NB!
Latest
Architecture · Museums · Science · Paris · Saint Petersburg
The world's largest Foucault pendulum in St Isaac's Cathedral operated until 1986
In 1931, a Foucault pendulum, the invention of a French astronomer of 1851 that demonstrates the rotation of the Earth, was installed beneath the dome of Saint Isaac's Cathedral. And if the pendulum that Jean Foucault hung beneath the dome of the Paris Panthéon on a 67-metre
Archive · Faith · Observations · Saint Petersburg
A Te Deum in the Colonnade Hall of the Tauride Palace before the opening of the Fourth State Duma, 15 November 1912
This is how it ought to be in the largest Orthodox country in the world, and not twice a year on feast days
Faith · The East · Art
Legend of Khidr helping Zul-Qarnayn find the spring of living water in Central Asia
Khidr and Alexander the Great Watch a Spring of Living Water Restore a Salted Fish to Life. According to legend, Khidr, the great preacher who travelled over water standing on a fish, helped the great Emperor Dhul-Qarnayn find the magical spring of life-giving water somewhere in Central Asia.
Observations · Ethnography · Humour
In an ancient game-song, a sparrow or a drake entertains the audience by imitating how children, merchants, lads, girls and old women walk and caper about in dance
Old women all go like this: hunched over, stooping low. And girls go like this: perked up, merry-making, perked up, and clap your hands! Let us commit it to memory. Hunched over or perked up. And above all, do not mix them up.
Faith · Society · Rome
Pope Leo XIV posts photos from a visit to the Vatican Radio transmission centre, an extraterritorial possession of the Vatican in the Santa Maria di Galeria area, 18 kilometres north-west of the centre of Rome
And do you know, it is quite an enviable plot of land, 430 hectares in extent, ten times the size of the Vatican itself, which covers 44 hectares. The visit of Leo XIV, together with officials of the Dicastery for Communication and the office of the Governorate of Vatican City
Archive · Faith · Ethnography
Ethiopian clergy sing and dance at Easter in the courtyard of the Russian hospital in Addis Ababa
Abyssinian Orthodox clergy at Easter in the courtyard of the Russian hospital in Addis Ababa, 1900s. In Ethiopia there is a tradition of going from house to house and singing religious chants on religious holidays. In the background are the fence and gates of the Russian compound. Psalmists and singers
Archive · Architecture · Books · Moscow
Photograph from the second volume of the 1986 book “Moscow”
View of the Stalin skyscraper on Vosstaniya Square from Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, autumn 1980. From the book "Moscow", Volume II, 1986
Faith · Ethnography
The centaurs descend from the first of men to kill a kinsman, namely King Ixion, who did not wish to pay his father-in-law the bride-price for his beautiful daughter and pushed him into a fire pit covered over with planks
The centaurs descend from the first of men to kill a kinsman, namely King Ixion, who did not wish to pay his father-in-law the bride-price for his beautiful daughter and pushed him into a fire pit covered over with planks. For this dreadful crime Ixion was punished
Books · Monarchies · Observations · Paris · Nature
Old fish in the ponds of the Petit Trianon and Barbara Pym's remark about Marie Antoinette
The British novelist Barbara Pym, in her ironic novel Crampton Hodnet, written in the 1930s and 1940s, remarks that the fish in the ponds of the Petit Trianon are so old that they must surely have seen Marie Antoinette. In principle, some freshwater fish really do live for more than
Books · Observations · Mores
Men are, as a rule, more attentive to the breeding of their horses and dogs than to the upbringing of their offspring
Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims / Fruits of Retirement. William Penn, 1693
Observations · Science · People
A reminder from Carl Jung:
Life really begins only at 40; until then, you are merely conducting research