Category: Europe
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Musers
Musers The musings of the stone figures are focussed on the child at their feet that goes its own way. The large head in the back is looking in the same direction but seems engrossed in his own thoughts. This musing in unison is contagious, I feel like joining them. Photo of the week: Berlin,…
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He who laughs last, laughs best
He who laughs last, laughs best “There was a time when the staging of skeletons of the saints, installed in astonishing postures, was intended to defy death and to show victorious martyrs, therefore to vivify the faith of believers. Each parish had to have a recumbent figure, or at least relics of saints, often taken…
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Sainte Quintienne
Sainte Quintienne The nuns of Montorge didn’t make only wax heads of angels (see last week’s post), also of saints, preferably saints that had come to a violent end while defending their Faith. The nuns would meticulously carve and paint the wounds on the pale faces of the martyrs, showing the suffering they had gone…
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Wax twosome
Wax twosome Two women’s wax heads waiting to be completed with a wealth of hair and a long dress. And then to become flying angels or maybe even the Virgin Mary. But that was in the 18th or 19th century when they were fabricated by the nuns of Montorge. With their wry mouths, I wouldn’t…
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Flat twosome
Flat twosome Like ancient Egyptian reliefs – see for example the reliefs inside Ramose’s tomb in Thebe – Assyrian reliefs too stand out by their flatness and beauty. They are hardly three-dimensional but the subtle curves of head and hair are delicately shaped and bring the face to life. When the relief shows two partly…
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Not to forget
Not to forget At the beginning of the 2nd World War there were 17.000 Jewish residents in the part of Amsterdam where I live. During the war 13.000 of them were deported and murdered in the concentration camps. When I walk through my neighbourhood I can ‘stumble’ sometimes upon little brass plates in the pavement.…
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Anne Frank
Anne Frank There she stands, Anne Frank, on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam where she lived 9 years of her short life till 1942. On 6 July of that year she went with her family into hiding on the Prinsengracht in what now is known as the Anne Frank House. Sculptor Jet Schepp has portrayed her all…
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Liberation Day
Liberation Day For the 75th time this year. Every year on the 5th of May we celebrate the end of the occupation by Nazi Germany. On the 7th of May 1945 the allied forces drove through this street, then called the Noorder Amstellaan, into Amsterdam, cheered and applauded by its inhabitants. A year later the…
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Oswiecim
Oswiecim Conceived at the end of the war and born in an again free Netherlands, the horrors of the Second World War have entered my consciousness through poignant images and stories. One morning in 2007, in the train from Krakow to Prague, we made a stop at Oswiecim. For us just a stopover; for 1.5…
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Auschwitz
Auschwitz (…) Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng (…) (…) he yells play sweeter for death Death is a German-born master…
καιρός remembered 