Published on
June 18, 2009 in
General.
A Day in Vienna – from Angie Wednesday 17 June
Coming from Madrid, we are still on Madrileno time, so rose late, as did Kathy, our host here in the Judenplatz. She is very welcoming, and she makes rooms in her large flat available to visitors to Vienna. Her father Emanuel Fiscus was a Holocaust survivor, and led a remarkable life. On the Judenplatz is a large memorial to the 65,000 Austrian Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. I can see it from our window.
It’s a big concrete rectangle shaped as a mausoleum, and the 4 walls are a relief of rows of books with their spines inverted, so you can’t see what they are. Stories which won’t be told.
Nearby is the Art Forum am Judenplatz, which is showing the Holocaust survivor Adolf Frankl’s permanent exhibition Art Against Oblivion. These are telling and heart-wrenching images in expressionist style. These things must be confronted and never forgotten, although it has taken the Viennese long enough.
Arrival of a transport on the ramp in Birkenau, October 1944
After the morning muesli and rounds of emails, it was down to our local coffee shop and Bäckerei:
Continue reading ‘A Day in Vienna’
Published on
June 15, 2009 in
General.
Monastery Valley and Gertrude Bell album
Monastery Valley is best described by Gertrude Bell – below. But we had a delightful ramble along this very quiet and lonely spot. 
It was evidently a place where monks could isolate themselves from the secular, and find the penance they sought, and maybe visions into the bargain. (Visited by A & R Sunday 26 April.)
Monk's cell carved into cliff
Red Church Album
Kizil Kilisi is the Red Church, half an hour’s drive up and over the hills behind Guzelyurt. Rather fragile, it stands strikingly alone in cultivated fields surrounded by hills.
It is the only byzantine church still standing in this part of the world, many have been destroyed or allowed to crumble by previous Turkish governments as probably a deliberate policy of erasing the Christian past – see Alexander Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain.
The Friends of Cappadocia are raising money to restore it before it collapses, but it is a race against time as you can see here…
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