Author: Abellio

I like writing, but I’ve spent most of my life writing about things that don’t particularly interest me. Finally, as I neared the age of 60, I decided to change that. I wanted to write about things that interested me. What really interests me is beauty. So I’ve focused this blog on beautiful things. I could be writing about a formally beautiful object in a museum. But it could also be something sitting quietly on a shelf. Or it could be just a fleeting view that's caught my eye, or a momentary splash of colour-on-colour at the turn of the road. Or it could be a piece of music I've just heard. Or a piece of poetry. Or food. And I’m sure I’ve missed things. But I’ll also write about interesting things that I hear or read about. Isn't there a beauty about things pleasing to the mind? I started just writing, but my wife quickly persuaded me to include photos. I tried it and I liked it. So my posts are now a mix of words and pictures, most of which I find on the internet. What else about me? When I first started this blog, my wife and I lived in Beijing where I was head of the regional office of the UN Agency I worked for. So at the beginning I wrote a lot about things Chinese. Then we moved to Bangkok, where again I headed up my Agency's regional office. So for a period I wrote about Thailand and South-East Asia more generally. But we had lived in Austria for many years before moving to China, and anyway we both come from Europe my wife is Italian while I'm half English, half French - so I often write about things European. Now I'm retired and we've moved back to Europe, so I suppose I will be writing a lot more about the Old Continent, interspersed with posts we have gone to visit. What else? We have two grown children, who had already left the nest when we moved to China, but they still figure from time to time in my posts. I’ll let my readers figure out more about me from reading what I've written. As these readers will discover, I really like trees. So I chose a tree - an apple tree, painted by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt - as my gravatar. And I chose Abellio as my name because he is the Celtic God of the apple tree. I hope you enjoy my posts. http://ipaintingsforsale.com/UploadPic/Gustav Klimt/big/Apple Tree I.jpg

THE GROUP OF SEVEN

Milan, 13 January 2025

My wife and I were recently listening to an article from the New York Times about an Egyptian immigrant to New York, by the name of Armia Khalil. Mr. Khalil had been an artist in Egypt. He liked to create pieces that echoed the country’s ancient artefacts. He did so using tools he had created that were similar to those used by the Ancient Egyptians themselves. Of course, when Mr. Khalil arrived in New York, with a suitcase crammed with his tools but with hardly two nickels to rub together, he didn’t have the luxury to use them; he needed a job. But he didn’t want any old job. He wanted a job that brought him close to art. So he applied over and over again for jobs as a museum guard to the city’s many museums; he reasoned that at least this would allow him rub shoulders with art all day. Finally, after six years of trying, he managed to unhook a museum guard job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Readers can read (or hear) the rest of his delightfully heart-warming story in the original New York Times article, if they can get around the paper’s firewall. If not, they can visit his WordPress blog – it gives me great pleasure to advertise a fellow WordPress blogger.

Mr. Khalil’s repeated attempts to be hired as a museum guard to get close to art brought back fond memories for me. Because I had tried to do the same many, many years ago. It was January, I was 18, I was staying with my parents in Ottawa for five months until the beginning of June, I needed to find something to do. Whenever I had spent the holidays with my parents, I had always found the time to visit Canada’s National Gallery. This is the building I used to visit, back in the early 1970s, although I see it has now moved into a sparkling new building somewhere else in Ottawa.

I found the time I spent there most soothing. I thought, why not spend my five months in Ottawa, sitting on a chair in the Gallery’s exhibition rooms and admiring the art around me? So I got myself an appointment with the head of the guards and arrived promptly for the interview. It was in a dreary, windowless office somewhere in the basement of the building. He was sitting at his desk, flanked by one of his guards. He invited me to sit down. He looked me over. Then, with great frankness, he told me why he doubted that I was right for the job. He pointed out that I was much more educated than the other guards, so had I thought about what my social interactions with them would be like? (the implication being, no doubt, that I would be awfully lonely during the working day, with no colleagues to really speak to). Did I not think, he continued, that I was far too young to get stuck in what was, at the end of the day, a pretty boring job? His basic message, I felt, was that it was best to be ignorant, probably stupid, and old before accepting a dead-end job as a museum guard. His side-kick nodded throughout this analysis, which was sad because at the end of the day his chief was talking about him. Thinking about it now, he could have been describing Mr. Bean working at the Royal National Gallery in London, in the film Bean.

My interview was terminated with a final parting shot. The chief pointed to my fashionably long hair and regretfully informed me I would have to cut it, to conform to the short-back-and-sides style sported by the (male) guards. Crestfallen, I left without a job. Unlike Mr. Khalil, I did not try other museums or art galleries in Ottawa.

It was actually just a couple of rooms in the National Gallery that I would particularly have wanted to sit in as a guard, using my time to admire the paintings. They were dedicated to the Group of Seven, a coalition of Canadian painters who came together from shortly after World War I to the early 1930s. They were looking for a style of landscape painting that was distinctly Canadian and modern. To my mind, they succeeded brilliantly, with Lawren Harris being the jewel in the crown. His iconic painting, North Shore, Lake Superior, painted in 1926, is in the National Gallery.

But he painted many other wonderful paintings. Here is a selection. This first painting, Northern Lake, is from around 1923, early on in the Group of Seven’s life.

This painting, from around 1924, is another whose subject is Lake Superior: Pic Island.

At some point in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Harris went to Canada’s far north and even to Greenland. The results of these expeditions were a long series of almost abstract paintings of great beauty. I show only three here. The first two hang on our walls in Vienna in the form of prints (I am not, alas, rich enough to be able to afford an original Lawren Harris).

This one is titled Lake and Mountains, from 1928.

And this one is Mt Lefroy from 1930.

The final painting I show from Lawren Harris is Icebergs, Davis Strait, also from 1930.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in later decades Harris veered off into abstraction. I haven’t followed him there; abstract art is not really my thing.

While I particularly admire Harris, the paintings of the other members of the Group of Seven are not be sniffed at. I give one example for each of them.

Franklin Carmichael, Wabajisik Drowned Lake, from 1929.

A.Y. Jackson, Barns, from 1926.

Frank Johnston, The Fire Ranger, from 1921.

Arthur Lismer, Pine Wrack, from 1933.

J.E.H. MacDonald, Algoma Waterfall, 1920

Frederick Varley, Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay, from 1921.

After all these years, I still don’t know if I would have enjoyed spending five months next to the paintings of this group of artists, or if I would have been bored to tears by the company of my fellow guards, or both. For any readers who might be asking themselves what I did end up doing those five months, I can reveal that I went to work for the YM/YWCA. I replaced a guy who had to go on a long sick leave, so it was a perfect fit. My job was to hand out stationary to the staff and to print the various flyers which they produced. I became a dab hand at offset printing, even if I say so myself – a skill, alas, I was never able to put to good use again.

THREE WISE MEN

Milan, 6 January 2025

Today is 6 January, the day of the Epiphany! The day when the Three Wise Men arrive in Bethlehem to find the Child Jesus. Momentous event! In the words of St. Matthew’s Gospel (I cite the King James version)

And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

Or, as the Christmas carol puts it

Three Wise Men
We Three Kings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts we traverse afar,
Field and fountain,
Moor and mountain,
Following yonder Star.
Refrain
O Star of Wonder, Star of Night,
Star with Royal Beauty bright,
Westward leading,
Still proceeding,
Guide us to Thy perfect Light.

Gaspard
Born a King on Bethlehem plain,
Gold I bring to crown Him again,
King for ever,
Ceasing never
Over us all to reign.
Refrain

Melchior
Frankincense to offer have I,
Incense owns a Deity nigh:
Prayer and praising
All men raising,
Worship Him God on High.
Refrain

Balthazar
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;—
Sorrowing, sighing,
Bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.
Refrain

Three Wise Men
Glorious now behold Him arise,
King, and God, and Sacrifice;
Heav’n sings Hallelujah:
Hallelujah the earth replies.
Refrain

The Three Wise Men are, of course, important characters in our annual crèche. Ever since Christmas Day, they have been travelling across the furniture of our living room, on their way to Bethlehem. This year, I have had them accompanied by a retinue worthy of their rank.

I found the figurines of the retinue in a box where they had been carefully stored away by my mother-in-law many years ago. It seemed a pity not to bring them out into the light of day. I think it all looks pretty impressive! (But we have to do something about the camels; I’ve been telling my wife for years that we need to find some more camels, one camel simply isn’t enough. And we have to get a statue to replace the kneeling Wise Man; kneeling before the Baby Jesus is OK, but he can’t be on his knees the whole trip to Bethlehem …).

Here, we can see the tail-end of the cortege.

I added the birds because they were also in the box. A bit odd, but why not? Maybe the Wise Men were like St. Francis, they were listened to by the birds (boy, are we going to have fun when we set up the crèche with our grandson, possibly grandchildren, in a few years’ time! Who knows what interesting additions we could come up with!).

And now the Three Wise Men have arrived at the manger and are adoring the Baby Jesus!

This scene of the Adoration of the Magi has been painted over and over again by European artists. I pick here just one of the many offerings. It is by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, who painted it in about 1470.

In truth, though, I prefer the rendering of the Three Wise Men in the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna.

Dressed as they are as Persians, wearing the Phrygian cap which Romans seemed to think all Persians wore, they fit better with what the Gospel of St. Matthew had to say: “behold, there came wise men from the east”. Now Matthew didn’t actually say how many Wise Men there were, but pretty quickly most Christian sects settled for three, one for each gift. Matthew also didn’t say how old they were, but clearly by the time these mosaics were laid down it was generally agreed that they represented the three ages of Man, so we have one old one, one middle-aged one, and one young one. It was only later that it was decided that they also represented the three races known to Europeans: the Europeans themselves, the peoples of the Middle-East, and the peoples of Africa. Paintings of the Magi are some of the earliest representations of Black people in European art. Here is a lovely example from an Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch.

Painters don’t seem to have been much interested in what was happening to the Three Wise Men on their way to Bethlehem. But T.S. Eliot, in his poem Journey of the Magi, did try to imagine what the trip was like. I cite here the first twenty lines of the poem.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Compared to this description, our Three Wise Men have had it pretty easy: nice, warm living room, easy travel across the furniture, respectful entourage …

As told in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the arrival of the Three Wise Men was like a poke in a hornet’s nest. In Jerusalem, they asked, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” Matthew goes on, “When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And … he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, In Bethlehem … Then Herod … said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.” But, Matthew tells us, after giving Jesus his gifts, “being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.” He goes on, “behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.” The Flight to Egypt was also a popular theme for European painters. I show one example, by my favourite painter, Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, where one of the painter’s luminous angels is playing music on a viol to soothe Mary and Jesus in their slumber (the music held by Joseph is readable; it is a motet by the Flemish composer Noel Bauldeweyn dedicated to the Madonna, with a text from the Song of Songs, Quam pulchra es, “How beautiful you are”; nice touch).

Alas, Herod was not a man to be crossed. Matthew tells us, “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.” This Massacre of the Innocents was, too, a popular theme for European artists. I show here an example of the genre by Peter Breughel the Elder.

I’m actually being a little economical with the truth. This is really a copy of Breughel’s painting, by his son Peter Breughel the Younger. The original was once owned by the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. For some reason – queasiness? – he had the dead children painted over. This copy retains the dead children.

Quite by chance, just before Christmas, we stumbled across a very sophisticated crèche, in a place called Baggio, which once was a village but then got swallowed up by Milan some 150 years ago. There, in the crypt of a church, over the last forty years or so, dedicated local volunteers have created 58 scenes from the Bible, with the Nativity being the central scene. Some of the scenes have running water, others have moving figurines, … it’s very impressive. Here is a shot of the first scene, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (with a delightfully slithery snake in the tree).

Here is one of Moses and the parting of the waters of the Red Sea.

And here is a shot of the central scene of the Nativity.

As I say, very impressive … although I will admit to having been just a teeny-weeny bit jealous. We’ll soon be packing away the crèche and its figurines for another year, but I’m already thinking how we could expand the offerings next year. Running water and moving figurines is a bit beyond me. But maybe Herod in a palace in Jerusalem? The Massacre of the Innocents? Some “snow” for the Wise Men to trudge wearily through? At least let’s fix the camel problem!

A LOMBARD CHRISTMAS DINNER

Milan 31 December, 2024

It is a sad fact of life that most of the time we fail to follow through on our New Year’s resolutions. I am no different. In fact, I have such a dismal track record on this topic that I stopped many years ago making these resolutions – I did not want to add so many paving stones to my private road to Hell.

But there is one end-of-year resolution on which my wife and I seem to be holding the course, one I explained in my first post of this year. Summarizing quickly, the two of us decided that we – and any children or grandchildren who may be visiting – would, for a period of eight years, use the traditional Christmas lunch or dinner to honour our mixed genetic pool: Puglia and Lombardy: the heritage of my wife; Burgundy, England, Scotland and Norway: my heritage; – and, if we are still around, Ireland and the old Pale of Settlement: the heritage of our son-in-law. Specifically, for each of those eight years, we would cook a typical Christmas lunch or dinner from each of these regions. I decided to start at the southern end of the genetic pool and move north, so last year we cooked ourselves a Christmas lunch from Puglia, which we shared with our son.

Contrary to previous attempts, we did not forget this resolution, and so this year now found us cooking a typical Christmas dinner from Lombardy, which we shared again with our son as well as with his girlfriend. I’m so proud that we managed – at least this year – to keep to the resolution, that I’ve decided to share this year’s menu with my readers.

We started with ravioli in brodo. As far as I can make out, each province in Lombardy has its special type of raviolo, but we didn’t get that subtle. We just took a packet of ravioli stuffed with braised meat which was being sold in our local supermarket, and we cooked them in a chicken broth made with cubes. Since we are most definitely not part of the Instagram generation, we have never got into the habit of taking photos of the food we eat. We just wolf it down and then say “damn, we should have taken a photo”. So I throw in a photo I found on the internet to give readers an idea of what we were eating.

Next, as the main dish we had cotechino with lentils and mashed potatoes. I throw in another photo of this dish from the internet.

I refer any of my readers who wish to know more about this typical Lombard dish to a post I wrote several years ago, where I go into probably too much detail about it; I have no desire to repeat myself here.

For dessert, we had that great, that splendid, Lombard delicacy, the panettone. I’ve also covered this miracle of Lombard cuisine in an earlier post, so I won’t go into further details here. I just refer my readers to that post and throw in a photo of a slice of panettone. I deliberately chose a photo which shows a large dollop of mascarpone, because for the first time ever, we had our panettone with mascarpone.

We decided to add mascarpone because we read that the Lombards are known to slather this extra bit of yumminess onto their panettone during the Christmas season.

Since I’ve never mentioned mascarpone in any of my previous posts – for the simple reason that we hardly ever eat it – let me use this occasion to say a few words about it. It’s a Lombard cheese, originally from the area around Lodi to the south of Milan. Like cotechino, it used to be made with the left-overs from the production of more remunerative dairy foodstuffs, in this case cheeses. It is a smooth, spreadable cheese, with a an ever so slight sweet taste to it and a hint of the aroma of cream.

Mascarpone is now well-known worldwide because it is one of the main ingredients in the famous tiramisù – which, I was surprised to learn, is a very recent creation, from the 1960s, with its place of birth being somewhere in the Veneto or Friuli-Venezia-Giulia regions of Italy.

Mascarpone is actually used in tiramisù in the form of crema al mascarpone, which is a mix of a syrup of sugar, egg yolk, and mascarpone. This is but one variant of sweetened mascarpone which Italians have been eating since at least the 1400s and possibly earlier.

If I am dwelling a little on crema al mascarpone it’s because I have a horrible doubt: should we have eaten our panettone with crema al mascarpone rather than just with mascarpone? Both ways are promoted by different sites on the internet. I have to say, my wife and I found that mascarpone alone combined well with panettone. But might crema al mascarpone have combined better? There’s only really one way to find out – make (or buy) crema al mascarpone and slather it on a couple of slices of panettone. Something to work on next year.

Of course, there wasn’t just food. There were wines, too! Staying in theme, we chose two Lombard wines, a red and a white. The red was a Bonarda, one of the sparkling red wines that are common in the north and centre of Italy. This is a topic I’ve covered in an earlier post, so any readers interested to find out more about this intriguing family of sparkling reds can go there. Here, I’ll just insert a photo of some of the vineyards where Bonarda’s grapes are grown.

As for the white wine, we chose a Lugana, whose grapes are grown on the far eastern edges of Lombardy, looking over the southern shores of Lake Garda.

I suppose we could have finished with some digestivi or some grappa made in Lombardy, but we left it at that. Sometimes, especially at our age, one can have too much of a good thing and spend the night regretting it.

So that’s Lombard Christmas dinner done! Next year, we venture into a Burgundian Christmas lunch – or maybe a Beaujolais Christmas lunch, if there is a difference; my mother was specifically from Beaujolais. We shall see, a happy year of research awaits me.

Happy New Year to all my readers! May 2025 bring you and your families peace and happiness.

MOSS

Milan, 16 December 2024

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but I could never figure out what my angle should be. The thing is, I want to write about mosses, but once you’ve said that mosses can be really beautiful, there’s nothing much more to say about them. I could blather on about their biology and ecology, but only muscophiles would find that interesting. Looking at them from a historical point of view doesn’t help much, either: as far as I can tell, they haven’t played a significant role in anyone’s history. They do have some practical uses, like bedding and wound dressings, but nothing that really stands out. And forget the dietary angle: no-one eats moss unless they are starving, so there are no interesting dishes to report on. So the post has remained unwritten.

But now, finally, I’ve decided. Since there’s not much to write about on mosses, I’ll focus on photos instead. This post will be a photo essay celebrating their beauty! (That being said, I’ll still write some stuff – I can’t stop myself – but it will be more like extended titles to the photos).

I have to start in Japan, because it is moss country par excellence: something like 1,800 species of moss, or around 15% of the world’s total, grow on its islands. It was there, back in 1985 when my wife and I toured the country for a month, that we first appreciated the beauty of mosses. Our first experience was on the island of Hokkaido, where we were taken to visit the Moss Canyon in Shikotsu-Tōya National Park. It’s more of a gorge, really, about 200 metres long with walls some 5 metres high. These walls are covered in velvety green moss.

Later, when we went to Kyoto, one of the temples we visited was Saihōji, whose entire garden is cloaked in moss.

Other temples we have visited in Kyoto over the years have integrated moss into the overall design of their gardens. This example, from Tofukuji temple, is one of the more intriguing.

Many have even integrated moss into what you might think of as a most unmossy place, their dry rock gardens, where moss is often used to create islands in the sea of pebbles, like this example, also from Tofukuji temple.

Here are the islands up close.

Here is another example, from Ryoanji temple.

But moss found out in Japan’s nature can be just as beautiful. Here are various photos I’ve taken over the last few years during our annual stay in Japan.

A moss-covered log on the flanks of mount Kurama, north of Kyoto.

Fallen Japanese maple leaves smothering a field of moss, out in Ararshiyama in the north-west of Kyoto.

A tree stump crowned with moss, on the Kumano kodo trail.

A stone basin with a moss-covered rim, seen on the same trail.

A stone lantern, being slowly colonized by moss.

An abandoned motorbike, also being slowly colonized by moss.

Japan is the land of moss, but it is also the land of fire, as we saw up close on that visit to Hokkaido’s Shikotsu-Tōya National Park

Iceland, too, is a land of fire, as we have recently been reminded.

But, as my wife and I discovered when we hiked the Laugavegur trail a few years ago, Iceland is also a land of moss.

The contrast could not be starker. One island country has lush vegetation of which moss is but a part. The other has little vegetation, its climate being too harsh. And yet mosses manage to thrive. Which was just as well for us because wherever there was water they covered with ethereal green the otherwise denuded landscape which we hiked past.

Well, that’s our photo album with mosses. If we ever come across beautiful mosses elsewhere, I will add photos to the album.

SAINT TECLA

Milan, 18 November 2024

Ever since 2016, when I wrote a post about Saint Radegund I’ve been meaning on and off – more off than on, I should say – to write a post about Saint Tecla, as part of my sub-category of posts on obscure saints whose names still dot the European landscape; in this particular case, a small road behind Milan’s Duomo is called after her. The last post in the series, from this summer, was about Sankt Ilgen. Two days ago, at the end of a hike which my wife and I did on Lake Como, I came across a church dedicated to Saint Tecla, in the village of Torno. It’s not a particularly interesting church. This is what the exterior looks like.

And this is a view of its interior.

Quite honestly, the view from the church’s door across Lake Como is more interesting.

Nevertheless, I took my bumping into this church as A Sign that I should finally get my finger out and write this post.

So who was this Saint Tecla? (and by the way, I prefer to use the Italian – and Spanish and Portuguese – spelling of her name rather than the English Thecla) Let me start by inserting a photo of a 6th Century mosaic portrait of her which graces the Basilica Eufrasiana in the town of Poreč in Istria, in Croatia.

For any of my readers who are interested in early Christian mosaics and have never visited the Basilica Eufrasiana, I suggest that you do so. I throw in a couple of photos of the mosaics there to whet their appetite.

Readers with good eyesight will see that the portrait of Saint Tecla is one of the portraits on the inside of the arch, to the right.

Given her great popularity in Christian Orthodox religions (probably much greater now than it is in Western Christian religions), I also throw in a photo of a depiction of her in a manuscript produced for the Eastern Roman Emperor Basil II in the 11th Century.

Of course, neither of these portraits is from life. And in fact, there is a good chance that Tecla never had a life – the Roman Catholic church quietly dropped her from its official Martyrology back in 1969, which normally occurred because there was a lack of historical evidence that the saint or martyr in question ever existed. But let us put this cavil aside, and see what her various hagiographers had to say about her.

Tecla was believed to have come from Iconium in the Roman province of Galatia (now Konya in the modern country of Türkiye). The story goes that when St. Paul passed through Iconium on his second missionary journey, Tecla was transfixed by his sermons. Here is the scene depicted in an altar carved in the 15th Century for a chapel in the cathedral of Saragossa in Spain, but which now resides in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters. That’s Saint Tecla at the the window of her house. Note the man (I think) stroking his chin pensively down at the right; a nice touch.

Unfortunately, Saint Paul seems to have lost his head. No worries, let me throw in a photo here of a fresco of St. Paul’s head, recently uncovered through the clever use of a laser-based technology, in a 4th Century catacomb named after St. Tecla, in Rome. This, I read, is the oldest extant solo portrait of the Apostle. I’m intrigued by the very pointy beard; I have never imagined Paul with that kind of beard.

Continuing on with Tecla’s story, she declared to her mother Theocleia and her fiancé Thamyris that she was abandoning her marriage plans and would join Paul. Both Theocleia and Thamyris were alarmed at this attempt at independence and decided to drag both Paul and Tecla before the city governor. Paul was merely sentenced to scourging and expulsion, but Tecla was to be burned at the stake. Turning again to that altar which once resided in Saragossa’s cathedral, we have the scene sculpted in alabaster. The sources say she was stripped naked, but that clearly didn’t play well with the sculptor and/or the donor.

Miraculously, a storm blew up, which doused the pyre. Personally, I would have put her back in gaol, built another pyre, and had a second go. But no, she was freed, whereupon she joined Paul, cut off her hair (I always find it interesting that hair is considered – by male authors? – such a sign of femininity, the cutting of which signifies renunciation of physical attraction), and followed him. And off they went to Antioch in Pisidia (nowadays called Yalvaç). There – even without her hair – she drew the lascivious attention of one Alexander, a nobleman of the city. He attempted to take her by force, but she fought him off, tearing off his cloak and knocking the coronet off his head in the process, much to the amusement of the townspeople. Seemingly, then, Alexander attempted this rape of Tecla, for that is what it seems to have been, in public, which is a little odd. Or maybe the writer of the story wanted to show the arrogance of power.

In any event, Alexander felt greatly injured in his aristocratic pride and had her dragged – yet again – in front of the city’s governor for assaulting a nobleman. This time, the governor condemned her to be thrown to the wild beasts (as an aside, I have to say that hagiographers of the early Christian martyrs all seem to have been working off the same playbook; martyrs were either burned at the stake, tortured in hideous ways, thrown into rivers with heavy weights around them, or thrown to wild beasts, or some combination of these). Interestingly, the women of Antioch rose up as one against the sentence, although it changed nothing (I think the hagiographers’ intention was to intimate that Tecla was a natural leader of women).

And so she was paraded through the streets of Antioch, stripped of her clothes (again), and thrust into the arena. The men in the crowds were baying for blood, the women were weeping for poor Tecla (taken by the spirit of the story, I have added this bit; as far as I know, none of the hagiographers said it, although they do make clear that the women in the crowd were rooting for Tecla). Miracle! Some of the wild animals (female) protected her from other (male) animals. A lioness was especially active in defending Tecla. We see the scene here in a 15th Century altar from the chapel of the Cathedral of Tarragona in Spain (in passing, I should note that Saint Tecla is the patron saint of Tarragona). In this case, the sculptor had no problems making Tecla at least half naked. Note all the animals lying meekly at her feet. I like, too, the crowd pressing in to see what’s happening.

At this point, the story gets somewhat muddled for me. Reading between the lines, and giving my fervid imagination free rein, I’m guessing that the organizers of this spectacle had thought up the idea of having a large vat in the arena full of ravenous seals. They must have thought they could throw the remains of Tecla, once she had been ripped to pieces by the wild beasts, into the vat (although I wonder if seals would eat human remains; but hey, what do I know?). But Tecla had other ideas. She had asked Paul to baptize her, although for some reason he had temporized. Standing in that arena, surrounded by wild – but currently meek – animals, she decided that before she died in that arena, she would baptize herself. Note once again her streak of independence: baptizing yourself?! impossible; only men can baptize people! Nevertheless, she threw herself into the vat. The altar in Tarragona’s cathedral gives us once again a vision of this scene.

I’m not sure what has happened to the arena and its crowds, we seem to have a more sylvan scene. I also get the impression that the sculptor had no idea what seals looked like, he seems to have come up with a bunch of eels. But le’s not niggle, because another miracle occurred! The vat was struck by lightning, which killed all the seals – but of course not Tecla.

All these miracles were too much for the governor. He ordered her clothed and released her to the rejoicing women of the city. She returned to Paul, “wearing a mantle that she had altered so as to make a man’s cloak” (an important phrase for future generations of some women, who looked to Tecla as an example of breaking the eternal glass ceiling for women). She went on to convert many people, including her mother, to Christianity, and then retired to a cave near Seleucia (today’s Silifke) where she lived for many decades. This is the exterior of the cave.

And this is a shot of its interior, which has been turned into a church.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there is a rival story that Tecla did indeed spend her last years in a cave, but in the small town of Maaloula in what was then the kingdom of the Nabateans, close allies of the Romans, and in what is now Syria. It seems a far more dramatic site, and has a Christian Orthodox church and nunnery built next to it.

The site, alas, has fallen prey to modern religious wars. ISIS fighters invaded Maaloula in 2013, going on a rampage against Christian people and buildings, destroying all religious sites in the town. 3,000 fled the city, leaving only Muslims and the nunnery’s forty nuns. Twelve of them were kidnapped, and after negotiations were release in 2014. The nuns were dispersed and were only able to come back to the town in 2018. Horrors continue to be committed in the name of religion …

There’s further bits and pieces to Tecla’s hagiography, but I’ll skip them. Given the story, it’s a bit of a mystery why Tecla was such a popular saint. As far as I can make out, her popularity rested on the fact that she offered early Christian women a strong example, equal to, not subordinate to, men. She offered a female equivalent to the – male – Apostles; she went around converting people just as much as Paul did. She threw off the bonds of what was a strongly patriarchal society – she broke off an engagement arranged by her family, in fact she turned her back altogether on marriage; she didn’t wait to be baptized by a man but just did it herself; she took to the road without a protecting male presence (although she seems to have had to pretend she was a man in order to do this). The Church Fathers, notably Ambrose of Milan, lauded her for her virginity – but I always suspect this approval of virginity by the Church, since it always seems to be tied to retiring from the world into a nunnery and being Wedded to Christ; the idea of being in this world on equal terms with men was anathema to the Church (and to society more generally). I suspect she could easily be the patron saint of this new B4 Movement coming out of South Korea.

Well, I’ll leave readers with a somewhat more modern take on Saint Tecla by El Greco, in his late 16th Century painting “The Virgin and Child with St. Martina and St. Tecla”. It was painted for the Oratory of St. Joseph in the city of Toledo, but is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

We will, of course, immediately recognize Tecla because of the lioness which is protecting her. She also, rather oddly, is holding a martyr’s palm – oddly, because she actually was never martyred. One of the many strange things about Tecla.

LENTILS FOR MY FERRITIN LEVELS

Milan, 4 November 2024

It is a sad fact of life that as one gets older, the machine that is our body begins to falter. Machine parts begin to show signs of wear and tear, leading to unfavourable results in blood, urine or other samples of our vital fluids. One such unfavourable result which has been dogging me for a number of years is the levels of ferritin in my blood. My old doctor had been monitoring it, and shortly before he retired he decided that the time had probably come for me to do some regular blood-letting to bring the ferritin levels down. Luckily, the liver specialist which he sent me to – high ferritin levels being normally due to some malfunction in the liver – didn’t agree, recommending continuing monitoring. At which point, I decided to see what I could do to bring down my ferritin levels naturally, through my diet. I had already pretty much completely eliminated red meat, which is high in heme iron. That was pretty sad, but I comforted myself with the thought that it was good for the planet. My daughter found a scientific article online, which recommended a diet high on berries, especially blueberries, and the liberal use of cocoa powder – it seems that the polyphenols which these contain can help bring ferritin levels down. I did that for several months and then did the blood tests again. There was a modest decrease in my ferritin levels. I asked my new doctor what else I could do. She suggested imbibing lots of tea and eating lots of pulses – they, too, contain high levels of polyphenols. Well, my wife and I are already regular tea-drinkers, carrying on a fine British tradition.

So I didn’t see much scope for improvement there. Pulses were a different story. Quite frankly, we don’t eat many of those; we’re not terribly, terribly fond of them. We’ll eat pasta e fagioli once or twice a year, normally when winter sets in; this particular version has used penne rigate and cannellini beans.

And come Christmas time, we’ll often have ourselves a popular Christmas dish in northern Italy, cotechino e lenticchie, a type of sausage with lentils. I’ve already covered this dish exhaustively in a previous post, so I won’t say any more here. I just invite readers to drool over this photo.

That is pretty much the sum total of our annual pulse intake. After some discussion, my wife and I agreed that I could go with lentils. I quite like lentils in salad, so I’ve been regularly eating a lentil salad for lunch and dinner. But I fear I’ll get rather bored with having this all the time, and might need to branch out. What other lentil dishes could I try?

Well, for starters, I could eat nice mixed salads like this one, of fennels and lentils.

But that is really just a modest change to the original dish. What else?

Well, given that the original wild lentil plant comes from the Middle East and was domesticated there (like so many of our foodstuffs), I’m thinking I should start by looking there for a lentil dish I could try. And in fact, it so happens that there is a very popular lentil dish in the Middle East which goes by the name of mujaddara. It’s a very simple dish: it’s a mix of lentils and rice, with a topping of caramelised onions. You can season it with cumin, mint, or coriander (although I would skip the coriander, which I don’t like).

It’s considered a poor person’s dish, but if you’ve got money to burn you can add meat to the mix. The dish is generally served with a side of yoghurt or a salad.

Going off on a tangent, I’m blown away by the etymology of the dish’s name. Mujaddara means “pockmarked”, a reference to the look of the dish, brown lentils pockmarking the white rice. It would be nice to think that whoever came up with this name was thinking of a face pockmarked by bad acne, but I rather fear that they were referring instead to pockmarks caused by the dreaded smallpox, like in this recreation from earlier centuries.

But back to mujaddara. I have to say, I’m intrigued by the Egyptian variant, koshari. To the rice, lentils and caramelised onions, the Egyptians add pasta (macaroni or vermicelli), and tomato sauce. You can make it even more complicated, by adding other odds and ends as this photo shows.

In all of this, it’s the tomato sauce that attracts me, I’m a great fan of the tomato in all its forms. But this is not the type of tomato sauce I’m used to. To the basic sauce base is added garlic vinegar or even a lemon sauce. Garlic vinegar I will forget, but the addition of a lemon sauce … that’s worth considering.

Hang on, though. I think I’m getting rather far away from the lentils, which is the whole point here but which seems to be getting drowned out by all the other stuff that’s being added in. In Obelix’s day, it did indeed seem much simpler in Egypt; it was just lentils – although Obelix is finding that a tough diet to keep to.

In any event, I need to keep my eye fixed on the simpler mujaddara.

Talking of which, it seems that the simple, no-frills mujaddara has a long, long history. It looks like the Palestinian version of mujaddara is closer to the original version of this dish. Instead of the rice, they use bulgur, which is parboiled and cut durum wheat – rice probably wasn’t in common use in the Middle East until Roman times. It would seem, then, that mujaddara is a member of the broad family of pottages, where various grains are boiled up together to form a sort of porridge (various vegetables can be added, too). So it must be a descendant of the “mess of pottage” for which Esau gave away his birthright to his twin brother Jacob. Here is how the story is recounted in the King James version of the Old Testament (I always find the KJV text so much more satisfying to read; it’s rather like Shakespeare):

And Jacob sod [prepared] pottage. And Esau came from the field, and he was faint. And Esau said to Jacob, “Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint” … And Jacob said, “Sell me this day thy birthright”. And Esau said, “Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?” And Jacob said, “Swear to me this day”; and he sware unto him. And he sold his birthright unto Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

Just for the hell of it, I throw in a painting by the Dutch painter Jan Victors that depicts this scene; Jacob is to the right, Esau to the left.

As much as domesticated rice travelled westward from India to the Middle East (and beyond), so the domesticated lentil travelled eastward from the Middle East to India. The peoples along the way continued mixing lentils with rice, with some changes to the basic recipe. Which means that there are possible mujaddara variants for me to try. For instance, Iranians have a dish they call adas polo, where dates, raisins, cinnamon and saffron are added to the basic lentil-rice mix.

The sites I’ve read up on adas polo say that it has a very different flavour profile from mujaddara, which, looking at the ingredients, I can well believe. Adas polo certainly looks enticing, but I feel that, like koshari, it’s too complicated. Maybe I’ll just leave it to the next time I go to a Persian restaurant (there are some really good Persian restaurants in Vienna).

Going further east, the Indians also have their lentil-rice dish, khichdi. I mentioned khichdi in a post I wrote a number of years ago about a pale British imitation of this dish, kedgeree. Basically, you bring together rice, lentils in the form of a dal, some vegetables like cauliflower or peas or potato, and spices.

Bringing in khichdi has allowed me to surreptitiously slip in that glory of Indian cuisine, dal. Quite honestly, there are probably as many variations of dal as there are Indian families. The base is always the same: lentils or other pulses like peas or beans which are cooked with turmeric until mushy. The endless variations come with the fried garnish which is added at the end of the cooking process. I throw in a photo of a moong dal, where the garnish has been made by frying asafoetida, cumin seeds, chopped green chilies, and chopped garlic in ghee.

If I go for dal, I would have to find a garnish with no – and I mean no – hot spices in it; as I’ve recalled several times in this blog, I actively dislike hot spices.

Which would also create me a problem with another dish, misir wot or kik wot, which hails from Ethiopia.

Just as domesticated lentils travelled east and west out of the Middle East, they must have travelled south, too. I suspect they got to Ethiopia via Yemen. In any event, here, too, you cook the lentils (or other pulses) with a garnish made of onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes and berbere fried in niter kibbeh (the Ethiopian equivalent to ghee). The red flag here is berbere, which is a spice mixture liberally used throughout the Ethiopian highlands and usually containing “chili peppers, coriander, garlic, ginger, Ethiopian holy basil seeds, korarima, rue, ajwain or nadhuni, nigella and fenugreek”, according to berbere‘s Wikipedia entry. I’m not sure what some of the more local spices taste like, but chili peppers … that’s bad news for me.

Stepping back here and reviewing all the alternatives I’ve mentioned makes me realise that most if not all of them are based on making a soupy or slurry-like lentil dish. Remembering the adage “East, West, Home’s best“, maybe I should just opt for a simple lentil soup like my mother used to make (she actually didn’t, but readers get the idea). The internet is stuffed with recipes for lentil soups without horrible, nasty, hot spices in them; without onions and garlic, which don’t agree with my digestive system; without a bunch of spices which, if we buy, would mean a row of bottles that would sit on our kitchen shelves for ever more. Maybe this is the way I should go when I get bored with my lentil salads. And maybe, when the world just gets too much for me, I could retreat into my infancy and eat my lentils in milk, a comfort food which my mother actually did make for me and my siblings years and years ago.

PLUMS – IT’S AUTUMN

Vienna, 23 September 2024

It’s that time of the year again. The time of plums here in Central Europe (or strictly speaking, European plums; there are so many different types of plums). On our hikes now we often see small plum trees covered in the dark purple fruit.

I can never understand if these trees have seeded wild after the passage of some plum-munching, stone-spitting person, or if they were part of now abandoned communal orchards which were once a common feature in this part of the world (the so-called Streuobstwiesen, the scattered-fruit-meadows, meadows through which villages have sprinkled plum and other fruit trees for their communal use – a nice idea, I think).

However the plum trees got there, they are welcome indeed. When we come across them, we will fill our rucksacks with a few days’ worth of dessert and walk on.

Normally, when the plums arrive the weather is turning towards Autumn here. The days are drawing in, the temperatures are beginning to bite, it’s time to wear trousers when I hike and take a sweatshirt with me in case a cold wind picks up; time, too, to carry a waterproof jacket to counter the occasional shower.

As I eat my plums, I will often feel a pang of regret that the Summer is drawing to a close. But this Summer has been ferociously hot in Central Europe. So it is with a certain sense of relief that I bite into my plums these days, even as I grieve the massive damage caused by the recent floods to man, beast, and vegetation (including plum trees, no doubt).

About a month ago, during our hikes we were coming across what looked like mirabelle plums: small, round, yellowish.

They seemed to be wild, or at least feral, being used as fencing around gardens or just mixed up with other trees and bushes on the side of the paths. There were never any plums within reach, evidence that other gatherers had hiked these paths before us. All we were left with were plums that had been knocked off by wind or the heavy rains that we have been having this summer (a result of the intense heat). Many of these little plums were damaged and, judging by the taste, not necessarily all that ripe. We picked them up anyway; it breaks our heart to see this free bounty from Nature just being trampled underfoot. Our gatherer ancestors would never have countenanced such waste.

Talking of our ancestors, it seems that we human beings have been chomping on plums and spitting out the stones for a long, long time. Archaeologists digging in Neolithic sites in Bulgaria, for instance, have found plum stones from 8,000 years ago. Some of the stones seem to belong to a wild plum called cherry plum.

They do indeed look cherry-like, small and red. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this plum tree on our hikes. But that’s not too surprising since its natural range is South-West Europe (which includes Bulgaria, of course) and West Asia. So the Neolithic farmers who were drifting into Europe from Anatolia must have been very familiar with this tree. From articles I’ve read, I sense that most cherry plums tend to be on the sour side. But I also get the sense that our ancestors, until not too, too long ago, before the massive production of sugar, preferred sourer food, or at least were more tolerant of sourer food. That sourness still resonates with the descendants of our Neolithic ancestors in Romania and Georgia. They use cherry plums in their recipes as a souring note. The Georgians, for instance, use cherry plums to make Tkemalu sauce, a sour sauce, which is then a main ingredient in kharcho soup (mmm, looks good, I wonder if there’s a Georgian restaurant here in Vienna where I could try it?).

Some other stones in those Bulgarian Neolithic sites, no doubt in the more recent archaeological layers, seem to show that domestication of the plum had begun to occur. It’s not very clear what species exactly got domesticated to give us the various types of plums we have in Europe: European plums, damsons, bullaces, egg plums, greengages, spillings, mirabelle plums, just to give the names we use in English. It could have been the cherry plum alone whose DNA was manipulated. Or it could have been that cherry plums were crossed with sloe plums.

I came across a couple of bushes of sloe plums this summer as we crossed a meadow or two – not scattered-fruit-meadows, I should add, just ordinary meadows. The bushes were on the edges of these meadows, in that indeterminate zone between meadow and woods. I looked at them, thinking “they look like miniature plums” and wondering if they were edible. I went back and forth on trying them, but in the end I felt that discretion was the better part of valour. I didn’t want to keel over in a meadow, poisoned by some unknown plant. But now that I’ve done a bit of reading on plums, next time I come across them – next year at this point, God willing – I’ll give them a little nibble. I don’t expect the experience to be all that pleasant, I have read that sloe plums are quite tart. Maybe I’ll just drink sloe gin, a gin in which sloe plums have been marinated. That sounds a much more pleasant experience.

SANKT ILGEN

Vienna, 10 September 2024

It had to happen. On our latest wandering across the Austrian landscape, this time in Styria, my wife and I came across yet another obscure saint, Saint Ilgen. This good saint had given his – or was it her? – name to a village located in the similarly named Ilgental, the valley of Ilgen, along which we were walking to get to the jump-off point for our three-day hike around the Hochshwab. I throw in a photo of the jump-off point, the Bodenbauer inn. As readers can see, it’s a popular place.

And here are a couple of photos of the mountains we climbed over.

But now, settled in the train back to Vienna, I have had the time to investigate this mysterious Saint Ilgen. My first inkling of who we might be talking about came about this morning, as we walked back through the village of Saint Ilgen. I noticed a small shrine on the side of the road that I had missed the first time we came passed through the village.

For readers whose sight, like mine, is not quite what it used to be, the writing above the statue says, in German, “Saint Aegidius pray for us”. Ah! So Ilgen was probably the same as Aegidius! A little bit of train-based internetting has confirmed this.

Aegidius was a name that rang a bell. And indeed, a little bit of e-riffling through my past posts has confirmed this. Last year, I had come across Saint Aegidius when researching another obscure saint, Saint Veit, whose name my wife and I would quite often come across on our wanderings across the Austrian landscape. Saint Aegidius, like Saint Veit, was one of the fourteen Holy Helpers who Medieval Europeans turned to, to deal with life’s many miseries. Here is a photo of those Holy Helpers from a chapel in Baden-Württemberg. Saint Aegidius is in the third row from the top, the second from the right, wearing a monk’s brown tunic but holding a bishop’s crozier. I only know this because I blew up the photo enough to be able to read the names helpfully added to the base of each statue. Readers will notice that the statue is decked out in very much the same way as the statue in the photo above. This was no doubt the standard way of depicting the saint.

I don’t know why the saint was called Aegidius, because most Medieval Europeans didn’t call him that. The British knew him as Giles, and many other Europeans knew him by variants of that name. For instance, the French knew him as Gilles – as we shall see in a minute, he was a French saint. And since our story starts in Austria, I feel I ought to mention some of the German variants: Jillies, but also Gilg or Gilgen which in some places – like that valley which my wife and I had been walking up and down – morphed into Ilg or Ilgen. So I shall drop Aegidius and continue with Giles.

Who exactly was this saint Giles? Quite honestly, I’m not sure he ever existed. But the story put out by the monastery of Saint-Gilles, which lay between Nîmes and Arles in the south of France and whose tomb the monks claimed to have in their church crypt, was that he was a hermit who in the 7th Century AD was living a saintly life in the thick forests around Nîmes. His only companion was a female deer, to whom he was very attached. One day, hunters of the local king – or maybe the king himself – were pursuing the deer, which ran to Giles for protection. Giles put himself between the hunters and the deer and got wounded in the hand by an arrow. Full of remorse for having wounded such a holy man, the king gave him land and money to build a monastery, which Giles proceeded to do. He then became its first abbot, leading the monastery until his death, carrying out miracles etc. along the way. There are other, more fanciful details in his hagiography, but I’ll leave it at that. Here, we have a painting by an unknown, possibly French, possibly Dutch, painter from about 1500 depicting our good saint.

We see him protecting the deer, with the arrow in his hand and presumably the chastened king kneeling at his feet.

Saint Giles was one of the Medieval Europe’s most popular saints. As far as I can make out, this can be traced back to the fact that the monastery of Saint-Gilles was strategically placed at the crossroads of a number of pilgrim routes. One of the branches of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, used by pilgrims from Provence and northern Italy, passed by the monastery. I throw in a map of the three main routes in France for the Camino de Santiago. The one which passed by Saint-Gilles is the bottom, maroon-coloured, one.

The same route could of course be used in the opposite direction, and indeed was so used by Spanish pilgrims going to Rome. At Saint-Gilles they could either go overland through northern Italy or they could sail to central Italy, embarking at a port located close the monastery. French pilgrims, and Northern European pilgrims more generally, on their way to Rome also often used this marine route. The same with pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, who would frequently pass through Rome first. I mention all of this because I want to use this occasion to see if I can’t persuade my wife to do some hiking in this part of the world. To whet her appetite, I insert a photo here of a pensive hiker near the Col du Mont Genèvre, which pilgrims from northern Italy would have crossed. I’m sure we could find a hiking trail which would take us down the French side maybe as far as Sisteron.

But back to Saint Giles. I don’t think I’m being too cynical if I suspect that the good monks of Saint-Gilles, watching all this pilgrim traffic going by, felt the need to more effectively tap into the riches it represented. They therefore created the backstory of Giles the saintly hermit, with the requisite tomb and relics, et voila! Pilgrims began to stop at the monastery’s church to pray and leave a few pence in the offerings box. Of course, the pilgrims also needed places to stay and eat, so a small town sprang up around the monastery to service these (and no doubt other) needs, giving the monastery another source of income via tithes, taxes, and whatnot.

Over the next few centuries, the fame of the monastery of St-Gilles grew to such a degree that it became an important pilgrimage destination in its own right, up there with with Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. It’s not surprising, then, that Giles was such a popular saint – and that so many boys came to be called after him.

Of course, with all this pilgrim traffic the monastery grew rich and powerful, and large building programmes were undertaken. But, as Giles the Hermit could have told them if he had ever really existed, all power, all riches are transitory. The fashion of pilgrimages passed and the port silted up, so the monastery’s main source of income dried up. The number of monks dropped off, so those large monastic buildings were half empty. And then vicious religious wars were fought, with Huguenot forces burning the monastery buildings to the ground. Whatever was left of them were razed during the French Revolution. Only a few mouldering remains are left.

The Abbey church, although also badly damaged a few times, has remained. Here we see the beautiful Romanesque portico.

While here we have the interior, where the gothic style has begun to intrude.

And here we have the crypt, where the Saint’s tomb – rediscovered in 1865 – is located.

Maybe I could persuade my wife to make a quick visit to the church after we’ve hiked down from the Col du Mont Genèvre …

And the name of the goodly hermit, once so popular? Well, I’m afraid it has dropped way down in the rankings. In the UK, only 8 baby boys were given the name Giles in 2023. In France, it was slightly better, with 50 little Gilles being registered. As for the German-speaking lands, Ilgen seems to be only a surname these days. Like the hermit, the name seems to have retreated far, far away from human societies.

I guess that means my wife and I will have to leave future sightings of the name to our wanderings across the face of Europe.

QUIRKY CARS

Vienna, 29 August 2024
updated Sori, 10 March 2025

My wife and I were walking along some street a few weeks ago when I spotted a gorgeous red FIAT 500 driving past. Of course, I didn’t have the gumption to take a photo, so this one which I’ve lifted from the web will have to do.

I have a doubt, though. Was it a FIAT 500, or was it a FIAT 600? I must confess to never having been able to distinguish very well between the two. So just in case, I also throw in a photo of a red 600.

Just to help readers understand why I get confused between the two, I throw in a composite photo of a FIAT 500 and FIAT 600 nose-to-nose.

I think readers will agree that they really are very similar, with the 600 being slightly longer to allow passengers to (more or less) sit comfortably in the back seat.

I’ve always had a fondness for quirky little cars. The VW Beetle comes to mind.

So does the Citroën’s Deux-Chevaux (2CV).

My childish side moves me to also include here a photo of two of the deux-chevaux’s equally quirky drivers, Dupont and Dupond from Tintin.

My excuse for doing so is that my mother had as friends two old ladies who were twins, and they would always come and visit us in a deux-chevaux. While they didn’t drive quite as badly as Dupont and Dupond, their arrival was always accompanied by a mini-drama when they were parking.

I think I can go so far as to add the Morris Mini-Minor to the list of quirky cars, although, while having a fairly high quirkiness coefficient, it is not, in my humble opinion, as quirky as the other cars I’ve mentioned.

That being said, it did have a pretty cool part to play in the original 1969 film “The Italian Job”, with Michael Caine.

In my youth, I would also see bubble cars like this one.

In my opinion, though, they’re not quirky, they’re just weird, like Trump.

I might be fond of quirky cars, but I’ve never actually owned one. The closest I’ve ever been to quirky-car ownership is through my wife, when she co-owned a white FIAT 600 with her flatmate while doing her graduate studies in Bologna. It must have been twenty-fifth hand, that car. We took it on a long road trip over a Christmas holiday to Puglia. My mother-in-law accompanied us; the saintly woman spent the whole trip wedged in the back. Being rather old, the car had a problem of leakage from the radiator. Every 100 km or so, we had to stop and top up the water. At these moments, my mother-in-law would ask out loud if we would ever make it to our destination. To capture a little of that drive to Puglia, I throw in a photo of a FIAT 600 rockin’ down the highway, as the Doobie Brothers sang way back in 1972.

That one trip is the only time I’ve ever driven one of these quirky cars. I once accompanied a University flat mate of mine on a long, long trip from London to her mother’s place in Austria (I mentioned this trip in my last post). She was driving a Dyane, not quite as quirky as the original deux-chevaux but close enough.

I didn’t drive because I didn’t have my license yet (I’m not sure she would have let me drive anyway; she was very possessive of her Dyane). Apart from the length of the trip, the only notable thing that happened is that a Frenchman wearing a beret (I kid you not) drove into my side of the Dyane about half an hour after we had left Dunkirk. Classic British-French misunderstanding. My friend thought she had priority because she was on a large main road and the bereted Frenchman was coming in from a small road on the right. He, on the other hand, was strictly applying that quirky French rule of the road “Priorité à droite”, regardless of relative road sizes.

At least my friend wasn’t driving on the left-hand side of the road … This is a cartoon from way back in 1966 by the famous British cartoonist Giles.

In contrast, a FIAT 500 (or maybe FIAT 600) was part of a scene of Italian-British cultural exchange earlier in my life. The one and only cruise I’ve ever been on (it is the subject of an an earlier post) stopped off in Brindisi on the way back to Venice. It was 1968 or ’69. A group of us youngsters on the ship went for a stroll through town. We were of course noticed by the local population, especially since one of us was a very pretty blue-eyed, blonde-haired teenager. Within minutes of us beginning our walk, this white 500 (or maybe 600) came careening around the corner on two wheels and came screeching to a halt next to us. The car’s driver and passengers all hopped out and after much hand waving and some words we managed to understand that they were inviting us to a café for a drink. Since none of us spoke Italian and none of them spoke English, the conversation was exceedingly limited. Nevertheless, a good time was had by all. Eventually, we went our separate ways, they in the 500 (or 600?), which careened away around the corner on two wheels. To celebrate this moment of entente cordiale in Italy, I throw in a photo of a bar in Brindisi from perhaps 10 years earlier, with what definitely looks like a FIAT 600 parked outside it.

These quirky cars are of course collectibles now. One fellow who I worked with – the one who once spent more time getting local salted capers than doing the work, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post – recounted to me in excruciating detail his efforts to do up an old 500 he had bought. Maybe it looked something like this when he bought it; this particular FIAT 500 has been quietly mouldering away for at least ten years now in a parking space down the road from our apartment at the seaside.

He told me that all he needed to find was the original of one small part (some sort of knob) and he was done. The car would be worth millions! (of liras) I never did find out if he managed to lay his hands on that small part …

Of course, it comes with my age to say that they don’t make things the way they used to anymore. But in the case of quirky cars, it’s really true. Modern cars are so boring, no character, just boxes on wheels. Even the modern cars whose manufacturers exploit the mythic status of the old quirky cars by giving them the same name are but pale imitations of the originals – if they look like the original at all.

The new FIAT 500 EV looks quite like the old 500, just pumped up, as if it has been attending a body-builders’ gym.

The new FIAT 600, on the other hand, bears absolutely no resemblance to the old FIAT 600.

For its part, the new Mini Cooper looks a teeny-weeny bit like the old Mini-Minor.

As for the deux-chevaux and the Volkswagen beetle, no-one has (yet) dared come out with a modern imitation of them.

The only exception I would make to my damning judgement of modern cars is the Smart Fortwo car.

Now that is a car with character! You can see in the photo one of its quirky characteristics, that it can be parked head onto the pavement.

My wife and I once stayed at a hotel which offered a free drive in a Smart. No idea why, but we said “what the hell, why not?” and we took it for a spin. A most delightful experience! If I had to own a car, which I most definitely do not, I would try to persuade my wife to buy a Smart. Actually, instead of buying why not join a car sharing scheme? Car2go offers Smarts.

What new quirky cars might I see before I pop my clogs? Surely the new era of EVs will throw up a quirky car or two. I wait with bated breath.

ONION DOMES

Vienna, 8 August 2024

In my last post, I mentioned the brief trip my wife and I made to Schruns in the Montafon valley. We liked the Montafon valley so much that we decided to go back for some more hiking. This time, we explored new side valleys and some of the (artificial) lakes at the top of the valley. But I don’t want to talk about that, delightful though it has been. I want to talk about the view from the terrace when we were eating our dinner.

As readers can see, the town’s church tower is capped by a delightful example of an onion dome. The towers of many churches in Austria and Bavaria, as well as in other parts of the German lands, are crowned with onion domes. In the valley of Montafon alone, my wife and I saw five onion domes during our hikes or from the bus on our way to our hikes’ starting points.
Sankt Gallenkirch:

Gortipohl:

Gaschurn:

Partenen:

And finally Tschagguns, where a lantern has been inserted into the onion:

I first remember seeing these onion domes decades ago, when one of my flatmates at University invited me to spend the Easter vacation at her mother’s place in the Alps in Austria (her mother was Austrian). We drove all the way there from the UK. At some point, we crossed into Bavaria and I began seeing these onion domes atop church towers through the car window. I was rather astonished; for me, onion domes was something you only found in Christian Orthodox lands. The example that comes to mind for most people is St. Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square, but I refuse to give space to the invaders of Ukraine. I shall instead insert a photo St. Michael’s monastery in Kyiv.

What on earth were these onion domes doing in Germany and Austria?! I didn’t get an answer to my question at the time – even though my flatmate was studying architecture, she had never posed herself the question – and life rolled by. It wasn’t until I was sitting on that terrace staring at the tower of Schruns’s church that I posed myself the question anew. Luckily, in the intervening decades the internet has come along and Wikipedia – that splendid instrument for giving answers to the most off-the-wall questions – has been created.

The story which Wikipedia tells is a fascinating one. First of all, this was not a question of German-speaking church builders importing a new style from further east in Europe. It seems, rather, that the answer lies with a certain Bernhard von Braidenbach, an important official in the Archdiocese of Mainz, who lived from about 1440 to 1497. He was important enough to deserve a tombstone in Mainz cathedral, of the type that brass rubbers love. I throw in a photo of his tombstone.

Braidenbach is chiefly remembered today for a book he wrote in 1486, Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, in which he recounted his pilgrimage to the Holy Land undertaken in 1483-84. He was actually accompanying (i.e., keeping an eye on) the young Count Johann von Solms-Lich, so he also had a knight with him to protect the Count and the party. And, very important for us, he took along a certain Erhard Reuwich, an artist from Mainz. Why he decided to take an artist with him is unknown – at least to me. But it’s good that he did, as we shall see. Once back in Mainz (minus the count, alas, who had died on the return trip), Braidenbach wrote what was essentially a travel guide for future pilgrims to the Holy Land. What was groundbreaking about the book is that he inserted into the text some 25 woodcuts prepared by Reuwich, of views of the cities they passed through and other topics.

The book was an instant hit with European elites. It went through several editions and was translated into numerous languages. And – what is important for our story – church builders picked up on a detail in one of the woodcuts, Reuwich’s view of Jerusalem as seen from the Mount of Olives.

Sharp-eyed readers will immediately see the unmistakably onion-shaped dome on the building in the foreground of the woodcut. I blow up the photo for those of my readers whose sight, like mine, is less than perfect.

So there we have it. That little feature in one of the book’s woodcuts – admittedly of one of the holiest places in the world for Christians – seems to have inspired builders in the southern German lands to crown their church towers with onion domes.

The building whose onion dome they copied is the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine at the centre of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. This aerial photo is taken more or less from above the Mount of Olives and gives a very similar view as the woodcut.

The photo shows the unmistakable octagonal arcade surrounding the dome. It also shows – shock! horror! – that the dome is not onion-shaped! From my extensive reading (in Wikipedia), it seems that it never was. As far as I can make out, the dome has kept the same shape it had when it was built back in 692 AD.

I have to assume that our friend Erhard Reuwich was taken by a fit of poetic license when he prepared the woodcut. Quite honestly, I’m glad that he was feeling poetic the day he laboured over the woodcut, because otherwise I wouldn’t have found myself staring with such pleasure at the church tower in Schruns and other places in Montafon valley.

In this day and age of hostility between the Islamic and Christian worlds, I’m also rather pleased to see that Christian church builders don’t seem to have had any scruples about copying the dome of an Islamic building for their Christian churches.

Well, I finished this post on the train back to Vienna, and as I paused and stared out of the window somewhere in Bavaria, a church tower with an onion dome flashed by.