Archaeology · Faith · Science · Ethnography
Archaeologists have discovered a sacred place of people who lived 23,000 years ago at a Palaeolithic site in the Bryansk Region. It was a hearth with mammoth bones dug into it, and beneath them lay objects which, in the researchers' opinion, were used for ritual purposes. Among them
Architecture · Faith · Observations · Heritage
Another Baroque iconostasis, this time a Russian one, of the 1730s-1740s. Though in a very sorry state, even if the Dormition Cathedral of 1508 in Rostov the Great does belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. A church on this spot was already reckoned old in the 1100s, new cathedrals
Faith · Art · Museums · Humour
They are kept in the White Chamber of the Rostov Kremlin, which houses the delightful display of the Museum of Church Antiquities, which has existed since 1883. These sculptures in the round adorned the bases of the prayer places built for Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nikon on the model
Architecture · Faith · Art
Everything You Need to Know About the Baroque, in Two Photographs. The altar of St Peter's Church in Malmö
Faith · Museums · Observations · Nature
I understand that not everyone will care for regular gardens of the French type. Very well, then: I was taken with the metropolitan's garden of apple, pear, cherry and plum trees beneath the ancient walls of the Rostov Kremlin. Metropolitan Jonah Sysoyevich conceived it in the manner of
Architecture · Faith · Art · Museums · Humour
Saint Michael the Archangel of Brussels. The statue recalls the works of Tsereteli, but this is another creator: Martin Van Rode, who lived in the fifteenth century. The Archangel with the dragon crowned the 96-metre spire of the town hall. Michael is made of copper sheets, which have oxidised
NB! · Architecture · Faith · Heritage · Paris
The roof of Notre-Dame, July 2019. As you can see, most of the structures are now made of reinforcing steel
Faith · Art · Observations · Heritage
It must be said that this is a very strange fourteenth-century tomb, in the village church of Ampleforth in North Yorkshire. And if it struck you that this double monument depicts a married couple, then why is the woman wearing a wimple? Were these people buried in one grave,
Archaeology · Faith · Cinema · Books · Museums · Observations
These hands, too, have been raised from the depths, though not of the sea but of a marsh. The pottery found in 1891 in the marsh of Santa Gilla dates from the 4th-3rd centuries BC. These are votive hands, that is, offered as gifts in fulfilment of a vow,
Archaeology · Faith · Art
If a hunched fellow wrapped in a predator's skin, greedily drinking from a two-handled cup, ever catches your eye, you are most likely looking at the most mischievous of the Greek gods: Silenus, henchman of Dionysus. Incidentally, the kantharos, as this vessel is properly called, was essentially
Faith · Science · People
In the reasoning of the French monk and, strange to say, philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), the idea of preformation is presented with some interest. Malebranche held that every living creature is, from the very beginning, contained in the egg of its mother. In the embryo of a tulip bulb
Faith · Books · London · Mores · Ethnography
Yes, he has fallen asleep In the last, eternal, unwaking sleep. I shall make a coffin his bed, Fairies will gather at his grave And no worm will dare creep into it. Literal translation Indeed, in ancient Britain there was a belief that fairies take particular care of young corpses