Category: Europe
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Shutter pig
Shutter pig It’s only an outline, the sawn out pig itself is gone.We look at an empty space, the negative form of a pig.So true to life that we see its round, fat body in front of us. Photo of the week: Shutter pig, Solalex, Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland 2021
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Cors des Alpes
Cors des Alpes A concert with two alpine horns and two accordions in an old Hydro Power Plant in the Rhône, where the river flows out of Lake Geneva. Very original, as for the music, the instruments and the location.The musicians played arrangements of old baroque compositions and more recent pieces specially composed for these…
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A wall in Kazimierz
A wall in Kazimierz Broken, mangled, scattered in disarray,unearthed from layers of dust and sand: fragments of memory of the deceased,which fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. A memorial wall for the dead,for the eyes of the living. Photo of the week: 16th cent. Jewish R’emuh Cemetery wall, Kazimierz, Krakow, Poland 2007
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Memento mori
Memento mori When we walk through a cemetery, we may well be glad that we still belong to the world of the living, but it inevitably reminds us of our own mortality. This is certainly true of the Portuguese Jewish cemetery near Amsterdam. Many gravestones feature images symbolising death: an hourglass running out (and which…
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Anno Mundi 5490
Anno Mundi 5490 The Jewish cemetery at ‘Ouderkerk aan de Amstel’ near Amsterdam is called Beth Haim which means House of Life. This tells us something about the Sephardim philosophy of life – and death. The picture shows a detail of a partly submerged gravestone in which we see a shepherdess with her cattle. A…
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Watery grave
Watery grave I saw this sculpted marble gravestone at the cemetery of the Portuguese Jewish community in ‘Ouderkerk aan de Amstel’. The Sephardim Jews had started settling in Amsterdam in the 16th century and their cemetery in nearby Ouderkerk dates from 1614. I used to pass and visit it regularly on my walks along the…
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Death and decay
Death and decay Two headstones, one a bit more pointed than the other, are each covering a corner of two gothic church windows, one a bit more pointed than the other. A harmonious rhythm of corresponding forms that subconsciously may have caught my eye. But I took the picture in the first place because I…
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Cross on stilts
Cross on stilts I.I climbed up to an elevated cemeteryand saw a cross on stilts.Raised for a still better view?For the pursuit of heaven?Or just for fun? II.I descended the steps into a pitch-dark tomb. Groped for my camera, managed to put on the flash and took a picture. The photo shows what I couldn’t…
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Of light and loss
Of light and loss I enjoy visiting cemeteries. Gravestones, a name and two dates, sometimes a photograph of the deceased. Sometimes there are also other expressions of loving remembrance which, in all their simplicity and – often – kitsch taste, can be moving. Gravestones remind us of the dead who rest beneath them, but they…
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Necropolis
Necropolis Buried in the earth, flat, seated, wrapped in cloth, put in a coffin, embalmed, thrown in a river, fed to the vultures, burned,… Of all animals human beings are the only ones that do something special about the dead. Trying to do justice to their deceased loved ones and to their own feelings of…
καιρός remembered 