Monatsarchive: Juli 2018

I have just seen my first Porsche since Odessa. Trust me, I notice these things. Lousy roads from Odessa to Uman‘ to Lviv. Many Ladas of various years and models belching various quantities of black smoke. No Porsches. Kyiv: no … Weiterlesen →

„[unintelligible], start recording!“ catches my ear. I notice a young American couple. She’s in short shorts, he’s got cargo shorts. With the portable tripod collapsed to a wand perhaps eight inches in length, the blob atop it appears like a … Weiterlesen →

These people died during the 2014 Revolution. There are 11 panels like this of Ukrainians who died in eastern Ukraine 2014-2016.

With its economic instability, mass immigration, corrupting influence of money on politics, and ever-increasing gap between the rich and everyone else, our current era bears more than a slight resemblance to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dubbed by … Weiterlesen →

After driving behind KFOR vehicles in Kosovo exhibits like this have a new meaning for me. The museum has a huge collection of medieval arms and armor, with no narrative. The arms collection goes through the 19th Century and then … Weiterlesen →

Notice the Save Oleg Sentsov banners are more prominently displayed than the posters for the museum’s exhibits. „Between 1939 – 1950s, following the reorganization of the museum institutions,…“ Indeed.

There is a range of prices for different exhibits, as in Odessa. The most expensive ticket is about 2 €. A very nice woman at the ticket desk explained the exhibits, and with a little German said the exhibit I … Weiterlesen →

This was a bit hard to find, on a hilltop in the center of the city, surrounded by trees. In the 1970s it was easy to find buildings in Belgium and Germany that still had shell holes, and Petra and … Weiterlesen →

I like the power of the figure here. This man or woman has broken through a prison bar, and it’s not clear if they may now fall, but they are free. I like this monument.

The oral histories excerpted on the prison museum walls reminded me of those in the KGB prison in Vilnius. For these people the Nazi time was just one phase in decades of Soviet terror. I wrote in the visitors‘ book … Weiterlesen →

This was one of three Lviv prisons where political prisoners were murdered by the NKVD as the Soviets retreated in the first weeks of the Nazi invasion of the USSR. The Nazi discovery of thousands of decomposing corpses ostensibly killed … Weiterlesen →