Faith · The East · Society · Rome
Pope Leo XIV on Netanyahu’s crimes and the complicity of the West
The East · Science · Society · People
The theory linking warfare and revolutionary outbreaks on earth with the activity of the sun was first advanced by the Russian Soviet scientist Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964), a biophysicist and the founder of heliobiology and aeroionification. Chizhevsky demonstrated a dependence between the cycles of solar activity and many phenomena
Faith · The East · Art
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. Dhul-Qarnayn is usually identified with Alexander the Great, but sometimes with King Darius and even with
The East · Books · Humour
"Ah, Petka, Petka, I once knew a Chinese communist by the name of Zhe Zhuang. He often had a dream in which he was a red butterfly flitting about in the grass. And when he woke up, he could not make out whether it was the butterfly who had
Faith · The East · Cinema · Society
Well, it is high time to recall the triumph of the Christian defenders of a tiny island in 1565, when an Ottoman armada descended upon it. The Siege of Malta is one of the most heroic and most dramatic battles in history. Malta remained the last bulwark of Christendom in
Architecture · The East · Heritage · New York · Society
Trump's order cutting foreign aid from the USA has struck heritage protection programmes. The US presidential administration plans to cut around $60 billion of foreign assistance, including the closure of almost half of overseas grants. One of the organisations affected is the New York-based World Monuments Fund:
Coming Up · The East · Art · Museums
The New Jerusalem Museum has opened "Light Between Worlds", a large-scale exhibition project that brings together two significant but little-studied collections of art of the 1920s and 1930s: that of the I.V. Savitsky Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan and that of the
Archaeology · Faith · The East · Monarchies
Dendera, Egypt
The East · Art · Monarchies · Observations · Humour
The august pair were captured by an artist who most probably never saw them and had not the faintest notion of their appearance, so that the realism of the portraits rests solely on pale skin and fair hair. I do not know whether there exists a reality in which the
Archaeology · Architecture · The East · Heritage
Derbent, with a history of more than 2,000 years, is one of the oldest cities in Russia
Archaeology · The East · Geography
On the spread of international trade in antiquity: during excavations of the Etruscan city of Lattara in the south of France, fragments of woollen goods were found, dated to the 5th-6th centuries BC and made, quite definitely, from the wool still famous today, produced in Kashmir. Wool from the
The East · Geography · Maps
The Aral Sea appears on maps of Asia only at the very end of the seventeenth century. Indeed, many atlases of even later date, such as this atlas by Sanson, still show the Caspian Sea as if it were two seas in one: they mark the Syr Darya and the