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

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.

THE COMMON RHODODENDRON – PRETTY FLOWER, INVASIVE SPECIES

Vienna, 30 July 2024

I mentioned briefly in my last post that our grandson had spent some time with us. Wonderful! But tiring. After we had waved him and his parents goodbye, my wife and I headed into the Austrian Alps for a few days of well-deserved R&R. Specifically, we went to a place called Schruns, which – for those readers who are interested – lies in the Austrian province of Vorarlberg. But provincial boundaries – or any boundaries, really – are just lines in our heads, abstractions we impose on the landscape which surrounds us. It would be better to say that Schruns sits in the lower part of the valley of the river Ill, a river that starts its course at the head of the high Alpine valley of Ochsental, up on the slopes of the Piz Buin (Ox Peak in the local Rhaeto-Romance language), the highest peak in Voralberg, and then runs through the 40-km long Montafon valley.

Sorry, let me immediately be clear that this post is not going to be a rant about the foolishness of borders. I just got carried away a bit as I wrote that last paragraph. No, it is actually the result of a hike that my wife and I did high up above Schruns, at 2300 m, on a beautiful, sunny day. Here we are at the top, looking down at Schruns in the Montafon valley below.

In case any readers are wondering, we did not hike up the 1600 metres up to the top of the mountain from Schruns. Dedicated hikers we may be, but not fanatics. We took a gondola lift up 1200 metres and then hiked up the rest of the way. In that climb, we passed through a huge field of dwarf rhododendron.

I have to say that, although the sight was very pretty, my heart sank when I saw those rhododendrons. You see, I was under the impression that all rhododendrons originally came from the Himalayas, that I was in front of an introduced species, and – based on something I had read somewhere – that rhododendrons in Europe were now an invasive species, a topic I have written about in several posts. I was biased towards this thinking by my sighting, the previous day, on a hike along the river Ill of thick stands of Himalayan Balsam, which as I’ve reported in an earlier post is indeed an invasive species here in Europe. So it was with a certain grimness that I photographed another patch of rhododendrons on a hillside in front of where we had lunch on the edges of a small Alpine pond.

Well, I’m glad to report that I was completely wrong. Yes, the Himalayas do host a large number of rhododendron species, as – surprisingly to my mind – do Papua New Guinea and Borneo. But there are a number of rhododendron species native to North America, and – key to this post – a few rhododendron species native to Europe. I am extremely glad to tell readers that two of these, closely related to each other, are native to the Alps, so no invasive species on our hike! They are the alpenrose, Rhododendron ferrugineum

and the hairy alpenrose, R. hirsutum.

I think readers will agree that there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two. The biggest difference seems to be in the leaves. The undersides of the alpenrose’s leaves are covered in rust-brown spots, while the hairy alpenrose’s leaves have hairy edges. The pH of the soil is a prime decider of what Alp they will grow on, with the alpenrose favouring acidic soils and the hairy alpenrose alkaline soils. I suspect that once upon a time the two were one and the same species, and then they began to diverge as they adapted to different soils. They are still close enough so that they will hybridise where their ranges overlap. Since I have absolutely no idea what the pH of the soil is in the mountains above Schruns, I have correspondingly no idea which of the two alpenroses my wife and I were looking at on our hike. And I certainly didn’t get down on my knees to have a closer look at their leaves.

But where did I get this idea that rhododendrons are an invasive species? I can’t have dreamed it. Well, it turns out that there is another European species, the common or pontic rhododendron, R. ponticum, which is indeed invasive. Actually, as in the case of the alpenroses, there are two closely related species. One, the subspecies ponticum, is found around the southern Black Sea basin (hence its name) and all the way to Georgia and the northern Caucasus, with a presence also in Lebanon.

The other, subspecies baeticum, is found in a few damp valleys in a couple of mountain ranges in central and southern Portugal and southern Spain.

It is this latter subspecies that has become an invasive species in the UK and more generally in Western Europe. Its story is typical of the period when Europeans went around the world hunting for “pretty plants”, plants which simply gave pleasure because of their flowers, foliage, shape, or other characteristics. This started in the early 18th century; of course, the global trade in plants had started several centuries earlier, immediately after Europe’s discovery of the Americas, but in those earlier centuries people were interested only in plants that were commercially interesting. The common rhododendron ssp. baeticum was an early example of this massive movement of pretty plants around the world. It seems that it was brought to England in 1763 through that British foothold on the Iberian peninsula, Gibraltar, which is located quite close to its natural range. A new plant nursery in Hackney, run by a German émigré by the name of Joachim Conrad Loddiges, was the first to make the common rhododendron’s seeds available. One of the early buyers from Loddiges was the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, who had the distinction of being British Prime Minister twice.

As readers can imagine, in those days, when Respect for one’s Betters was much more engrained, where such a Distinguished Personage went others were sure to follow. The result was that the planting of common rhododendrons in posh and then not so posh gardens quickly spread. Of course, it helped that it had a really pretty flower. But then most rhododendrons do. The craze for rhododendrons expanded as new species of rhododendrons, from North America and then from Asia, poured into the UK and Europe more generally. Rhododendrons hybridise quite easily, which added to the excitement as gardeners hybridised rhododendrons with abandon to create plants with ever more glamorous flowers. Often, to speed things up, new species were grafted onto the rootstock of common rhododendrons; the latter were tough and often there already, so it made for a quick way to turn your garden into a splendid glade of multi-hued rhododendrons. I throw in here photos of some modern examples of such dazzling displays of rhododendrons. The first, fittingly, is from Wentworth House in Yorkshire, one of two country houses that our friend the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham once owned.

Just to remind ourselves that it’s not just grand gardens that have rhododendrons, here’s one – maybe a common rhododendron, but you can’t tell, what with all the hybrids around – in someone’s back garden.

Alas! As far as the common rhododendron was concerned, it all turned out to be too good to be true. By the 1970s if not before, people had realised that it was a horribly invasive species. Primarily because of its huge production of seeds, it quite easily “hops over” garden fences and – if the soil and climate on the other side is welcoming – it goes feral. Then, once the plant has rooted, the roots send up suckers, which in no time at all grow into new bushes. The branches of all these bushes layer tightly together, blocking out sunlight and stopping anything else from growing. And to cap it all, many of the rhododendrons which were grafted onto the rootstock of common rhododendrons reverted to common rhododendrons if they weren’t looked after, creating yet more common rhododendron plants ready to hop over garden fences. The net result was thick stands of common rhododendrons taking over large swathes of land.

Here, a stand of common rhododendron is slowly engulfing a bus stop.

Well, who cares about a bus stop? But the common rhododendrons are choking stream beds and the understory of woods. They also carry a family of pathogens that can kill certain species of trees. This map shows the distribution of the common rhododendron, both inside gardens and out, throughout the UK and Ireland in the early 1970s.

Source: J.R. Cross, “Rhododendron Ponticum L.”, Jnl. Ecology, Vol. 63, No. 1, pp.345-364, Mar. 1975

Readers will notice dense patches of dots in many places in the UK, as well as in Ireland. Western Scotland and Snowdonia in Wales have been especially badly affected. Eradication programmes are underway. But it’s hard (and therefore expensive) work.

And you have to come back for at least five years after you’ve cleared a patch, to ensure that no roots were left which have thrown up suckers and no seeds were left which have sprouted. And now scientists have discovered that after you’ve cleared a patch it’s not a given that the cleared land will revert back to its original composition of plants; the balance has been disturbed and some plants may move back in faster than others and stop the slower movers from recolonising the land. So more work will be required to ensure that the original plant composition returns.

There is something really quite ironic about the common rhododendron letting rip and taking over large swathes of British, and other European, countryside. Back in the Iberian peninsula, where the plant came from originally, it is hanging on by its fingernails. It is a relict population from the the original laurissilva forests which covered the Iberian peninsula 66 million years ago, It is no longer suited to the dry climate in Iberia and has retreated into a few damp valleys. Reproduction is largely confined to the roots sending out suckers as the climate is now too dry for seedlings to survive. With climate change turning the southern part of the Iberian peninsula into a semi-desert, I suspect it will expire there. But, luckily for it, and unluckily for other plants, a bunch of ignorant plant traders brought it into an ecological niche where it just thrives, thank you very much! Of course, we can’t really blame the people who back in 1763 carried the plant to the UK, no-one then had the knowledge of what impacts there can be from moving plants around the planet. But now we do know, and yet we still do it. Are we stupid or what?!

Sorry, I can sense another rant coming on, time to stop. But if any of my readers have common rhododendrons in their gardens I beg them to rip them out without delay. If they really want rhododendrons, there are many, many equally pretty rhododendrons which do not “go forth and multiply”, as the Bible has it.

PAWPAWS, NOT PAPAYAS

Vienna, 20 July 2024

My wife and I recently had our annual check-up with our GP in Vienna. He’s been our doctor here for nigh on 20 years. The first thing he told us was that he was retiring at the end of the week. Tutto cambia, tutto su transforma, everything changes, everything is transformed, as I mournfully intoned in an earlier post. After he had given us our prescriptions for the routine blood and other tests we do every year (the results of which, though, will be reviewed this year by his partner in the medical practice), we chatted a bit about his retirement plans. He told us that he and his partner would be selling their apartment in Vienna (which is how we met him; they lived on the floor below ours), and they would be moving to a house which they have spent the last couple of years restoring, out in the countryside in southern Styria.

He was especially enthusiastic about its garden. He told us that he has filled it with all sorts of exotic plants, which have been flourishing. It doesn’t surprise me, he has exceedingly green fingers; we would gaze down with wonderment (and not a little envy) at the terrace of their apartment, a riot of flowers and plants, which he would lovingly curate in the evenings during the spring and summer. He told us with a note of pride in his voice that he had even successfully planted a pau-pau tree. A what tree, my wife and I both asked? After some toing and froing, we finally understood he was talking about a tree that produces a fruit called pawpaw. But the confusion wasn’t over yet. Since neither of us had ever heard of pawpaw fruits, my wife fished out her iPad and undertook a rapid Google search to see what they looked like. The search term “pawpaw” resulted in this image.

You mean papaya, we asked? This is what we call this fruit. No, no, our doctor said, not papayas; pawpaws. More Google searching and my wife came up with this.

Yes, the good doctor said, that’s the one.

Well, well, they say you learn something new every day (who coined that phrase, I wonder? Must Google it). My wife and I certainly did that day, along with the distressing news about our doctor’s retirement. After promising to visit the two of them in Styria one of these days, we said our emotional goodbyes.

Of course, I couldn’t leave it there. I was just like my little grandson picking at a scab (did I mention that he’s been staying with us?). I just had to find out more about this pawpaw. Which was fine, because it turned out to be a really interesting fruit.

First of all, as this map shows, pawpaws are native to the US, and more specifically to the eastern, southern, and midwestern states – the push into southern Ontario is probably man-induced, as we shall see in a minute.

It’s intriguing that the pawpaw tree is found this far north, in temperate climes, because it actually belongs to a family nearly all of whose members are tropical. It’s a nice example of environmental adaptation. It would seem that the ancestor of the pawpaw developed on what is now the North American continent when the climate was tropical. As the climate cooled, the plant reacted by adapting to the chillier temperatures. Nevertheless, it never quite lost its earlier tropical “look”. Its leaves, for instance, have drip tips, a typical feature of tropical plants which are subjected to heavy rains.

And the fruit itself looks quite tropical; looking at the photo above one could easily mistake it for a mango, for instance.

The name “pawpaw” is a bit of a puzzle. It seems that there was a confusion between the pawpaw and the papaya. Down in the British Caribbean colonies, the papaya was known as the pawpaw – and still today, in the UK and in many ex-British colonies, the papaya is called pawpaw. There was a brisk trade between the Caribbean and American colonies, and the thinking goes that when Brits coming from the Caribbean landed in the more southerly American colonies and first set eyes on this tree and its fruit they said “Ooh, look, those look like pawpaws” and the name stuck. Those Brits must have had very poor eyesight, though. In these next few photos, I invite my readers to compare various aspects of the two plants. Here’s what the tree looks like.

Here’s what the leaves look like

Here’s what the flower looks like.

Here’s what the fruits look like on the outside.

And here is what they look like on the inside.

I think my readers will agree that, with the possible exception of the whole fruits, the two really don’t look like each other at all. Maybe those Brits from the Caribbean were actually comparing the taste of the two fruits? For reasons that will become clear in a minute, neither I nor my wife have ever eaten pawpaw, so I am relying here on other people’s impressions of the fruit’s taste. This description, from its entry in Wikipedia, seems to summarise quite well various attempts I have found around the internet to describe the taste : “a flavour somewhat similar to banana, mango, and pineapple”. I haven’t eaten piles of papaya, but that description doesn’t fit with my sense of the papaya’s taste. I rather agree with one person’s assessment that the papaya tastes like a cross between a cantaloupe and a mango.

So the mystery remains: what the hell were those initial namers thinking?! They just created a big confusion. Why didn’t the colonists in the American colonies adopt the name given to the fruit by the local First Nations tribes? The Virginians did it with persimmons, after all (a transliteration of the Algonquian name for the fruit: “pessamin”).

The coureurs des bois (roamers of the woods), French Canadians who traded for furs with the First Nations and who were a key figure in the North American fur trade, were often the first Europeans to explore the part of the US which is the fruit’s natural range. They sensibly adopted the Algonquian name for the fruit, “assimin”, giving it a French twist, though, coming up with “asiminier”. Here we have an etching of a heroic-looking coureur des bois which appeared in a French Canadian magazine from 1871.

Taking a leaf from the Virginian colonists’ book, I shall start a campaign to have the fruit’s name changed to assimmon. Readers are welcome to join me in this futile tilting at windmills; just for the hell of it, I insert Picasso’s take on the original tilter at windmills, Don Quixote, with his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panchez.

I have to say, I do have a sort-of official approval for this effort: the plant’s proper botanical name is Asimina triloba, where the first part of the name picked up the coureurs des bois’s name. In fact, I shall start right now. I shall call the fruit assimon in the rest of this post.

As readers can imagine, the pawpaw – sorry, the assimon – was very popular with the First Nation tribes who occupied the fruit’s range. Here you have what turns out to be the largest edible fruit that is indigenous to the US, and it’s delicious to boot! The tribes loved it so much that they extended the fruit’s original range by carrying it with them when they moved into new territories (as they did with the Jerusalem artichoke – and of course maize). This most probably explains the fruit’s presence in Southern Ontario, brought there, it is theorised, by the Erie and Onondaga tribes. To bring us back to those far-off times, I throw in a photo of a figure that appeared in Samuel de Champlain’s books on his voyages in what is now Canada and the US. It relates to an attack Champlain carried out together with the Hurons on an Onondaga village, situated on what is now called Onondaga lake, close to the modern city of Syracuse in the northern New York State.

It’s lucky that the First Nations did move the assimon tree around, because it had evolved into a cul-de-sac. If readers go back to the photo of the open assimon fruit, they will notice its large stones. Fruit stones have evolved to be swallowed by the animals which consume the fruit, to be then expelled in a nice, fertilising pile of poo somewhere else as the animal in question wanders around. The bigger the fruit stone, the larger must be the animals eat the fruit – otherwise, they can’t swallow it. It’s been theorised that the assimon’s very large stone means that it evolved to be eaten by the American continent’s megafauna. Here is a photo of these large beasts, also showing humans, to give an idea of their enormous size.

Only the omnivores amongst them ate fruit, of course, but those which did spread the assimon around.

About 10,000 years ago, though, America’s megafauna died out. Quite why this happened is hotly debated, but the arrival of human beings, the ancestors of the First Nations, from across the Bering Straits was in all probability a big factor in this wave of extinctions. The modern bear is now the only animal big enough to swallow the stones of the assimon without choking. So it was just as well for the plant that humans stepped in and moved the plant around – and it was only fair that they did so, given the role they had played in the extinction of the megafauna.

As I said earlier, even though my wife and I lived something like eight years all told in the assimon’s range, we never tried it. We never even saw it being sold in supermarkets. How can it be that the US’s largest indigenous fruit is not readily available in every supermarket in the country? How can it be that enterprising Americans didn’t bring the plant to Europe, China, Japan, and anywhere else with the same temperate climate and establish assimon orchards?

The sad fact is that the assimon, in contrast to more popular – and non-American – commercial fruits like apples, pears, or peaches, stores poorly, primarily because the fruit ripens to the point of fermentation very quickly after it is picked. An assimon only keeps for 2–3 days at room temperature, about double that if it is refrigerated. This short shelf-life and therefore difficulty in shipping the fruit any distance means that the food industry is simply not interested in it. I have commented unfavourably in an earlier post about the fact that many of the foodstuffs eaten in the US are not native there, suggesting that native foodstuffs should be eaten. But in this case it really seems that the assimon is simply unsuited to our modern way of life. The best one can hope for is to find it in farmers’ markets held in the fruit’s range. And they will only offer it during the month of September, which is when the fruit ripens (there is a niche market for the shipping of the fruit over longer distances, but it must be a risky business).

Or you plant a tree in your garden if you live in the right climate. Which brings me back to my good doctor! We said we would go and see them. Maybe we could go and see them in September, when his assimons are ripe. But we need to know very precisely when they are ripe and then immediately go down to visit them and try this delectable fruit. But how to do this without sounding crass? “Hello, are your assimons ripe? If not, we’re not interested in coming.” I shall have to discuss this with my wife and try and find a more subtle way of doing this.

OUR DOLOMITES HIKE, 2024

Vienna, 27 June 2024

My wife and I recently completed our annual hike in the Dolomites. We returned to old stamping grounds this year, to the Val di Fassa, in the autonomous province of Trento. This was where we started our annual pilgrimages to the Dolomites five years ago. That year, however, our carefully constructed six-day hike was thrown into chaos and confusion by two mega-meteorological events. The first was a hugely powerful windstorm, Vaia, which swept through the Italian Alps in late October of 2018 and brought millions of trees crashing to the ground – the official tally talks of 8 million cubic metres of trees being downed.

The second was a monster snowfall in May of 2019, a mere month before we were meant to start our hike.

As we saw over and over again during our severely modified hike, the Val di Fassa was badly hit by Vaia.

A good number of the trails we were meant to take were blocked off over long sections by downed trees. The local tourism authorities had planned to use the month of May to clear the trails, but the monster snowfall of that month put paid to their plan. On top of it, that unexpectedly heavy snowfall meant that a good number of the huts we were meant to spend nights at, and the trails leading into them and out from them, were still blocked with snow when we arrived in the Val di Fassa.

Five years on, the weather behaved better in the preceding months, and we were able to do a good number of the trails blocked to us back in 2019. We got off to an iffy start, hiking in fog so thick that we could have been in a park in Milan during the month of November.

But after that, the weather cleared and glorious sights awaited us!

It wasn’t just towering mountains and emerald valleys far below us that left us breathless (although some of the breathlessness was also due to our climbing hundreds of metres of steep slopes). It was also the streams and small lakes we passed by.

Or the wild flowers that greeted us along the paths we passed along.

Even the smallest beings we came across had the power to enchant us.

There were shadows among all this wonderfulnness, though, notably the clusters of dead European spruce trees we saw dotting the woods that clothed the steep flanks of the valleys.

All was not right. There hadn’t been so many standing dead trees in 2019. What was going on? A massive infestation by another beetle was what was going on. A beetle not nearly as cute-looking as the other beetles we had seen and photographed.

A beetle which goes by the name of European spruce bark beetle in English and bostrico tipografo in Italian. The English name is rather prosaic, merely confirming the beetle’s preferred victim to be the European spruce. The Italian name is much more interesting. The second part of the name rather colourfully indicates the type of intriguing “calligraphy” which the beetle and its offspring create in the tree as they burrow into it – and kill it.

The first part of the Italian name also harks back to the elegant whorl-shaped channels which other members of this family of wood-burrowing beetle creates. It is an italianization of the name that Aristotle gave to the family, βόστρυχος, which is the Greek word for “curl”.

I hope my readers will excuse this little riff on the etymology of the beetle’s name, but I feel that often the origin of words tells us a lot about how our ancestors perceived the world around them. In any event, for all its intriguingly shaped burrows, this beetle kills the European spruces (and other trees) which it infects, and it kills them quite quickly, within a few months. The trees first look peeky, their crown wilting and turning rust-coloured, then they start massively losing their needles, then they dry out, at which point, to borrow – with the necessary adaptations – John Cleese’s speech about the dead Norwegian parrot, the trees are no more, they have ceased to be, they’re expired and gone to meet their maker, they are late trees, bereft of life they rest in peace, they’ve rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible: they are ex-trees.

Under normal circumstances, healthy European spruce can beat off the nefarious beetle’s attacks, which usually only burrows into dead trees or trees that are already dying. The infestations are endemic but under control. But after huge destructions of trees which massive storms like Vaia bring about, there is suddenly vast amounts of dead and dying trees available for the beetle to feast on. Worse, the trees which have remained standing are – unsurprisingly – stressed and unable to defend themselves effectively, so the beetle also merrily attacks apparently healthy standing trees. The result: an uncontrolled epidemic of the beetle, with huge increases in its population, and the large patches of dead trees we were seeing everywhere.

Locals grimly told us that it could be five years or more before the situation rights itself and beetle populations drop back down to endemic levels again. By then, perhaps as many trees will have been killed off as were brought down by Vaia. I fear that if we come back to Val di Fassa in the coming years, we’ll find valleys which look like they have a bad case of the mange, with big, bald patches speckling the hillsides.

I don’t want to sound smugly virtuous, but the people who manage these forests haven’t done a very good job. Anxious to maximise profits, they have planted monocultures of European spruce and trees all of the same age, to make it easy to clear cut any particular patch of forest. If instead they had planted a mix of different species and ensured a mix of trees with different ages, they might have made less profits short-term but they would have been better able to weather big disruptions like those caused by Vaia. This is especially urgent since with climate change massive, intense storms like Vaia (wind velocities of over 200 km/hr were recorded) are going to happen more frequently.

But who is listening to old farts like me? I fear that on our future hikes, my wife and I will be mournful witnesses to ever more examples of short-term thinking: downed trees, dead trees, bad erosion, flooding, desertification, and on and on. I despair sometimes at the world we are leaving our little grandson and any other grandchildren who may soon come along.

LIME TREES TO SHOE POLISH

Milan, 11 June 2024

What is the matter with me?!

Over the last few days, we’ve been passing down alleys of lime trees.

The trees are all in flower – this one was covered with them.

The flowers fill the air with their scent, I breathe it in … and I am reminded of shoe polish.

No-one under the age of 40 will remember a world where most of the shoes we wore were made of leather. As I look around the subway carriage where I’m writing this, I can only see one pair of leather shoes among perhaps 70 pairs of feet. I, on the other hand, being well over the age of 40, still remember a time when we mostly wore leather shoes – and remember the concomitant joys and anguish of shoe polishing. At my boarding primary school (prep school in British parlance), a specific period of every week was set aside for shoe polishing. We all had to go to a room dedicated to this task, where we picked up a cloth – to spread the polish – and a brush – to put a high gloss on our shoes – before getting to work. As I picked up the tin, there was that ineffable smell of the polish. That was the joy – or at least the pleasant sensation. No doubt it was caused by the solvent which the manufacturers used to keep their polish pasty. After the spreading of the polish on my shoes came the vigorous polishing. That was the agony, as my arm very soon began to ache. But I couldn’t slow down, there was always a master on hand to bark at me to put my back into it. And then came again the joy, as I admired my well-polished shoes glowing on my feet. Of course, I have no photo of this weekly exercise. I did find this photo, though, which will give readers a sense of what it was like – although the boy in question looks to be enjoying it far too much.

After the passage of so many decades, I can’t remember the brand of polish we used. I’m guessing it was Kiwi; that was certainly the brand that my English grandmother used, and it seems to have been the most popular brand in the UK.

In passing, I should say that I learned to my surprise that Kiwi was originally an Australian brand (and was given its name by the owner to honour his wife who hailed from New Zealand). Merely another example of my unconscious Euro-centric biases …

Old brands of consumer products always have me searching for the posters they used in their advertising campaigns. I find these old posters a fascinating sub-genre of popular art. In another life I would have been an avid collector of old posters. In this case, though, I didn’t find any really scintillating Kiwi posters online. The best I found was this one.

Not so in the case of a now extinct brand of Italian shoe polish called Taos, manufactured by the now also extinct company Edoardo Pessi. Look at this lovely poster! It’s a riff on the fact that the biggest purchaser of Pessi’s shoe polish was the Italian army.

In a rush of enthusiasm, I throw in photos of a few more posters for Taos and other Italian shoe polishes.

At this point, I have to admit to having played a very small part in Edoardo Pessi’s demise. It was early on in my career as an environmental consultant. My company was hired by the multinational corporation Sara Lee (now also extinct) to carry out an environmental assessment of the Pessi factory. Sara Lee was in negotiations to purchase Edoardo Pessi, and the idea was to figure out what environmental liabilities Sara Lee might also be buying and bring down the purchase price by a corresponding amount. This is the factory where I carried out my assessment.

I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets when I say that there were some problems with underground tanks leaking solvents (out in the back yard there, next to that sliver of lawn; I remember it well). I guess a couple of 100,000 dollars were knocked off the purchase price because of that.

In any event, the purchase by Sara Lee went through. But it was really just an exercise in asset stripping. Quite quickly after the purchase, Sara Lee concluded that this factory had no future – which made a lot of sense; I mean, look at it, hemmed in as it is on all sides by houses. So they closed the factory down. But they didn’t shift operations to an industrial site on the outskirts of town as they could have done. Instead, the packed all the equipment off to their other factories, they laid off the workers, and sold the land to a developer, who proceeded to raze the factory to the ground and put up some swanky apartment buildings in its place. Sara Lee even stopped making the Taos shoe polish – who polishes their shoes anymore? (and they already owned Kiwi; one shoe polish brand was more than enough).

Well, all of this, although an enjoyable little trip down Memory Lane, still doesn’t explain why, when I breathe in the scent of lime tree flowers, I think shoe polish. The mysteries of olfactory chemistry …