The East · Geography · Maps · Observations · Nature

The Kapchagay Reservoir, created in 1969, on a map of Alexander the Great's empire

The map of Alexander the Great's empire caught my interest for its easternmost part. If one looks at the north-eastern frontier of Alexander's conquests, where they run up against the unsubdued Massagetae and Saka, one notices an amusing thing: the Central Asian lakes Issyk-Kul

Moscow · Observations · Society · Nature

Some time ago I fought, without success, the wretched municipal services over the mixed-herb lawn beneath my windows, home to birds and insects, but in the end it was mown, dug up, stripped of its fertile topsoil and covered with the belch…

Some time ago I fought, without success, the wretched municipal services over the mixed-herb lawn beneath my windows, home to birds and insects, but in the end it was mown, dug up, stripped of its fertile topsoil and covered with that belch of anthropogenic bad taste: turf in rolls.

Coming Up · Heritage · Science · Nature · Saint Petersburg

Arboretum Park of the Peter the Great Botanical Garden operates in test mode from 2 July

Incidentally, since 2 July one of Russia's first parks, the Arboretum Park of the Peter the Great Botanical Garden, has been open on a trial basis. The oldest trees in the regular part of the park, laid out in the 1820s, are two hundred years old, but the

A fig tree's foliage hangs down from a stone vault inside an ancient structure, with a park and houses visible beyond.

NB! · Archaeology · Observations · Nature

A fig tree grows upside down in the Baiae Baths Archaeological Park on the Bay of Naples

A fig tree that grows upside down. The Archaeological Park of the Baths of Baiae, on the shore of the Bay of Naples. The tree is about 20 years old. Such an unusual fig

Museums · Science · People · Nature

The Oceanographic Museum of Monaco devotes an entire hall to Cousteau: a kind of model of his ship holds the personal belongings of the museum's one-time director, the equipment Cousteau used, the instruments he invented, finds, letters and much else besi

https://theparnassian.com/osnovannyi-v-kontse-xix-veka-kniazem-alberom-i-okeanograficheskii-muzei-raspolozhen-v-ogromnom-zdanii-navisaiushchem-nad-morem/

NB! · Paris · Nature · Humour

Nature has been so cleansed during quarantine that the pigeons have returned to the Vendôme Column

Archive · Moscow · Mores · Nature

Asparagus in Moscow gardens since the 17th century and Russian distrust of lettuce

Asparagus was loved and cultivated in Russia, even in Moscow, from the seventeenth century at the latest. The German Olearius recalls: “There are also kitchen vegetables of every kind, especially asparagus as thick as a finger, such as I myself ate at the house of a certain Dutch merchant, a

Museums · Nature

Japanese spider crab at Bexhill Museum in Bexhill-on-Sea and its size

A Japanese spider crab in the collection of the Bexhill Museum in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex. The museum itself is Edwardian in its modesty: it has just two members of staff, and its collection consists of the curiosities assembled by the museum's curator, John Sargent, together with

NB! · Books · Mores · Nature

Aldous Huxley adored cats; for many years he kept a Siamese named Limbo, after Huxley's first collection of stories

Art · Observations · Nature · Humour

I cannot tell whether this kitten is on the verge of a nervous breakdown or is a hideous demon from a grimoire

Children and a Mousetrap. Dominicus van Tol, 1660s.

Books · Science · People · Nature

Cholera, the volcanic eruptions of the 1810s and Pushkin’s Boldino Autumn

Strange as it may seem, Pushkin's Boldino Autumn, so often recalled of late in connection with coronavirus isolation, may also be linked to the volcanic eruptions of the 1810s, which had such a profound effect on the Earth's climate. It is believed that the gigantic cloud

Geography · Science · Nature

The 1816 Year Without a Summer, the Tambora eruption and a theory about the bicycle

Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, or The Year Without a Summer: such is the name under which 1816 entered history, when snow fell every month in Western Europe and parts of the USA, temperatures stayed at winter levels, and rain and hail never ceased. A century later, climatologists explained