Faith · Art · Observations
Into my mind comes the image of the Bogolyubovo Icon of the Mother of God, commonly called the oldest iconographic depiction of the Protection. Created between 1158 and 1174, the icon is held to be the first ever painted on Russian soil. The story of its making is traced to
Art · Museums · Paris · Pop Culture
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NB! · Observations · Pop Culture · Humour
Cinema · Heritage · People
The memorial plaque on house no. 72, Chkalov Street, in the city of Rybinsk commemorates the sons of Khaim Shmuilovich Schenker, a clerk at the Rybinsk office of the Volga River Steamship Company, Joseph and Nicholas, who emigrated with their family to the USA in 1893, when they were 15
NB! · Architecture · Moscow · Society
NB! · Archive · Faith · People
Cardinal Bergoglio and Pope John Paul II. Jorge Mario Bergoglio became a cardinal on 21 February 2001; twelve years later he would be elected Pope.
Observations · Mores · Society
A favourite Facebook group asks what Soviet roubles and Beryozka shop certificates are worth. And, you know, looking at the latest political events in the world, I allow myself to disagree with the experts who say they are now worth nothing. I would be especially wary of swearing that they
NB! · Archive · Books · People · Nature
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Moscow · Mores · Nature
In the 1930s everyone knew the story of the lioness from the communal flat at 16 Bolshaya Dmitrovka, and not only in the USSR. Vera Chaplina, a member of staff at the Moscow Zoo and a writer of animal stories, took home a lion cub whose mother had rejected her.
Archive · Books · Observations
The Prague Archive was fitted out with very convenient booths with lifting mechanisms for using vertically oriented card cabinets. Today all this is, of course, obsolete: card catalogues are being replaced everywhere by electronic ones, which is, in my view, a serious mistake, one we shall yet have cause to