Back door

Back in the fifth century BCE, Ezra and Nehemiah, while composing the Torah, may have purged from it the Babylonian and Canaanite creation myths. Yet the vanquished stars of those tales—Leviathan, Behemoth, and the Ziz bird—found a cozy refuge in poetry, the Psalms, the Book of Job, and the rabbinic tradition that interprets them. And there they’ve been quietly thriving for three thousand years.

The Iranian regime erected and unveiled a statue version of the bas-relief celebrating Shah Shapur’s victory over Emperor Valerian yesterday in central Tehran, on Enghelab, the Revolution Square. According to the Iranian press, the statue is a serious warning to the West

Traditionally, each village held the “maiden market” on a different day, where parents ceremonially received visitors from other villages, led them to the main square, and had the girls perform dances

The jars, along with the gourds, baskets, instruments, and inscriptions, fill the room with the atmosphere of an antique shop or a small museum

The excavations led to sensational results during the Covid (2020-2022). Next to the still-functioning bath, an Etruscan bath sanctuary was uncovered, dating back to the 3rd century BCE. For seven centuries, bathers hoping for healing continuously enriched the site with bronze and other votive offerings

Not mere objects, not little knick-knacks for a shelf. Each one stands here in place of a real person, representing a moment of great need when divine help was sought

Vulnerable yet protective, like angels or perhaps the genius spirits of the forgotten Etruscan mythology.

If I were ever to build a studiolo again, I would choose a location like Giovanni Grimani’s, the Patriarch of Aquileia

When we speed past it on the highway as evening falls over Tirana, its curved concrete walls, reminiscent of the Ronchamp chapel, and the faintly glowing cross on its façade make me think it might be a modern church

We leave feeling very happy about what we had seen. We came to witness decay – and instead, we found life

The spectre of communism still haunts Tirana—today not through ideology, but in the form of wandering statues with no place to call home

Most of the figures are dressed in traditional attire and adopt a ritualized, almost sculptural posture for the camera, their faces closed, as though conscious of the legacy they are just leaving behind

Beneath each scene of the Creation and the episodes of first men’s story, are four quadrilobe panels with four grotesque creatures, on each of the twice ten pillars

Japanese tourists also come in, and they are very surprised, even touched. Japanese people do not know how popular Japanese prints are in the West, and they are shocked that there is a special shop for them here

So the devil himself danced in the person of Salome. This is why she must be depicted in contorted, unnatural poses, as if possessed by a devil

Thus, while the son outwardly dedicated the monument to his father, he was in fact erecting a memorial to himself—showing off his lineage, his virtue, and his means to commission such a work

We have seen enough ruined medieval churches in Svaneti to know that it is thanks to such local guardian angels that about a hundred of them have survived intact

The Estonian absurd does not stop at naive artists and everyday life, but also permeates high art.

Here, on the banks of the Daugava River, the first Christian missionary in the Baltics, the Augustinian monk Meinhard of Holstein, met the pagan Livonians

Every second Saturday in Riga, a flea market is held in the Wöhrmann Garden (since the Baltic Germans left, Vermanes dārzs) next to Berga Bazārs

With such a history, it is no coincidence that Latvians know exactly which side to stand on and what to expect if their former oppressors prevail again

The warehouse workers were too lazy to sort the sheets and told him to take it all. He shipped four hundred tons of map sheets in several train cars

We got to know Lajos Erdélyi in our childhood from his photo album about the Jewish cemeteries of Transylvania

Pictures, even the most realistic pictures, do not depict reality, but use conventional formulas through which the viewer reconstructs a certain image of reality in himself

It is dark. It is dark even late in the morning, and it is already getting dark in the early afternoon. The only source of light is the snow

The yaks not only live, but sometimes also die, and if this happens unplanned, then the hour of the vultures comes

As the statue bearers see each other at the end of the two streets leading onto the square, the processions start, and the statue of Christ bows before His mother, the Sardinian men carrying it before the Sardinian women carrying Mary

The inscription on the school board reads: “Who was in church at Easter?” and the little pioneers write down the names of those they know were there. We can only imagine what happens next

There was a Christmas in Kashan as well, at least once. And guess what, one of the participants was Hungarian

A walking crowd appears in front of us, led by huge turbaned figures. A young woman with a tall red lampshade on her head stands out of them. “They are bringing the bride now”

The man who survived the flood did not meet his goddess mate on earth, but in heaven, where he was guided up by the wise old monkey. This is why the Mosuos venerate the monkey

The mountain peoples build towers, as if only those twenty meters were needed, added to their thousand or two-thousand-meter high surface to reach the sky at arm’s length

What is this? A reaincarnation of the destroyed Buddha? Or was it not destroyed after all, only withdrawn from the open area – where the whole city could see it – into a closed building as a compromise?

In the border regions of Tibet, predominantly inhabited by nomads, in Kham and Ando provinces, the monasteries have been the main territorial and social organizing factors

Kangding’s best-known cultural product is the Love Song of Kangding. In China, it is second only to the national anthem in terms of familiarity and popularity

Coming from Sichuan’s Chengdu, the caravans entered Tibetan territory in Dartsedo, today’s Kangding city. This was traditionally considered the gateway of Tibet, as it is still today

The term Andachtsbild denotes such religious images which, although coming from biblical stories, are not illustration, but rather extremely concentrated summaries and emblems of them

I asked the monks in Kandze Monastery where their cemetery was. They looked at me shocked, then pointed upwards. “Do you bury in the sky?” “Yes.”

Here, especially if it is said by a foreigner, from whom one would not expect it, it is no longer a greeting, but rather a magic spell that causes deep astonishment and increased euphoria. In fact, it calls to the surface, as if by magic, all the beauty, joy of life and kindness that characterize the people living here

I wonder what a Jewish woman’s tombstone with a Hebrew inscription is doing in the wall of a Franciscan monastery founded in the mid-15th century?

When a big storm is nearing – she continues –, the men go out to the sacred field, where they ask the spirits to avert any calamity. But they also go out to beg for rain in times of drought. Both usually work

Saint George, triumphantly enthroned on the wooden gate of Msho Arakelots, could not save others, but he could save himself. The door is still standing today in the Western Armenian section of the Yerevan History Museum

Saint George is the patron saint of Georgia. What’s more, Georgia got its name from him. And, what’s more, it is likely that the figure and cult of the knight St. George the dragon-slayer also arose in Georgia sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries

You can still see the gates of the dead when walking along Via dei Consoli. You can identify them by their narrow, high Gothic arches, and by the fact that the masonry of the walled in ones is different from the elegant block stones of the house

The main function of shepherds’ churches was to serve as a ritual meeting place of shepherds transhuming – that is, marching up and down between winter and summer pastures – on April 25 and September 29

He tells me that he really likes apples, but the other day he almost choked on one, it got stuck in his throat and he could barely cough it out. As he talks, I can see that he only has one tooth like in the cartoons. It is difficult to safely eat apples like this

And how can hundreds of thousands of tourist visit a cult place that serves prayer? Erdoğan dismissed these problems: “Like all our mosques, the doors of Hagia Sophia will be wide open to locals and foreigners, Muslims and non-Muslims”, he promised. That promise has since been proven to be a lie.

“Look, my grandmother just died. She worked as a seamstress in a factory all her life. Under the bed where she spent her last two weeks, we found a bag of potatoes. She has been sewing such bags all her life. This is how my gradmother’s life passed.”

The history of Morocco is a succession of capitals. The successive dynasties, having overthrown the previous one, always create a new capital in their own tribal territory, spectacularly humiliating the city of their defeated opponent, looting and destroying it

Something else perished, too — a true emblem of the Church, a jewel of the old basilica, and one of the masterpieces of a new artistic age. The façade of the old basilica had once been adorned with a monumental mosaic by Giotto: the Navicella, or The Boat of Saint Peter

Yet, for all their pomp, these coffin-bearers look oddly delicate. Shouldn’t an admiral’s coffin be carried by grizzled sailors or rugged soldiers? Instead, Mélida gives us smooth-faced, almost feminine figures — in fact, they are women dressed as men.

There is only one community institution in the village, the “Antigua Peña”, Old Club, that is, the pub. There is no store: a grocery truck comes twice a day with bread, meat, fish and other basic foods, and on Saturdays the mobile supermarket. “In which other village do they deliver the goods to your door?” the residents say proudly

These days, the procession of the Magi is accompanied by a brass band that fills the streets with rumor commensurate with the importance of the procession. In the nineteenth century, however, the chaotic musical background was provided by the population itself, and its typical instruments were the conch horn and the glass trumpet

Assa (1987), directed by Sergei Soloviev, was as much a cult film of the Soviet change of regime as Hair was of an earlier change in the West. The theme songs of the movie – just like Aquarius in Hair – all became “anthems” of the change

Guests recieve the beautiful loaves distributed at the home of a wedding, and usually keep them as souvenirs, put on the wall or in display cases. I visited an old Sardinian woman whose wall was covered with such breads, and she was able to tell her life story by reviving the memories related to them.

The small black wild animals are the trademark of the wilderness. Medieval imagination did not consider the Egyptian desert an uninhabited wasteland, but rather a barren yet populated place, home to various wild creatures. Among these were ravens, which, by the Lord’s command, fed Saint Anthony the Hermit and Saint Paul with bread; deer that nourished other hermits with milk; lions from whose paws merciful hermits extracted thorns, binding them in lifelong gratitude

Not only did the geese make Saint Martin a bishop, but they also chose the day of his feast in the calendar. And what’s the thanks?

From the main street, you can see the river and the more modern houses built on the other bank. This is where the old town got its name: 望鱼 wàng yú means “watching the fish”. Local folklore holds the rock itself to be a curled-up cat watching the fish playing in the water before her nose

From before the Byzantine destruction of icons in the 8th and 9th centuries, barely a dozen Christian panel paintings have survived, the vast majority of them in the St. Catherine Monastery in Sinai, where the hand of the image-destroying Byzantines did not reach

“How many Armenians are there in the city?” I ask the young doorman. “Maybe we are six or seven families”, he replies. I wish the rebirth of this church would also mean the survival of the community.

And the three walls are in fact covered with sculptures, or more precisely, reliefs. Standing men in tall, peaked hats and knee-length tunics, in the style of the Parthian – i.e. Hellenized Persian – art of the 2nd and 3rd century

Since then, the official Turkish historiography has presented the event as an Armenian rebellion and collaboration with the Russian enemy, which had justified the “displacement” (as they call their massacre) of the Anatolian Armenians

In Diyarbakır at ten o’clock in the evening, there is still a lot of life. The teahouses, cafés, pastry shops, restaurants, and the terraces of the caravanserais are full, people are chatting over tea at small tables in the square in front of the Great Mosque, Kurdish musicians are playing, singing and dancing in the streets

I recently wrote about how Mussolini’s frasi celebri – quotes from his historical speeches, which, writes Umberto Eco, “marked all my childhood, and whose most significant passages we memorized in schools”

The ceremony of the meeting, s’incontru, is perhaps most traditionally celebrated in Oliena. The background atmosphere and noise is provided by the descendants of the bandits of Oliena, who stand on the rooftops from erly morning, and shoot blanks

He was born and grew up here in the neighborhood, went to this school, and although he spent most of his life away from here, as a miner, he returned after his retirement. He was pained by the state of the mosque. As the only resident of the old Afanour, he moved into the teacher’s room and restored the mosque complex with his own hands

The arrival of the first swallows and the first storks, the official seal of the new spring, is a big event in the life of a small town. But since it is not about the visit of great people, saints or rulers, it rarely occurred to anyone to include this event in the local history.

In eastern Sicily, where Petralia is located, the monarchy achieved more than two thirds. This might be also the reason of the survival of the monarchist campaign inscriptions in Petralia, as silent witnesses of the resistance against the colonizing North

In only a few pictures does the true meaning of wonder appear: the epiphany. The wonder that is always present and sometimes shines on. The entry of authenticity into reality, or rather the cathartic recognition of its presence in reality

The new gate no longer regarded those coming from Florence as enemies, but rather as well-disposed visitors—just as Ferdinando himself proved to be. The gate’s façade was adorned with the Medici coat of arms, and beneath it was inscribed the greeting: Cor magis tibi Sena pandit.

Arriving at Sighetu Marmației, the first thing I see is a camel. Right after the town sign — its head adorned with a halter in red-white-green, the national colors of Hungary, its legs shackled. While I watch, it doesn’t stoop once to graze, turning away in disgust from the lush, flowery meadow

Another day ended in the Janowska, the last German labor camp which still works in the same buildings and with the same function on the outskirts of Lwów.

After the recovery of the frescoes and on the initiative of a committee composed in the name of St. Anastasia, during the Yugoslavian war two icons, representing the saint, traveled around the Earth aboard the Mir space station as a harbinger of peace.

It is attested by this secret sign for the initiates that we have discovered in Palma de Mallorca, while walking up on the Carrer Pietat

In the feast of Saint Anthony in Sa Pobla of Mallorca, besides the blessing of the animals, the fire, the pig-roasting and the common banquet, the demons come on the scene as well who, while the saint lived a life of hermit in the desert, “appeared in the form of various beasts, and with their claws and corns were cruelly tearing him.”