Archaeology

Four Neolithic earthwork circles found near Rechnitz in Austria

Four Neolithic earthwork circles found in Austria. In an archaeological park near the town of Rechnitz (Austria), four earthwork circles about 100 metres in diameter have been discovered. They were built in the Middle Neolithic, in the 5th millennium BC, 2,000 years before Stonehenge. Similar circles are found throughout

Architecture · Moscow · Museums · Heritage

Restorers have recovered the parquet and sphinx stoves of Francesco Camporesi's palace theatre

Restoration of the Egyptian Pavilion at the Ostankino Estate completed. Specialists have restored more than 700 sq. m. of authentic artistic parquet, door leaves adorned with gilded and silvered carving, faux marble, items of fittings and stucco decoration, as well as the historic stoves with their sculpted sphinxes. The design

Architecture · Faith · Heritage · Paris

Emmanuel of 1681 and the nine new bells of 2013 at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris

The restored bells of Notre-Dame de Paris have a good many unusual and interesting details attached to them. The great bell Emmanuel, for instance, is a witness to history: cast in 1681, it is the only one of the large bells to have survived the French Revolution. Napoleon heard

Faith · Mores

Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov on why God asks people only to fulfil their ordinary duties

The Lord does not require you to stop eating, drinking and sleeping, or to give all your property to the poor. Do what you ought: if you are a wife, be a normal wife; if you are a father, be a normal father; if you are a son, be a

NB! · Observations · Pop Culture · Humour

The new Versace collection is really not bad at all; I would happily try on some of the looks

The new Versace collection is really not bad at all; I would happily try on some of the looks. But the women's handbags… Gentlemen, it is high time we put an end to this fashion; we have played long enough, and that will do

NB! · Geography · Science

A sailing chariot, invented in the early seventeenth century by the mathematician Simon Stevin for Prince Maurice of Nassau, allowed swift travel, by the standards of the day, along the shores of the North Sea

Two marionettes on museum plinths: a figure in a white costume with green trim, a chef-style cap and a dark mask, and a lady in an embroidered wide gown and a grey wig.

Art · Museums · Humour

Eighteenth-century Venetian marionettes from the collection of Marchesa Luisa Casati

They Rather Overdid It with This Fellow. Eighteenth-century Venetian marionettes from the collection of the Marchesa Luisa Casati

Books · People

And with every year I live more stubbornly, more fiercely

Anna Akhmatova on old age

Faith · Books · Science

Virgil's line that all is full of Jupiter and its meaning in alchemy

Tell me, Damoetas, whose flock is this? Is it Meliboeus'? "You are mistaken, Aegon: it is another's. But let it be, for often Thyrsis himself called out to me, and Aegon answered." <a lengthy, bantering conversation of the shepherds> With Jove, Muses, let

NB! · Architecture · Nature

Vertical Greening That Did Not Quite Take

NB! · Moscow · Observations · Paris · Humour

The Paris Métro Weeps Bitter Tears When It Thinks of the Moscow Metro

Archaeology · Observations · Nature

Homo erectus meeting the Flores man as a possible source of myths about hobbits and dragons

A pity about this good-natured fellow. In the first place, of course, he has a wife and children back in the den; and in the second, imagine yourself a fairly sturdy East Asian Homo erectus, in possession of a large brain, meeting a Flores or Luzon man, representatives of

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