You may have noticed there was something of a blank here at Lucid Ephemera for a few weeks while I went off and did festive things and had a holiday. More details on Italians in puffy jackets and wild boar salami follow in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I hope all of you [...]
Archive for the ‘history’ Category
2010 and 2011, thank you and hello
Posted in Aleppo, archaeology, architecture, Australia, autumn, Berlin, bread, British colonial mansions, cathedrals, chocolate, Christmas, churches, Crete, Cretins, Cyprus, Damascus, day trips, deer, Dodgy taxi drivers, driving, elbow, England, expat, fleas, food, Germany, Greece, history, Italy, Liverpool, manor houses, markets, Morocco, mosques, museums, odd hotels, Ottomans, Phillipine overseas domestic workers, post offices, Recalcitrant stereos, rowing, shopping, singing, smuggling, summer, Sunday, Syria, The Cyprus Question, The Mediterranean Middle Lane, tombs, tourism, travel, Turkey, Uncategorized, Venetians, Volkswagens, Volkswagons, weather, winter, wordless, work, working from home, Xania on January 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Statuesque
Posted in churches, Damascus, history, Italy, tombs on November 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I’m feeling a bit under the weather this week having been off work with a minor but persistent illness. Inspiration and energy being in short supply, I’m posting some photos instead: a collection of bronze and stone people.
Wordless Wednesday
Posted in architecture, Cyprus, England, history, Italy, Syria, Uncategorized on July 21, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Reasons to Love Berlin #1: Bohemia
Posted in architecture, Berlin, Germany, history, Sunday, travel on June 4, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Berlin is oozing with creativity. Not just in an high-art, gallery-and-music-and-theatre type way: although it’s richly endowed with stupendous art, music and theatre, Berlin is also a fertile ground for whimsical ventures on a shoestring budget that pop up like mushrooms. Abandoned buildings get turned into galleries and cinemas; fly-by-night clubs appear and disappear; disused [...]
A Knightley Haunt
Posted in day trips, England, history, manor houses on September 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Blessed with a temporarily sunny day and encumbered with a desire to get out of the house, yesterday I ventured out on a jaunt into Derbyshire, this time to visit Kedleston Hall. The place is gorgeous. It has a spectacular art collection, an awe-inspiring domed entrance hall and a suite of rooms entirely covered in [...]
Curlew Wharf and Close Quarters
Posted in Australia, England, history on September 11, 2009 | 3 Comments »
We recently engaged in a spot of house-hunting, which some people love. A friend, upon hearing that we were looking, asked excitedly if she could hunt for properties for us, because of her immense enjoyment of said task. I would take pleasure in it too, if it were for someone else. When it’s on your [...]
Eternal Love
Posted in churches, day trips, England, history, manor houses, tombs on September 7, 2009 | 4 Comments »
One of the things that I love doing when visiting anywhere in England is looking at the graves and tombs in and around old churches. Call me morbid, but I love the old headstones, some with inscriptions so worn they’re indecipherable. It makes me think about what we leave behind, and what the world will [...]
Strolling in the Souq
Posted in Aleppo, food, history, Syria on August 21, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Syria is largely unwesternised; it is the unadulturated Middle East, fresh, raw and pungent. Where Lebanon has cosmopolitan Beirut and other Arab states have big glitzy cities, Syria went into a period of economic decline in the 19thC and missed the rampant development that blighted many European cities, who bulldozed their heritage and created modern [...]
Spires and Minarets
Posted in architecture, cathedrals, Cyprus, history, mosques, Ottomans, The Cyprus Question, Turkey, Venetians on August 7, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Cyprus seems to have been invaded by everyone from the Turks to the armies of Mordor. There were Crusaders of various stripes, different species of French nobles and at least two types of Italians (Genoese and Venetians), let alone the various incursions of the last five hundred years. Each has left their mark on the [...]
Unearthing People
Posted in archaeology, Cyprus, history on July 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday I had a mind-blowing run-in with Cyprus’s history. We went for a stroll at dusk around a medieval church that is surrounded by parts of walls, ruins and foundations of former buildings. They had been digging a hole beside the church to bury a pipe and there were also mounds of dirt suggesting other [...]
