Dubrovnik, or rather the port of Dubrovnik, since for our time here we are staying at a hotel on the island of Koločep. We disembarked from our bus, boarded a ferry, and arrived at the hotel at 8:30. After check-in I ate at the hotel’s restaurant, since I was nearly fainting with hunger (having had no breakfast and only bread and water for my lunch). After dinner, which was an excellent salad with grilled turkey, I showered and went straight to bed, which is why I’m writing this on Wednesday and not on Tuesday.
Today marks the first day of the Innsbruck Program’s academic field trip to Croatia. I will admit, this trip was one of the reasons why I signed on to the program. I couldn’t miss a chance to explore my ancestral homelands in the Balkans.
Our trip is a seven-day affair, which began today with a bus ride from Innsbruck to Zagreb, followed by a reception given by the students and professors of the Philosophical Faculty of the Society of Jesus at the University of Zagreb. Tomorrow, day two, will consist of two lectures given by the Faculty and a tour of Zagreb, punctuated by free time in the early afternoon and evening. Tuesday, day three, is another day of travel. We go south by bus to the medieval fortress-city of Dubrovnik, stopping along the way at Plitvića National Park. Days four and five will be spent in Dubrovnik and its environs. Day six is the first step of the return journey to Innsbruck, as we travel by bus from Dubrovnik to Opačije (a town on the Croatian-Slovenian border) via the city of Split. Day seven is a day of unrelenting travel through Slovenia and Italy back to Innsbruck.
To chronicle this odyssey, I’ll be keeping a journal of sorts on my computer, to be posted to my blog when I get back to Innsbruck. So, I begin.
Today began at the uncomfortable crack of dawn, with our departure from Innsbruck at 6:00am. I arose at 4:30, showered and breakfasted, made a last-minute check of my luggage, then walked to the arranged meeting-point. We traveled by charter bus, as we will this entire trip, a necessity when one realizes that well-organized railways (our program director’s favorite means of travel) do not exist south of Hungary.
The bus ride proceeded by several stages. The first was from Innsbruck to a rest stop located somewhere in Styria (one of the provinces of Austria), then from there to the city of Maribor (known as Marburg in German). We took an hour and a half to wander through the city and idly pass the time throwing bread to the ducks in the Drau River. I’ve seen the Drau at a point near its source in the Austrian Alps, and while it was there a rushing torrent, it is in Slovenia a fat, slow, and disgustingly brown body of water.
Our final leg of the journey took us through Slovenia and into Croatia, through a landscape which started out looking much like the Appalachian Mountains, but slowly became more and more like northern Indiana/southern Michigan. We finally came to a halt in front of the Philosophical Faculty building in Zagreb at 4:45pm. It is located in one of the nicer parts of the city, and is itself quite a new building, its exterior built of plain tan stone and the interior furnished with sleek metal and polished Slavonian oak. We had some time here for refreshments, as well as to meet the students enrolled at the faculty. It was for me a bit surprising, since all of them study philosophy, and I’ve not spoken to other fellow philosophy student since I left the US all those months ago. The conversations were pleasant, as all of them were fluent in English, as well as German, so a middle ground could easily be reached.
At 6pm, we repaired to the auditorium for a series of presentations by the students of the Philosophical Faculty to showcase Croatian culture and talent. A pair of singers performed a duet from a Croatian opera; a string quartet played a piece by a Czech composer written for a wealthy Croat in the 18th century, and one student performed as a mime. These pieces were coupled with a presentation about Croatian culture, and the usual addresses of overture by various potentates of the Faculty.
Directly afterwards was dinner, a pleasant buffet affair which lasted until 8:45, with singing and music by three students playing guitar. I met and talked with more students of the Philosophical Faculty, discussing various things under the general order to have a “cultural exchange.” After the dinner, we boarded our bus which took us to our lodgings, a convent and spiritual center outside Zagreb, where I sit now writing this.
Thus is the first day concluded. Good night to you all; I shall furnish further reports when there is more to report.
Monday, May 18, 2009 (Day Two)
Our second day in Croatia was also our only full day in Zagreb, and as such it was packed to the proverbial gills. I rose once more at dawn’s break (6 am in this particular case), and breakfasted with the rest of my group, a simple, continental affair of bread, spreads, cheeses and meats, washed down with coffee and a sweet raspberry tea. We left our lodgings at the convent at 8:45, arriving in Zagreb at 9:30 outside the Philosophical Faculty building, where we were to have our first lecture. This was on the economy of Croatia, and was given by the Dean of the Zagreb School of Economics and Management. His English was not what might be called the best, filled through with forgotten articles and a thick Slavic accent. He was fortunately assisted by a graduate student who spoke English with a pronounced American accent, certainly a strange thing to hear after all of my time in Europe.
The presentation was an overview of the Croatian economy since 1945, but it was designed with an audience of economic students in mind. The students of economics number two in our group, which made for some amusing moments as the lecturer would declare “as you have learned in your macroeconomics classes”, a phrase which would invariably be followed by a stream of financial technobabble which might have been uttered in Swahili for all of the understanding I had of it. Still, when it was not enveloped in technicalities, the lecture was enlightening enough to make it worth its while. I recently gave a presentation in my Economics class in Innsbruck on the very same subject, so it was very nice to hear the matter treated by experts in the field, rather than a student of philosophy who doesn’t know the difference between macro- and micro-economics, and who couldn’t care less.
This lecture was followed by a walking tour of Zagreb, or at least of the older parts (the “upper town” as it is known to the locals). We began at the Cathedral of Saint Steven and the Assumption of Mary, standing outside to hear a lecture in art history which I have known for three years now, and then a more interesting tour of the church itself. The cathedral has been through many different phases of architectural existence: it started out as a basilica. That burnt down and was replaced by a church in the Romanesque style. That too burnt down, and was replaced by a Baroque church. That one fell down in an earthquake and was replaced with the present neo-Gothic building. As is to be expected from any cathedral of a capital city, the Zagreb cathedral contains the tombs of various Croatian heroes and holy people, along with relics, copious small chapels and altars, and tour groups.
After the cathedral we walked through the city market, which was redolent with the smell of fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s much like a US farmers’ market, although perhaps somewhat cheaper. We then walked down a small alleyway crammed with the tables and umbrellas of its cafes, to find ourselves on a street which was built over a river which once flowed through Zagreb. It marked the border of the old “Bishop’s Town” and the “Duke’s Town”, that part of Zagreb which was given a charter (and hence tax-free status) by its local ruler sometime in the 14th century, as I recall. Our route into the Duke’s town took us through the old eastern gate, now a shrine to Mary which is often frequented by the townspeople, who on their way past stop to offer a quick prayer and bow. The interior of the gate is covered with stone plaques hung by the faithful in thanks for prayers heard and assistance granted.
We then arrived in the main square of the Duke’s Town, which contains the church of St. Mark, a building much like the Stefansdom in Vienna in construction, with a roof made of brightly lacquered tiles. Unlike the roof of the Stefansdom, the roof of this church displays not the black eagle of Austria but the coats of arms of Croatia and Zagreb on a red and white checked field.
This square also holds Zagreb’s government offices and the building of the Croatia Parliament, and it is here in front of the cathedral that the president takes his oath of office, an act done in commemoration of the square’s medieval functions as place of declaration and execution. Next to the square is the Jesuit Square, which holds Zagreb’s Jesuit Church (an essential to any properly Catholic European city) as well as the buildings which held the novitiate and the Jesuit-run high school, both established in the very early 17th century.
Nearby is a panoramic view over the “Lower City”, that part of Zagreb which was built during the 19th centuries. In the centuries before that the ground of the “Lower City” was a field which was often the sight of great battles as the Croats clashed against the invading Ottoman empire. Now it is a place where skyscrapers and the revived architectural styles of the 19th century rub shoulders and hobnob amid a profusion of cars, pedestrians, and streetcars.
Our way down from this panorama lead us into Trg Bana Josipa Jelačića, or, in English, Josip Jelačić Square. It is named after Josip Jelačić, a 19th century Ban (or governor) of Croatia, who lead the Croats to victory over the Hungarians in 1848. A statue of Jelačić now resides in the square, depicting the general astride his charger with sabre pointed at the invisible ranks of his adversaries. The statue, when originally built, pointed northwest toward Hungary, but it was removed when Yugoslavia was created. It was restored in the 1990s after Croatia’s independence, but Jelačić now levels his gaze southwards, toward Serbia, as a reminder of the Croatian War of Independence.
Here our tour ended, and we were given 3 hours’ free time to explore Zagreb. I and some friends repaired to the nearest ice cream store, and having refreshed ourselves walked southwards into the “Lower City”. We passed by the National Theater, and several other galleries and buildings of pompous presentation, before turning east at the Botanical Gardens. We walked east for about 10 minutes before coming to a halt at a park much like the Mall in Washington D.C. in its form. We rested in the grass at the base of a monument depicting King Tomislav, the 6th century ruler who was also the first king of the first independent Croatian state.
After resting for a goodly while we turned northwards and walked back to the square in front of the cathedral, where our bus was waiting to pick us up an return us to the Philosophical Faculty. When we arrived we attended a lecture given by our philosophy professor from the University of Innsbruck. The lecture was the first of three he will give this week, all on the subject of Political Ethics. While I personally found the subject matter fascinating, the lecture was over before my professor could satisfactorily get to the point, although I’m told that he will continue the lecture in my next philosophy class on Tuesday the 26th.
After the lecture we went into Zagreb again, to enjoy a glass of beer and some food with the students at the faculty. The point of this time was supposed to be to “build cultural connections”, although most of my conversation with the Croatian students was spend roundly abusing Serbs, Slovenians, and all other nationalities who spoke ill of Croatia. It seems that the famous Balkan pride is still alive and quite vigorously well.
At 8:30, we got back on our bus and traveled to our lodgings for our last night in Croatia. Here I’m going to end this day, since I have to wake up at 4am tomorrow morning, a prospect which I find wonderfully dreadful.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009 (Day Three)
If I wasn’t writing this on Wednesday evening, I would say that Tuesday was the most grueling day of the trip so far. Fortunately, if that’s the right word, it wasn’t, but it gives Wednesday a run for its money. The day started when I slept through my alarm, to be awoken ten minutes before our bus left for Dubrovnik. I had had the foresight to pack the night before and to lay out my clothes for the next day, so I threw those on, almost forgot my watch, toothbrush, and toothpaste, and bolted out of the building, stopping briefly to turn in my room key and thank the nuns in hurried German (the only language in which we could communicate). I got on the bus, found a seat, and settled in for a 10-hour bus ride to Dubrovnik. I felt rather like Bilbo at the beginning of his adventure, rushing out of the front door without pocket-handkerchief, coat, or especially breakfast.
Like all of out bus rides, this one was broken up into stages, three of them in this case. The first was a stop at Plitviča National Park, which I would not have missed for a mint of money. I could best describe it as a canyon filled with uncountable waterfalls, but broad enough for the water to form a series of small, fjord-like lakes, each connect to each other by yet more waterfalls. The lakes were clear as fine glass, and where the water did not sit placidly it rushed out and into open space. I made, then and there, a resolution to come back with a few days’ time at my disposal rather than ninety minutes.
The second phase of the trip was made up of reading and napping, and I awoke from my nap to find that our bus was traveling not through the Michigan-like countryside of northern Croatia, a landscape full of fields and forested hills. Our highway wended its way through a countryside that looked like Wyoming highlands, a desolate place filled with stark low mountains, sparse clumps of buildings, and the Croatian equivalent of sagebrush. We stopped at a rest stop in the middle of this expanse, and the heat that met me as I left the bus hit me like a punch, and then roasted me like an oven. My travail was alleviated by cool water and a sit-down in the shade, followed by a walk to a breezy promontory overlooking a startling blue lake. It was quite large, and I think connected in some fashion to the Adriatic, for I could see from my vantage point docks and wharves crowded with sailing ships and yachts too large for a mere lake.
The third leg of our journey took us through this desolate country, up and down and through the mountains, on a small two-lane road which seemed to cling with all of its strength to the mountainside. From it we could see the new, four-lane highway which is under construction, and which traverses the distance much more easily with a series of long tunnels through the mountains and longer bridges over the valley.
This third phase ended when we crossed into Herzegovina. This might sound a bit strange, but the interlocking of Croatia and Bosnia/Herzegovina means that there is a small, three kilometer stretch of Bosnia which cuts straight through Croatia to the Adriatic. It is a relic from the 15th century, when Dubrovnik (which owned the land at the time), was in fierce commercial and even military competition with Venice. While Dubrovnik was impervious from the sea, it was somewhat less invulnerable on its landward sides. Thus, the city rulers gave a small piece of their land to the Ottomans (who controlled much of the Balkans at that time), a piece of land which was in between Dubrovnik and the Venetian-controlled region of Dalmatia, the same piece which we drove through. Thus, if the Venetians wanted to march an army down toward Dubrovnik, they would have to land in Venetian-controlled Dalmatia, and then march through Ottoman territory to reach Dubrovnik. The Ottoman Empire would not have taken kindly to a large body of armed men gallivanting through its territory, and thus did the buffer zone function. It remained part of Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout the rest of history, up to the present day, where it represents a tiresome delay on the drive to Dubrovnik, although I hear that Croatia is building a series of bridges between outlying islands in order to route the new motorway I spoke of around this strange little Bosnian interjection.
Our passage into Bosnia was lax and straightforward, without even so much as a passport check. We rested in Bosnia for half an hour, then drove back into Croatia and along the coast to Dubrovnik, or rather the port of Dubrovnik, since for our time here we are staying at a hotel on the island of Koločep. We disembarked from our bus, boarded a ferry, and arrived at the hotel at 8:30. After check-in I ate at the hotel’s restaurant, since I was nearly fainting with hunger (having had no breakfast and only bread and water for my lunch). After dinner, which was an excellent salad with grilled turkey, I showered and went straight to bed, which is why I’m writing this on Wednesday and not on Tuesday.
Monday, May 25, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Last: Greece
The flight to Athens from Rome was a pleasant hour and a half, which I spent looking at a bilingual Greek/English magazine to try to refresh my knowledge of the Greek alphabet. My efforts did not avail to much, but fortunately nearly all of the signs in Greece are either Greek/English bilingual, or Greek transliterated from the Greek alphabet into our Latin alphabet.
After collecting our bags, we took a bus from the airport to the center of Athens, which was a surprising hour’s ride on a highway that would have been much at home among our interstates. In fact, a lot of Greece is like America, with billboards, big open roads, and skyscrapers. There are very few old buildings in Athens, apart from the churches and a small district near the Acropolis (and the ruins, of course).
After arriving at Syntagma Square (Syntagma is Greek for constitution, and the square is so named because it was the site of a protest demanding a constitution), we walked to our hostel, which was very nice, almost like a hotel. It was then that we found that our reservations had been cancelled, which lead to an hour’s worth of headache trying to get them back. In the end, we were given a very nice studio room complete with kitchen and bathroom to ourselves, in compensation for our trouble.
The next day we did basically nothing, sleeping and going for short walks to recharge ourselves. The day after that we went on a brief walking tour of Athens, followed by a visit to the Acropolis. The Acropolis (a word which means, roughly, “high city” in Ancient Greece) was originally a fortress. The excavation of fortifications point to settlement in the time of the Mycenaean civilization (around 1200 BC). The Acropolis remained a fortress until the first Persian war, when Athens was sacked by Persian troops. It was rebuilt as a temple complex following the war, although parts of the old fortress (specifically, the column drums) were integrated into the new Acropolis as a reminder to the Athenians of the war. Currently, there are three temples reconstructed on the Acropolis: the Temple of Nike (Greek goddess of victory, not shoes) the Erechtheum (a temple dedicated to various gods, and named after Erechtheos, a legendary king of Athens), and most famously the Parthenon (otherwise the temple of Athena Parthenos, or Athena the Virgin). The other building reconstructed on the Acropolis is the Propylaea, a large gate complex.
The Parthenon is built on spot where, according to legend, the first Athenians prayed to the gods, asking which god they should dedicate their city to. Poseidon appeared first and struck the Acropolis with his trident, causing a spring to burst forth, symbolizing that the Athenians would become rich through trade if they chose him. Athena appeared next and struck the Acropolis with her spear, and on the spot an olive tree shot up from the ground, symbolizing that under her patronage Athens would be a peaceful city, as well as a place of great leaders. The people chose Athena, and named the city of Athens after her.
Currently the Parthenon, and indeed all of the Acropolis, is undergoing massive restoration, hence all of the scaffolding in my pictures. To offset this, Athens has recently (as of this writing) opened the new Acropolis Museum, although when I was in Athens it was still closed. The new museum is built in the shape of the Acropolis, and is designed to replace the tiny museum currently located on the Acropolis. The Acropolis Museum is located nearby its namesake. The museum will hold all of the artifacts recovered from the Acropolis during its excavation over the past 2 centuries, except the marbles which Lord Elgin nicked from the Parthenon in the 1820s. Their place in the museum will be held by plaster casts of the marbles until the British Museum decides to return the real ones.
Day three was our first excursion, to Cape Sounio. Located at the easternmost point of the province of Attica, Sounio is the site of an extraordinarily well-preserved temple of Poseidon, located on a small steep-cliffed spit of land which juts into the Aegean Sea. The temple supposedly has Lord Byron’s name carved into the marble somewhere, although it was lost to us amid the profusion of other names which people had carved into the marble. The temple was about 2.5 hours from Athens, but it was time well-spent. After wandering around the temple and its surrounding ruins, we clambered around the rocky, boulder-strewn seashore, then headed back to Athens.
On the fourth day we went on a tour to Delphi, site of the legendary and cryptic oracle. The bus ride was quite long, approximately 3.5 hors one way, and the weather went from cloudy and overcast in the lowlands to blizzard in the mountains where Delphi is located. Fortunately, the blizzard petered out by the time we got to Delphi, leaving a constant drizzle in its place. The ruins are not typical of your standard Greek temple-complex, as all of the buildings are constructed from the local black volcanic rock (a kind of basalt, I believe) rather than marble. The Delphi complex is build on the side of a mountain and is many-tiered. The lower parts contain monuments donated by various cities as offerings to the oracle, as well as treasuries to hold the individual votive offerings from citizens of various cities or regions. The middle level contains the temple of Pythian Apollo, seat of the oracle (who was in reality a woman who hallucinated due to breathing in toxic volcanic gases), as well as various shrines and monuments. The upper levels are home to an amphitheater and stadium, built for the Pythian Games. These games were competitions like the Olympic Games, but held in the off-years (much in the same way our Summer and Winter Olympics are held), and not quite as prestigious. The Pythian Games also had theater (in comedy and tragedy) as listed competitions.
Our tour snaked up to the stadium and then down below the Delphi complex to the gymnasium used for the Pythian Games, and to the nearby ruins of the temple of Athena Pronaia. After the conclusion of our tour, we stopped in the nearby village of Arachova for an hour, and then proceeded back to Athens. That night we ate out at a restaurant in Athens called Damigos, which has been in the past a film set for practically every movie set in Greece.
Our second to last day in Athes was a Sunday, noteworthy because Museums and archeological site are free of charge on Sunday. I visited the Archeological and War museums, followed by the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This temple is absolutely gigantic; if completed it would rank among the largest free-standing religious structures in the world. After the temple I went back to the Acropolis for another visit, and was there able to take far better photos due to the improved weather.
My last day in Athens was filled with last-minute sightseeing. I first visited some caves said to be the prison of Socrates, although actual archeological investigation has shown that they were actually storehouses. It was, though, a pleasant fantasy to imagine myself standing in the same spot where the legendary philosopher kicked the bucket. I then climbed up the hill behind the so-called prison, to the ruins of a shrine to the Muses which provided me with an excellent view of the Acropolis. The hill which I climbed is part of a massive “archeological park” which is located southwest of the Acropolis. There aren’t very many actual or recognizable ruins in the park, but those which do exist are open to the public. A stroll through the park carried me through the ancient neighborhoods of Athens, and along the old walled road which ran between Athens and the port city of Piraeus, before bringing me to Pynx Hill, the birthplace of democracy and the place where orators such as Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes gave their speeches. Nearby Pynx Hill is the Areopagus, a massive rock and the place where Socrates debated philosophy and St. Paul preached to the Athenians. Now the rock is a place where people go to enjoy lunch in the Grecian sun and where vendors hawk their wares.
Below the Areopagus, and my next destination, are the Ancient and Roman Agoras. Although the word “Agora” means “marketplace” in Ancient Greek, the Agora was much more than that. It held law courts, governmental offices, gymnasiums, schools, businesses, and more. Regrettably, it has suffered untold damage over the centuries and the ruins of the Agora are far less complete than those of the Roman Forum. The only complete building is a temple to Hephaestus, although the markethall built in Roman times has been reconstructed into a museum, filled with artifacts of pottery and stone. The Roman Agora is in slightly better condition, and contains the Tower of the Winds, the first known meteorological station which when intact was equipped with eight sundials (for all times of day), a water clock, and a weathervane.
My last stop was the Amphitheater of Dionysus, built on the eastern slope of the Acropolis. The theater is mostly ruined, and although it sat over 5000 in its prime, it is now partially overgrown with grass and weeds. It is the next target for excavation and restoration, but the effect of this work has yet to be seen.
After I left the Amphitheater, my odyssey back to Innsbruck began with a bus ride from the center of Athens to the airport. My flight from Athens to Milan got me there at around 11:00pm, followed by a bus ride from the airport to the train station. I then boarded a train from Milan to Verona, arriving there at 2:30. I then waited in the train station for 3 hours before boarding a train to Bolzano (arriving at 7:30), followed by a train to Brenner (arriving at 10:25), followed by one last train to Innsbruck (arriving at 11:45). This frantic dash of around 18 hours concluded my gallivant around the Mediterranean. The last few days of my February traveling were spent in Vienna, and as they were mostly relaxing days filled with museum-visiting, I feel no need to comment upon them further. Refer to the webalbum for a pictographic account.
After collecting our bags, we took a bus from the airport to the center of Athens, which was a surprising hour’s ride on a highway that would have been much at home among our interstates. In fact, a lot of Greece is like America, with billboards, big open roads, and skyscrapers. There are very few old buildings in Athens, apart from the churches and a small district near the Acropolis (and the ruins, of course).
After arriving at Syntagma Square (Syntagma is Greek for constitution, and the square is so named because it was the site of a protest demanding a constitution), we walked to our hostel, which was very nice, almost like a hotel. It was then that we found that our reservations had been cancelled, which lead to an hour’s worth of headache trying to get them back. In the end, we were given a very nice studio room complete with kitchen and bathroom to ourselves, in compensation for our trouble.
The next day we did basically nothing, sleeping and going for short walks to recharge ourselves. The day after that we went on a brief walking tour of Athens, followed by a visit to the Acropolis. The Acropolis (a word which means, roughly, “high city” in Ancient Greece) was originally a fortress. The excavation of fortifications point to settlement in the time of the Mycenaean civilization (around 1200 BC). The Acropolis remained a fortress until the first Persian war, when Athens was sacked by Persian troops. It was rebuilt as a temple complex following the war, although parts of the old fortress (specifically, the column drums) were integrated into the new Acropolis as a reminder to the Athenians of the war. Currently, there are three temples reconstructed on the Acropolis: the Temple of Nike (Greek goddess of victory, not shoes) the Erechtheum (a temple dedicated to various gods, and named after Erechtheos, a legendary king of Athens), and most famously the Parthenon (otherwise the temple of Athena Parthenos, or Athena the Virgin). The other building reconstructed on the Acropolis is the Propylaea, a large gate complex.
The Parthenon is built on spot where, according to legend, the first Athenians prayed to the gods, asking which god they should dedicate their city to. Poseidon appeared first and struck the Acropolis with his trident, causing a spring to burst forth, symbolizing that the Athenians would become rich through trade if they chose him. Athena appeared next and struck the Acropolis with her spear, and on the spot an olive tree shot up from the ground, symbolizing that under her patronage Athens would be a peaceful city, as well as a place of great leaders. The people chose Athena, and named the city of Athens after her.
Currently the Parthenon, and indeed all of the Acropolis, is undergoing massive restoration, hence all of the scaffolding in my pictures. To offset this, Athens has recently (as of this writing) opened the new Acropolis Museum, although when I was in Athens it was still closed. The new museum is built in the shape of the Acropolis, and is designed to replace the tiny museum currently located on the Acropolis. The Acropolis Museum is located nearby its namesake. The museum will hold all of the artifacts recovered from the Acropolis during its excavation over the past 2 centuries, except the marbles which Lord Elgin nicked from the Parthenon in the 1820s. Their place in the museum will be held by plaster casts of the marbles until the British Museum decides to return the real ones.
Day three was our first excursion, to Cape Sounio. Located at the easternmost point of the province of Attica, Sounio is the site of an extraordinarily well-preserved temple of Poseidon, located on a small steep-cliffed spit of land which juts into the Aegean Sea. The temple supposedly has Lord Byron’s name carved into the marble somewhere, although it was lost to us amid the profusion of other names which people had carved into the marble. The temple was about 2.5 hours from Athens, but it was time well-spent. After wandering around the temple and its surrounding ruins, we clambered around the rocky, boulder-strewn seashore, then headed back to Athens.
On the fourth day we went on a tour to Delphi, site of the legendary and cryptic oracle. The bus ride was quite long, approximately 3.5 hors one way, and the weather went from cloudy and overcast in the lowlands to blizzard in the mountains where Delphi is located. Fortunately, the blizzard petered out by the time we got to Delphi, leaving a constant drizzle in its place. The ruins are not typical of your standard Greek temple-complex, as all of the buildings are constructed from the local black volcanic rock (a kind of basalt, I believe) rather than marble. The Delphi complex is build on the side of a mountain and is many-tiered. The lower parts contain monuments donated by various cities as offerings to the oracle, as well as treasuries to hold the individual votive offerings from citizens of various cities or regions. The middle level contains the temple of Pythian Apollo, seat of the oracle (who was in reality a woman who hallucinated due to breathing in toxic volcanic gases), as well as various shrines and monuments. The upper levels are home to an amphitheater and stadium, built for the Pythian Games. These games were competitions like the Olympic Games, but held in the off-years (much in the same way our Summer and Winter Olympics are held), and not quite as prestigious. The Pythian Games also had theater (in comedy and tragedy) as listed competitions.
Our tour snaked up to the stadium and then down below the Delphi complex to the gymnasium used for the Pythian Games, and to the nearby ruins of the temple of Athena Pronaia. After the conclusion of our tour, we stopped in the nearby village of Arachova for an hour, and then proceeded back to Athens. That night we ate out at a restaurant in Athens called Damigos, which has been in the past a film set for practically every movie set in Greece.
Our second to last day in Athes was a Sunday, noteworthy because Museums and archeological site are free of charge on Sunday. I visited the Archeological and War museums, followed by the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This temple is absolutely gigantic; if completed it would rank among the largest free-standing religious structures in the world. After the temple I went back to the Acropolis for another visit, and was there able to take far better photos due to the improved weather.
My last day in Athens was filled with last-minute sightseeing. I first visited some caves said to be the prison of Socrates, although actual archeological investigation has shown that they were actually storehouses. It was, though, a pleasant fantasy to imagine myself standing in the same spot where the legendary philosopher kicked the bucket. I then climbed up the hill behind the so-called prison, to the ruins of a shrine to the Muses which provided me with an excellent view of the Acropolis. The hill which I climbed is part of a massive “archeological park” which is located southwest of the Acropolis. There aren’t very many actual or recognizable ruins in the park, but those which do exist are open to the public. A stroll through the park carried me through the ancient neighborhoods of Athens, and along the old walled road which ran between Athens and the port city of Piraeus, before bringing me to Pynx Hill, the birthplace of democracy and the place where orators such as Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes gave their speeches. Nearby Pynx Hill is the Areopagus, a massive rock and the place where Socrates debated philosophy and St. Paul preached to the Athenians. Now the rock is a place where people go to enjoy lunch in the Grecian sun and where vendors hawk their wares.
Below the Areopagus, and my next destination, are the Ancient and Roman Agoras. Although the word “Agora” means “marketplace” in Ancient Greek, the Agora was much more than that. It held law courts, governmental offices, gymnasiums, schools, businesses, and more. Regrettably, it has suffered untold damage over the centuries and the ruins of the Agora are far less complete than those of the Roman Forum. The only complete building is a temple to Hephaestus, although the markethall built in Roman times has been reconstructed into a museum, filled with artifacts of pottery and stone. The Roman Agora is in slightly better condition, and contains the Tower of the Winds, the first known meteorological station which when intact was equipped with eight sundials (for all times of day), a water clock, and a weathervane.
My last stop was the Amphitheater of Dionysus, built on the eastern slope of the Acropolis. The theater is mostly ruined, and although it sat over 5000 in its prime, it is now partially overgrown with grass and weeds. It is the next target for excavation and restoration, but the effect of this work has yet to be seen.
After I left the Amphitheater, my odyssey back to Innsbruck began with a bus ride from the center of Athens to the airport. My flight from Athens to Milan got me there at around 11:00pm, followed by a bus ride from the airport to the train station. I then boarded a train from Milan to Verona, arriving there at 2:30. I then waited in the train station for 3 hours before boarding a train to Bolzano (arriving at 7:30), followed by a train to Brenner (arriving at 10:25), followed by one last train to Innsbruck (arriving at 11:45). This frantic dash of around 18 hours concluded my gallivant around the Mediterranean. The last few days of my February traveling were spent in Vienna, and as they were mostly relaxing days filled with museum-visiting, I feel no need to comment upon them further. Refer to the webalbum for a pictographic account.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Fifth: Tying Up Malta
Oh-ho, look! It is a blog post! How amusing!
On my last full day in Malta, I planned to go and visit the ancient walled city of Mdina (pronounced “meh-DEE-nah”), which has existed in some form or another since the Normans conquered malta in the late 11th century. But, when I arrived at the Valletta bus termina, bright and early at 10:30, I found that the bus I had intended to take had vanished from its apportioned spot, and that the bus schedule I had nabbed yesterday did not really correspond to either the official posted schedule or the schedule offered in broken English by the bus drivers when I asked. My schedule and the offical schedule both agreed that there would be a bus leaving at 12:20, so I decided to abide by the majority opinion and find some way to waste time before the bus left.
Fortunately, such an opportunity was close at hand in the upper Barrakka gardens. To explain this opportunity, though, I’m going to have to go on a bit of a diversion, so kindly indulge my ramblings. The Upper Barrakka gardens, like all of the gardens and parks in Valletta (and you’ll be hearing about the rest of them, make no mistake), are built on one of the old fortress bastions, bastions being the place where two fortress walls meet to form a corner. This area of a fortress is usually much thicker that other areas, with the result that all of the former bastions, before they were transformed into gardens, were basically tolerably large squares (as in the public-meeting-place-center-of-town-square, not the Euclidean polygon), doing nothing except taking up space. The British, after World War Two, turned them into gardens as a place for the officers to take afternoon tea or whatever.
The Barrakka Gardens fill what used to be the Bastion of St. Salvatore, an area which was more heavily fortified than usual, as it commands a sweeping view of the Grand Harbor. Only one part of the bastion is not today occupied with palms and ferns, and this is a section known as the Saluting Battery. In the Age of Sail, long before the invention of things like radios or telephones, keeping accurate time was very difficult, and it was also essential for navigation. Ships’ captains could find latitude using sextants and spherical trigonometry, but longitude was a different matter. To calculate longitude, British navigators carried with them two chronometers, highly accurate clocks which were resistant to the vicissitudes of sea travel (storms, water, cannonballs, et cetera). One of these chronometers would be set to Greenwich Mean Time, the other would be synchronized daily to local time at noon. Thus, by measuring the difference in time between the chronometers, the captain could determine his location on a map.
Because of this, it was law in all British seaports that the port admiral was required to fire a gun, at noon, in order to aid the captains in synchronizing their chronometers. It was also customary for the port to salute arriving naval ships by firing a number of guns proportional to the rank of the ship’s commanding officer. This was the purpose of the Saluting Battery on the Bastion of St. Salvatore: the firing of the noonday gun, and the firing of salutes (hence the name). The Battery performed this function from the day of British takeover in 1809, to the Second World War, when the saluting cannon were removed and anti-aircraft guns were installed. The Battery suffered heavy punishment during the war, but was renovated and returned to its former duty of the noonday gun in 2004. The firing of the gun is done punctually every midday, by members of the Maltese Army dressed in replica uniforms of the British artillery regiments who were stationed in Malta in the last half of the 19th century, and the ceremony is done with fully replicated pomp and circumstance, which makes it somewhat amusing to watch.
Waiting for the noonday gun on a sunny bench in the gardens took up most of my morning, along with suppressing my laughter at the high ceremony on the saluting batteries (see webalbum for more pictures). After the gun I walked back to the terminal and caught my bus without much further confusion. The ride inland to Mdina took us out of Valletta’s various suburb towns and through what I guess qualifies as Maltese countryside, which is mostly green fields separated by low stonework walls. The bus ended at Rabat, a suburb of Mdina, which at its best only has a little under 300 people living in it. Following Maltese tradition, the bus terminal for Rabat and Mdina is a small parking lot with a little booth to wait in and a few benches. From there it was a short stroll through a small garden-park (one of the results of being part of the British Empire is a surplus of gardens, apparently) into Mdina.
The city itself is built of the usual Maltese stone, the color of desert sand, and it gives the city a strange and ancient feel. The city is the main attraction, unless you really feel like dropping 15+ Euros at the Knights Extravaganza (some kind of movie/documentary thing) or visiting a restored palazzo which belonged for a few centuries to a Venetian merchant family and which is now a museum of nothing in particular which also forbids photography within, for whatever reason. Still, it was an enjoyable place to spend a couple hours’ walk and to eat in a café perched on the old city walls and overlooking the countryside, Valletta, and the Mediterranean.
I returned to Valletta at 3 o’clock, with the afternoon and evening still before me. I decided to tour the battlements of Valletta, taking my time and also trying to spot as many relics of the past as I could identify. I also hunted around the city for the rest of the auberges of the Knights, managing to find all of them except Italy’s (which I gather has been turned into a hotel now). I found three other gardens built into the old battlements (the British colonial government must really have had a thing for gardens), as well as some construction-work and the explanation for the closing of all of the old buildings. It seems that not only is February the best time to do renovation, but the Maltese Parliament had just passed the new budget, which included heaps of money to generally clean up and improve the city of Valletta, starting with the old historical buildings. I guess my advice then is to not go Malta any time in the next year, or you will be disappointed of all of the great buildings there.
My next day in Malta was very brief indeed. I check out of my hostel, stopped in Valletta to see the firing of the noonday gun again, then took a bus to the airport and waited for a few hours before catching my plane to Rome. Once there I headed straight for my lodging (the hostel I had stayed at previously), then went out for dinner with friends before bedding down that night. The next day was spent killing time until our plane left for Athens. We visited a couple of churches, including St. Peter in Chains, which we finally got into, before flying out of Rome at around 8pm, arriving at Athens International Airport at around 11 to be confronted by a great deal of signage in a language we couldn’t read, let alone understand.
But that’s a story for the next blog post. See you next time,
-JA
On my last full day in Malta, I planned to go and visit the ancient walled city of Mdina (pronounced “meh-DEE-nah”), which has existed in some form or another since the Normans conquered malta in the late 11th century. But, when I arrived at the Valletta bus termina, bright and early at 10:30, I found that the bus I had intended to take had vanished from its apportioned spot, and that the bus schedule I had nabbed yesterday did not really correspond to either the official posted schedule or the schedule offered in broken English by the bus drivers when I asked. My schedule and the offical schedule both agreed that there would be a bus leaving at 12:20, so I decided to abide by the majority opinion and find some way to waste time before the bus left.
Fortunately, such an opportunity was close at hand in the upper Barrakka gardens. To explain this opportunity, though, I’m going to have to go on a bit of a diversion, so kindly indulge my ramblings. The Upper Barrakka gardens, like all of the gardens and parks in Valletta (and you’ll be hearing about the rest of them, make no mistake), are built on one of the old fortress bastions, bastions being the place where two fortress walls meet to form a corner. This area of a fortress is usually much thicker that other areas, with the result that all of the former bastions, before they were transformed into gardens, were basically tolerably large squares (as in the public-meeting-place-center-of-town-square, not the Euclidean polygon), doing nothing except taking up space. The British, after World War Two, turned them into gardens as a place for the officers to take afternoon tea or whatever.
The Barrakka Gardens fill what used to be the Bastion of St. Salvatore, an area which was more heavily fortified than usual, as it commands a sweeping view of the Grand Harbor. Only one part of the bastion is not today occupied with palms and ferns, and this is a section known as the Saluting Battery. In the Age of Sail, long before the invention of things like radios or telephones, keeping accurate time was very difficult, and it was also essential for navigation. Ships’ captains could find latitude using sextants and spherical trigonometry, but longitude was a different matter. To calculate longitude, British navigators carried with them two chronometers, highly accurate clocks which were resistant to the vicissitudes of sea travel (storms, water, cannonballs, et cetera). One of these chronometers would be set to Greenwich Mean Time, the other would be synchronized daily to local time at noon. Thus, by measuring the difference in time between the chronometers, the captain could determine his location on a map.
Because of this, it was law in all British seaports that the port admiral was required to fire a gun, at noon, in order to aid the captains in synchronizing their chronometers. It was also customary for the port to salute arriving naval ships by firing a number of guns proportional to the rank of the ship’s commanding officer. This was the purpose of the Saluting Battery on the Bastion of St. Salvatore: the firing of the noonday gun, and the firing of salutes (hence the name). The Battery performed this function from the day of British takeover in 1809, to the Second World War, when the saluting cannon were removed and anti-aircraft guns were installed. The Battery suffered heavy punishment during the war, but was renovated and returned to its former duty of the noonday gun in 2004. The firing of the gun is done punctually every midday, by members of the Maltese Army dressed in replica uniforms of the British artillery regiments who were stationed in Malta in the last half of the 19th century, and the ceremony is done with fully replicated pomp and circumstance, which makes it somewhat amusing to watch.
Waiting for the noonday gun on a sunny bench in the gardens took up most of my morning, along with suppressing my laughter at the high ceremony on the saluting batteries (see webalbum for more pictures). After the gun I walked back to the terminal and caught my bus without much further confusion. The ride inland to Mdina took us out of Valletta’s various suburb towns and through what I guess qualifies as Maltese countryside, which is mostly green fields separated by low stonework walls. The bus ended at Rabat, a suburb of Mdina, which at its best only has a little under 300 people living in it. Following Maltese tradition, the bus terminal for Rabat and Mdina is a small parking lot with a little booth to wait in and a few benches. From there it was a short stroll through a small garden-park (one of the results of being part of the British Empire is a surplus of gardens, apparently) into Mdina.
The city itself is built of the usual Maltese stone, the color of desert sand, and it gives the city a strange and ancient feel. The city is the main attraction, unless you really feel like dropping 15+ Euros at the Knights Extravaganza (some kind of movie/documentary thing) or visiting a restored palazzo which belonged for a few centuries to a Venetian merchant family and which is now a museum of nothing in particular which also forbids photography within, for whatever reason. Still, it was an enjoyable place to spend a couple hours’ walk and to eat in a café perched on the old city walls and overlooking the countryside, Valletta, and the Mediterranean.
I returned to Valletta at 3 o’clock, with the afternoon and evening still before me. I decided to tour the battlements of Valletta, taking my time and also trying to spot as many relics of the past as I could identify. I also hunted around the city for the rest of the auberges of the Knights, managing to find all of them except Italy’s (which I gather has been turned into a hotel now). I found three other gardens built into the old battlements (the British colonial government must really have had a thing for gardens), as well as some construction-work and the explanation for the closing of all of the old buildings. It seems that not only is February the best time to do renovation, but the Maltese Parliament had just passed the new budget, which included heaps of money to generally clean up and improve the city of Valletta, starting with the old historical buildings. I guess my advice then is to not go Malta any time in the next year, or you will be disappointed of all of the great buildings there.
My next day in Malta was very brief indeed. I check out of my hostel, stopped in Valletta to see the firing of the noonday gun again, then took a bus to the airport and waited for a few hours before catching my plane to Rome. Once there I headed straight for my lodging (the hostel I had stayed at previously), then went out for dinner with friends before bedding down that night. The next day was spent killing time until our plane left for Athens. We visited a couple of churches, including St. Peter in Chains, which we finally got into, before flying out of Rome at around 8pm, arriving at Athens International Airport at around 11 to be confronted by a great deal of signage in a language we couldn’t read, let alone understand.
But that’s a story for the next blog post. See you next time,
-JA
Friday, April 3, 2009
Economicry and Philosophising
Dear Everyone,
I wish to offer my apologies for the fault in the blog updates. I wish I could say that those responsible have been sacked, but regrettably I do not possess the power to fire University of Innsbruck faculty. Basically, I finished my first post on Malta, and then got ambushed by papers and midterms from hell and of death. So the updating schedule (by which I would have finished the travel reports by yesterday) got shot down, and there's been nothing on my end.
But, it's spring break. I'm going to be travelling, but I'm only making day trips due to lack of money and almost paralyzing exhaustion. Now, my plan (ha ha) is to finish writing up February Break traveling by April 20, and then put up one, maybe two posts about where I went over break. Knowing me, this won't happen at all, but I'm going to do my damndest to make it happen.
Happy Easter everyone!
-JA
I wish to offer my apologies for the fault in the blog updates. I wish I could say that those responsible have been sacked, but regrettably I do not possess the power to fire University of Innsbruck faculty. Basically, I finished my first post on Malta, and then got ambushed by papers and midterms from hell and of death. So the updating schedule (by which I would have finished the travel reports by yesterday) got shot down, and there's been nothing on my end.
But, it's spring break. I'm going to be travelling, but I'm only making day trips due to lack of money and almost paralyzing exhaustion. Now, my plan (ha ha) is to finish writing up February Break traveling by April 20, and then put up one, maybe two posts about where I went over break. Knowing me, this won't happen at all, but I'm going to do my damndest to make it happen.
Happy Easter everyone!
-JA
Saturday, March 21, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Fourth: Malta
So, class, who can tell me about the Great Siege of Malta? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?
No?
Can anyone tell me about the Siege of Malta during World War II? Hmmmm?
No?
Can anyone here tell me what Malta is?
No, Mr. Larkin, it is not a drink commonly served in soda fountains.
Well, I see we shall have to start from the start and begin at the beginning. [puts on lecturer’s cap and gown]
Malta is a tiny, tiny island in the southern Mediterranean, about 120 square miles if you include the island of Gozo off the northern coast. It possesses a heroic and ancient past, with settlements dating back to the Neolithic Age. In fact, the island possess the world’s oldest free-standing structures: the temple complexes at Ġgantija and Ħaġar Qim, which date to between 3600 and 3200 BCE (as a bit of comparison, Stonehenge was built around 2300 BCE). These temple complexes were erected by the first settlers of Malta, who probably came from Sicily. These settlers were also the first in a long line of possessors of Malta who would be conquered by some greater power. The island became a Greek colony, then a Phoenician one, and then a Carthaginian one, and then passed into the hands of Rome after the Punic Wars. It was on Malta that, according to Acts, Saint Paul was shipwrecked during his journey to Rome, and the Maltese still commemorate the Feast of the Shipwreck every February 10th with great festivity. After the fall of the Roman empire, Malta became part of the Islamic Empire under the Aghlabid caliphate, before being conquered by the Normans in 1091. After that year, Malta flitted between various famous and obscure European potentates, from the Duchy of Swabia and the House of Hohenstaufen to the Kingdom of England, until it was seized as a permanent fief by the Kingdom of Aragon (today’s Catalonia) in 1283.
In 1530, Malta was sold to the Order of the Knights of Saint John the Baptist, also known as the Hospitallers, the last of the Crusading Orders, who had in 1522 been expelled from their fortress-island of Rhodes by the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire. The Knights of St. John took over the island and turned it into a fortress like Rhodes, and proceeded to use the island as a base of operations in attacks against Ottoman trade and settlements. The Order’s conflict with the Ottoman Empire culminated in the Great Siege of 1565, when an Ottoman army of about 36,000 troops supported by around 12,000 laborers and slaves besieged the Knights in their strongholds on Malta. At that point, the Knights numbered no more than 550, as their order had been decimated not only by their defeat in 1559 at the Battle of Djerba, but also by the Wars of Religion in Germany and by Henry VIII of England’s declaration of separation from the Catholic Church, events which almost totally abolished the German and English forces of the Order. To support themselves in the Siege, the Order conscripted all of the male Maltese population into the army, and were also supported by small reinforcements of soldiers from Spain and Italy, as well as a number of adventurers who came to Malta seeking glory and loot. The defenders numbered, in total, somewhere between 6,100 and 8,500 men. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, given both the scarcity of extant accounts of the Siege, and also given the chroniclers’ habit of exaggerating the numbers of the Ottomans and reducing the number of the defenders so as to add to the sense of danger and drama.
The Siege began on May 18th of 1565, and battle quite literally did not cease until Spanish reinforcements arrived on September 8th. Historians have described the Siege as the last, dying gasp of crusading spirit, as it not only marked the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, but also the last battle where the Knights of St. John, or indeed any military-religious order, participated. After the Siege, the Order built the citadel of Valletta, named after the Grandmaster of the Order at the time of the Siege, Jean Parisot de la Valette. This city and all of its fortifications and building still stands, in very nearly the same form as it did when it was built in the 1570s, and is today the capital of Malta.
The island slipped out of history for the next 200 years, until the Napoleonic Wars, when it was captured by the French and then by the British, who added it to the Empire following the war. It remain a colonial possession under the British until 1974, and was during World War II assaulted by the German and Italian air forces. In 2004 Malta joined the EU, and adopted the Euro in 2008.
Maltese culture is, as one might expect, a mish-mash resulting from many centuries of foreign possession. The official languages are English and Maltese, a patois of about 70% Arabic and 30% Italian, and Italian is also widely understood and spoken. The food has been strongly influenced by North Africa and the Middle East, favoring spicier dishes with an emphasis on rice as the grain of choice rather than wheat. The Maltese are 99% Catholic, with only a very, very small Protestant community making up the difference, and religion is a deeply rooted part of daily life. The island is chock full of places to go, see, and experience, and my three full days there were not nearly enough for it all.
I arrived in Malta at 12:40pm via the International Airport in the middle of the island. The Airport is about the same size as South Bend’s, and one of the first clues I had to the size of the island was the fact that the airport and its runways took up a noticeable portion of my map. The airport, like so many of its European kindred, is located far away from civilization, in this case 25 minutes by bus. The Maltese buses deserve recognition for being quite possibly the most unique form of transportation on the European continent. They are nearly all 50-60 years old, relics that once served the United Kingdom and which were moved to Malta during its time as a British possession. The buses now sport bright orange and white paint, and the interiors are plastered with religious postcards and icons, while rosaries take the place of fuzzy dice in the adornment of the rear-view mirrors. The buses are also quite cheap, and one can travel the length and breadth of the island for 50 cents.
I took one bus on a jouncing ride through the countryside to the Valletta bus terminal, then changed buses and went to the suburb of Sliema, which was were my hostel was located. However, the hostel’s reception desk was closed due to renovations and my room key, which was supposed to be located in an envelope on the front desk was nowhere in sight. I was informed that the reception would be open the next morning, and so I checked in to a cheap (35 Euros per night) hotel for that night, and resolved to apply at the hostel again the next morning. Regrettably, the delay meant that I had wasted two hours which I had expected to use for sight-seeing, derailing my plans a little. I had intended to spend my arrival day in Valletta, going to museums and inspecting fortresses, then go inland to the cities of Mdina and Vittoriosa on the second day, then to the island of Gozo on the third day. I scratched my plans Gozo, and decided to go for a long walk along Marsamxett Harbor to clear my mind and calm my nerves. The day was absolutely stunning, 73 degrees Fahrenheit with a breeze coming off the Mediterranean and nary a cloud in the sky. My walk, however, took twice as long as I expected, since Marsamxett Harbor is filled with inlets and marinas along which my path wended, and I arrived in Valletta as the sun was beginning to set. I walked through the city a little, out to the western point of the peninsula, on which crouches the indomitable form of Fort St. Elmo, a relic from the days of the Great Siege, when it was defended for 34 days against relentless Ottoman assault, completely cut off from the rest of the defenders and under unceasing bombardment from cannons which catapulted 300-pound stone balls into the fortifications. Today, part of the fort functions as the Maltese police academy, while the rest houses the War Museum and is usually open to the public. However, as I learned after speaking to a few construction workers, January and February are traditionally months for upgrades and repairs to the historical buildings, and as such both fort and museum were closed to the public. I finished up the evening with a quick dinner in a café, where I rice which had been baked in a cheese crust.
The next day I checked out early and made for my hostel, where I found the reception desk open, and the owner somewhat mystified as to my absence yesterday. Still, everything got sorted out in the end, and I hopped a bus back to Valletta, ready to take in some museums. The first one I went to was St. John’s Co-Cathedral, a church with a dull, sober exterior built in 1571. The plain facade, undecorated with ornaments or sculpture, looks just like all of the buildings around it, with nothing to distinguish it as a cathedral. The interior, however, is decorated in the most lavish exhibition of the Baroque: gilding, frescoes on the ceiling, and gleaming marble in a rainbow of colors. The floor is decorated with marble version of the coats of arms of famous Knights of St. John, embellished with heraldic records of their accomplishments. The church holds ten side chapels, each originally built by knights of a specific nationality. The Order was divided into eight langues (French for ‘tongues’): Italy, Castile, Aragon, Provence, France, Germany, England, and Auvergne. Each langue maintained its own chapel, each own dominated with a massive oil painting of that langue’s patron saint.
In addition to all of the finery which I was now coming to expect of churches in Southern Europe, the Co-Cathedral also has a museum. The museum is housed in the former oratory, which was during the time of the Knights a place for meditation and prayer as well as an office building. The crown jewel of the museum is The Beheading of John the Baptist, painted by Caravaggio during his novitiate in the Order. While he completed the painting just after being adopted into the order (it is in fact signed “Fra Michelangelo Carvaggio”, and is the only signed Caravaggio in existence), he was expelled two weeks later after dueling and seriously wounding another knight. The Order took care to confiscate all of the work he had done while in Malta, and as a result, the museum holds a painting of St. Jerome as well as a small collection of sketches.
Further in are the museum’s collection of sacred artifacts, from the times of the knights: vestments, monstrances, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts. Much of the former treasure is now gone, carried off during Napoleon’s occupation of the island, but what remains is nonetheless impressive: chasubles embroidered with pounds and pounds of silver and gold thread, depicting scenes from the New Testaments and Last Judgments galore; a cross-shaped reliquary four feet high, cast from solid gold and embellished with precious stones and platinum, which still holds a relic purporting to be the hand of John the Baptist; massive illuminated pulpit bibles, each spanning four feet across when opened and painted with pigments concocted from gold leaf and powdered gems; huge tapestries depicting famous episodes of the Order and from Scripture; and of course the portrait gallery, containing portraits of all Grandmasters of the Order from about 1600 to 1798 and the portrait of the last Grandmaster, Ferdinand von Hompech zu Bolheim, a German from the Catholic Duchy of Württemberg.
After I exited the cathedral it was only a short walk to the Palace of the Grandmasters. The Palace was constructed in the 1570s and served as the residence of the Grandmasters of the Order until their demise in 1798, and as the residence of the British colonial governor until Maltese independence in 1974, when part of it was designated as the Presidential Residence, while the rest (the former chambers of the Grandmasters and several halls on the ground floor) were converted into the State Museum and Armory, respectively. To enter the Palace, one proceeds through a tunnel-like gate past two guards-of-honor and into the Royal Albert Gardens (named after Prince Albert of England, and part of a late 19th century British project to beautify Valletta by installing public gardens in the old fortifications. More on that later). There you buy your tickets, either for the State Museum or the Armory (reasonably inexpensive at 4 Euros with student ID, and the price covers the invaluable addition of an audioguide for the Armory). As Italy had quite exhausted my enthusiasm for frescoed Baroque rooms (which is all the State Museum really consists of) I went to the Armory, which is housed in the former refectory halls of the Palace. It consists of two chambers, one devoted to armor, the other to weapons. I’ll not spend an undue amount of time disgorging all of the information I learned there, but the pictures are up on the webalbum and they have captions to explain them. I will only remark that the Armory’s collection pales in comparison to the Waffenkammer in Vienna, but I’ll get to that further on down the road.
After leaving the Armory the time of day was approaching 3 pm. I boarded a bus for Vittoriosa, one of the oldest cities in Malta and the location of the old headquarters of the Knights of St. John. This was the city besieged by the Ottomans during the Great Siege of 1565. At that point, Malta was very sparsely inhabited indeed, with only two places that were really inhabited: the citadel of Mdina and the Three Cities (Borgo, L’Isola, and Bormla). The Three Cities held the headquarters of the Knights of St. John, located in Fort Saint Angelo, a looming castle built of the same tan stone as everything else on the island, and they bore the full brunt of the Ottoman assault: constant bombardment by the artillery which enfiladed them on literally every side, and daily onslaughts of tens of thousands of soldiers, drawn from every corner of the Ottoman Empire, from Greece to Hungary to Persia to Arabia Felix. The siege was a grueling, gory affair which lasted for more than a hundred days, from June to September of 1565.
While the Knights were in the end victorious, the Three Cities lay in varying states of ruin, from the complete desolation of L’Isola to the relative stability of Borgo. The Knights decided to build a completely new fortress-city to house their order against the possibility of another siege like that of 1565. That city was Valletta, and it became the capitol of Malta.
The Three Cities were rechristened respectively Vittoriosa, Senglea, and Cospicua, and dwindled in importance as the business of the Knights moved across the Grand Harbor to Valletta. Now they serve as undiscovered relics of Malta’s past.
The Vittoriosa bus terminal (like all other Maltese bus terminals, nothing more than a parking lot with a closed ticket kiosk) is located right across from the main entrance to the city: the Gate of Provence, so named because it was defended by those Knights who were from Provence. All of the Three Cities’ defenses were so divided, with those areas which were likely to come under heavy assault staffed with Knights whose langues were robust in number. Now, the Provencal Gate stands much as it did during the 16th century, a sloping barrier about 40 feet tall and more than a hundred feet thick at its base. The narrow, barely two-lane street that passes through the Gate of Provence winds its way under the sober and judgmental facades of buildings which have survived for over 600 years until emptying into Victory Square in the center of the town.
I spent my time wandering among alleys shadowed by the sunset, looking up landmarks and buildings. The most famous part of Vittoriosa is Fort Saint Angelo, the oldest part of the defenses of the Knights. It is built on a man-made island, connected to Vittoriosa by a small footbridge and a narrow stone aqueduct, and is, like the rest of the defenses, built of the tan Maltese stone. It was also closed, and apparently had been so for over a year due to massive renovations. The fort was closed to the public for a long time, before an attempt was made in the 1970s to turn it into a resort hotel. That venture failed miserably, leaving behind a half-constructed swimming pool and a great deal of structural damage. The current work on the fort is being done with the eventual goal of opening the entire structure to the public as a museum commemorating the Knights of St. John and the Great Siege of 1565.
After I left Vittoriosa, I went straight for my hostel, turning in early in anticipation of a long day in the morning.
No?
Can anyone tell me about the Siege of Malta during World War II? Hmmmm?
No?
Can anyone here tell me what Malta is?
No, Mr. Larkin, it is not a drink commonly served in soda fountains.
Well, I see we shall have to start from the start and begin at the beginning. [puts on lecturer’s cap and gown]
Malta is a tiny, tiny island in the southern Mediterranean, about 120 square miles if you include the island of Gozo off the northern coast. It possesses a heroic and ancient past, with settlements dating back to the Neolithic Age. In fact, the island possess the world’s oldest free-standing structures: the temple complexes at Ġgantija and Ħaġar Qim, which date to between 3600 and 3200 BCE (as a bit of comparison, Stonehenge was built around 2300 BCE). These temple complexes were erected by the first settlers of Malta, who probably came from Sicily. These settlers were also the first in a long line of possessors of Malta who would be conquered by some greater power. The island became a Greek colony, then a Phoenician one, and then a Carthaginian one, and then passed into the hands of Rome after the Punic Wars. It was on Malta that, according to Acts, Saint Paul was shipwrecked during his journey to Rome, and the Maltese still commemorate the Feast of the Shipwreck every February 10th with great festivity. After the fall of the Roman empire, Malta became part of the Islamic Empire under the Aghlabid caliphate, before being conquered by the Normans in 1091. After that year, Malta flitted between various famous and obscure European potentates, from the Duchy of Swabia and the House of Hohenstaufen to the Kingdom of England, until it was seized as a permanent fief by the Kingdom of Aragon (today’s Catalonia) in 1283.
In 1530, Malta was sold to the Order of the Knights of Saint John the Baptist, also known as the Hospitallers, the last of the Crusading Orders, who had in 1522 been expelled from their fortress-island of Rhodes by the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire. The Knights of St. John took over the island and turned it into a fortress like Rhodes, and proceeded to use the island as a base of operations in attacks against Ottoman trade and settlements. The Order’s conflict with the Ottoman Empire culminated in the Great Siege of 1565, when an Ottoman army of about 36,000 troops supported by around 12,000 laborers and slaves besieged the Knights in their strongholds on Malta. At that point, the Knights numbered no more than 550, as their order had been decimated not only by their defeat in 1559 at the Battle of Djerba, but also by the Wars of Religion in Germany and by Henry VIII of England’s declaration of separation from the Catholic Church, events which almost totally abolished the German and English forces of the Order. To support themselves in the Siege, the Order conscripted all of the male Maltese population into the army, and were also supported by small reinforcements of soldiers from Spain and Italy, as well as a number of adventurers who came to Malta seeking glory and loot. The defenders numbered, in total, somewhere between 6,100 and 8,500 men. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, given both the scarcity of extant accounts of the Siege, and also given the chroniclers’ habit of exaggerating the numbers of the Ottomans and reducing the number of the defenders so as to add to the sense of danger and drama.
The Siege began on May 18th of 1565, and battle quite literally did not cease until Spanish reinforcements arrived on September 8th. Historians have described the Siege as the last, dying gasp of crusading spirit, as it not only marked the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, but also the last battle where the Knights of St. John, or indeed any military-religious order, participated. After the Siege, the Order built the citadel of Valletta, named after the Grandmaster of the Order at the time of the Siege, Jean Parisot de la Valette. This city and all of its fortifications and building still stands, in very nearly the same form as it did when it was built in the 1570s, and is today the capital of Malta.
The island slipped out of history for the next 200 years, until the Napoleonic Wars, when it was captured by the French and then by the British, who added it to the Empire following the war. It remain a colonial possession under the British until 1974, and was during World War II assaulted by the German and Italian air forces. In 2004 Malta joined the EU, and adopted the Euro in 2008.
Maltese culture is, as one might expect, a mish-mash resulting from many centuries of foreign possession. The official languages are English and Maltese, a patois of about 70% Arabic and 30% Italian, and Italian is also widely understood and spoken. The food has been strongly influenced by North Africa and the Middle East, favoring spicier dishes with an emphasis on rice as the grain of choice rather than wheat. The Maltese are 99% Catholic, with only a very, very small Protestant community making up the difference, and religion is a deeply rooted part of daily life. The island is chock full of places to go, see, and experience, and my three full days there were not nearly enough for it all.
I arrived in Malta at 12:40pm via the International Airport in the middle of the island. The Airport is about the same size as South Bend’s, and one of the first clues I had to the size of the island was the fact that the airport and its runways took up a noticeable portion of my map. The airport, like so many of its European kindred, is located far away from civilization, in this case 25 minutes by bus. The Maltese buses deserve recognition for being quite possibly the most unique form of transportation on the European continent. They are nearly all 50-60 years old, relics that once served the United Kingdom and which were moved to Malta during its time as a British possession. The buses now sport bright orange and white paint, and the interiors are plastered with religious postcards and icons, while rosaries take the place of fuzzy dice in the adornment of the rear-view mirrors. The buses are also quite cheap, and one can travel the length and breadth of the island for 50 cents.
I took one bus on a jouncing ride through the countryside to the Valletta bus terminal, then changed buses and went to the suburb of Sliema, which was were my hostel was located. However, the hostel’s reception desk was closed due to renovations and my room key, which was supposed to be located in an envelope on the front desk was nowhere in sight. I was informed that the reception would be open the next morning, and so I checked in to a cheap (35 Euros per night) hotel for that night, and resolved to apply at the hostel again the next morning. Regrettably, the delay meant that I had wasted two hours which I had expected to use for sight-seeing, derailing my plans a little. I had intended to spend my arrival day in Valletta, going to museums and inspecting fortresses, then go inland to the cities of Mdina and Vittoriosa on the second day, then to the island of Gozo on the third day. I scratched my plans Gozo, and decided to go for a long walk along Marsamxett Harbor to clear my mind and calm my nerves. The day was absolutely stunning, 73 degrees Fahrenheit with a breeze coming off the Mediterranean and nary a cloud in the sky. My walk, however, took twice as long as I expected, since Marsamxett Harbor is filled with inlets and marinas along which my path wended, and I arrived in Valletta as the sun was beginning to set. I walked through the city a little, out to the western point of the peninsula, on which crouches the indomitable form of Fort St. Elmo, a relic from the days of the Great Siege, when it was defended for 34 days against relentless Ottoman assault, completely cut off from the rest of the defenders and under unceasing bombardment from cannons which catapulted 300-pound stone balls into the fortifications. Today, part of the fort functions as the Maltese police academy, while the rest houses the War Museum and is usually open to the public. However, as I learned after speaking to a few construction workers, January and February are traditionally months for upgrades and repairs to the historical buildings, and as such both fort and museum were closed to the public. I finished up the evening with a quick dinner in a café, where I rice which had been baked in a cheese crust.
The next day I checked out early and made for my hostel, where I found the reception desk open, and the owner somewhat mystified as to my absence yesterday. Still, everything got sorted out in the end, and I hopped a bus back to Valletta, ready to take in some museums. The first one I went to was St. John’s Co-Cathedral, a church with a dull, sober exterior built in 1571. The plain facade, undecorated with ornaments or sculpture, looks just like all of the buildings around it, with nothing to distinguish it as a cathedral. The interior, however, is decorated in the most lavish exhibition of the Baroque: gilding, frescoes on the ceiling, and gleaming marble in a rainbow of colors. The floor is decorated with marble version of the coats of arms of famous Knights of St. John, embellished with heraldic records of their accomplishments. The church holds ten side chapels, each originally built by knights of a specific nationality. The Order was divided into eight langues (French for ‘tongues’): Italy, Castile, Aragon, Provence, France, Germany, England, and Auvergne. Each langue maintained its own chapel, each own dominated with a massive oil painting of that langue’s patron saint.
In addition to all of the finery which I was now coming to expect of churches in Southern Europe, the Co-Cathedral also has a museum. The museum is housed in the former oratory, which was during the time of the Knights a place for meditation and prayer as well as an office building. The crown jewel of the museum is The Beheading of John the Baptist, painted by Caravaggio during his novitiate in the Order. While he completed the painting just after being adopted into the order (it is in fact signed “Fra Michelangelo Carvaggio”, and is the only signed Caravaggio in existence), he was expelled two weeks later after dueling and seriously wounding another knight. The Order took care to confiscate all of the work he had done while in Malta, and as a result, the museum holds a painting of St. Jerome as well as a small collection of sketches.
Further in are the museum’s collection of sacred artifacts, from the times of the knights: vestments, monstrances, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts. Much of the former treasure is now gone, carried off during Napoleon’s occupation of the island, but what remains is nonetheless impressive: chasubles embroidered with pounds and pounds of silver and gold thread, depicting scenes from the New Testaments and Last Judgments galore; a cross-shaped reliquary four feet high, cast from solid gold and embellished with precious stones and platinum, which still holds a relic purporting to be the hand of John the Baptist; massive illuminated pulpit bibles, each spanning four feet across when opened and painted with pigments concocted from gold leaf and powdered gems; huge tapestries depicting famous episodes of the Order and from Scripture; and of course the portrait gallery, containing portraits of all Grandmasters of the Order from about 1600 to 1798 and the portrait of the last Grandmaster, Ferdinand von Hompech zu Bolheim, a German from the Catholic Duchy of Württemberg.
After I exited the cathedral it was only a short walk to the Palace of the Grandmasters. The Palace was constructed in the 1570s and served as the residence of the Grandmasters of the Order until their demise in 1798, and as the residence of the British colonial governor until Maltese independence in 1974, when part of it was designated as the Presidential Residence, while the rest (the former chambers of the Grandmasters and several halls on the ground floor) were converted into the State Museum and Armory, respectively. To enter the Palace, one proceeds through a tunnel-like gate past two guards-of-honor and into the Royal Albert Gardens (named after Prince Albert of England, and part of a late 19th century British project to beautify Valletta by installing public gardens in the old fortifications. More on that later). There you buy your tickets, either for the State Museum or the Armory (reasonably inexpensive at 4 Euros with student ID, and the price covers the invaluable addition of an audioguide for the Armory). As Italy had quite exhausted my enthusiasm for frescoed Baroque rooms (which is all the State Museum really consists of) I went to the Armory, which is housed in the former refectory halls of the Palace. It consists of two chambers, one devoted to armor, the other to weapons. I’ll not spend an undue amount of time disgorging all of the information I learned there, but the pictures are up on the webalbum and they have captions to explain them. I will only remark that the Armory’s collection pales in comparison to the Waffenkammer in Vienna, but I’ll get to that further on down the road.
After leaving the Armory the time of day was approaching 3 pm. I boarded a bus for Vittoriosa, one of the oldest cities in Malta and the location of the old headquarters of the Knights of St. John. This was the city besieged by the Ottomans during the Great Siege of 1565. At that point, Malta was very sparsely inhabited indeed, with only two places that were really inhabited: the citadel of Mdina and the Three Cities (Borgo, L’Isola, and Bormla). The Three Cities held the headquarters of the Knights of St. John, located in Fort Saint Angelo, a looming castle built of the same tan stone as everything else on the island, and they bore the full brunt of the Ottoman assault: constant bombardment by the artillery which enfiladed them on literally every side, and daily onslaughts of tens of thousands of soldiers, drawn from every corner of the Ottoman Empire, from Greece to Hungary to Persia to Arabia Felix. The siege was a grueling, gory affair which lasted for more than a hundred days, from June to September of 1565.
While the Knights were in the end victorious, the Three Cities lay in varying states of ruin, from the complete desolation of L’Isola to the relative stability of Borgo. The Knights decided to build a completely new fortress-city to house their order against the possibility of another siege like that of 1565. That city was Valletta, and it became the capitol of Malta.
The Three Cities were rechristened respectively Vittoriosa, Senglea, and Cospicua, and dwindled in importance as the business of the Knights moved across the Grand Harbor to Valletta. Now they serve as undiscovered relics of Malta’s past.
The Vittoriosa bus terminal (like all other Maltese bus terminals, nothing more than a parking lot with a closed ticket kiosk) is located right across from the main entrance to the city: the Gate of Provence, so named because it was defended by those Knights who were from Provence. All of the Three Cities’ defenses were so divided, with those areas which were likely to come under heavy assault staffed with Knights whose langues were robust in number. Now, the Provencal Gate stands much as it did during the 16th century, a sloping barrier about 40 feet tall and more than a hundred feet thick at its base. The narrow, barely two-lane street that passes through the Gate of Provence winds its way under the sober and judgmental facades of buildings which have survived for over 600 years until emptying into Victory Square in the center of the town.
I spent my time wandering among alleys shadowed by the sunset, looking up landmarks and buildings. The most famous part of Vittoriosa is Fort Saint Angelo, the oldest part of the defenses of the Knights. It is built on a man-made island, connected to Vittoriosa by a small footbridge and a narrow stone aqueduct, and is, like the rest of the defenses, built of the tan Maltese stone. It was also closed, and apparently had been so for over a year due to massive renovations. The fort was closed to the public for a long time, before an attempt was made in the 1970s to turn it into a resort hotel. That venture failed miserably, leaving behind a half-constructed swimming pool and a great deal of structural damage. The current work on the fort is being done with the eventual goal of opening the entire structure to the public as a museum commemorating the Knights of St. John and the Great Siege of 1565.
After I left Vittoriosa, I went straight for my hostel, turning in early in anticipation of a long day in the morning.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Third: The Circus Maximus, Roman Churches, and Pompeii
Our third day in Rome was somewhat of a mish-mash, as we all had a list of sites we wanted to see, but none of them fit any particular theme. We decided that the best solution would be to take the subway to the Circus Maximus, which is located in the southern part of ancient Rome. It was Imperial Rome’s largest hippodrome, or chariot racing circuit. The sport of chariot racing had originated in ancient Greece, and the Romans adapted it with enthusiasm, as they did with so many Greek customs. Those who have seen Ben-Hur will of course remember the climactic chariot racing scene (along with the galley scene, probably the only part anyone remembers), which was staged in a very accurate replica of the Circus Maximus. In Imperial times, chariot races would be staged between four chariots: red, green, blue, and white, and each charioteer would have an enthusiastic fanbase, much as modern day sports teams do, complete with all of the swooning girls and riots that such a fanbase entails. The Circus was also the place where particularly hated criminals would be publicly executed, and thus the place where Christians would be thrown to lions and so forth.
Today hardly anything remains of the Circus; a few areas of the southwest turn have been uncovered and excavated, and a gravel path outlines where the racetrack would have run. Most of the Circus was hauled off during medieval times to act as building materials, with the only identifiable piece being the Flaminio Obelisk which was moved by Pope Sixtus V to the Piazza del Popolo in the 16th century. We walked down the track, staging a few silly stunts, and then proceeded to Santa Maria in Cosmedin, an ancient basilica from the 6th century. It was built on the Temple of Pompeiian Hercules, and heavily embellished in 782 by Byzantine Greeks fleeing the Iconoclast Controversy in the Byzantine Empire. The basilica contains the gilded skull of Saint Valentine, as well as an ancient piece of sculpture in the shape of a head with an open mouth, called la Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth). The statue was probably an ancient Roman fountain or manhole cover portraying one of the gods. According to legend, if a person puts their hand in the statue’s mouth and speaks a lie, the statue will bite that person’s hand off. Fortunately for my left hand, legend is wrong in this case.
After Santa Maria in Cosmedin, we took a meandering path back toward the Forum and Colosseum, with the eventual goal of trying St. Peter in Chains again. Our way took us through a few small and venerable basilicas, and thence behind the Forum, and stopped there to bask in the sun and gaze upon the ruins. Then we walked around the Forum and Colosseum, and to the Lateran Basilica. The basilica was originally a palace and law court built by the Laterani family in the early period of the Roman Empire. It was used after Constantine I as a conciliar building, hosting most famously the synod which condemned Donatism in 313. Eventually the palace was demolished and the basilica extended to become the official cathedral of Rome. The church also has a negative side to its history, as in order to finance its reconstruction in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Vatican revived the sale of indulgences, which drove Martin Luther to post the 95 Theses in 1517 and begin the Reformation.
The church is constructed much like St. Peter’s, with an interior of marble and gilt stone, mosaics, and frescoes. Massive statues of the apostles adorn the gigantic columns which support the roof, each statue at least twice as large as a normal person. The grandeur of the church is somewhat fitting, as it is the official seat of the Diocese of Rome (St. Peter’s being technically part of Vatican City, a different country), and we were suitably awed.
To walk to St Peter in Chains, we chose a route that went past the excavations of the Domus Aurea, the palace of the Emperor Nero. The palace, whose name translates to “House of Gold” in English, was built between 64 and 68 AD on land cleared by the fire which had devastated Rome. It was a lavish edifice, sheathed in pure white marble, decorated in frescoes and mosaics. The palace was designed for parties: of over 300 rooms, not one was designed as a bedroom. However, the palace was a politically embarrassing monument for Nero’s descendants, and it was covered over with dirt and the Baths of Titus and of Trajan.
When we arrived, we found St. Peter in Chains closed (again), and then went our separate ways. I and two others went to the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, known colloquially as the “Wedding Cake” or the “Typewriter.” It was designed in 1895 to commemorate Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of the unified Italian state, but was not completed until 1935. It generated much controversy during its construction, which entail the destruction of much of the medieval area of the Capitoline Hill. Today, the monument holds Italy’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as well as a museum commemorating the Italian Wars of Unification from 1815-71.
For the fourth day, we went south, traveling by an early train to Naples. After that, I and a friend boarded the Circumvesuviana, a train which travels from Naples, around Mount Vesuvius, and back, and which stops at the excavations of Pompeii. Pompeii was a prosperous Roman town which dominated the area until 79 AD, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the town and all its inhabitants under more than 60 feet of volcanic ash and pumice. The city was rediscovered in 1748, and has been under excavations since then. The city provides much of the basis for current historical thought on everyday life in the Roman Empire due to the remarkable level of preservation. It is not only the human bodies which have been mummified: objects of wood, such as doors, and cloth have also been fossilized by the eruption and thus preserved.
During our time there, me and Demi (my friend) spent three hours crawling over about one-fifth of the excavations, examining them without guidance from tour, book, or talking piece of plastic and trying to figure out what it was we were seeing. Of note (and these can be seen on the webalbum) were a bakery/grain mill, a tavern, and a ruined shrine to the muses. The mills, all four of them, are still intact, as are the ovens and the stone basins used to hold bread dough. The mills (the conical structure made of granite) would be powered by running water coming through the aqueducts. Grain would be dumped in the top and would trickle down and be ground between the rotating millstone and the conical base. There were at least two other bakeries which we found, but they were in lesser stages of intactness.
The tavern (the two pictures of counters with holes in them) was one of many in the city. The holes are stone vats in which wine would be stored, and cooled by the stone. It would be served to customers in pewter mugs which were chained to the counter to prevent theft. The taverns were popular places for Romans to meet, and were even frequented by the upper classes on occasion.
The final picture, the shrine, holds no particular value other than that I thought it might make a nice picture. After we left Pompeii, we made a moderately mad dash for our train back to Rome. The next morning we both arose early, though we made for different airports. I flew out of Rome International, as opposed to the two other domestic airports. I left Rome at 10:30 on a plane for Malta, but that’s a tale for another blog post (and yes, I will try to write faster, so you can all delete the incendiary emails I know you’re waiting to send me).
Today hardly anything remains of the Circus; a few areas of the southwest turn have been uncovered and excavated, and a gravel path outlines where the racetrack would have run. Most of the Circus was hauled off during medieval times to act as building materials, with the only identifiable piece being the Flaminio Obelisk which was moved by Pope Sixtus V to the Piazza del Popolo in the 16th century. We walked down the track, staging a few silly stunts, and then proceeded to Santa Maria in Cosmedin, an ancient basilica from the 6th century. It was built on the Temple of Pompeiian Hercules, and heavily embellished in 782 by Byzantine Greeks fleeing the Iconoclast Controversy in the Byzantine Empire. The basilica contains the gilded skull of Saint Valentine, as well as an ancient piece of sculpture in the shape of a head with an open mouth, called la Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth). The statue was probably an ancient Roman fountain or manhole cover portraying one of the gods. According to legend, if a person puts their hand in the statue’s mouth and speaks a lie, the statue will bite that person’s hand off. Fortunately for my left hand, legend is wrong in this case.
After Santa Maria in Cosmedin, we took a meandering path back toward the Forum and Colosseum, with the eventual goal of trying St. Peter in Chains again. Our way took us through a few small and venerable basilicas, and thence behind the Forum, and stopped there to bask in the sun and gaze upon the ruins. Then we walked around the Forum and Colosseum, and to the Lateran Basilica. The basilica was originally a palace and law court built by the Laterani family in the early period of the Roman Empire. It was used after Constantine I as a conciliar building, hosting most famously the synod which condemned Donatism in 313. Eventually the palace was demolished and the basilica extended to become the official cathedral of Rome. The church also has a negative side to its history, as in order to finance its reconstruction in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Vatican revived the sale of indulgences, which drove Martin Luther to post the 95 Theses in 1517 and begin the Reformation.
The church is constructed much like St. Peter’s, with an interior of marble and gilt stone, mosaics, and frescoes. Massive statues of the apostles adorn the gigantic columns which support the roof, each statue at least twice as large as a normal person. The grandeur of the church is somewhat fitting, as it is the official seat of the Diocese of Rome (St. Peter’s being technically part of Vatican City, a different country), and we were suitably awed.
To walk to St Peter in Chains, we chose a route that went past the excavations of the Domus Aurea, the palace of the Emperor Nero. The palace, whose name translates to “House of Gold” in English, was built between 64 and 68 AD on land cleared by the fire which had devastated Rome. It was a lavish edifice, sheathed in pure white marble, decorated in frescoes and mosaics. The palace was designed for parties: of over 300 rooms, not one was designed as a bedroom. However, the palace was a politically embarrassing monument for Nero’s descendants, and it was covered over with dirt and the Baths of Titus and of Trajan.
When we arrived, we found St. Peter in Chains closed (again), and then went our separate ways. I and two others went to the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, known colloquially as the “Wedding Cake” or the “Typewriter.” It was designed in 1895 to commemorate Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of the unified Italian state, but was not completed until 1935. It generated much controversy during its construction, which entail the destruction of much of the medieval area of the Capitoline Hill. Today, the monument holds Italy’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as well as a museum commemorating the Italian Wars of Unification from 1815-71.
For the fourth day, we went south, traveling by an early train to Naples. After that, I and a friend boarded the Circumvesuviana, a train which travels from Naples, around Mount Vesuvius, and back, and which stops at the excavations of Pompeii. Pompeii was a prosperous Roman town which dominated the area until 79 AD, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the town and all its inhabitants under more than 60 feet of volcanic ash and pumice. The city was rediscovered in 1748, and has been under excavations since then. The city provides much of the basis for current historical thought on everyday life in the Roman Empire due to the remarkable level of preservation. It is not only the human bodies which have been mummified: objects of wood, such as doors, and cloth have also been fossilized by the eruption and thus preserved.
During our time there, me and Demi (my friend) spent three hours crawling over about one-fifth of the excavations, examining them without guidance from tour, book, or talking piece of plastic and trying to figure out what it was we were seeing. Of note (and these can be seen on the webalbum) were a bakery/grain mill, a tavern, and a ruined shrine to the muses. The mills, all four of them, are still intact, as are the ovens and the stone basins used to hold bread dough. The mills (the conical structure made of granite) would be powered by running water coming through the aqueducts. Grain would be dumped in the top and would trickle down and be ground between the rotating millstone and the conical base. There were at least two other bakeries which we found, but they were in lesser stages of intactness.
The tavern (the two pictures of counters with holes in them) was one of many in the city. The holes are stone vats in which wine would be stored, and cooled by the stone. It would be served to customers in pewter mugs which were chained to the counter to prevent theft. The taverns were popular places for Romans to meet, and were even frequented by the upper classes on occasion.
The final picture, the shrine, holds no particular value other than that I thought it might make a nice picture. After we left Pompeii, we made a moderately mad dash for our train back to Rome. The next morning we both arose early, though we made for different airports. I flew out of Rome International, as opposed to the two other domestic airports. I left Rome at 10:30 on a plane for Malta, but that’s a tale for another blog post (and yes, I will try to write faster, so you can all delete the incendiary emails I know you’re waiting to send me).
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Second: The First Three Days in Rome
We left Florence with the intention to go to Siena for the day, and then arrive in Rome in the evening. However, the train we were planning on taking disappeared, leaving us with no option but to head to Rome early. Our train rolled down through the beautiful Tuscan countryside, passing fields which in spring would have been filled with grain, grapes, and olives, but which now lay fallow. The ride was beautiful, if somewhat slow, and we arrived in Rome around 2:30. We disembarked and boarded the metro for our ride to the hostel. There we checked in and promptly went to sleep. We woke up around 7, and went for a walk, buying gelato on our way to St. Peter’s Square. The square still contained a large nativity scene, built around the massive obelisk in the square’s center. We walked around, admiring the floodlit facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, before walking down the Via della Consolazione to the River Tiber. Our meandering way took us up the river to Castel Sant’Angelo, an ugly fortress which functioned for centuries as the papal residence. The building, now a museum like many of Rome’s old edifices, is still surrounded by the trenches and breastworks built during the 16th century to fend off the warring French and Spanish armies which used Italy as battleground for their conflicts.
The next day we took on Ancient Rome, which lies in the southeast of the city. Our first stop was, naturally, the Colosseum. The Colosseum was built between 72 and 80 AD, and was begun by the emperor Flavius Vespasianus, and it was known to the ancient Romans not as the Colosseum but as the Flavian Amphitheater, a name which belied the slaughter that took place within. The Colosseum usually hosted games for a certain period of time, usually 100 days, twice per year, with an off-season in between to recruit and train new gladiators. Contrary to popular belief, Christians were not thrown to the lions here; that happened in the Circus Maximus. The Colosseum was a place for combat, between gladiators, between animals, or between hunters and their prey. The Roman Empire spared no expense in stocking the Colosseum, and beasts from every corner of the known world were butchered there: tigers and elephants from India; lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, zebras and hyenas from Africa; wolves, boars, and wild elk from Germany and Gaul.
The structure gradually fell into disrepair after the fall of the Roman Empire. Citizens of Rome removed its marble and limestone for their houses and churches and, more importantly, the iron clamps build into the pillars to prevent collapse due to earthquake, which they melted down to forge into weapons. The Colosseum is basically built of bricks, with marble or limestone cladding to give it the appearance of being far grander. With only its brick and mortar remaining, the structure collapsed into its current state due to earthquake. We entered the Colosseum below the area where the emperor and his guests would have sat during the games, then traversing one quarter of the elliptical perimeter before climbing to the second floor, where we walked around the entirety of the building.
After we left the Colosseum, we walked north a bit, trying to get to the Church of St. Peter in Chains. The church has two claims to fame: it possesses what are supposedly the chains worn by Peter during his imprisonment, and also the tomb of Pope Julius II [check this, and add a bit of history], which has Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses. The church was closed when we arrived, so we turned around and headed for the Forum.
We entered the Forum at the base of the Palatine Hill, upon which the Palace of Domitian resided (and still resides today, if in ruins). Domitian, a somewhat unbalanced emperor with a tendency toward obsession and paranoia, built the palace in 92, 4 years before his assassination. The palace was according to contemporary accounts a masterpiece of architecture:
“Awesome and vast is the edifice, distinguished not by a hundred columns but by as many as could shoulder the gods and the sky if Atlas were let off. The Thunderer’s [quite possibly a reference to Augustus] palace next door gapes at it and the gods rejoice that you are lodged in a like abode […]: so great extends the structure and the sweep of the far-flung hall, more expansive than that of an open plain, embracing much enclosed sky and lesser only than its master.”
Thus spoke the poet Statius of the palace.
The entire Palatine Hill is covered in buildings, both above and below ground, and the Palace of Domitian is only the topmost. Archeologists have discovered and excavated the palaces of Augustus and Tiberius as well, and are currently preparing for another excavation campaign. After walking through the ruins of the dwellings of both Domitian and Augustus (the latter being far better preserved due to being underground for a long period of time, we walked down, past the Arch of Titus, and into the Forum proper. Several buildings of the Forum are particularly well-preserved: the Courts of Maxentius built shortly before the reign of Constantine in the 4th century AD and whose roofs aided Michelangelo in his design of St. Peter’s Basilica; a temple to Romulus and Remus which possesses the original bronze doors and locks it was built with in the ; and a crematorium where the body of Julius Caesar was burned. Of the reconstructions, the Curia (the building where the Roman senate met) is perhaps the best, as it contains nearly all of the original material. We left the forum by passing near, if not quite under, the Arch of Septimus Severus, one of the last of the Roman emperors.
The next day we set to the Vatican Museums in quite the same fashion with which we accomplished the Uffizi. Of the many galleries that we walked through, the best in my opinion were the art galleries, both antique and modern, which contain among other things Raphael’s massive Transfiguration, paintings of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, and several works by Matisse and Dali; the old papal apartments which contain Raphael’s School of Athens and other famous frescoes; and of course the Sistine chapel, which was very crowded and not very visitor-friendly (no photographs of any kind allowed). Regrettably, the galleries containing the Museums’ collection of Roman sculpture (including well-known works such as the Discus Thrower by Myron, the Laocoon, and the statue of the she-wolf nursing the infant Romulus and Remus) were closed.
After the Vatican Museums, our next stop was naturally St. Peter’s Basilica. This building is huge. The interior is easily massive enough to contain several modern-day churches insides its walls adorned with sculpture, gold, and painting. While entry to the basilica was free, entry to the treasury and old sacristy, which contain a goodly deal of treasures and artifacts, as well as the dome (which can be ascended in a manner similar to the Florentine Duomo), was not thus cutting our visit much shorter than it might have been. After a brief journey through the crypt below we left and crossed the Tiber, our goal now being to see some of the sights in central Rome.
Our first stop was the Pantheon. Originally built as a temple to all of the Roman gods in 126 AD (hence the name) it was later converted into a church. In it are buried Italian heroes such as the kings Victor Emmanuel II (the first king of the unified Italian state) and Umberto I (his son and successor), as well as famous painters such as Raphael and Carracci, as well as the composer Corelli. The building is famous for its dome, which is half a meter longer in diameter than the dome of St. Peter’s, and which inspired the Renaissance obsession with domes. The height from the floor to the oculus in the top of the dome is 43.2 meters, the same as the dome’s diameter, thus allowing the interior chamber to accommodate a perfect sphere. After the Pantheon we proceeded to the Trevi Fountain. The fountain was built in 1453 on the site of an ancient intersection of 3 aqueducts (today only one remains), and embellished heavily from 1751-62. The massive facade depicts the Tritons (Roman sea-spirits) guiding the chariot of Oceanus (the god of the seas and oceans).
As we left it began to rain, which was followed by dozens of street merchants emerging to try and sell us umbrellas. We walked to the Spanish Steps, an large and elaborately adorned staircase which used to lead to the Spanish Embassy (now a library) and which are now a popular location for pictures, con artists, and vendors. As the rain began to come down more heavily we made our way to the Piazza del Populo, a large square in the northern area of downtown Rome. It is know for the two church which flank the Via del Corso as it enters the Piazza, churches which are also nearly exact copies of one another, with only small differences in dome and bell-tower to tell them apart. As the rain began to let up and the street merchants exchanged their umbrellas for postcards (“20 postcards 1 Euro please”) and trinkets, we walked back to our hostel.
The next day we took on Ancient Rome, which lies in the southeast of the city. Our first stop was, naturally, the Colosseum. The Colosseum was built between 72 and 80 AD, and was begun by the emperor Flavius Vespasianus, and it was known to the ancient Romans not as the Colosseum but as the Flavian Amphitheater, a name which belied the slaughter that took place within. The Colosseum usually hosted games for a certain period of time, usually 100 days, twice per year, with an off-season in between to recruit and train new gladiators. Contrary to popular belief, Christians were not thrown to the lions here; that happened in the Circus Maximus. The Colosseum was a place for combat, between gladiators, between animals, or between hunters and their prey. The Roman Empire spared no expense in stocking the Colosseum, and beasts from every corner of the known world were butchered there: tigers and elephants from India; lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, zebras and hyenas from Africa; wolves, boars, and wild elk from Germany and Gaul.
The structure gradually fell into disrepair after the fall of the Roman Empire. Citizens of Rome removed its marble and limestone for their houses and churches and, more importantly, the iron clamps build into the pillars to prevent collapse due to earthquake, which they melted down to forge into weapons. The Colosseum is basically built of bricks, with marble or limestone cladding to give it the appearance of being far grander. With only its brick and mortar remaining, the structure collapsed into its current state due to earthquake. We entered the Colosseum below the area where the emperor and his guests would have sat during the games, then traversing one quarter of the elliptical perimeter before climbing to the second floor, where we walked around the entirety of the building.
After we left the Colosseum, we walked north a bit, trying to get to the Church of St. Peter in Chains. The church has two claims to fame: it possesses what are supposedly the chains worn by Peter during his imprisonment, and also the tomb of Pope Julius II [check this, and add a bit of history], which has Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses. The church was closed when we arrived, so we turned around and headed for the Forum.
We entered the Forum at the base of the Palatine Hill, upon which the Palace of Domitian resided (and still resides today, if in ruins). Domitian, a somewhat unbalanced emperor with a tendency toward obsession and paranoia, built the palace in 92, 4 years before his assassination. The palace was according to contemporary accounts a masterpiece of architecture:
“Awesome and vast is the edifice, distinguished not by a hundred columns but by as many as could shoulder the gods and the sky if Atlas were let off. The Thunderer’s [quite possibly a reference to Augustus] palace next door gapes at it and the gods rejoice that you are lodged in a like abode […]: so great extends the structure and the sweep of the far-flung hall, more expansive than that of an open plain, embracing much enclosed sky and lesser only than its master.”
Thus spoke the poet Statius of the palace.
The entire Palatine Hill is covered in buildings, both above and below ground, and the Palace of Domitian is only the topmost. Archeologists have discovered and excavated the palaces of Augustus and Tiberius as well, and are currently preparing for another excavation campaign. After walking through the ruins of the dwellings of both Domitian and Augustus (the latter being far better preserved due to being underground for a long period of time, we walked down, past the Arch of Titus, and into the Forum proper. Several buildings of the Forum are particularly well-preserved: the Courts of Maxentius built shortly before the reign of Constantine in the 4th century AD and whose roofs aided Michelangelo in his design of St. Peter’s Basilica; a temple to Romulus and Remus which possesses the original bronze doors and locks it was built with in the ; and a crematorium where the body of Julius Caesar was burned. Of the reconstructions, the Curia (the building where the Roman senate met) is perhaps the best, as it contains nearly all of the original material. We left the forum by passing near, if not quite under, the Arch of Septimus Severus, one of the last of the Roman emperors.
The next day we set to the Vatican Museums in quite the same fashion with which we accomplished the Uffizi. Of the many galleries that we walked through, the best in my opinion were the art galleries, both antique and modern, which contain among other things Raphael’s massive Transfiguration, paintings of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, and several works by Matisse and Dali; the old papal apartments which contain Raphael’s School of Athens and other famous frescoes; and of course the Sistine chapel, which was very crowded and not very visitor-friendly (no photographs of any kind allowed). Regrettably, the galleries containing the Museums’ collection of Roman sculpture (including well-known works such as the Discus Thrower by Myron, the Laocoon, and the statue of the she-wolf nursing the infant Romulus and Remus) were closed.
After the Vatican Museums, our next stop was naturally St. Peter’s Basilica. This building is huge. The interior is easily massive enough to contain several modern-day churches insides its walls adorned with sculpture, gold, and painting. While entry to the basilica was free, entry to the treasury and old sacristy, which contain a goodly deal of treasures and artifacts, as well as the dome (which can be ascended in a manner similar to the Florentine Duomo), was not thus cutting our visit much shorter than it might have been. After a brief journey through the crypt below we left and crossed the Tiber, our goal now being to see some of the sights in central Rome.
Our first stop was the Pantheon. Originally built as a temple to all of the Roman gods in 126 AD (hence the name) it was later converted into a church. In it are buried Italian heroes such as the kings Victor Emmanuel II (the first king of the unified Italian state) and Umberto I (his son and successor), as well as famous painters such as Raphael and Carracci, as well as the composer Corelli. The building is famous for its dome, which is half a meter longer in diameter than the dome of St. Peter’s, and which inspired the Renaissance obsession with domes. The height from the floor to the oculus in the top of the dome is 43.2 meters, the same as the dome’s diameter, thus allowing the interior chamber to accommodate a perfect sphere. After the Pantheon we proceeded to the Trevi Fountain. The fountain was built in 1453 on the site of an ancient intersection of 3 aqueducts (today only one remains), and embellished heavily from 1751-62. The massive facade depicts the Tritons (Roman sea-spirits) guiding the chariot of Oceanus (the god of the seas and oceans).
As we left it began to rain, which was followed by dozens of street merchants emerging to try and sell us umbrellas. We walked to the Spanish Steps, an large and elaborately adorned staircase which used to lead to the Spanish Embassy (now a library) and which are now a popular location for pictures, con artists, and vendors. As the rain began to come down more heavily we made our way to the Piazza del Populo, a large square in the northern area of downtown Rome. It is know for the two church which flank the Via del Corso as it enters the Piazza, churches which are also nearly exact copies of one another, with only small differences in dome and bell-tower to tell them apart. As the rain began to let up and the street merchants exchanged their umbrellas for postcards (“20 postcards 1 Euro please”) and trinkets, we walked back to our hostel.
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the First: Florence
As you might have known (although you probably didn’t), students at the University of Innsbruck have the entire month of February as winter break. Naturally, for we in the Innsbruck Program, this length of time off means but one thing: travel like crazy. On or around January 29th (our first day of break) all of the students in the program scattered to the four points of the compass and the four in between. This month, we (though not necessarily me) will be traveling from Dublin to Cairo, Athens to Paris, Rome to Berlin. This post and the eight following it will describe my own hectic travels, which lasted 23 days and which took me in a great loop through Italy, Malta, and Greece.
My itinerary, as it finally resolved itself (sometimes in a panicky and last-minute manner), worked out so:
January 29th to February 1st: Florence, Italy
February 1st to February 6th: Rome, Italy
February 6th to February 9th: the island of Malta
February 9th to February 10th: back in Rome
February 10th to February 16th: Athens, Greece
February 16th to February 17th: 18 hours of hectic traveling trying to get back to Innsbruck
February 18th to February 20th: Vienna
In this blog, I shall record my experiences, observations, and petty witticisms, and in general chronicle what I have dubbed the Great Continental Gallivant.
Pictures are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words at least, and I have at least a thousand pictures for your. You will find them at picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten . If you’ve never been to this site before, it contains all of the pictures I have taken in Europe, as well as some from back in the States. It would behoove you to bookmark the site or otherwise make note of it, because I will be referencing it constantly during the course of these entries.
And now, without any more gilding the lily and with no further ado, I shall begin with Florence, the gem of Tuscany and center of the Renaissance. Florence rose to power during the 14th century as a center of banking and trade, helped by the powerful Medici family, who, in addition to being fabulously, obscenely wealthy, were great patrons of the arts, sciences, and learning.
Florence is of course best known for its role in the Renaissance, where it played host to the creation and invention of so many classic treasures of that time: the dome built on a large scale, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and many other Renaissance artists, too many to be enumerate here.
I traveled to Florence with five friends. We would remain together throughout most of Italy, and I would rejoin three of them for my time in Greece. We had originally planned to leave for Florence very early indeed, departing Innsbruck at 5:30 am and arriving in Florence in the early afternoon. The night before we abandoned that option in favor of taking slower, cheaper trains. Thus we left Innsbruck at 11 am on January 29th, traveling first to Brenner, a town close to the Austrian-Italian border. The ride to Brenner was itself noteworthy, since the rail line wends its way through a deep alpine valley, past small villages and under massive bridges. The morning was bright and clear, and the countryside was stunning. At Brenner, we changed trains and boarded one heading south to Bologna. Those hours were spent in reading, napping, and occasional conversation. The train was quite empty until we reached Trent, about 4 hours into the journey, when it filled with the evening’s commuters heading home to Bologna.
After arriving in Bologna, we changed to our final train heading to Florence, arriving in that city at around 10pm. We trudged through the mostly empty streets to the hostel where we stayed at, which proved to be quite comfortable: our room was an apartment with extra beds, with a balcony providing a nice view of the street behind us. After a rather late dinner, we retired and went to bed.
The next day was an exercise in speedy tourism. We arose at 7am and were out of the door by 8, heading to the Uffizi, Florence’s massive art gallery, well known for its Medieval and Early Renaissance collections, with such works as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera being among its most noteworthy. The museums building was originally an office complex for the Medicis in the 16th century hence its name (Uffizio being the Italian for ‘office’), but it soon took on the role of an art gallery, first holding the Medici’s private collections, and later transforming into a museum proper. We saw it in 2 and a half hours, which if you’ve ever been there is no mean feat. It perhaps helped that none of us were particularly interested in looking at galleries full of medieval Catholic art (and after a while most of the works started to blend together).
After we exited the Uffizi, blinking in the morning sun, we went to the Duomo, the local nickname for Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. The Duomo was originally built in the 14th century, but the dome which gives the cathedral its name was not built until the early 15th, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi determined how to construct a dome of the magnitude required without that dome collapsing under its own weight: he supported the dome independently of the roof, and built it of much lighter brick, as opposed to the three kinds of marble used to build the rest of the church.
Since the dome contains passages leading up to its cupola, it was only natural that some ingenious and anonymous Florentine conceived the idea of using the climb to the top as a tourist attraction. Our ascent to the top took us through sets of spiral staircases leading up to a high balcony just beneath the curve of the dome, where we could look down on the people inside the cathedral and view the frescoes painted underneath the dome. After that, we climbed up inside the dome itself, between the outside layer of stone and tile and the inside layer of bricks. The view from the cupola, or rather the small balcony around the cupola, was spectacular as promised, giving us a 360 view of the city and the surrounding countryside.
After we had gotten down from the dome, we entered the cathedral proper. The inside was cavernous, although compared to sights I would see later in my trip, it was only moderate inside. Of particular note are the frescoes on the interior walls, commemorating those buried inside the cathedral.
We left the Duomo and walked north to the Accademia gallery, which house Michelangelo’s David. Although the Accademia is a respectable art gallery in itself, the David is naturally the main attraction, which has the unfortunate effect of eclipsing everything else in the gallery, and of making you wonder why you paid 10 Euros to see just one thing.
We then made our way slowly to the Ponte Vecchio, the “Old Bridge” over the river Arno. The bridge is lined with buildings, erected there when it was customary to build shops and businesses along a bridge. Today the shops all house jewelry stores in a vast and sparkly multitude, with a few open places where people can look out over the brown, sluggish expanse of the Arno River. We took the time to stroll down it, before walking along the river and onto another bridge, this one more conventional. We paused there for awhile, taking pictures and basking in the early afternoon sun, before returning to our hostel to join the rest of the Florentines in a siesta.
Dinner we had in a small, hole-in-the-wall trattoria near our hostel. It was moderately priced, and quite good, and I feasted on tortellini in a meat and cheese sauce, a carpaccio of arugula and beef, and naturally bread, olive oil, and vinegar, all washed down with the house wine. We returned to the hostel, packed, and went to bed.
My itinerary, as it finally resolved itself (sometimes in a panicky and last-minute manner), worked out so:
January 29th to February 1st: Florence, Italy
February 1st to February 6th: Rome, Italy
February 6th to February 9th: the island of Malta
February 9th to February 10th: back in Rome
February 10th to February 16th: Athens, Greece
February 16th to February 17th: 18 hours of hectic traveling trying to get back to Innsbruck
February 18th to February 20th: Vienna
In this blog, I shall record my experiences, observations, and petty witticisms, and in general chronicle what I have dubbed the Great Continental Gallivant.
Pictures are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words at least, and I have at least a thousand pictures for your. You will find them at picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten . If you’ve never been to this site before, it contains all of the pictures I have taken in Europe, as well as some from back in the States. It would behoove you to bookmark the site or otherwise make note of it, because I will be referencing it constantly during the course of these entries.
And now, without any more gilding the lily and with no further ado, I shall begin with Florence, the gem of Tuscany and center of the Renaissance. Florence rose to power during the 14th century as a center of banking and trade, helped by the powerful Medici family, who, in addition to being fabulously, obscenely wealthy, were great patrons of the arts, sciences, and learning.
Florence is of course best known for its role in the Renaissance, where it played host to the creation and invention of so many classic treasures of that time: the dome built on a large scale, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and many other Renaissance artists, too many to be enumerate here.
I traveled to Florence with five friends. We would remain together throughout most of Italy, and I would rejoin three of them for my time in Greece. We had originally planned to leave for Florence very early indeed, departing Innsbruck at 5:30 am and arriving in Florence in the early afternoon. The night before we abandoned that option in favor of taking slower, cheaper trains. Thus we left Innsbruck at 11 am on January 29th, traveling first to Brenner, a town close to the Austrian-Italian border. The ride to Brenner was itself noteworthy, since the rail line wends its way through a deep alpine valley, past small villages and under massive bridges. The morning was bright and clear, and the countryside was stunning. At Brenner, we changed trains and boarded one heading south to Bologna. Those hours were spent in reading, napping, and occasional conversation. The train was quite empty until we reached Trent, about 4 hours into the journey, when it filled with the evening’s commuters heading home to Bologna.
After arriving in Bologna, we changed to our final train heading to Florence, arriving in that city at around 10pm. We trudged through the mostly empty streets to the hostel where we stayed at, which proved to be quite comfortable: our room was an apartment with extra beds, with a balcony providing a nice view of the street behind us. After a rather late dinner, we retired and went to bed.
The next day was an exercise in speedy tourism. We arose at 7am and were out of the door by 8, heading to the Uffizi, Florence’s massive art gallery, well known for its Medieval and Early Renaissance collections, with such works as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera being among its most noteworthy. The museums building was originally an office complex for the Medicis in the 16th century hence its name (Uffizio being the Italian for ‘office’), but it soon took on the role of an art gallery, first holding the Medici’s private collections, and later transforming into a museum proper. We saw it in 2 and a half hours, which if you’ve ever been there is no mean feat. It perhaps helped that none of us were particularly interested in looking at galleries full of medieval Catholic art (and after a while most of the works started to blend together).
After we exited the Uffizi, blinking in the morning sun, we went to the Duomo, the local nickname for Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. The Duomo was originally built in the 14th century, but the dome which gives the cathedral its name was not built until the early 15th, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi determined how to construct a dome of the magnitude required without that dome collapsing under its own weight: he supported the dome independently of the roof, and built it of much lighter brick, as opposed to the three kinds of marble used to build the rest of the church.
Since the dome contains passages leading up to its cupola, it was only natural that some ingenious and anonymous Florentine conceived the idea of using the climb to the top as a tourist attraction. Our ascent to the top took us through sets of spiral staircases leading up to a high balcony just beneath the curve of the dome, where we could look down on the people inside the cathedral and view the frescoes painted underneath the dome. After that, we climbed up inside the dome itself, between the outside layer of stone and tile and the inside layer of bricks. The view from the cupola, or rather the small balcony around the cupola, was spectacular as promised, giving us a 360 view of the city and the surrounding countryside.
After we had gotten down from the dome, we entered the cathedral proper. The inside was cavernous, although compared to sights I would see later in my trip, it was only moderate inside. Of particular note are the frescoes on the interior walls, commemorating those buried inside the cathedral.
We left the Duomo and walked north to the Accademia gallery, which house Michelangelo’s David. Although the Accademia is a respectable art gallery in itself, the David is naturally the main attraction, which has the unfortunate effect of eclipsing everything else in the gallery, and of making you wonder why you paid 10 Euros to see just one thing.
We then made our way slowly to the Ponte Vecchio, the “Old Bridge” over the river Arno. The bridge is lined with buildings, erected there when it was customary to build shops and businesses along a bridge. Today the shops all house jewelry stores in a vast and sparkly multitude, with a few open places where people can look out over the brown, sluggish expanse of the Arno River. We took the time to stroll down it, before walking along the river and onto another bridge, this one more conventional. We paused there for awhile, taking pictures and basking in the early afternoon sun, before returning to our hostel to join the rest of the Florentines in a siesta.
Dinner we had in a small, hole-in-the-wall trattoria near our hostel. It was moderately priced, and quite good, and I feasted on tortellini in a meat and cheese sauce, a carpaccio of arugula and beef, and naturally bread, olive oil, and vinegar, all washed down with the house wine. We returned to the hostel, packed, and went to bed.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Thoughts on the inauguration
On this occasion, and in light of the past year, let us contemplate the words of Commander Susan Ivanova:
"It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for each other, because if we don't, who will? And that strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely of places. Mostly, though, it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings, even for people like us."
And let us continue with an excerpt from the works of William Blake:
America a Prophecy
02 The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave
03 their stations;
04 The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
05 The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
06 Reviving shake. inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
07 Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
08 Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field;
09 Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
10 Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
11 Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
12 Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open
13 And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
14 They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
15 Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
16 And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
17 For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
"It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for each other, because if we don't, who will? And that strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely of places. Mostly, though, it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings, even for people like us."
And let us continue with an excerpt from the works of William Blake:
America a Prophecy
02 The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave
03 their stations;
04 The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
05 The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
06 Reviving shake. inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
07 Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
08 Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field;
09 Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
10 Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
11 Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
12 Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open
13 And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
14 They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
15 Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
16 And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
17 For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
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