Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations - Atlas Obscura
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Built in 1324, Agios Nikolaos Church is located in the quiet village of Maza Apokoronas, a 40-minute car ride from Chania in Crete. It is said to be one of the most important Byzantine monuments on the western side of the island. The church is a single-aisle, barrel-vaulted structure, with many frescoes decorating its walls. Ioannis Pagomenos, the painter of the frescoes, transformed the walls of the church into a beautiful tapestry of saints and biblical scenes. At the center there is Christ the "Light-Giver" found between the Virgin Mary and Saint Nicholas. Legend has it that Pagomenos was buried underneath the church. Archeologists from Greece occasionally visit the church to work on preserving the frescoes. Despite numerous initiatives to help with their preservation, the lack of frequent visitors and the church's age makes it challenging to maintain them in good condition. As a result, many of the frescoes appear faded, and due to the candles that the visitors have been lighting, some of them appear black from the smoke. For anyone in Crete seeking a blend of history, art, and a touch of mystery, Agios Nikolaos is the place to visit.
Northern Taiwan once had a thriving coal industry, but it declined due to low-quality deposits, mine collapses, and international competition. By 2000, the last mine closed. Today, much of this history has faded from public memory, though traces remain across the landscape. Just two kilometers from Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world, lies Hexing Coal Mine, one of many abandoned mines in the region. The Taipei City government has turned this site into a small historical park to preserve its legacy. The site, more of a mini-museum, takes about 5 to 10 minutes to explore. It includes two main areas: the track section and the mine entrance. The track section contain a status of a miner pushing a cart and a mural depicting the coal production process. By the entrance, a charming statue of a pangolin holding mining tools offers a whimsical nod to the mine’s history. A short path leading into the mine houses simple exhibits on coal mining culture and history.
In a corner of the parking lot outside Hōryū-ji Temple, the oldest surviving wooden structure in the world, there is a small mound most visitors are likely to disregard. But not giving it a look would be a shame, since it too happens to be a piece of ancient Japan. Japan is home to thousands of tumuli or burial mounds, and Nara Prefecture is no stranger to these ancient tombs. Funazuka, or the “Boat Mound,” had long been purported to be the site where the remains of an ancient wooden boat was unearthed, but for a long time remained an unassuming heap of dirt with a shrubbery on it. Its status as an actual tumulus was not even confirmed until 2023, following a number of excavations that started in 2019. An archaeological dig done by the University of Nara in 2022 revealed a burial chamber in which lay a pair of swords, amber jewelry, and pottery ware. Part of the walls showed signs of looting in the 7th century, as if someone had stolen portions of stonework to reuse them in newer construction projects. Though there are mysteries yet to be solved, the tentative dating seems to suggest that its looting might have had some relations to the construction of Hōryū-ji. Who knows what more history hides beneath this ancient town of Ikaruga?
Queen Victoria’s oldest son, Albert Edward, visited Pune, India in 1872 during the British Era. At the time, he was the Prince of Wales. Albert Edward would later become King Edward VII, ruler of the United Kingdom. To commemorate his visit, the British authorities decided to build a structure. Several options came up, such as a museum, a dispensary, or a clock tower. They decided on a public library to be built in the Cantonment area. This area was primarily developed by the British and is known as Pune Camp today. The library, which was called the Albert Edward Institute Library, was started at a different location on a smaller scale in 1875. In 1881, the military establishment transferred the land to the institute trustees and the library was shifted to its current location. The current location was inaugurated in 1881 by Sir James Fergusson, who was then the governor of Bombay (now Mumbai). In the early 1900s, the administration of the library was passed on to the Parsi residents of the area. The prominent trader Cowasjee Dinshaw Adenwalla’s son, Hormusjee Dinshaw Adenwalla, donated his book collection to this institute. In addition to that, funds were given to expand the premises and the Cowasjee Dinshaw Hall was added eventually. Today, this place is called the Albert Edward Institute Library and Cowasjee Dinshaw Hall & Library. This heritage library holds a collection of around 20,000 books, some of which are quite rare.
Ballarat has historically been one of Australia's most important cities. It was the location of the Eureka Rebellion, which led to Australian democracy, and at one point it was considered as the nation's capital. As such, former Member of Parliament and Ballarat local Richard Crouch thought it appropriate to commemorate all of Australia's prime ministers here. In 1939, Ballarat commissioned the first 12 busts in the series to be placed in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens on what was previously known as the "Horse Chestnut Walk." Most of these original sculptures were made by Wallace Anderson, who invited the living prime ministers to sit down for him. For the deceased prime ministers, he closely studied photographs and records and sought approval from their relatives. These first busts were unveiled between 1940 and 1943, cast in bronze on granite pedestals. They cost Richard Crouch £1000 (AUS$99,000 today), and he left another £1000 government bond for future additions. Today, Prime Ministers Avenue consists of 29 sculptures, with the most recent one of Malcolm Turnbull unveiled in November 2022. A bust for Turnbull's successor, Scott Morrison, is currently in the works. The busts vary widely in style and realism based on their respective artists. Some prime ministers have criticized their own portrayals. Robert Menzies laughed when he first saw his own and unsuccessfully asked for it to be removed. Malcolm Fraser's bust was replaced because the original sculptor was unhappy with it. Gough Whitlam's bust was stolen shortly after it was unveiled, and two others were vandalized with political messages in 2020. However, Prime Ministers Avenue's most serious threat has been the continuation of funding. Australia went through five prime ministers in the 2010s, depleting Crouch's original funds. Ballarat has struggled to keep up with the frequently changing list of prime ministers, and has unsuccessfully asked the federal government for funds. Instead, the city is forced to use money from donations and their public arts program.
This article is adapted from the March 15, 2025 edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here. My boyfriend, Peyam, grew up celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year. We’re currently planning the menu for our second annual Nowruz party, and, as with many holidays, certain things just have to be on the table. Peyam insists that it’s not Nowruz without kuku sabzi, a frittata-like baked dish of herbs and eggs, and sabzi polo mahi, herbed rice with fish. Nowruz falls on the spring equinox (March 20 this year), so many classic Nowruz dishes are made with herbs to represent spring’s triumphant return. And in Persian cuisine, herbs like mint and parsley are not mere garnishes: They are vegetables, eaten whole and chopped, raw and stewed. Like English “greens,” the Farsi word sabzi refers to leafy plants as well as their color, but it’s more inclusive. Persian “greens” are not just spinach and lettuce, but basil, dill, cilantro, fenugreek; anything fragrant, fresh, and alive. A pot of growing sabzi—usually wheat, mung bean, or lentil sprouts—is included in the Nowruz display known as the Haft-sin, both to symbolize spring, and because sabzi in Farsi begins with the letter sin, equivalent to S. Rounding out the Haft-sin, meaning “the Seven S’s,” are other symbolic items starting with that letter, such as seeb (apples) and serkeh (vinegar). Another common inclusion is my favorite Nowruz dish, a deep brown pudding called samanu in Iran, or sumalak in other Nowruz-celebrating countries, such as Uzbekistan. Tasting its sweet, nutty flavor, you’d never guess that samanu is also made of sabzi with no added sugar, thanks to a transformation that’s nothing short of magical. You can buy jarred samanu at Persian stores, or online. But if you’re up for a culinary challenge, you can make it yourself, as I did for the first time last Nowruz. Making samanu from scratch can be daunting because of one key, unskippable ingredient: time. The entire process, from grain to sprouts to pudding, takes about one week, at the end of which you’ll be babysitting a pot on the stove for an entire day. But in my opinion, all that time and effort just makes it even more special. Traditionally, the hard work of preparing samanu was shared. Women and children would gather to tell stories, sing songs, and make wishes for the New Year while taking turns stirring the pot. Last year, I was worried about getting things right—and wanted to give myself some buffer if I failed—so I timed the recipe to finish a few days early. This meant I had to freeze my samanu and defrost it for our Nowruz party, but this had no effect on its flavor (it is magical, after all). I decided to make it an annual tradition and prepared samanu again this year, but with slightly more confidence. So how do wheatgrass sprouts become pudding? The secret is an ephemeral chemical reaction. Seeds like wheat grains are packed with plant fuel (sugar) stored as long chain molecules (starch). During germination, starch reserves break down into their component sugar molecules, which the growing plant consumes until it can make more energy from the sun. For a brief moment, the sprout is flooded with sweetness. Samanu is made by extracting the juice of these maximally-sweet sprouts and cooking it low and slow. The sprout juice gradually thickens due to the remaining starch, loses its grassy taste, and darkens as the sugars caramelize. The process can be compared with malting, the roasting and grinding of sprouts at their peak sweetness, which produces the sweet, nutty malt flour prized for everything from beer to milkshakes. Additional wheat flour and water helps maintain samanu’s consistency, but nothing else is needed. However, some people add a splash of saffron water, or toss in almonds or walnuts at the last moment while making a final wish for the New Year. Samanu may also be garnished with nuts, or with pomegranate seeds, which is my preference because of the exquisite color contrast. If you make samanu, however you choose to serve it, be sure to marvel at it when you do. Your efforts have paid off and, improbably, you have made a dessert entirely out of wheat. You have distilled the pure essence of springtime.
London has a rich theatrical history. The city boasts over 240 performance venues, with more than 40 of them being located in what is called the West End. But what happens when one of these playhouses goes belly-up or is destroyed? Luckily for one in particular, the St. James's Theatre on King Street, four bas-relief panels have been saved from demolition. The reliefs are visible from a side-street, Angel Court, adjacent to where this once prestigious auditorium once stood. The sculptured art pieces were created by Edward Bainbridge Copnall. They depict the faces of theater promoter Gilbert Miller, actor George Alexander, playwright Oscar Wilde, and esteemed thespians Vivien Leigh and Sir Laurence Olivier. These Carrara marble panels also include various scenes from several productions associated with the theater in its heyday. St. James's Theatre opened in 1835 and operated for over 100 years before it was demolished in 1957. It got a reputation for being unlucky due to a high volume of short-lived productions. But the Greek revival-style building was also revered for having hosted premier performances of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan. The four marble bas-relief panels at the former site of the theater were erected as balcony fronts to an office building erected in 1959 called St. James's House. They were meant to be an homage to individuals who had connections to the theater. By 1986, St. James's House had also been demolished, but the relief panels remain. The artworks are not the only tribute to this by-gone playhouse. The Golden Lion pub, located next door, showcases a theater bar, complete with a staircase adorned with black and white photos of famous persons with links to this once grand institution.
The history of Judaism in Mexico generally reflects that of Jewish communities in Europe and the Mediterranean. In Iberia, Sephardic Jews lived relatively freely until the late 14th century, when Catholic authorities brought about mass conversions. Many converted (or appeared to), becoming known as Conversos. In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon ordered the expulsion of non-Christians from the Peninsula, mostly targeting Muslims and unconverted Jews. Conversos were almost certainly among the early migrants from Spain to what is now Mexico; though given Catholic oppression, Judaism was not practiced in the open. As Jewish populations in Europe fluctuated throughout the centuries, based on local tolerance and trends, migration to the Americas continued to reflect these shifts. Mexico, like Europe, was affected by the rise and policies of the Ottoman Empire. The late 19th century saw a mass exodus from Ottoman-conquered territories, including present-day Lebanon and Syria. Many of these emigrants settled in Mexico, where they are commonly called Libaneses. While the majority were Christian, Jewish migrants from the Middle East, known as Mizrahi, established Mexico’s first openly Jewish community in the late 1800s. In the early 20th century, further Jewish migrations followed, mainly Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe fleeing antisemitism and pogroms, which culminated in the Holocaust. This heritage is reflected in the synagogue’s centerpiece, the aron qodesh, which houses the Torah; it is modeled after one in Lithuania at the request of the donor who provided the land. The temple, called Nidje Israel, was established in 1941 as a place of worship for the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi community, distinct from the Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking Mizrahi. The official name of Justo Sierra comes from its location on a street named after the Mexican intellectual and writer who advocated for public education but had no known connection to Judaism. The synagogue’s construction features a double facade—the Justo Sierra one being that of the Colonial building that once stood there, and the synagogue that was built in Art Deco style popular at the time. Within the temple, a piece of rubble from its sister Nidjei Israel Synagogue, which collapsed in the 2017 Mexico earthquake, is on permanent display. Like in many other places around the world, Jewish communities in Mexico face antisemitism and stereotypes, especially when it comes to perceptions of Israel’s foreign policies. During the Israel-Palestine war of the mid-2020s, Mexico’s government supported South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. In 2024, Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum, its first female president, and the first with known Jewish ancestry. As a member of the left-leaning Morena party, however, she has largely supported the Palestinian cause. This stance, and the apparent fact that she is non-practicing, has sparked conflicting views on her Jewish identity, both within and beyond Mexico’s Jewish community. Her presidency serves as a reminder of the significance of the Jewish community in the country’s history—from this synagogue to the nation’s highest office.
This story was originally published on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. St. Patrick’s Day usually conjures images of partying, Catholicism, Irish nationalism and, perhaps most famously, the color green: green clothes, green shamrocks, green beer, and green rivers. So my students are often surprised when I tell them that St. Patrick’s Day was once a solemn feast day when you’d be far more likely to see the color blue. In fact, there’s even a color known as St. Patrick’s blue. ‘True Blue’ Historians don’t know much about St. Patrick. But they believe he was born in the fifth century as Maewyn Succat. He wasn’t Irish; rather he was born in Wales, the son of a Roman-British official. He was, however, captured by Irish pirates and enslaved in Ireland. After six years he went back to Britain but returned to Ireland as one of the missionaries to convert Irish pagans to Christianity. At some point he adopted the Latin name Patricius. In the 10th century, the first evidence of St. Patrick being a beloved figure in Ireland emerged. In the early 17th century, Luke Wadding, an Irish priest, persuaded the Catholic Church to make March 17 a feast day for St. Patrick. Back then, feast days were far from raucous affairs: Catholics typically went to Mass and then had a quiet dinner at home to celebrate. Other denominations, including Anglicans and Lutherans, recognized the day as well. But any commemorations would include the color blue. The Dublin Evening Post reported that in a 1785 St. Patrick’s Day ceremony in Dublin, a group of men identifying themselves as patriots “marched in a grand procession round the garden, dressed in true blue, and carrying along with them a number of curious pageants.” Constance Markievicz, who fought in the 1916 Easter Rebellion for independence and was the first minister of labour in the Irish Free State, maintained that blue was “the old colour of Ireland.” To connect the past to the nationalist movement, she used blue as the background for the Irish Citizen Army’s flag. In 1934, Irish politician W.T. Cosgrave asserted that blue is “in perfect, traditional, national accord with our history and in close association with the most revered and venerated memory of our patron Saint.” Out With the Old, In With the New Since the 12th century, Ireland had been a colony of Great Britain. Like the American colonists who rebelled against the British crown, a group of rebels called the United Irish launched an insurrection in 1798 in a quest for independence. Led mostly by middle-class Protestants and in coordination with some Catholics, the United Irish adopted the “wearing of the green” to represent Irish nationalism and their fight against British imperialism. The rebellion failed, and the British government made Ireland part of the United Kingdom in 1801 to prevent future revolutions. The government also bestowed greater rights to Protestants over Catholics. Ireland became more sectarian over the course of the 19th century, and nationalism became more associated with Catholicism. In some ways, the two became interchangeable. With nationalism ascendant and Catholics outnumbering Protestants, green was widely embraced, particularly since it had been worn by the United Irish. Green Crosses the Pond Before the 1840s, most Irish immigrants to America had been Protestants, many of whom had been the descendants of Scottish settlers in Ulster and would later become known as the Scots Irish. Like those that would succeed them, they celebrated St. Patrick’s Day to commemorate their connection to Ireland. In the earliest recorded American celebration of the day, banquets toasting Ireland and St. Patrick took place in Boston in 1737. By the 1760s, annual parades were being held in New York and on the island of Montserrat to celebrate Irish culture and identity. Irish immigration to the new world increased dramatically after the Great Hunger of the 1840s, when the potato crops failed and over 1 million indigent Catholics arrived in the U.S. Facing discrimination from American Protestants who claimed they were more loyal to the pope than to the U.S., they viewed St. Patrick’s Day as a link to the history and culture of Ireland. Celebrations were a badge of pride and dignity, and they called for Irish independence to demonstrate they, too, believed in republican principles. Irish nationalist groups active in the U.S.—the Fenians, Clan na Gael, and, later, Irish Northern Aid—participated in these American St. Patrick’s Day parades, proudly wearing green to demonstrate their nationalism and the connection to past nationalist groups such as the United Irish. In Ireland, however, St. Patrick’s Day remained a solemn day of observance with little revelry. The Irish government didn’t recognize St. Patrick’s Day as a public holiday until 1903, and the first parade in Dublin wasn’t held until 1931. Even pubs remained closed on March 17 until 1961. Since 1922, when 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland became semi-independent, the tricolor flag of Ireland has been the official flag. Green represents the Catholics, orange represents the Protestants, and the white in the middle symbolizes peace. Yet green remains the color associated with St. Patrick’s Day and Ireland throughout the world, largely due to the Catholic diaspora and its association with nationalism. However, blue still plays a symbolic role in Ireland: Since 1945, the flag representing the president of Ireland has a gold harp with a dark blue background—the color known as St. Patrick’s blue.
In 1887, New York’s infamous Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island received a new patient named Nellie Brown. She was a bit different from the other occupants there. As soon as she entered the doors, all of the intense acting out that had landed her there disappeared. That’s because Nellie Brown was really Nellie Bly, an undercover journalist on assignment for a newspaper called the New York World. Bly faked her own insanity, fooling several doctors and a judge, to get sent to the institution. Blackwell’s opened as the New York City Lunatic Asylum in 1839 on what’s known today as Roosevelt Island. It was a state-run hospital housing poor patients. Tours of the facility were popular and seen as ways to make money and ensure patients were given the best treatment. The complex was meant to house 1,000 patients, but by the late 1800s, Blackwell’s was severely overcrowded with nearly 1,600 people. Tourism ground to a halt, budgets were cut, and fewer doctors were able to provide care. But most visitors were not able to see what was going on behind the walls. Bly’s reporting gave one of the first real accounts of the brutality and horrors female patients faced at asylums like it. About 100 years earlier, institutions like Blackwell’s were built to essentially imprison the mentally ill and did not have mission statements intended to cure or treat them. Asylums across England and the U.S. became magnets for curious tourists who mostly went to gawk at patients as if participating in a spectator sport. Practitioners running the asylums—who weren’t doctors at that point—had no training and believed mental illness was a disease of the body, not a condition of the brain. They used cruel and inhumane treatments that reflected this thinking, including blood-letting, ice baths, starvation, and corporal punishment. “Dangerous” patients were often chained to walls naked, and others underwent “rotational therapy”: spinning in a chair for hours to induce vomiting. London's Bethlem Royal Hospital, known as Bedlam, is one of the best-known asylums where tourism thrived. It opened in 1247 as a monastery, and by 1407 it was housing mental patients. Tourism began there in the early 1700s and continued well into the 18th century. Visitors paid a penny entrance fee to wander the wards. Superintendents hoped that visitors would feel compassion for the patients and therefore donate to the hospital. The reality was most tourists were there simply to see—and often ridicule—patients. “Looking at the patients made those on the outside feel privileged because they weren’t like them,” says Troy Rondinone, a historian at Southern Connecticut State University and author of Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination. “These were popular places to go, and they did have zoo-like, leering atmospheres.” There were rules about what tourists could see, but supers couldn’t always control the exchanges with patients. Many patients didn’t seem bothered by the visitors, scholar and historian Janet Miron writes in Prisons, Asylums and the Public. Miron reports that some visitors to Blackwell’s in New York even suggested some patients seemed to like the company and attention. Many patients were social and answered tourist questions. Others, however, hid in seclusion, shirking the intrusion and glares from strangers. These were the patients who suffered from asylum tourism, Miron writes. The tourists experienced some slight mental discomfort, as well. One visitor to Bedlam reported hearing rattling of chains, drumming on doors, and patients ranting and singing so frighteningly, it could “put Hell in an uproar.” “There was this false idea that patients would be cured,” Rondinone says. “But in reality, they were essentially trapped and stripped of all of their belongings, living in a place with iron bars on the windows.” “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap,” Bly wrote. By the early 19th century, though, asylums began to change, and the use of “moral treatment” was on the rise. Mental illness was no longer considered a disease of the body, but was thought of as curable. An idea grew that if asylums were designed well and managed properly, conditions inside would improve. But tourism didn't stop. Contrary to the 1700s when visitors mostly went to witness the spectacles inside, Miron writes that 19th-century citizens considered tours as part of their duty “to improve the treatment of the insane.” Hospital superintendents had to convince the public that the brutal treatments of the past were over. “Tourism was still about money but also about getting good press,” Rondinone says. “The hospitals were treating patients and ‘healing’ them and could ask for more money to ensure the hospitals stayed alive.” So tourism continued with less outright exploitation. Asylums were such a firm part of the tourism industry that the hospitals were promoted in ads and tour books at the time. Blackwell’s was listed in the 1880 Miller's New York As It Is guidebook. “A visit to the several establishments on this island will well repay anyone interested in the efforts for ameliorating human suffering,” the guidebook author wrote. “The humane object of this institution is to separate vagrants from criminals, and to compel all to work who are able to do something towards their own support.” There was a change in why the public toured asylums and what parts, too. At the time, many asylums were built following psychiatrist Thomas Kirkbride’s design. Kirkbride believed that housing patients in an environment with fresh air and natural light would promote better health. “Kirkbride was very proud of the design and wanted architects and visitors to see it and how it was healing people’s minds,” Rondinone says. These asylums were massive structures that included two wings with corridors to allow sunlight and air ventilation. They had sprawling gardens that were designed to be sanctuaries for patients, but also to be part of their recovery. Occupational therapy was part of moral treatment, so patients could farm the land and tend to the grounds as part of their therapy. In fact, the meticulously designed grounds were becoming huge draws for tourism. “The approach to the Asylum from the southern entrance, by the stranger who associates the most sombre scenes with a lunatic hospital, is highly pleasing,” Miller’s New York As It Is guidebook stated. “The view from the top of it, being the most extensive and beautiful of any in the vicinity of the city.” By the late 1800s, around the time Nellie Bly got herself committed at Blackwell’s, optimism surrounding moral treatment began to decline. It was the cusp of the Industrial Revolution in America and more immigrants were coming to the United States. Soon state-funded asylums were full of impoverished people and immigrants who didn’t speak English. Superintendents were tasked with managing overcrowded facilities with little staff. Blackwell’s population swelled from 278 in 1840 to more than 1,300 by 1870. To save money, the hospital skimped on food. Manicured gardens and occupational therapy gave way to corporal punishment, restraints, and drugs. “What you start seeing inside is mirroring [people’s] outside standings,” Rondinone explains. “If you were wealthy, you could pay and go to a nice sanitarium. If you were poor, you were put in a state hospital like Blackwell’s.” By the late 19th century, Blackwell’s and other asylums like it were full of the city’s lower classes. By the time Bly was committed to Blackwell’s, stopping by an asylum wasn’t easy for tourists. Visits had become reserved mostly for wealthy females with charitable clout who considered the task as part of fulfilling her duties to society. Writings from these wealthy women at the time contradict what patients really experienced. The affluent certainly didn’t see what Bly faced—and exposed to the public—which became a two-part series on the front page of the New York World. Bly started with the small things like the horrible food. Soup was spoiled. Tea “tasted as if it had been made in copper,” she wrote. Buttered bread and oatmeal were inedible. She revealed how the building was freezing and how she and other female patients were subjected to regular beatings and torture, like ice baths. “It was hopeless to complain to the doctors, for they always said it was the imagination of our diseased brains,” she wrote. Bly admitted she never attempted to act insane while inside. She wrote “the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be.” Bly ended up suspecting the treatments were making patients worse. “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap,” she wrote. “It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.” But Bly did get out, and her exposé for the newspaper shocked the public. Her pieces eventually helped lead to the kind of reform the watchful eyes of tourists never could. “Around this time, cities were trying to allocate money for mental hospitals,” Rondinone explains, “but [Bly’s] series of articles definitely outraged people and led to a huge push for reform.” Other reports confirmed Bly’s articles, and several months later, she published a book about her experience called Ten Days in a Mad-House. However, for all its negatives, asylum tourism did have some positives. It may have helped educate the public about mental illness and showed what treatments did—and did not—work. “The idea that they were curing people was a myth,” Rondinone says. “The truth was it was reform through enslavement, and that was very disturbing to people.” Today, the only tours of asylums are those that are abandoned and turned into haunted houses. The patients are mercifully no longer present, but as far as society has come, the fascination in people's minds is still there. “I still don’t think asylum tourism says anything bad about us,” Rondinone continues. “I think it’s very human to be intrigued.” Sometimes that intrigue can lead to reform, other times it leads to abandoned tourism.
Few buildings in Hamburg feature such a jarring contrast between hulking, Brutalist concrete and lush greenery. This bunker started life in 1942 as part of the eight Flak towers, built during World War II to defend major German cities. These were largely the initiative of Adolf Hitler himself, who provided input into the initial designs. The towers were considered such a priority that Germany's railways were ordered to prioritize necessary construction shipments. Built primarily for anti-aircraft defense, one tower could provide a rate of fire of 8,000 rounds per minute with an 360-degree range of 14 kilometers. They also contained retractable radar installations and could double as air raid bunkers with a capacity of 10,000 people. A staggering 30,000 civilians crammed inside one during the Battle of Berlin. Although the Flak towers did not prevent cities from being intensely bombed by the Allies, their 3.5-meter-thick walls were so impenetrable that even the largest Soviet guns could do little damage. Following the war, some towers were not demolished because of the difficulty of doing so. The required explosives could have caused damage as far as two kilometers away. In the case of the Feldstraße Bunker, the auxiliary L-Tower used for communication and fire control was eventually demolished but the main G-Tower remained. It is the only surviving intact G-Tower of the first-generation design, consisting of a castle-like structure with four octagonal turrets. Immediately after the war, this Flak tower was used as emergency housing, since most of the city's homes were damaged by bombing the tower failed to prevent. In the early 1950s, it continued to be used as temporary housing for victims of domestic abuse. It also continued to be used as a potential bomb shelter due to the Cold War. In the 1990s, the bunker was repurposed as a center for different media businesses, including a concert hall, advertisement agencies, nightclub, and a musical instrument store. The idea of "greening" the bunker by adding plants on the exterior was first proposed in 1992, however the idea did not get off the ground until architect Mathias Müller-Using managed to attract investors to it in the 2010s. They added five stories to the building, which would be used as a hotel with restaurants, and event hall, and a fitness club. Criticisms were initially levied because the greenery had to be scaled back due to fire codes and the land was leased at a discount. The "green bunker" was finally completed in 2024 after two years of delay. It is open to all and has a rooftop garden and a "mountain path" panoramic staircase on the side.
The Great Library of Alexandria was famously lost in a fire caused by Julius Caesar, then dwindled away in time, and nothing at all remains today. No ruins, no artifacts, no nothing. But grieve not, dear bibliophiles, for there is another. The ruins of a Library of Alexandria can be found at the Serapeum site, one of the top tourist attractions in the city known for the enormous Pompey’s Pillar flanked by a pair of sphinxes. Originally built during the reign of Ptolemy III (246–222 BC), it is home to an underground network of tunnels and storerooms, which once served as a satellite location of the Library of Alexandria, established as the original facility began to run out of room for storage. Often described as a “sister” or “daughter” to the Great Library, the subterranean repository of ancient knowledge has been reduced to ruins through the ages, but still shows signs of what it was many centuries ago. On the walls in these dark tunnels are rock-cut niches, which must have once held a collection of papyrus scrolls, and it goes on and on, offering a glimpse into a lost ancient wonder.
Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, hear how John Ringling traded his wooden clown shoes for a life of luxury—then lost it all after transforming Sarasota, Florida into a circus capital. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Join us daily, Monday through Thursday, to explore a new wonder with cofounder Dylan Thuras and a neighborhood of Atlas Obscura reporters.
A unique institution is located within a 13th-century church on the banks of the Thames in Lambeth: the Garden Museum. This deconsecrated medieval Church of St Mary-at-Lambeth has been restored as Britain's only museum dedicated to the art, history, and design of gardens. The story of the Garden Museum began in 1976 when John and Rosemary Nicholson discovered that the neglected churchyard of St Mary-at-Lambeth housed the tomb of the renowned 17th-century royal gardeners and plant hunters John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger. The church, slated for demolition after its deconsecration in 1972, was rescued from oblivion when the Nicholsons opened the world's first museum of garden history in 1977. The museum's collections offer a glimpse into the social history of gardening, from the practical to the kitsch and twee. Tools, art, and specimens sit alongside vintage slug-repellent tins, garden gnomes, and plastic flamingos as the museum aims to capture every aspect of gardens and gardening and provide a diverse tapestry of horticultural history. Some of the most curious artifacts include a plant pot made from a German Howitzer shell by First World War soldiers for use in a garden they had established in their trench, a miniature pot of tulips created for Queen Mary's Doll House, and a gnome of former prime minister Tony Blair. A highlight of the museum is the recreation of The Tradescant Ark. The museum's Tradescant Ark Gallery provides a taste of England’s first public museum. The original "Ark," belonging to the Tradescants, father and son, was housed nearby and showcased a remarkable collection of natural curiosities and cultural artifacts to its 17th-century visitors. These pioneering naturalists and collectors, serving as gardeners to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, traveled extensively, gathering not only plants for the royal gardens but also a fascinating array of craft, creatures, and crystals. Their travels took the gardeners across Europe and Russia to North Africa, while John the Younger even journeyed to Virginia, collecting specimens from the New World. The recreated gallery, with its dark wood cabinets meticulously reconstructed based on historical descriptions, evokes the spirit of the original Ark. Inside, visitors can marvel at a fascinating, sometimes unsettling, assortment of taxidermied animals, gleaming crystals, shimmering shells, and crafts from around the globe. While not all original items survive, the gallery showcases objects similar to those that would have been present, offering insights into the Tradescants' 17th-century worldview. The accompanying labels reveal the blend of scientific observation and imaginative storytelling that characterized the era. For example, the display of the Barometz, or 'Vegetable Lamb', in fact, a collection of carefully arranged fern roots, highlights the 17th-century belief that there was a species of sheep that grew on a stalk, consuming surrounding vegetation before dying. The Tradescant collection was ultimately passed to Elias Ashmole, a friend of the family, who donated it to Oxford University, helping to establish the Ashmolean Museum. One of the museum's two gardens contains the incredibly elaborate tombs of the Tradescants and Captain William Bligh, who was set adrift during the mutiny on the Bounty. A 131-step ascent of the building’s medieval church tower rewards visitors with a breathtaking panoramic view of the surrounding area, including a unique perspective of The Palace of Westminster across the Thames and of the museum’s neighbor, Lambeth Palace.
Okinawa, the southernmost archipelagic prefecture of Japan, is home to many unique cultures utterly unknown in the mainland. Munchū is one such concept of genealogy, referring to communities of shared paternal ancestry. Though it is no longer as significant as it once was, it would often help establish a bond between strangers when they turn out to be distantly related. Traditionally, a munchū community consists of hundreds of people at once and funds local festivals, scholarships and funerals. When they pass away, its members are buried together in a mausoleum that their shared fund maintains. The largest example of such munchū gravesite can be found in the city of Itoman, belonging to the Kōchi clan as well as the Akahigi clan. Here, some 5,000 people have rested in peace for the past 300 years, all in a massive mausoleum that sprawls over a whole acre. The complex is composed of one main mausoleum called toshi and four sub-graves called shiruhirashi. The deceased are first buried in the latter for three years, and then their remains are washed after which they are relocated to the main mausoleum.
Located in a classic red-brick row house in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the Museum of the Palestinian People is easy to miss. It began in 2015 as a traveling exhibit named the Nakba Museum Project. Its founder and director, Bshara Nassar, hails from a Christian Palestinian family that runs an educational farm near Bethlehem. Inspired by D.C.’s many great museums, as well as his family’s work in cultural exchange, Nassar thought this city would be an excellent place for an American museum of Palestinian history and culture. In 2019, the traveling exhibit laid roots in Washington, the place where it began. Information panels tell the story of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and the Jews, Muslims, and Christians who are all indigenous to that land. There are also several historic artifacts, such as a few of the distinctive black and white keffiyeh, and a right-of-return key—a symbol of homes lost during forced relocation programs. Rather than being divided into discrete sections, the museum is laid out in a kind of mosaic. The displays of Palestinian history are interspaced with the artwork, demonstrating that the story of a people and its culture are inextricably tied together. The story of Palestinians today is marked by conflict with the state of Israel. As a result, much of modern Palestinian artwork features themes of war and resistance to occupation. As the cultural heritage of a people is destroyed through dispossession, demolition, or even genocide, it is important to have places that gives those people a voice. The Museum of the Palestinian People fosters a dialogue between Palestinians in Palestine, the Palestinian diaspora, and visitors to the museum, in the hope of that voice being heard.
On a pleasant December morning, Tarun Nayar was at a mangrove reserve in Mumbai, where he plugged his synthesizer into a thick leaf. The sound that emerged was hypnotic and otherworldly, blending a sense of the future with nostalgic echoes of 1980s synthwave. It felt like something right out of Stranger Things. Nayar is not your traditional musician—he’s a fungi whisperer. By connecting cables from his custom-built modular synthesizers to mushrooms, fruits, and leaves, he transforms their natural bioelectric signals into captivating sounds. During his performances, he works with focused precision, adjusting the knobs and buttons to fine-tune the rhythmic and peculiar sounds that are created. Over the last five years, Nayar has jammed with myriad types of fungi, including trumpet-shaped chanterelles and the glorious, red-roofed fly agaric mushrooms. He has also collaborated with a giant ficus tree, clumps of bamboo, sword ferns, a pineapple, and even the odd-looking citrus fruit called Buddha’s Hand. “It’s an intoxicating feeling to be able to make all these crazy sounds and program really interesting melodies, many of which will probably be impossible to play on a traditional instrument,” he muses. Music has always been central to Nayar’s life. Born to a Punjabi father and a Canadian mother, he was immersed in Indian classical music from an early age, particularly through his training in tabla, a type of hand drum. But for the past four years, the former biologist, who is based in Montreal, has been experimenting with what one may describe as plant music. Nayar’s journey into this experimental soundscape began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was living on a tiny island north of Vancouver, surrounded by nature. That’s when he began “messing around” with flora. He recalls plugging a software synthesizer into a salmonberry bush. “All of a sudden, the synthesizer started playing a piano patch,” he says. “I could actually ‘listen’ to the salmonberry bush.” Nayar was immediately hooked by the idea of transforming biological data into music. “To me, it was the coolest thing ever,” he recalls. “I knew I would be spending the next 10 years of my life exploring this.” In 2021, Nayar started posting videos of his “little experiments” on the internet under the stage name Modern Biology. While initially his videos on TikTok received only three to four views, slowly they gained momentum and worldwide attention, leading to tens of thousands of people appreciating his work. “To be honest, I was quite surprised that people were interested in this relatively niche practice. It really gave me a feeling of community during the pandemic when my bubble was quite small,” admits Nayar. Today, he has over 379,000 followers on Instagram alone. To be clear, fruits, fungi, and trees don’t make music. They don’t even produce sounds that lie within the audible range of human hearing. But as Nayar explains, “almost every behavior in plants and fungi is mediated by electrical impulses, just like in humans. Every thought, every movement, every little cellular division is associated with an electrical activity. These signals or processes are all reflected in the conductivity of the organism’s body. All I’m doing is tapping into these fluctuating electrical fields and translating the electrical signals into musical notes.” Nayar sometimes enhances the biofeedback by layering subtle, ethereal sound effects that help to amplify the soundscape. His interest in sound synthesis began several years before the pandemic, sparking a deep fascination that eventually led him to build his own analog synthesizers at home. He pursued courses focused on DIY synthesizers made out of breadboards—versatile plastic boards with perforated holes, designed for assembling electronic circuits by plugging in jumper cables. “It’s a way to rough out basic circuits,” he explains. One of the first exercises in the online course involved the humble orange. “We had to use it in a circuit as a resistor,” Nayar recalls. “Everything has electrical resistance, but some materials are so resistant that current can’t even pass through them. Fruits and vegetables, however, are effective conductors, allowing electrical current to flow through them.” When Nayar squeezed the orange, he realized that its conductivity changed, and the sound changed with it. “The pitch of the oscillator went up or down depending on whether you were squeezing it or not,” he says, adding with a hint of amusement, “you can actually play the synthesizer just by squeezing the orange!” From holding festivals in parks to conducting intimate gatherings at restaurants, Nayar has been gaining attention for his experimental music. His goal is to encourage people to reconnect with nature. “For the most part, as human beings we kind of forget that the world is alive,” he says. At many of his performances, guests are invited to engage with the natural world by foraging for mushrooms and plants, which Nayar then links to his synthesizer. With headphones on, attendees can immerse themselves in the unique sounds produced by the fungi, whether they’re relaxing on the grass or swaying to the rhythm. Mumbai-based ecological designer Gautam Muralidharan, who has known Nayar since 2009, describes the experience as “trippy.” “It’s like listening to the planet,” Muralidharan explains. “There’s something profound about connecting with the underground—the hidden, mysterious part of the Earth that we rarely interact with. What fascinates me is how Tarun blends technology, nature, and music in a way that’s both communicative and accessible to people.” As part of the Conscious Collective, an initiative created by the Godrej Design Lab that explores green design solutions in India, Nayar spent a few days experimenting with flora at a mangrove reserve in Mumbai in December 2024. “There were a couple of local fishermen over there, and when I encouraged them to listen to the mangroves, their response was very moving. One of them said that he felt the mangroves were asking him to ‘keep on watching over them, to keep taking care of them’,” recalls Nayar. Do the sounds shift in tone or feedback depending on the kind of plant? “Essentially, there is a large amount of variability even within the same organism over the course of a day,” responds Nayar. “As plants orient towards the sun, move water through their tissues, and photosynthesize, their conductivity changes dramatically. What I've noticed, anecdotally, is that plants tend to be a little more consistent in how their bioelectric fields change. Fungi, on the other hand, are unpredictable. I think it's within the realm of possibility that different species or groups of organisms have different bioelectric 'signatures' but this science is quite new, and we may be years and years away from knowing that for certain.” Nayar isn’t stopping with sound alone. He’s also exploring multisensory experiences, which led him to the food world. A couple of years ago, Portuguese chef Rui Mota learned about Nayar’s work and encouraged him to explore the visceral relationship between taste and sound. Intrigued, Nayar delved into scientific research and found that high frequencies can bring out sweeter flavors in food, while lower frequencies accentuate bitterness. He began hosting experimental events in San Diego, Salt Spring Island, and Los Angeles. “That’s when I witnessed how people could truly feel in their bodies how sound changes taste,” he explains. The first major iteration of an immersive dinner came in 2024 at Burdock & Co, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Vancouver. Nayar plugged the ingredients into his synthesizer, and dinner guests wore silent disco headsets so they could “hear” their lavish four-course meal as they were eating it. “We tried the food without the music and then with the music,” he explains. “And the guests used an app, which allowed them to give numerical scores to the sweetness and bitterness of food, before and after we heard the music. The experience was really interesting because we confirmed the scientific evidence that tastes change in certain ways when certain sounds are experienced.” The biggest takeaway for Nayar was how meditative the dining experience became, offering diners a profound somatic connection with their meal through sound. One of the guests, Eli Wener noted, “The meal was exceptional, but tasting the sound elevated the food beyond anything I've ever experienced before. You really have to live it to believe it.” Modern Biology stemmed from Nayar’s quest to understand what lies at the root of many people’s disconnect with the natural world. “I realized that we have lost our connection to our homes, to our land,” he notes. “As human beings, can we truly feel like we belong? Can we reconnect with the fact that our bodies are made of earth, our blood is made of water, and our lungs are filled with the exhalation of plants? Because when we’re in a state of connection, we won’t make destructive decisions. We won’t cut down virgin rainforests and we won’t hurt each other. We’ll realize that we’re all connected, just like the mycelium beneath the ground.”
Sat upon the exterior of Chelmsford Cathedral is a sculpture of St. Peter. Located on the southeast corner of the South Transept, this modern carving of the saint, produced by Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones, blends traditional symbolism with a few subtly contemporary touches. Officially ‘The Cathedral Church of St Mary the Virgin, St Peter, and St Cedd’, it is unsurprising that the church depicts the significant saint. St. Peter, traditionally recognized as the first Pope, is often depicted holding the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven in recognition of the authority bestowed upon him by Jesus. While the carving remains faithful to traditional symbolism, its style is distinctly modern. For example, in his carving, Huxley-Jones stayed true to this iconic key imagery with a twist, portraying St. Peter with an enlarged Yale key in his hand. Additionally, in a further modernized symbolic feature, St. Peter is dressed in fisherman's boots, a nod to the disciple's humble origins as a fisherman and his connection to the everyday lives of ordinary people. Its position is no coincidence, this depiction of St. Peter faces towards Bradwell and (the chapel) St. Cedd established upon arriving in Essex, connecting the cathedral to the roots of the faith in Essex.
In 1997—at the height of a wave of exposés, lawsuits, and public outrage against the tobacco industry—Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, launched a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. The factory he opened near the Atlanta International Airport to churn them out at scale attracted ample media attention. But this coverage was more positive than one might have expected. Torigian wasn’t actually involved in the dubious tobacco industry. Bravo cigarettes contained nothing but lettuce, dried and cured to look like tobacco, processed into sheets, shredded, flavored with herbal extracts, and rolled up and boxed like any other cig. Torigian’s marketing materials claimed that Bravo “tastes (well pretty close) like a cigarette,” but lacked their harmful nicotine and tobacco tar. However, in interviews, he stressed that he hadn’t spent 40 years developing the product just to offer a safer replacement for traditional smokes. He wanted people to use Bravo as a smoking cessation tool. “You get the physical and psychological satisfactions you’ve associated with smoking, like opening the pack, lighting up, puffing,” Bravo’s old website explained. So when you decide to quit tobacco but face cravings, “you smoke a Bravo instead of an ordinary cigarette until the time comes when you don’t need either.” “No matter how often you may have tried and failed,” the site promised, “Bravo will help you break the smoking habit entirely. It will do so safely, naturally and gradually at your own pace.” Even at the time, this struck many folks as an odd proposition. But Bravo wasn’t just one aging inventor’s offbeat idea. It was the most developed of many attempts, stretching back over a century, to develop alternatives to tobacco cigarettes. And Torigian’s persistence in bringing the brand to market, its modest success, and its eventual obsolescence reflect a rapid evolution from the ‘50s onwards in our understanding of the risks of smoking and the best ways to kick the habit. “Tobacco has always had its critics,” says Louis M. Kyriakoudes, director of the Albert Gore Research Center and an expert in the history of the tobacco industry and nicotine addiction research. Some early European users, writing around the turn of the 17th century, complained about its aroma, flavor, and effects on their breath. Others griped about price and availability. But a fair few worried about its impact on their health, too. “So, there’ve always been people looking for something else to smoke” that’d offer the same experience, says Kyriakoudes. As early as the mid-19th century, American inventors filed patents for tobacco replacements made of cheap, often fragrant materials like “finely cut cornstalks” or “leaves of sunflower and rhubarb.” A few of these early “herbal cigarettes” actually caught on towards the end of that century, Kyriakoudes adds—but primarily as medicinal items, smoked in order to “to treat upper respiratory tract symptoms like congestion.” The main legacy of those soothing, tobacco-free offerings was the development of easy-on-the-throat mentholated tobacco cigarettes. The search for an herbal blend that could replace tobacco really took off in the late 1940s, though—around the same time epidemiological research started to draw clear lines between tobacco and lung cancer. Initially, independent inventors like Jean U. Koree, who worked on everything from airplane parts to injectable drugs, led this safety-focused charge. (He patented a formula for turning wood pulp into pseudo-tobacco in 1948.) But after a series of damning studies piqued the public’s interest between 1953 and 1954, Big Tobacco got involved in alternatives research as well, Kyriakoudes explains, in order to develop ostensibly healthier cigarettes for the health-conscious. Simultaneously, they initiated their now-notorious campaigns to insist that tobacco cigs were safe and sowed doubt about public health research. “They saw this as a publicity problem, not a public health problem,” says Kyriakoudes. “They think they’ve got to come up with a safer product to assuage their customers’ concerns.” Torigian entered this research race in 1959. Born in Constantinople in 1922, his family immigrated to America in 1929, eventually establishing a pharmaceutical laboratory in New York City. Torigian served as a pharmacist’s mate in the Navy during World War II, got a degree in pharmacology from Columbia University in 1949, and worked with a series of small pharma firms in NYC. He later claimed that one of his mentors, Joseph Genovese, who managed a local drugstore chain, challenged him to develop a safer cigarette. He saw a “refreshingly simple, direct, and efficacious” way to meet that challenge: swap out tobacco and its nicotine. Like many early tobacco alternative researchers, Torigian initially planned to replace one habit with another. But according to his widow, Joanne Torigian, he became convinced that smoking any plant was potentially deadly, as it’d always produce some level of harmful tars and particulates. So he decided to design and market his tobacco alternative as a cessation tool. Torigian passed away in late 2021, at 99. But Joanne had a front row seat to his work on Bravo. She even gave the brand its name. “I come from an Italian background,” she says. “So when he told me he was interested in doing this, I said, ‘Oh, Puzant, bravo, bravo!’ And he said, ‘That’s what I’ll call it!’” In his lifetime, Torigian helped launch a few biomedical startups and assisted in the development of new forms of useful drugs like injectable anticoagulants and pediatric analgesics. But those closest to him say that Bravo, and the underlying idea of weaning people off smoking with a less harmful cigarette, became his lifelong obsession. In 1960, he filed a patent for a process to dry, cure, process, shred, and roll almost any leafy green into pseudo-tobacco. From the start, he had a hunch that lettuce would be especially close to tobacco in look and taste, without creating many harmful byproducts. But he experimented with over 200 plants to test that hunch. Carrot, peanut, and tomato tops; cabbage, grape, and watermelon leaves; hickory, maple, and rhododendron. He personally prepared and tried smoking them all. As Bravo’s site later summarized, “Most were awful and made him feel sick.” By 1965, he’d circled back to lettuce. And while most researchers were still tinkering with ideas, he worked with a set of investors to open a factory in Hereford, Texas, hire around 200 workers, and start churning out 90,000 packs a month. Although a brash decision in hindsight, at the time he had reason to believe the venture would be a big success. There were virtually no smoking cessation tools on the market, and tobacco insiders seemed to believe there’d be real consumer demand for the right alternative smokeable. Torigian was so confident he’d found “the answer to the global smoking problem” that he appeared before a 1967 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the development of safer cigs to declare “with some pride that such a product has been achieved.” He presciently called on Congress not to put any faith in filters, the big safety solution of the era, lambasted the tobacco industry for willful inaction on health and safety solutions, and urged legislators to join him in an “all-out-attack” on nicotine and tobacco. But by 1969, Bravo was defaulting on loan payments, and by 1972 the brand was in bankruptcy. Kyriakoudes suspects that Torigian struggled with marketing; he was going head-to-head with a massive industry, after all, and trying to sell a safer alternative to a product many people still saw as largely safe. Torigian himself later claimed that he’d simply struggled with logistics and hostile business partners. But it's likely the biggest problem was that Bravo’s lettuce faux-tobacco cigarettes simply smelled and tasted terrible. People who tried them said they were worse than “coffee grounds in a newspaper wrapper,” and akin to “smoking old socks.” Several tobacco alternative researchers cited “pungent, acrid, and objectionable burning odors” and “undesirable taste” as major hurdles to their projects. They tried to find solutions through the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, experimenting with ever more leaves—banana, coconut palm, taro—and with additives like paprika, sassafras, and turmeric. But the tobacco industry seemingly pulled support for alternatives research around the mid-‘70s. By then, Kyriakoudes explains, they had a solid playbook for muddying the waters of public health research and stymieing regulations—as well as a firm internal understanding of nicotine’s addictiveness and how to use it to retain customers. Kyriakoudes suspects that the handful of individual inventors who kept pushing towards tobacco alternatives did so out of a genuine belief in harm reduction and desire to help others kick their tobacco habits. That’s certainly what drove Torigian to keep tinkering with his lettuce leaves, even after he lost his life savings on Bravo’s initial outing. After Bravo, he moved to Malaysia to help establish and manage a drug manufacturing plant, then took over and expanded his family’s lab. He officially retired in 1984, but experimented with startups like an early online nutritional counseling service. All the while, in his free time, he was patenting new drying and curing racks, new enzymatic processing solutions, and other new approaches to make a Bravo 2.0 launch more successful. His persistence may have been fueled in part by obsession. But it also reflected a reasonable belief that there was still a need for something like Bravo. Despite Big Tobacco’s best efforts, awareness of the dangers of smoking gradually grew with time—yet the first nicotine gum to help people quit smoking only got FDA approval in 1984. Over the next decade, medical consensus emerged that a mix of nicotine replacement and counseling or therapy were the best tools to help people quit smoking. But not everyone had access to these resources—and folks like Torigian thought there ought to be an alternative to (as he saw it) replacing one form of nicotine delivery with another. Torigian also started his work in an era when even anti-tobacco crusaders viewed smoking as an oddly sticky social habit rather than an addiction. Despite mounting evidence that nicotine ought to be treated like other addictive drugs, health officials hesitated to endorse that view until the late ‘80s—in part because they feared labeling so many people as addicts in need of treatment. Torigian, like many other researchers, remained convinced that with the right support the mind could master any physical craving. After all, Bravo helped him master his own cravings. According to Joanne, they were both smokers until Torigian started his work on Bravo. (He was a menthols man.) She quit cold turkey after he sent her to a hospital for a graphic look at a chronic smoker’s lung. But he needed something to help with his urges. The Bravo-fueled taper-down strategy he developed got him past the worst of them. When Torigian relaunched Bravo into the booming but uncertain smoking cessation market of the late 1990s, he came prepared with a handful of scientific studies that supposedly showed lettuce cigarettes were safer than nicotine and could blunt cravings. He found doctors willing to endorse it as a cessation method, and included quitting strategy literature on his site and in bulk orders. He even came up with messaging to hedge against the taste factor. “As you know it takes a few packs to become accustomed to any new brand,” one Bravo ad reads. “Accept the different taste. Enjoy a more pleasant aroma,” reads another. Wallace Pickworth, a prolific tobacco health effects researcher, explained over email that he and other scientists whose work Torigian referenced actually used Bravo cigarettes as a control in a few studies on the effects of nicotine. He still finds Bravo fascinating, but says their unpalatability limited their usefulness. Dozens of pharmacies sold Bravos across the US until about 2010. So clearly, Torigian found a consumer base, and probably did help a few people. Both research and a small body of Bravo testimonials suggest a placebo can provide a little withdrawal relief, which can make the difference for some aspiring quitters. But time and research have shown that tools like Bravo don’t help a notable number of people on their quitting journeys, and may actually distract folks from more effective solutions. A small body of research also suggests that, while safer in some respects, lettuce releases certain heavy metals when smoked, and its tars carry unique risks. So Bravo (and most other herbals) were in the end arguably as dangerous as tobacco. Joanne wasn’t privy to the internal workings of Bravo in its last days, but it seems as if the brand simply petered out as the American cessation market went down a different trajectory. You can still buy herbal cigarettes in U.S. today. But they’re mostly sold as cool or witchy affectations (think clove, lavender, and mugwort smokes), or as smokey movie props. Still, Torigian remained convinced to the end that he was onto something big—that his lettuce cigarettes would be his legacy. And interest in the idea of an herbal cessation tool does persist in a few countries. Over the last decade, inventors in China, Korea, and Thailand have patented tobacco-free cigarettes, made of tea leaves, lotus, chicory, and more, to help people break free of tobacco. A 2024 study found that over 78 percent of the few dozen herbal cigs sold on global online marketplaces make (often unsupported) cessation aid claims. So for better or worse, Torigian's questionable yet well-intentioned dream of alternative cigarettes may yet be alive. Joanne is certainly still a true believer. “It would be wonderful if someone wanted to try this again,” she says of Bravo. “If someone wanted to do this to help people give up smoking.”
At first glance, the painting appears almost ordinary. A male subject, his identity lost to the centuries, gazes solemnly out to the viewer from his oval frame, housed in a slightly yellowed paper card holder 5 inches in length and 6.25 inches in height. The details of lavish garments rendered in precise strokes from a woodcock feather brush are still clear, but the edges of the picture appear frayed—with good reason. This particular work was painted not on canvas, but on the ethereal strands of a spider web. Although much remains unknown about the painting, there are a few clues to its origins. The words Gemälde auf Spinnengewebe, German for “Paintings on Cobweb,” are written next to it, along with the signature Fr. Unterberger in Innsbruck (Tirol). Carol Mobley, the current owner of the work, is offering it for sale at the Ephemera Fair in Greenwich, Connecticut, on March 14 and 15. Mobley came by this particular oddity almost by chance. “The guy I got it from was in his 90s and had it for maybe 40 years,” she says. “He said that a relative gave it to him. He’d always meant to do more research into its origins, but never got around to it.” Almost certainly, the painting made a transatlantic voyage from Tyrol, Austria, and passed through Ellis Island. “It's just a shame that some of the cobweb has deteriorated away, I'm sure that's from being jostled around over the years,” Mobley says. Given how far it journeyed, though, it’s a wonder it’s still intact at all. In the 19th century, Spinnwebenbilder, also known as cobweb painting or gossamer painting, was a somewhat popular form of folk art in the Tyrolian Alps. Due to the fragile nature of these gossamer works, fewer than 100 such paintings have survived the ravages of time. Almost all are in private family collections, sequestered away into drawers or passed down as heirlooms. No one knows exactly who first thought the dewy strands of spiderwebs and silk caterpillars would make for a suitable artistic medium. Most likely they were a member of a monastic order near the Puster Valley, an alpine vale stretching through Italy and Austria. By the 16th century, these monks had developed a mastery of the laborious process of collecting cobwebs, washing them, then layering them on top of one another. Once the webs formed a milky, opaque surface, they would stretch them over mats to form their miniscule canvases, then grab their brushes. The resulting renditions of Catholic saints would have appeared to float like specters in cloister windows. The Chester Cathedral in England is home to one of the last such pieces of iconography: an image of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child, painted by the Tyrolean artist Johann Burgman. As the centuries crept by, secular subjects entered these ghostly frames. Mobley speculates that the figure in her painting was an Austrian military man from his uniform. Dukes, duchesses, and other members of society who were wealthy enough to afford a portrait are common subjects, along with landscapes and pastoral scenes. Franz Unterberger, the artist who signed this particular work, played an outsized role in popularizing these curiosities. Although an accomplished oil painter, Unterberger most likely did not wield the brush here. Rather, he worked as an art dealer out of a shop in Tyrol, where he commissioned cobweb paintings from anonymous artists and sold them. His business continued into the 1930s, by which time the last artist with the knowledge of this enigmatic craft had passed away. While a few 20th-century artists have taken a stab at the finicky medium, the art has largely died out. All that remain are a few rare fragments of a lost art.
A bowl of fool’s noodles might look unassuming, but its simplicity holds decades of history and cultural significance. Found in noodle shops across Taiwan, this dish consists of thin, chewy noodles tossed with scallions and a lightly seasoned oil-based sauce. Unlike most noodle dishes, it arrives at the table without toppings, and diners adjust the flavor themselves with black vinegar, chili oil, and spicy bean dregs. One of the most well-known spots for Fool’s Noodles is Xiaonanmen Fuzhou Fool’s Noodles, a shop that has been serving this dish for over 70 years. The name “fool’s noodles” has an uncertain origin. Some say that, because the dish is so simple and inexpensive, only a fool would order something so plain instead of more elaborate options. A more credible explanation is that the name comes from Taiwanese Hokkien pronunciation, where “fool” (shǎguā) sounds similar to “sa̍h-koe,” referring to briefly boiled noodles. The dish also traces its origins to Fuzhounese immigrants, and while some shops call it "Fuzhou (dry) noodles," the Taiwanese version has evolved into its own distinct style, with no identical counterpart in China. Eating fool’s noodles is about finding the right balance of flavors. Many shops suggest first tasting the noodles as they are, then adding black vinegar before adjusting with chili oil or spicy bean dregs. Some diners prefer a heavier mix of all three condiments, while others keep it light to let the original scallion oil flavor stand out. The noodle typically goes with a clear bowl of soup with simple choices of wontons, a boiled egg, and meatballs.
Constructed throughout the 1860s, the Megatron is a culvert upon which Sheffield Station—formally known as Midland Station—was built. Allowing an increase in transport to the burgeoning industrial centre, and covering the stinky sewer-filled waters, the culvert was an important architectural work that has long been forgotten. Today, visitors to the train station stand just feet above the Victorian tunnel network, but urban explorers and guided tours can take curious patrons down into the underground. A quick hop down into the River Porter — named for its dark color — leads into the tunnels. Guides take visitors through the brick tunnels, under bridges, and ultimately arrive at the main attraction: a high-ceilinged atrium where several murders were allegedly once committed hundreds of years ago.
In Vienna, Italy, a clean chimney is considered essential for ringing in the New Year. According to tradition, the chimney sweep is a perennial bringer of good luck and contentment, especially in winter when fireplaces blaze at full force. When a family knew their chimney was clean, domestic peace reigned, and their family could be sure of a safe and warm holiday, heralding a prosperous new year. In Vienna, the importance of having a professional class of chimney sweeps began when the city passed a fireplace inspection law in 1432. By 1512, Emperor Maximilian I granted Hans von Mailand the first chimney sweep patent. Allegedly, Viennese royalty likely owe the preservation of their titles to the chimney sweep. As legend has it, a sweep at Schönbrunn Palace once overheard a plot against the kaiser and put a damper, as it were, on the coup. This is often cited as another reason that encountering a chimney sweep is good luck. Nearly 600 years after the momentous fireplace regulation, some 150 sweeps currently swab Vienna’s vents. Each rauchfangkehrer undergoes six years of training before being considered a master sweeper, and the fullest account of their skills and history are contained in two rooms on the second floor of the Rauchfangkehrermuseum (Wieden District Museum). Brushes, fire equipment, figurines, official decrees and certificates, toys, banners, and a host of related paraphernalia await those who venture into the archival stacks. Unusual items lurk in every corner, including myriad pig effigies which may at first seem out of place, until one realizes that they are likewise symbols of luck and are frequently paired with chimney sweeps. Look carefully and one will spot an amusing figure of St Florian, the patron saint of chimney sweeps, firefighters, blacksmiths, and soap-makers. Those who are true rauchfangkehrer enthusiasts should also consider visiting during Fasching, commonly referred to as “ball season”, which begins in November and lasts until Shrove Tuesday. Since 1991, the chimney sweeps have hosted their own Vienese ball featuring original dances celebrating their unique vocation.
Home to several national museums and a major zoo, as well as numerous temples and shrines, Ueno Park is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Tokyo. You’d think it's been explored by tourists all over, and you couldn’t have been more wrong. The western portion of the park is home to the Shinobazu-no-ike, a lotus-covered natural pond; and at the heart of it is an artificial island built in the mid-17th century to accommodate the Benten-dō temple, modeled after the sacred island of Chikubu on Lake Biwa. Originally, the temple was to be established on Shōden-jima, a tiny natural island on the Shinobazu Pond whose name roughly means Ganesha Island, but it was deemed too small for such purpose. It is a fascinating site that still exists, yet virtually unknown despite being located in Ueno Park. How come? The thing is, the island only opens to the public once every 12 days, on the Day of the Snake—likely because the goddess Benten is associated with snakes. Even on the days it is open, the island is so tiny that visitors may not realize that it is an island. Accessible via a stone bridge, the island is home to a torii arch, a fox statuette, a variety of shrinelets and religious stelae, as well as a statue of En-no-ozuno, a 7th-century mystic known as the founder of Shugendō asceticism. Intriguingly, the statue is placed so that it faces the Shinobazu-no-ike, and only lucky visitors to Shōden-jima gets to see its backside, which is designed to look phallic.
This eclectic entertainment complex was started by two like-minded artistic types Tim Vincent-Smith and Matthew Wright, in 2017. Their combined creative endeavors developed the world's first theatrical amphitheater constructed entirely out of disused piano parts. A year later, their hard work of salvaging musical instruments from landfills was premiered, to great acclaim, at the city's botanical gardens. Visitors can try playing the interactive musical sculptures, or enjoy musical performances hosted in a ring of seating made, of course, of dismantled pianos. For nearly a decade they have been fabricating these Frankenstein-like musical contraptions to bring melodious entertainment to various communities around the globe. These include concerts in Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as a number of city-wide interactive sculptures in Leeds. For the last several years they have called a warehouse along the city's waterfront home. Here they offer a variety of concerts and workshops, as well as adoptions for repurposed pianos.
Most people visit Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi to see sights related to the park’s volcanoes, including Halemaʻumaʻu Crater at the top of Kilauea and the various lava flows produced by Kilauea in recent decades. Given the destructive capacity of the recent volcanic activity, the park may seem like an unlikely location for an archaeological site, yet one of the most notable collections of petroglyphs within Polynesia can be found downslope from Kilauea’s summit. The site, named Puʻuloa (long hill), lies in a lava field that formed between the years 1200 1450. Today, a seemingly barren lava field near an active volcano may not seem like a good place to leave petroglyphs, but the lava at Puʻuloa is actually ideal for it. This lava is a form of rock called pahoehoe, with smooth layers on top and rougher, darker layers underneath, so images pecked into the rock appear very prominently. Additionally, Puʻuloa is located where two ancient Hawaiʻian land divisions (or ahupuaʻa) once met, and such sites on the Big Island were quite common places for people to create petroglyphs. The site contains over 23,000 petroglyphs. Most of these are small circular holes called puka, that were created after a baby was born. The child’s mother would peck the small hole into the rock, deposit a small segment of the child’s umbilical cord into it, and then cover it with a rock. However, Puʻuloa features many other geometric designs, particularly circles, as well as depictions of people. Some are drawn as stick figures, others are drawn with triangular torsos, while more are drawn with thicker, heavier lines and filled-in torsos. Uniquely, the site also features a very rare petroglyph of a sea turtle.
For most visitors passing by the National Taiwan Museum, the two bronze oxen at the front entrance often go inadvertently unnoticed. Despite a sign that states “No Climbing,” children frequently turn the animals into an impromptu playground. The oxen originally belonged to the Taiwan Grand Shrine, the highest-ranking Shinto shrine in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. Located in Yuanshan, the shrine was dismantled after World War II, and the site was later repurposed into what is now the Grand Hotel. In 1949, the oxen were relocated to their current location, where they have remained ever since. Though they appear as a pair, the two oxen were commissioned separately. The East Ox, closer to the MRT station, was cast in 1935 by the Hōan-kai, a Buddhist organization from Hokkaido, Japan. It was dedicated to the Taiwan Grand Shrine in memory of soldiers who died in the 1868 Battle of Hakodate. The West Ox, cast in 1937, was a gift from the Japanese merchant Kawamoto Takuichi. Beyond the Bronze Oxen, the 228 Memorial Park behind the museum holds other remnants from Taiwan’s Japanese colonial past. A bronze horse and two stone lions, originally from other sites in Taipei, have also found a home here. Some locals jokingly refer to the park as a "shelter for stray animal statues."
Denmark is a notoriously flat country, with an average elevation of just 101 feet. As such, climbing its highest point is not a particularly strenuous feat. However, finding that elusive location has proven difficult. Møllehøj, what is currently considered the highest peak in the country, was identified in 2005, and only rises above the rest by an inch or so. Previously, Himmelbjerget, 10 miles to the northwest of Møllehøj, was regarded as the tallest mountain in the country. When it was decided that elevation should be measured from sea level, however, Ejer Bavnehøj was measured to be the "true" highest point in the country. In honor of this and the reannexation of Northern Schleswig after World War I, a memorial and observatory were built at the top of that hill in 1924, and are still standing today. That claim was upended in 1941, when it was discovered that Yding Skovhøj, just over a mile northwest, was three feet taller if one counted its bronze-age burial mound on top. Ejer Bavnehøj also had a mound, but it was bulldozed during the construction of the memorial there. A debate then ensued for the next twelve years, with some defending Ejer Bavnehøj because they did not believe any manmade structures should be counted in a hill's elevation. Finally, the National Geodetic Institute ruled in 1953 that the mound should be disregarded, and they measured Ejer Bavnehøj as higher by just over two inches. Another measurment in 2005 found that hill to be actually the third highest point in the country, at 16.5 inches lower than Yding Skovhøj. Trumping both of them was Møllehøj (Mill Hill), measuring 3.5 inches higher than either. At a glance, Møllehøj does not appear to be particularly higher than Ejer Bavnehøj. Particularly because of Ejer Bavnehøj's towering observatory, which still has a plaque proclaiming it as the highest point. By contrast, Møllehøj is marked only by a millstone — a remnant of the mill from which the hill took its name — surrounded by some benches and interpretive signs. Considering how close the hills all were in height, and how easily dirt can weather, it is quite plausible that the highest point in Denmark has shifted again since 2005. As such, the debate over which point should truly take the title may never be settled.
Janez Bratovž, aka JB, founded his eponymous, Michelin-recommended restaurant at a time when nouvelle cuisine was unknown in Yugoslavia. He learned his trade in Austria and introduced specialties like carpaccio and foams to a land of hearty but simple dishes. He’s been described as the godfather of fine dining in this part of the world and while Ana Roš is the highest profile Slovenian chef, her flagship restaurant is in a rural area near the Italian border, and JB has led the way here in the capital for decades. JB develops sophisticated dishes based on the best local ingredients he can find, many of them indigenous: from trdinka (a red corn varietal) to blackstrap pigs (considered to have the best fat of any breed), from pumpkinseed oil (of around 800 varietals of pumpkin only this one, styriaca, yields delicious oil when cold pressed, and it’s native to Slovenia) to Soča River trout (the world’s largest and considered to have the tastiest flesh). While he’s cooked for Pope Francis and Ferran Adrià, he is technically retired, though he’s still in the kitchen most days. His son, Tomaz, has taken over the kitchen while his daughter, Nina, is sommelier, and his wife, Ema, manages the restaurant—it’s truly a family affair. The food is soulful, sophisticated, and personal. Take, for example, one of JB’s famous dishes, which simply consists of a fresh egg cooked at the table by pouring pork cracklings over it. This is JB’s Proustian moment—he grew up so poor that a big treat was a single fried egg that his grandmother would make him once a week. But the must-try is his signature dish: ravioli with foie gras, pistachio, and chestnut foam and veal jus. And in case you were wondering, the restaurant is in a building designed by none other than Slovenia’s most famous architect, Joze Plečnik, as the headquarters of Triglav Insurance Company.
On August 21, 1937, Philippine President Manuel Quezon issued Proclamation No. 173, initiating an open-door policy for the country so that it could receive persecuted Jews fleeing Europe. Under this program, the local Jewish community in the Philippines assumed responsibility for the refugees, ensuring they would not burden the local community. The same year, the Jewish Refugee Committee (JRC) was established. The program was selective; only refugees with ‘desirable’ professions such as doctors and scientists, along with their families, were prioritized and eventually granted visas. From 1938 on, the Philippines welcomed over 1,300 Jews from Germany and Austria. President Quezon even used his residence, Marikina Hall, to receive refugees. This proclamation later became the basis of Commonwealth Act 613, later known as the Philippine Immigration Act of 1940. Thousands more refugees could have been rescued has the United States government not imposed a limit of 1,000 Jews per year over a 10-year period. The Philippines continued to receive Jewish refugees until December 8, 1941, when Japan attacked the country. These refugees, who came to be known as ‘Manilaners,’ stayed until after the war before relocating to the United States. President Quezon safeguarded the documents related to the special immigration program, including travel documents and refugee passports, in a special vault at his home. He was the only person who was authorized to access it. His house, along with the vault, was relocated to the Quezon City Memorial Circle. The vault is now placed in a ground-floor room previously used by Aurora Quezon, the President’s wife, in her later years. In 2015, the Quezon Heritage House was designated as a Local Heritage Site by the Quezon City government.
Just outside of Idaho Springs, Colorado—over 10,000 feet above sea level—lies a pristine alpine lake. While Saint Mary’s Lake is beautiful, most visitors to this area are looking for something a little bit further up the trail: a small, somewhat dirty patch of snow, known as Saint Mary’s Glacier. Despite its name, it isn't a glacier at all. A true glacier is defined as a mass of ice and rock that moves downhill under its own weight. While slow, they are also very powerful, stripping away the earth beneath them and shaping the landscape over thousands of years. Saint Mary’s Glacier lies inside a couloir, a small valley created by a real glacier. However, the snow patch currently occupying the couloir isn’t heavy enough to move anywhere. It also fails to meet the minimum size requirement of about 25 acres. As a result, Saint Mary’s is best classified as a permanent snowfield. Colorado only has a handful of true glaciers left, all of which are rapidly diminishing. Rocky Mountain National Park is home to most of the remaining Colorado glaciers. While Saint Mary’s is not technically a glacier, it is still a beautiful hiking destination.
Located north of central Hirosaki, the former village of Onizawa has an evocative name. Oni, of course, refers to Japanese demons resembling two-horned ogres, powerful and strong. Naturally, there is a story behind such name. According to local folklore, a rice farmer named Yajuro once befriended an Oni from Mount Iwaki, and the two would often meet for lunch, sitting together on the branch of a great daimyo oak tree. When Yajuro mentioned that water kept leaking from his rice paddy, the Oni helped him build a steadfast canal. But when Yajuro introduced the Oni to his wife, breaking his promise to keep their relationship a secret, the Oni left the village to never return again. The daimyo oak tree survives today, believed to be over 700 years old, and known as Kishin-koshikake-gashiwa or the Demon-sitting Daimyo Oak Tree. There is a tiny shrine beside the tree, and the Oni is considered a kind of deity in Onizawa. Even during the Setsubun festival, the villagers of Onizawa are known to refuse to throw soybeans—unlike people from other parts of Japan—out of respect for the friendly demons.
With the rise of automated ticket machines, hundreds of ticket offices across the London underground network became redundant. Instead of allowing these prime locations to fall into disuse, an innovative initiative emerged to transform the former ticket office windows into "Tiny Parks." The first of these miniature gardens, introduced in 2017 at St James's Park Station in partnership with The Edible Bus Stop, aims to bring greenery into urban spaces, where it is often lacking. Nine of these pocket-sized parks are currently located throughout the London underground network, with each station selected for its botanical name. St James’s Park has two, Wood Green and Kilburn Park each host three, and Belsize Park has one. Establishing these unique ecosystems involved more than a year of planning to create optimal conditions for these obscure oases to thrive in their confined spaces. Each tiny park is filled with plants chosen for their resilience and ability to flourish with minimal care, including succulents, orchids, and ferns. These carefully curated collections are designed to require watering only once a month, a task entrusted to dedicated staff known as tiny park rangers. With the hardy plants needing little care, the rangers are free to add personal touches. Visitors can look out for these little details like dinosaurs and butterflies hiding within the foliage.
Between 1862 and 1874, the Metropolitan Board of Works in London created the Thames Embankment by redeveloping a significant portion of the riverside. This project extended the shoreline by reclaiming land from the river and constructing new riverside walkways and gardens. One of the smaller details of this project was the manufacturing and installation of new lamps that would stand alongside the riverfront, lighting the path. Three different iron lamp designs were proposed for the embankment. One design created by George Vulliamy, who was chief architect to the Metropolitan Board of Works, featured entwined dolphins at its base. A second design created by Joseph Bazalgette, who was chief engineer for the Board of Works, features a base with bent lion paws. These lamps are now common sights along the riverfront in London. The third proposed design was the most ornate of the three. Created by Timothy Butler, the lamps feature two small children climbing the central shaft, passing a torch between them. Two cornucopias filled with fruit curve downwards from the central shaft, spilling their contents at the lamp’s base. Ultimately, the board didn't choose this third design for mass production. The main concern was that the design was too complex to reproduce accurately in the large numbers needed for the Embankment. However, two copies of this lamp standard still stand along the Thames Embankment in Chelsea.
Zapurza Museum of Art & Culture is located next to Khadakwasla Lake, around 20-25 kilometers south west of Pune, India. It is a museum, an art gallery, a lakeside picnic spot, and a cultural center all rolled into one. The museum also conducts workshops and hosts events on art-related subjects. The museum is spread out over a huge area. A beautiful statue of Nataraja (which is a depiction of Lord Shiva) welcomes visitors into the museum. Inside, there are 10 curated art galleries. All of them are dedicated to some specific concept or craft. One of them has paintings of modern and contemporary artists, while another has everything related to lamps and lights, from historic to modern. One has the evolution of garments and clothing, while one has a collection of jewelry. The art galleries lead visitors to the amphitheater, which overlooks the beautiful Khadakwasla Lake. Interesting artifacts are peppered all around the cobblestone garden paths, like a vintage 1927 Austin 7, an ancient wooden rowboat, a medieval warrior’s statue, and an ancient hollowed out wooden log used for storing grains once upon a time. There is a temple of Lord Shiva in the garden premises. At one point, there is a lawn with a viewing deck and a fort-like bastion. The spot offers fantastic views of the lake. Beyond the lake, visitors can see the iconic Sinhagad Fortress in the distance.
According to legend, beneath Kashima Jingu lies a mythical being of earth-shattering proportions. Japanese mythology tells that this colossal catfish causes earthquakes with its restless thrashing. Kashima Jingu is said to be key in keeping the sea monster, known as Namazu, from wreaking havoc. The shrine contains a single sacred stone: Kaname-ishi. It is is said to have been set in place by Takemikazuchi-no-Okami, the shrine's main deity. According to Japanese mythology, the powerful god of thunder and swords wrestled the unruly Namazu into submission, ultimately pinning its huge head beneath Kaname-ishi. While Kaname-ishi may appear modest from above, its legend states that the small stone is merely the exposed tip of a much larger monolith. It is said that the stone extends deep underground, anchoring Namazu firmly in place to this day.
Around Valentine’s Day, my parents start watching the weather. They’re waiting for a stretch when the temperatures are above freezing during the day but fall below 32 degrees Fahrenheit at night. This shift in the weather signals the start of maple sugaring season. My family’s home in Northeast Ohio is squarely in the center of North America’s maple sugaring region. Sugar maples grow in a region that stretches from Québec in the North to Tennessee in the South; West to Missouri and Minnesota; and East to the New England Coast, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. When the sap of these trees is collected and boiled, the water evaporates and leaves a thick, sweet syrup—or, if boiled longer, crystallized maple sugar. The sap, syrup, and sugar of sugar maples have been a traditional food for humans for thousands of years. I’m not talking about Log Cabin or Mrs. Butterworth’s “maple-flavored syrup”; that’s corn syrup and food coloring. Real maple syrup is seasonal, regional, and handmade. The flavor is highly local, affected not only by climate and soil, but processing techniques and bacteria. Tasting the real thing for the first time becomes a core food memory, a turning point in one’s life. But due to a variety of issues, ranging from climate change to waning interest in running small farms, both these plants and processes are dying out in some areas. Which makes maple syrup an ideal candidate for preservation on the Ark of Taste, Slow Food International’s online catalogue of distinctive foods at risk of disappearing. And yet, there is currently only one regional syrup recorded on the Ark: Nova Scotia maple syrup, added by husband and wife Scott Whitelaw and Quita Gray, the proprietors of Sugar Moon Farm in Earltown, NS. I first met Quita as she was working the register at the front of Sugar Moon’s shop and restaurant. Our meeting wasn’t planned: I had just finished breakfast in their dining room, nearly drinking my weight in their exceptional syrup. I’d ordered a meal of biscuits spread with whipped maple butter, waffles made with heirloom Red Fife wheat that I had drowned in syrup, a maple latte, and a bracing, hot maple tonic, made with lemon juice and cayenne pepper. And I planned to take more of the full-bodied, vanilla-forward syrup from their shop home with me. As I browsed the store, Quita had asked me where I was from and what brought me in. I admitted that I was there because I wanted to try the Ark’s only maple syrup. It was purely coincidence that it was Quita and her husband that had been the ones to add Nova Scotia syrup to the Ark of Taste. Quita is humble about the syrup’s inclusion on the Ark. “Any region could submit the same thing. It's a really regional, hyperlocal food. It’s different everywhere,” she told me. “I believe in protecting unique flavors. Is Nova Scotia particularly unique? Probably. But so is Wisconsin syrup. All of them have to be protected because they reflect the terroir of where they are.” But beyond its flavor, she nominated Nova Scotian syrup because of the distinct challenges the local delicacy faces. ”At the time [of the nomination], Nova Scotians were looking into why our yield is so much less and our trees grow so slowly,” she said. “So we had a science committee and they were taking a deep dive into the qualities of our syrup and trying to find out. ’Cause we know it’s exceptional syrup.” The multiple studies that came out of that committee’s research concluded that “syrup from Nova Scotia had higher amounts of minerals, especially magnesium and manganese” as well as higher concentrations of phenolic compounds, such as coniferyl alcohol (a sweet-tasting flavor enhancer), sinapyl aldehyde (offering floral and fruity flavors), and vanillic acid (vanillin: the main flavor component of vanilla), than any other maple syrup samples from Canada or the United States. Not only do these minerals and phenols contribute to the complex flavor of maple syrup, they increase in concentration throughout the season. It’s not known why Nova Scotian syrup has this unique composition, but Quita thinks it’s because they are a maritime sugaring region. Every part of Nova Scotia is less than 50 miles from the ocean, and Quita believes that the weather and the salty sea air have an impact on the soil and trees. Compared to syrup from inland provinces, like Québec, the syrup at Sugar Moon has a unique taste of pine and ocean. And something about the climate makes the trees grow extraordinarily slowly. Whereas in other maple regions, a tree is usually a good size for tapping when it’s 30 or 40 years old, in Nova Scotia, it takes 80 or 100 years. Even when the trees are mature and ready to tap, producers are faced with another challenge: “Our yield is half to a third of what everyone else makes,” Quita added, although it’s unclear why it takes so much more sap to make syrup from Nova Scotian sugar maples. “So we can’t compete as a commodity,” Quita told me. “Then it becomes: ‘How do we differentiate ourselves as something unique that needs to be protected?’” Quita and her husband have been making syrup in Nova Scotia for 30 years. She grew up on the other side of the continent, in Vancouver, and met Scott while in forestry school. When they graduated, they started looking for land to buy to build a future together. “And we met the guy that had this place,” Quita said, referring to the rough-wood sugarhouse and the dense, surrounding forest. “He built this place by hand using draft horses, Clydesdales. And when we met him, he was looking for the right people. We had no money. We apprenticed for two years. We learned maple sugaring and horse logging and took over in 1994.” “We raised three daughters on the farm,” she continued. “The youngest is 19 and she was our sugar baby; she was born right at the peak of the maple season. She’s got a good maple name: Samara. A samara is a seed from a maple tree.” Their sugar bush is 200 acres, with 2,500 taps, spread over a hill. Modern commercial sugar bushes like Sugar Moon’s tend to be on a slope, because rather than spiles dripping into individual buckets, every spile is connected by tubing. “And the sap comes down the hill through the network of tubing by gravity to our camp,” Quita explained. Quita and her team process the sap in the sugarhouse. Maple sap has a high sugar content, ranging from 1 to 5 percent; but it still takes at least 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The sap first enters a reverse osmosis machine—systems typically used to remove impurities from water, but in this case, it’s the water that maple syrup makers want to remove. Sap gets filtered at high pressure through a semi-permeable filter membrane that’s porous enough for water to flow through, but not the sap’s sugar or other compounds. This system can remove up to 90 percent of the water in sap; so a mid-sized operation that collects 100,000 gallons of sap will only have to boil 10,000 gallons of the concentrated result. That concentrated sap is then boiled off in a wood- or gas-fueled evaporator, until it is 66 to 68 percent sugar syrup. “At the end of the season we pull taps, clean out the lines, plug them up, push them up the tree,” Quita told me. They are pushed high to avoid the snow, which can be three or four feet high at the start of the season. “Next year when we go back, we will drill a new hole.” And the process starts again. Quita and Scott organize the syrup at their gift shop by when it was harvested and processed in the season: light, early-season syrup is on one end; dark, pungent late-season syrup on the far side. They don’t blend their syrups for a consistently flavored product; they embrace the differences that come throughout the season, and consumers can hunt for their preferred flavor profile. Everywhere maple syrup is produced, the first syrup of the season—or “sugarmaker’s syrup” as it's sometimes called—has a light, delicate flavor. It was preferred by early European colonists because of its similarity to processed white cane sugar. But the syrup still has its own unique flavor notes: butter, marshmallow, and vanilla. A mid-season syrup has an amber color; it can taste caramelized, woody, and tannic. End-of-season syrup can be as richly colored as molasses. It often has the most intense “maple” flavor, tasting deeply caramelized, with notes of burnt sugar and rum. The difference in flavor and color over a single maple season is caused not only by minerals and phenols, but mainly by bacteria—which also happens to be the reason that maple syrup from a small producer tastes better than a large-scale production. Maple sap naturally contains at least 22 different bacteria, which also live in the tubing and equipment that it’s processed in. These bacteria convert sucrose in maple sap into glucose, which caramelizes more richly, and the presence of three sugars—sucrose, fructose, and glucose—present a more varied flavor than the presence of two. Warming weather throughout the season, along with agitation during the sap-collection process, creates more bacteria, which increases fermentation. Large commercial maple sugar producers clean their lines and equipment more frequently, process more sap faster in a temperature-controlled environment, and seldom expose the maple sap to air or agitation. The result is a more consistent product, which is often blended with syrup from across the season. But small-batch syrup, with all its helpful bacteria, is far more flavorful. While warm weather during the sugaring season can increase the presence of tasty bacteria, the warming climate can be a detriment to the syrup. “We had a hurricane two years ago,” Quita told me. “We haven’t made syrup in two years.” She still doesn’t know when they’ll resume operations. Not only did the hurricane tear out their carefully set gravity lines, but it ripped hundreds of trees out of the ground, destroying their mature crop of slow-growing maples and making the path into their sugar bush virtually impassable. Quita and Scott have always sold syrup from a neighbor who makes an outstanding product but is uninterested in marketing it. They’ve been relying on that neighbor’s supply while they slowly drag downed trees out of the woods. Nova Scotia is at the far northern edge of the Atlantic Hurricane System, but hurricanes that would historically dissipate before reaching the province are now making landfall. Ocean temperatures are rising as a result of climate change, which increases the frequency and intensity of storms. In the 21st century, a storm is almost three times as likely to strengthen to a Category 3, compared to dates from 1970 to 1999. The increase in destructive weather events have put some sugarmakers out of business. “It finished some operations along the North Shore,” Quita told me. “They will not make syrup again.” I hiked up the hill to see the decimated sugar bush; hundreds of maple tree trunks were stacked along the rutted path, old taps still visible in some. Climate change is obvious when you look at maple tapping; for centuries, sugarmakers have documented the first day the sap begins flowing. In the past century, the maple sugaring season has shrunk and shifted earlier in the year. According to Timothy D. Perkins, a research professor at University of Vermont Proctor Maple Research Center, Vermont’s maple sugaring season begins at least a full month earlier now compared to the late 1800s. In Nova Scotia, an in-depth study from Dalhousie University found the maple season now starts 10 days earlier than in the 1980s and there has been a 40 percent drop in sap yield in this time, as well. The biggest fear is that mild winters will affect the temperature and barometric changes that sugar maples need to produce their spring sap surge. If there’s no freeze, there will be no syrup. Multiple studies have noted that warming weather has both shortened the sugaring season and reduced the sugar content in maple sap by about half on average across maples’ entire region. Only advances in technology that have made syrup-making more efficient—such as the reverse osmosis machines—have saved the industry. But while there is worry that rapid climate change could destroy the industry, preserving maple forests actually helps ward off climate change. Sugar bush forests pull more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they put out. On average, a temperate sugar maple forest holds 100 tons of carbon. According to the Federation of Québec Maple Syrup Producers, “Québec’s sugar bushes store 744,000 metric tons of carbon per year, eleven times more than maple syrup production creates. This is equivalent to the emissions of 220,000 vehicles or 440 million litres of gas in the same period.” The entire province of Nova Scotia could be making more maple syrup. The provincial government wants to increase sugaring revenue, but is having difficulty finding younger farmers to take over when older generations retire or get pushed out by the uncertainties of a changing climate. So if you, dear reader, dream of moving to a beautiful region and spending your years tending to a sugar bush, there are resources to support you. The Maple Producers Association of Nova Scotia offers mentorships, funding, and a four-day Maple Sugaring Bootcamp. And if you live elsewhere in the sugar maple’s magic region, you can start in your own backyard. My parents have been tapping their own trees since 2011. It’s become an important ritual for my family; the first sure sign of spring and one that connects us to traditions much older than written memory. “Sugar Moon is an Indigenous term,” Quita told me. Their farm is named after Siwkewiku's, the Mi’kmaw term for the March Moon that shines during the sugaring season. The Mi’kmaw’s traditional lands are in Nova Scotia, but most of the Indigenous communities in North America’s entire sugar maple region have relied on maple sugar as a staple food for millennia. “The name acknowledges the roots of our business,” Quita added, between welcoming visitors to the shop. “We started inviting a Mi’kmaw friend to come and bless the season. It reminds us every year: this isn't just a commodity that we're sucking from a tree and selling. This is a gift.”
Winding through Ljubljana following a trail of Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik’s structures, like stars in a constellation, is a great way to explore the city. While Ljubljana began as an ancient Roman town called Emona, it was never of particular importance until the 20th century. In fact, Plečnik called his hometown a “cultural backwater” and made it the mission of his career to elevate it through architecture. He lived during the Modernist era, when the idea was afloat that good architecture could improve the lives of those who live in and with it. He is beloved by architecture fans but little known in the popular imagination because he never founded nor joined a major movement. He was content doing his own thing, mostly back home. Plečnik sought to make Ljubljana into a “new Athens” and managed to get the commissions to design all of the spaces and buildings that would feature in an ancient Greek city like Athens: a stadium, cemetery, (necropolis), market square, covered walkway (stoa) meeting square (agora), temple mount (acropolis). He redesigned Preseren Square, named after Slovenia’s most famous poet, the Romantic France Preseren, and included a giant bronze statue of him being crowned with a laurel wreath. Beside the square is Plečnik’s Triple Bridge, or Tromostovje—three bridges at slight angles to one another that cross the Ljubljanica River. Historians believe that a bridge of one sort or another has spanned the river at this point since the 13th century, but in 1932, Plečnik’s redesign radically rethought the structure, with one bridge for pedestrians, one for cars, and one for bicyclists. Inspired by the Rialto Bridge in Venice, this also contains some of the earliest public toilets in Europe, which are still in use (and shockingly clean).
Established in 1987 by the Mexican Society of Cartoonists, this museum celebrates the country’s rich cartooning tradition. Political cartoons have long been popular in Mexico, reflecting its tumultuous history and the people’s relationship with the authorities. Some of the oldest works here are by the famed José Guadalupe Posada, whose skeleton cartoons illustrated political and parodistic broadsides in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of these would become the Calavera Catrina (Female Dandy Skull), now an icon of Day of the Dead imagery. Originally, it was meant to mock Mexico’s well-dressed women at a time when imported French fashion was in vogue. Publishers tailored the accompanying text to parody the elite or working-class merchants who preferred to trade with chickpeas over native Mexican products, earning it another nickname: Calavera Garbancera (Garbanzo-Selling Skull). This example highlights how widely distributed Mexican illustrations often speak truth to power. The museum uses cartoons from other decades, up to the 2024 election and subsequent Claudia Sheinbaum presidency, to show the power of single pictures. Multi-paneled comics also form a significant part of the exhibitions, ranging from newspaper strips to comic series like La Familia Burrón by Gabriel Vargas and Memín Pinguín, created by Yolanda Vargas Dulché and later illustrated by Sixto Valencia Burgos, among others. Memín Pinguín and artist Valencia are highlighted in the museum, given the character’s particular history. Created in 1943, Memín and his mother—both Afromexican (or possibly Cuban immigrants)—were originally drawn in a stereotypical style common at the time. The character’s enduring popularity led to comics and even postage stamps featuring him abroad. In 2005, controversy arose in the United States due to his design, resulting in debates that raised points about judging the character’s appearance versus personality, as well as the reluctance to redesign the character over decades. In addition to the stories of La Catrina and Memín Pinguín, the museum showcases other well-known Mexican publications, like the superhero Kalimán and the erotic comics of El Libro Vaquero (The Cowboy Book). Built in the 1770s, the site was once a dormitory for students of the Real Colegio de Cristo (Royal College of Christ). Despite the age of its location, the museum is constantly updated. Members of the Cartoonist Society can often be found here for conversations and staffing the well-stocked shop.
The Fraser River played a critical role in the history of British Columbia. It was the site of the gold discoveries in the 1850s that led to the creation of the province, and became a transportation corridor to the rest of Canada. Steamboats could travel as far as Yale, a gold camp downstream from this point, and then a set of precarious roads continued upstream to the Cariboo gold fields. These roads were largely obliterated when the Canadian Pacific Railroad was built through the canyon in the 1880s. This is the “second Alexandra Bridge,” which replaced an earlier version that had been closed in 1912 for safety reasons. Completed in 1926, it lay on the Fraser Canyon Highway, which was officially re-opened in 1927. The rise of automotive travel by the 1920s had led to pressure for a new highway through Fraser Canyon. This Alexandra bridge was decommissioned in 1964, being replaced by the new Alexandra (arch) Bridge on the Trans-Canada Highway, which became the new automobile route up Fraser Canyon. The old Alexandra Bridge has been recognized as a Provincial Heritage Site and is open to non-motorized traffic. It is undergoing limited renovation for safety reasons that preserves the historic flavor. The bridge was named after Princess Alexandra of Denmark, who married Prince Albert Edward in 1863 (long before he became King Edward VII in 1901).
Once upon a time in present-day Izumi, Osaka, there was a mystical forest called Shinoda-no-mori, home to many kitsune—mischievous, shapeshifting foxes of Japanese folklore. According to legend, these magical creatures lured a hunter named Akuemon to the forest. His wife was severely ill and he had been advised by his sorcerer brother Ashiya Douman to hunt a kitsune and collect its liver to make medicine for her. Akuemon was about to kill a white fox named Kuzunoha when Abe no Yasuna, who just so happened to be the son of a lord Akuemon had murdered years prior, stumbled upon the scene. Yasuna fought the hunter and bravely saved the poor fox’s life, avenging his father in the process. Grateful beyond words, Kuzunoha took the form of a beautiful girl and married Yasuna, and the two had a son named Dōjimaru. When the child was seven years old, however, Yasuna found out the true identity of his wife—a taboo among the supernatural. Kuzunoha now had to return to the forest, leaving her loved ones behind. Having inherited her mother’s magical prowess, Dōjimaru (later Seimei) grew up to be a spiritual advisor to the Emperor as an onmyōji—astronomer, sorcerer, exorcist, all in one. Today, he is remembered as the single greatest sorcerer in Japanese history. The legend was immortalized through literature during the Edo period, adapted into several kabuki plays. In the 1740s, in the heyday of the story’s popularity, a local magistrate dedicated his household shrine, which stood in the heart of the legendary forest, to the fox god Inari. It came to be known as Shinodanomori Shrine, dedicated to Lady Kuzunoha. The main hall is said to enshrine the stone that Kuzunoha transformed into after she returned to the forest, and there is also a well-worshipped camphor tree that has stood here for over 2,000 years, which some say was once Kuzunoha’s home. It may not be an enchanted forest today, but there certainly remains a sort of magical air about this place. Who knows, perhaps some foxes still roam the area, unseen by humans.
The Tennessee Williams Home & Welcome Center in Columbus, Mississippi offers a glimpse into the early life of the iconic playwright. Now transformed into a charming visitor center, this beautifully restored Victorian home offers insight into the writer who gave us A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie. Period furnishings from the early 1900s, evocative photographs, and thoughtfully curated exhibits celebrate both the local heritage and the dramatic influences that shaped Williams’ storytelling. Whether you’re a devoted fan of Southern literature or simply curious about American cultural landmarks, the Tennessee Williams Home & Welcome Center is an essential stop on your journey through Columbus. Knowledgeable docents lead tours that illuminate the playwright’s roots and the city’s rich history.
Causland Memorial Park boasts an amphitheater, beautifully established ornamental vegetation and plenty of places to sit and have a nice picnic or a stroll. The unsual park sprawls over two acres in the center of the city of Anacortes, Washington. Originally designed and built in the 1920s by artist/architect John Baptiste LePage, it is a registered historic place featuring a great deal of stone mosaicwork. A good portion of the park is dedicated to local veterans who served the U.S. through World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War.
Around 4 kilometers east of Old Goa, in the village of Gandaulim, India, on a hilltop, is an old church that has a fascinating connection with Croatia. The Church of Sao Bras (Saint Blaise) was a chapel built by Croatian sailors and traders in 1541 and was later elevated to the status of a parish church in 1563. The church is a replica of Sveti Vlaho (St. Blaise) Church in Dubrovnik. It is believed that Croatian traders from that era settled in Gandaulim and formed their colony, which had around 12,000 residents once upon a time. Croatian Indologist Zdravka Matisic discovered the reference to Croatia’s links with Goa while studying Sanskirt in India. After this discovery, an official delegation from Croatia visited this church in 1999 to further explore the historical connection between the two places.
Dear Atlas is Atlas Obscura’s travel advice column, answering the questions you won’t find in traditional guidebooks. Have a question for our experts? Submit it here. * * * Dear Atlas, I love meeting locals when I’m traveling, but I’m never quite sure how to go about it when I'm in a completely new destination. Do you have any tips? We travelers all have the same fantasy. We arrive in a foreign city and head to a bar. Or maybe it’s a restaurant. Or a bookstore. It doesn’t matter where because the outcome we want is all the same. We strike up a conversation with a local who then invites us to hang with their friends/go to a party/meet the family. And, suddenly, we get to explore the nontouristy side of the destination, make new friends, learn culture—the kinds of experiences they literally make movies about. It’s a great dream, right? Except real life isn’t like the movies. On most trips, the only locals you meet are the ones in the tourism industry guiding you around or taking your order in a restaurant. Yet there are plenty of ways to make that “meet a local” fantasy come true if you know where to look. But before I get to that, let me address the elephant in the room here: A lot of people worry about language barriers and rightfully so. After all, how are you supposed to communicate if all you have is rusty high-school Spanish? For starters, basic English is spoken just about everywhere and there is usually one person in a friend group who can communicate and often will translate. Not speaking German didn’t stop me from going to that birthday and not speaking Ukrainian didn’t stop me from going to a party. For better or worse, English is the lingua franca of the world. Second, thanks to the Google Translate app, you can always pass a phone back and forth to communicate. It can lead to some funny moments, but that’s part of the charm. So, with that out of the way, here are a few ways to meet locals when you travel: First, Facebook Groups have become a really popular way to meet people internationally in the last couple of years. You find people of all ages and in all destinations that want to meet and even host travelers. I used this method twice last summer while I was traveling around Europe and once while in Peru over the winter. Two of my favorites are Find a Travel Buddy, Digital Nomads, and Girls Love Travel (for female travelers only). You can also find plenty of destination specific ones via the search function. Note that you’ll get a lot of spammy messages so you do have to search for the diamonds in the rough—but it’s worth the effort! Second, try using Meetup.com or Eventbrite. No matter your interest, there is usually a local group on one of these websites. See if they are hosting a meet up while you are in town. Both sites make it easy to see what’s happening and are a stupendous way to meet people who love some of the things you also love. It makes it easier to connect with people because you already know you have shared interests. Third, try something sporty. Around the world, there are tons of local sports leagues you can join. I’ve had friends join pick up volleyball games in Spain and I joined a pickleball game in Vienna. And run clubs have exploded in popularity so if you like to run, find some people to run with! Usually after the run, everyone goes out for a meal or drinks. And don’t worry if you aren’t a runner. They go at a slow pace. The best way to find run clubs or sports leagues is through SweatPals, Meetup.com, or through a simple Google search using a search query like “(sports league / run club) (destination).” The Internet has made it a lot easier to meet locals when you travel. You don’t have to get lucky in a restaurant or buy a farm in Tuscany to meet locals. Use the resources above and you’ll find yourself hanging out with locals in a wide variety of settings in no time. * * * Matthew Kepnes didn’t take his first trip overseas until he was 23. In 2005, he took a trip to Thailand that inspired him to come home, quit his job, and backpack around the world for a year. That trip ended up lasting 18 months. In 2008, he started his website, Nomadic Matt, to help others travel better, cheaper, and longer and has helped millions of people a year realize their own travel dreams. His new book, How to Travel the World on $75 a Day, helps people have incredible travel experiences on a budget. When he isn’t traveling, he resides in Austin and New York City. He can be found at his website as well as on Instagram at @nomadicmatt.
In 1836, missionary couples Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding accompanied a trapper caravan to what was then the Oregon country. Narcissa and Eliza were the first European-American women to make this trip. The Whitmans established a mission at Waiilatpu, on the Walla Walla River, about five miles west of the site of the eponymous modern city. They were initially welcomed by the Cayuse, the dominant Native American tribe where the mission lay. A daughter, Alice Clarissa, was born on March 14, 1837, and became a big favorite with the tribe. Tragically, Alice accidentally drowned in the Walla Walla, and her death on June 23, 1839, evidently broke Narcissa's heart. She became withdrawn and lost her zest for missionary work. Meanwhile, Marcus, with a toxic mixture of arrogance and good (albeit patronizing) intentions, was becoming frustrated that his message was not being received. He apparently viewed the Cayuse as ignorant savages determined to remain ignorant—but he also never bothered to learn their language, much less their cultural values. By the early 1840s, emigrant trains were beginning to stream westward into Oregon, and the Whitman Mission became an important stop on the trail. One result is that many Cayuse began to conclude that the Whitmans were more focused on ministering to these emigrants than to them. Things came to a head in 1847, when a measles epidemic arrived with a wagon train. The disease swept through the Native American tribes, who had little natural resistance, with lethal effect. To his credit, Marcus tended to both emigrants and natives, but although the emigrants died from measles too, it was obvious to natives and emigrants alike that the death rates were wildly disproportionate. Some Cayuse thought that the disease was a plot to remove them from their lands. Furthermore, according to Cayuse custom, a medicine man whose patients died could be put to death. On November 29th and 30th, 1847, a group of Cayuse killed all the men at the mission, as well as Narcissa Whitman, who was the only woman slain. The other women, as well as the children, were taken hostage. They were later released after extensive negotiations in which Eliza Spalding's daughter, also named Eliza, served as translator. Eliza was the only Euro-American in the group who was fluent in Cayuse. What came to be called the "Whitman Massacre" led to the Cayuse War, in which the US Army waged punitive actions, including destruction of crops and dwellings, against the Cayuse and their allies. The war dragged on until 1855 and had catastrophic consequences for the Cayuse and affiliated tribes. They were forced to cede all their traditional lands and accept the sovereignty of the U.S. Government; in essence, to become wards of the state. The tribe was also forced to hand over the alleged perpetrators of violence against the Whitmans, who were given a swift trial and then hanged. At least one of those executed may have been innocent. The present museum at the site does an excellent job of presenting this sad and complex narrative. For one thing, the tribes' side of the story is now also presented in detail, and Cayuse tribe members are now actively involved with the museum.
Located near the Triple Bridge, the part open-air, part covered Tržnice Central Market in Ljubljana is another of architect Jože Plečnik’s designs. A sign of his forward-thinking, the market needed no renovations since it first opened in 1939. It includes a winding column-lined portico (Plečnik loved columns and sometimes stuck them places where they didn’t support anything, just because he liked them) and separate areas for butchers (one the ground level) and fishmongers (the lower level, nearer the river where they once disposed of organic leftovers). The fruit and vegetables are sold in open stalls—be sure to stop by the sauerkraut stall run by Marjetka Zabjek, a local legend whose family sells an indigenous cabbage that makes the best sauerkraut. You can also get sour turnip (which sounds kind of dreadful but is delicious, sauerkraut made with turnip instead of cabbage)—a perfect side served with sausage and dressed in cracklings, to warm you up on an alpine evening. A vending machine run by a family dairy farm sells unpasteurized, fresh raw milk, yogurt, and cheese 24/7. You can also take home a souvenir jewel-colored candle—just be aware that while they may look like lovely decorative objects for the home, they’re designed to adorn the graves of your loved ones. Tomb candles or grave candles are often used in celebration of All Souls' Day in Slovenia. An indoor part of the market beneath a Jesuit seminary houses stalls selling bread, cheese, cured meats, baked goods, and more. Every Friday outside of wintertime one square of the market hosts a popup food stand festival called Odprta Kuhna (Open Kitchen), founded by Israeli expat Lior Kochavy. It is hugely popular, with dozens of street food options and as many as 20,000 people converging for a Friday meal or two. This is a great place to feel Ljubljana at its most vibrant, to meet locals, people watch and taste your way through the best of the capital.
This story was originally published in bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On the Nass River, in the lands of the Nisg̱a’a Nation along British Columbia’s northern coast, the ropes holding two aluminum skiffs strain as the ocean yanks back its tidal waters. Hidden beneath the turbulent surface, thousands of smelts known as eulachon, each about the size of the blade of a chef’s knife, jostle in the rushing water. If the night ahead goes as one local fishing crew hopes, the racing water will sweep some of those fish right into the gaping steel-frame mouth of their submerged net. At times, when the run is strong, the crew needs only to sink and unfurl their net. Then “bam,” as one fisherman puts it, “the net’s full.” Hundreds of eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus) will flash silver as they tumble into the holds of the skiff, filling it within a few hours. The crew from Walter’s Camp, one of a handful of Nisg̱a’a fishing camps along the stretch of river known as Fishery Bay, can then putter back to shore. There, they’ll shovel their catch into a bin or burlap sacks, then warm up in their cabin, with its wood-burning stove and impressive supply of packaged cookies, to wait for the next excursion. The annual return of spawning eulachon to the Nass River from the sea, where they spend most of their lives, often coincides with winter’s last blast. Some years fishers have to drill boreholes in a thick cap of ice; other years they dodge icebergs as big as bears that can capsize a boat or destroy a net. Traditionally, Nisg̱a’a and other Indigenous peoples relied on the eulachon spawn to deliver them from hunger at winter’s end, earning the fish the heady titles of “savior” or “salvation fish.” Though Nisg̱a’a don’t depend on eulachon for basic survival anymore, excitement still ripples through Gitlaxt’aamiks, Gitwinksihlkw, Laxgalts’ap, and Gingolx—the nation’s four villages, spread out along the Nass—when the spawning forerunners appear. Someone might catch the first few fish with a dip net and share them with elders, everyone eager for the first taste. Then camp bosses, who have spent the preceding weeks assembling crews and stockpiling supplies, prepare to harvest in earnest. As the fishers gather, so do hundreds of gulls and eagles. So many gulls can appear at once that the flock shivers across the sky like an apparition. “My grandmother would say, ‘When you see the white ghost coming up the valley, you know the eulachon are coming,’” says fisherman Ian Morven. There are so many birds in Fishery Bay some seasons, locals insist, that you cannot see the sky. One observer in the mid-1800s compared the spectacle to a heavy snowfall. The birds feast and squabble and take river-rafting adventures on driftwood as it surfs toward the river’s terminus, roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) to the west, where the water spills into Portland Inlet, north of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. I flew in, too, on wings made of metal, to witness the eulachon fishing tradition at the invitation of Nicole Morven, harvest monitoring coordinator with the Nisg̱a’a government’s fisheries and wildlife department. (She is related through marriage to fisherman Ian Morven.) At a time when global fish stock collapses have become too commonplace, the opportunity to witness abundance was alluring. Eulachon once visited an estimated 100 glacial-fed mainland rivers between southwestern Alaska and northern California, and many Indigenous communities throughout the region have their own deep relationships with the oily fish. But beginning in the 1990s, the species suffered a drastic decline throughout much of its range, disappearing from some rivers altogether. The Nass River, which has always had one of the largest eulachon runs within the artificial boundaries of Canada, managed to remain relatively stable. In a good year, it still receives millions of the fish. Why eulachon still manage strong returns here, and in most eulachon-bearing rivers farther north in Alaska, but not to others is largely a mystery. It’s also a source of dismay for those communities whose own deep connection to the fish has been interrupted. Eulachon are both nutritional wonders—nuggets of health-sustaining fatty acids, protein, iron, and vitamins—and a deeply storied animal, with cultural and historical significance that links Indigenous peoples to one another and to their traditional homelands. Every year, a small but dedicated group of Nisg̱a’a fishers seizes the opportunity to greet oolies, as they’re affectionately called, in the Nass once more. At the same time, their government does what it can in these quickly changing, climatically unstable, economically complicated times to ensure that the fish will keep coming home over the long run—and that the harvest will be able to continue without interference. Home for the Nisg̱a’a is a dramatic place, crisscrossed by icy rivers and punctuated by jagged mountain ridges overhead and the crunchy remains of an old lava flow underfoot. The landmark Nisg̱a’a Final Agreement of 2000, the first treaty signed in British Columbia in 100 years, solidified Nisg̱a’a ownership of roughly 2,000 square kilometers (800 square miles) of land that the Nisg̱a’a people have inhabited for many thousands of years. The agreement also guaranteed the right to fish and hunt in a much larger area. In this sparsely populated expanse—roughly an hour’s drive from grocery stores in the nearest city of Terrace, British Columbia—people can still turn to the ecosystem outside their front doors as a source of nourishment. Many Nisg̱a’a mark the beginning of their harvesting year by feeding on the fat-rich eulachon—fried, smoked, sun-dried, or rendered into a beloved oil called “grease.” Some eat grease every day, often slathered on toast or as a condiment. One fisherman tells me he consumes as much as 53 liters (more than 11 gallons) a year and keeps a collection of vintages to sample from, like cellared wine. Traditionally, grease was paired with seaweed, roe, and berries; it has also been used to preserve fruits, as medicine and ointment, and to lubricate tools. Nicole Morven, my host, says she once enlisted it to revive a cat dying from antifreeze poisoning. She dribbled some into the animal’s mouth with a syringe as it lay motionless. “A few hours later, it was back to normal.” Following the eulachon catch, the harvest cycle continues, as locals hunt sea lions that chase the smelts up river. Soon after, salmon start to arrive. The Nisg̱a’a especially covet the sockeye, which comes early in the season and which they smoke, can, or freeze. Into the fall, community members harvest mushrooms and hunt moose. Represented on paper, the sustenance cycle is a circle. Or, a bowl. The Nisg̱a’a “have one bowl to eat from in this valley,” says an unnamed source in the book Nisg̱a’a People of the Nass River. It is “known as Ts’ak’hl Nisg̱a’a, Nisg̱a’a Bowl.” The Nass River lies at the heart of that cycle. The Nisg̱a’a traditionally called it “Lisims,” a word in their language for murky. It’s said that when English captain George Vancouver visited in 1793, the neighboring Tlingit nation, whose traditional lands are concentrated in southeast Alaska, told him that the river’s name was “Ewen Nass”—the great or powerful food basket—and Nass is what landed on the maps. Tlingit oral history positions the river as the origin of eulachon stocks farther north: It’s said that, long ago, a Tlingit visitor intercepted a single eulachon as it approached the Nass, tied a string to it, and towed it home to the Chilkat and Chilkoot Rivers in Alaska. Out on the water, the sky has turned inky and the bite in the air has grown fangs. “Are your hands cold?” one man asks his son, a high schooler who has come eulachon harvesting for the first time. “If so, just put them in the ocean.” The other fishers nod. “It’s an old trick,” another chimes in. “A few minutes later they’ll be steaming.” I consider my own numb fingers and toes, but can’t bring myself to extract them from their wool cocoons long enough to dunk them into the ice-rimmed tidal river. Another warming technique some locals swear by is to plunge hands into a pailful of maggots—alas, no wriggling larvae have accompanied us onboard tonight. The half dozen seasoned fishermen out this evening seem unaffected by the nostril-lancing cold. Grease—and adrenaline—keeps their blood running warm, they claim. Simon Haldane*, the camp’s boss, a burly man with a quietly rumbling voice, seems perfectly comfortable in a thin hoodie and overalls, while I’m still shivering despite wearing so many layers that my elbows no longer work. He incorporated grease into his diet with a teaspoon a day, advanced to a shot glass, and then worked up to a coffee-mug portion. (Too much too soon can, ahem, “clean your system out,” he explains.) “Now I swear I’m impervious to cold,” he says. Tonight, the cold is the least of it. The river is hurling obstacles like a video-game villain chucks flaming discs. Earlier, before the Walter’s Camp fishers even managed to position their two skiffs side by side and drop their net, two logs careened into the hull of one boat and tangled in the anchor lines. A couple of crewmembers managed to shove one away. Fisherman Peter Smith struggled with the other, a tree trunk that matched his own size. He grunted and swore and sweated until he finally dislodged it and collapsed into the bow. Now, another canoe-sized log, turned sideways, is barreling toward us, fast. With a grappling hook in hand, fisherman Lonny Stewart vaults out of the skiff and into a small speedboat used to support the fishing operation, and the driver guns the motor to intercept the log. As the rest of us gape, Stewart manages to plant his hook into one end of the log and laboriously swing it around. It swerves back and forth, like a trailer threatening to come off its hitch on the highway, and barely misses us. But both boat and log are now on a collision course with another fishing crew set up about 100 meters (330 feet) downriver; as the boat gets whisked along, Stewart ducks under the other crew’s anchor lines and manages to just thread the log past their net and boat. Haldane, who was quietly narrating impending disaster beside me throughout the operation, lets out a breath and hoots. “You the man, Lonny! I didn’t doubt you for a second!” He turns back to the rest of us in the boat. “That’s enough excitement for one night.” Long ago, well before modern commitments got in the way, Fishery Bay was a major eulachon processing center. Thousands of locals and visitors would gather along the river’s banks for the harvest. Families would spend months here, and the shoreline was busy with homes, at least one church, and sky-high drying racks. In the 1800s, the Nisg̱a’a pulled up and processed an estimated 2,000 metric tons (4.4 million pounds) of eulachon each year. With an average eulachon weighing around 40 grams (1.4 ounces), that equates to a staggering 50 million fish or more. As the drumbeat of assimilation, industrialization, and globalization picked up pace, activity at Fishery Bay began to wane. The two world wars marked significant periods of decline, as young, capable members signed up for military efforts, says Sim’oogit Hleek (also known as Harry Nyce Sr.), who serves as the director of fisheries and wildlife for the Nisg̱a’a government. “After that, industry came into the valley.” Employment in commercial fishing and logging operations and the canning industry kept people busy, while the new influx of money tended to shift attention away from traditional activities and toward Western goods, he says. Canada’s shameful residential school system also robbed many young people of knowledge—Sim’oogit Hleek among them. He was sent away as a child. When he returned to the Nass valley, Sim’oogit Hleek says, “I did not have the traditional experience to partake [in the eulachon harvest]. So, that was unfortunate for me.” Though the number of Nisg̱a’a members harvesting eulachon has diminished over time, as have their catches, the fish’s significance to Nisg̱a’a culture remains strong. Today, fishers sign on as their work schedules and other responsibilities permit. In the early 2000s, a road was carved into the river’s forested edge, connecting Fishery Bay to the four year-round villages and making it easier for fishers to come and go. The Nisg̱a’a operate as many as six camps each year, spread along the north bank of Fishery Bay. Members of one of the Tsimshian nations, whose traditional territory spans the northwest coast of B.C., run an additional camp a little farther downstream. The first priority during the harvest is for any members in the community who want eulachon to have “a feed”—a loosely defined quantity roughly equivalent to a mixing bowl’s worth of fresh eulachon per family. Then the crews fill wooden bins big enough to pen a small farm animal. Those fish “ripen” for days until they’re ready to be rendered into grease. Their smell goes from barely detectable to noticeably fishy to downright nauseating. (Nicole Morven affectionally calls it a “repugnant stench.”) Once the bin is full, the rest of the harvest goes to community members, to compensate the crew, and for trade. When it’s time to make grease, each camp has its own proprietary process, just as each has its own fishing strategies. The details are not mine to share. As I chat with the Walter’s Camp crew in their cabin—a rustic one-room hut with notes scribbled on the plywood walls from past visitors, sleeping bunks in a loft, a compact kitchen, and a TV lounge tucked behind the stairs—Lonny Stewart worries I’ve learned too many details. “Don’t write that down!” he pleads when another fisherman describes an aspect of the crew’s setup. Eulachon harvesting and grease making are age-old art forms. The magic is in the details, and some prefer those details be shared on a need-to-know basis. Stewart does, however, open a Mason jar of grease from the shelf for me to sample. He holds it up so the solidified oil inside gleams gold in the window light before offering a taste. It has a roasted, almost-nutty flavor. Fishy, but much more subtle than the smell implied by the fermenting fish outside. Past generations often traded their grease or allowed others the right to fish in exchange for furs, blankets, or other goods. Grease was such a commodity that the routes Indigenous peoples traveled from the interior to acquire it are known as “grease trails.” Today’s eulachon harvesters are more likely to sell grease or trade fish for camp necessities like boat fuel, building supplies, and rope, or for seafood such as herring eggs. As I chat with Haldane at Walter’s Camp one afternoon, a pale, curly-haired man knocks on the door. “I’m hoping to get some oolies. I’ve got 50 liters of gas to trade. What’ll that get me?” Haldane thinks for a moment. “Six sacks.” Roughly 68 kilograms (150 pounds) of fish for 11 gallons of gas. The customer nods and goes off with one of the other fishers to do the trade. Visitors stop by to trade for eulachon every day the camp is running, Haldane tells me. Mostly, eulachon stays within the Nisg̱a’a community. While the harvest is underway, locals throughout the villages are busily processing tubs of fresh fish. After marinating the eulachon in brine long enough for the eyes to turn white, some “stick” the fish for smoking, puncturing them under the jaw to thread a long rod through their mouths, or pushing one eulachon’s head through the lower jaw bone of another so the two form the shape of an arrowhead, and then hanging them in a smokehouse. Personal smokehouses are as common in the Nass valley as backyard sheds might be in suburbia. At a community smokehouse center in Gitlaxt’aamiks, students use another preservation method—stringing eulachon up on a triangular structure called a ganet to dry in the wind. When the fish are ready, the students distribute them throughout the village. Sharing is engrained in the culture of the harvest and extends beyond the four villages. Every year, the community sends a truckload of eulachon to “urban locals”—Nisg̱a’a members who live in Vancouver, Terrace, and Prince Rupert. Some camps also supply the fish to other nations, such as the Nuxalk in Bella Coola. Modern-day grease trails are paved and plied with cars and trucks, but they’re still an important pathway in the eulachon economy. Driving the winding road that connects Fishery Bay to the villages, Morven slows so she doesn’t miss the hand-hewn wooden sign marking the trailhead to Walter’s Camp. She nudges the government pickup onto the gravel shoulder, slips on her mittens and shoulders a backpack, then heads down the forested trail, shuffling so as not to fall on the hard-packed ice. She’s in pursuit of eulachon today, too—but she’s fishing for information, rather than sustenance. When she reaches the camp’s grease bin, she kneels in her snowpants, pulls out a freezer bag, and counts 50 freshly caught fish to bring back to her office, where she and her colleagues will record their length, weight, sex, and whether they appear to have spawned or not. They’ll also check for parasites—they find them very infrequently, perhaps once a year. Morven visits the fishing camps periodically to take samples, gathering 300 to 500 each season, and record harvesting stats from each crew. Her work is part of a larger effort by the Nisg̱a’a Nation to monitor the health of the run. Her department watches trends and patterns, seeing if catch numbers are consistent with effort year over year—one indicator that the population is holding steady—and if the eulachon are relatively consistent in size and apparent health. “I think about the generation behind us. We’re trying to keep the tradition going so we have resources for future generations,” Morven says. No one can say exactly how abundant eulachon were in the past, or how many there are today. Eulachon is what fisheries folk call a “data poor species,” with few in-depth, long-term monitoring projects throughout its range. Like other small forage fish, it is highly variable by nature and heavily influenced by oceanic conditions, notes marine biologist Robert Anderson of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Historical accounts indicate that eulachon numbers have crashed and rebuilt more than once, though a 2017 NOAA report notes that eulachon were abundant enough to sustain more than a century of “unrestrained harvest opportunities throughout the range of the species.” In addition to subsistence and recreational harvesting, eulachon have fueled a number of commercial fisheries. South of the U.S.-Canada border, for example, on the Columbia River, which straddles Washington and Oregon and has historically hosted the world’s largest eulachon run, commercial fishers regularly scooped 1,000 metric tons (2.2 million pounds) or more per year up until the 1990s. The Nass supported one of the most lucrative fisheries in British Columbia, peaking at about 900 metric tons (2 million pounds) a year before it closed in the 1940s. (After closing it for a few years, authorities have recently allowed a small commercial fishery to resume on the Columbia, with fishers taking an annual average of 5.6 metric tons. And in Cook Inlet, Alaska, commercial fishers are allowed to take as much as 181 metric tons (400,000 pounds) a year with hand-operated dip nets, though have yet to exceed 90 metric tons.) After whatever ecological switch was tripped in the 1990s that caused eulachon to disappear en masse, nearly every run between the northern coast of British Columbia and California showed some level of decline. Experts calculated that the average drop in abundance was around 83 percent, says Anderson. “It wasn’t something that was just following typical cycles of boom and bust,” he adds, “but a range-wide crash that was year after year after year.” (Though there have been stronger returns in some recent years and the outlook no longer seems quite as dire, numbers remain depressed compared to what they were historically.) In 2007, the Cowlitz Tribe of Washington state, concerned about declines they were witnessing along the Cowlitz River, petitioned NOAA to list eulachon under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. In response, the agency drew a line on the map below the Nass River, defining everything from the Skeena River in British Columbia (immediately south of the Nass) to the Mad River in Northern California as the southern distinct population segment (DPS), and in 2010 designated that population as threatened. The line, Anderson explains, was based both on where the declines were most pronounced and a suite of ecological and biological characteristics—everything from genetics and body size to spawning locations and timing. It also roughly coincides with the transition zone between two distinct drivers of oceanic conditions: the southern California Current and northern Alaska Current. While researchers have identified other threats to eulachon—such as offshore shrimp trawling, industrial pollution, marine mammal predation, and dams and other water diversions—the biggest driver seems to be shifting ocean conditions. “It’s like, what do you do about that?” Anderson says. NOAA’s eulachon recovery program, led by Anderson, carries out activities such as stock biomass surveys, river sampling, and genetic analysis to better understand the dynamics of the species, and works with the shrimp-fishing industry to reduce bycatch. But, of course, they can’t do anything about the changing oceans. Within British Columbian waters, eulachon are treated as three distinct groups. In 2011, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) assessed the Fraser River and Central Coast populations as endangered. The independent advisory panel identified the third group, from the Nass, Skeena, and Bear rivers, as threatened. The Nisg̱a’a community balked. A threatened classification could interfere with their ability to harvest and was incongruous with their own observations that the Nass run remained reliable. Since 1997, when the Nisg̱a’a began keeping catch data, they have taken an average of 181 metric tons (400,000 pounds) per year, equating to roughly 4.5 million fish (roughly 11 percent of historical harvests). But catch figures don’t always reflect actual abundance on the river. Some years, fishers catch few eulachon, but the reasons vary. The community may not require as many fish during certain years, for instance; the crews harvest until needs are met and then stop. Other times, ice may prevent access to the fish. Low-harvest years “happen now and again,” says veteran fisherman Gerald Robinson. “It’s Mother Nature’s way of saying to let the fish come back.” After the threatened designation, the community campaigned for a reassessment. COSEWIC scientists reviewed the catch data in relation to fishing effort numbers, and in 2013 updated the designation to “special concern,” acknowledging that the run remained strong on the Nass compared with other rivers. Soon after COSEWIC’s original report, the Nisg̱a’a began carrying out larval tows on the Nass each spawning season. Twice a week throughout the spring, workers collect a series of samples from the river. Then technicians painstakingly count the eggs and larvae—there can be a few thousand in a single sample. By factoring in the volume of river discharge and the fecundity of an average female eulachon, it’s possible to extrapolate how many spawning fish came through in a season. There aren’t enough data points to show clear trends yet, says biologist Cam Noble of LGL, an environmental research and consulting firm that collaborates with the Nisg̱a’a on the monitoring work. The team found that in 2014, the first year of monitoring, 4.5 million eulachon had arrived in spawning waters. The next year spiked to 38 million, and then rose to 70 million in 2016. Thirty million arrived in 2017, and 37 million in 2019, the most recent year available. The Nisg̱a’a anticipate that the data will help make the case that the Nass River eulachon remain harvestable, in the event that COSEWIC or other outside organizations turn their attention to Nass eulachon again in the future. This doesn’t mean, however, that some Nisg̱a’a aren’t worried about eulachon. While Sim’oogit Hleek, the fisheries director, agrees that the Nass eulachon run is vibrant enough to support continued fishing, there’s little doubt in his mind that the quantity of fish coming into the river is diminishing over time. “We notice, of course, depletion of everything,” he says. “Everything’s depleting now based on how the environment is changing.” Salmon don’t surge into the rivers as they used to, either; moose and mountain goats are harder to come by as well. Yet even in the ecosystem’s compromised state, traditional food is still available for those who want it, he says, and the eulachon run remains strong enough to supply anyone in the community who chooses to pursue it. Leaning over the side of a skiff, one of the fishers uses a hook to tug on the net and finds it heavy. “There’s something in the net, there’s something in the net,” the fishers chant in chorus as they pull the mesh to the river’s swirling surface. Haldane lifts the sodden mass and releases the narrow mouth of the net; a few hundred eulachon spill into the boat, mouths fluttering in the shock of air that heralds a departure from their own life cycle and the beginning of their post-mortem service up the food chain. There remains much to learn about the savior fish, which spends a mere five percent of its life in the river. The rest of the time, eulachon dwell in obscurity somewhere along an oceanic shelf, 50 to 200 meters (160 to 650 feet) below the surface. Do they die after spawning, for example? Biologists are uncertain. As many as 94 percent of eulachon caught by the Nisg̱a’a have already spawned to “some degree,” says Noble, of LGL. If eulachon do expire after spawning, as most experts believe, the fish swept into Nisg̱a’a nets were at the end of their lives anyway, and the impact of the fishery on the eulachon population “is a lot smaller than what the numbers might imply.” Researchers with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, however, conducted a survey in Chatham Sound, where the Nass River eventually empties into the sea, and found females that appeared to be recovering after spawning. There’s also, of course, the uncertainty around why eulachon keep showing up in sizable quantities in some rivers but not others. Why in 2005 did eulachon in Alaska’s Unuk River crash, while rivers on either side of it held up? Why has the Columbia River continued to be a stronghold for the species overall, despite major losses elsewhere in the southern DPS? Anderson suspects that, unlike salmon, which have precise homing instincts to natal rivers, eulachon may shift between rivers within the region from year to year. Strongholds such as the Columbia—and presumably the Nass—may also act as “anchors,” with populations spilling into other rivers during good years. “Every time we think we have it down, they do something that challenges that understanding,” Anderson says. Plus, new variables find their way into the eulachon equation. The Nisg̱a’a government, which like most governments has economic ambitions alongside environmental ones, is pursuing the construction of a floating LNG platform roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the Nass River’s mouth. During the public consultation process, environmental organizations, Nisg̱a’a citizens, and others voiced concerns about potential harm to the surrounding ecosystem and marine life, including eulachon. The majority of fishers I meet in the Nisg̱a’a territory don’t seem to spend much time worrying about disappearing eulachons. They focus on what they know: that when a certain moon aligns with a certain tide, the eulachon will appear; that if the wind is going to snarl, it’ll be when the tide turns; that the females arrive in the early spawning waves; that the best fishing happens at night; that when the fish become scattered and sparse, the run is almost finished. Some Nisg̱a’a, I’m told, believe the Nass is blessed and will continue to provide. They leave monitoring to others and focus on the demanding tasks at hand. A couple of weeks into the harvest, the task at hand is to stir boiling vats of fish to separate fat and flesh from bone. Nicole Morven brings me to a camp to watch some of the process. Cooking a batch of eulachon can take 18 hours. The workers stir with a large ladle, sometimes deep into the night under a shelter assembled from plywood, corrugated metal, and tarps. Pungent plumes of steam rise off the vats, permeating everything and everyone with the yeasty stench of boiled fish. Peering into one of the vats after the cook is done, I can see a thick, fuzzy gray layer of detritus lining the bottom and the occasional bone sticking up, left behind as the golden-hued oil rose to the top. The eulachon has been separated first from the river, and now from its constituent parts. It has taken on a new form, just as the river water rushing past the hut will rise as vapor when the warmer days of spring arrive, to fall again later as rain. Though nature’s cycles are increasingly uncertain, the Nisg̱a’a relationship with the beloved oily oolie is steadfast. Once the grease is ready, the workers will siphon it off and strain it into jars—preserving a taste that links hundreds of generations of human and fish for another season. *Simon Haldane passed away after my visit to the Nass Valley for this story. His father, Bruce, ran an eulachon camp and introduced Simon to the fishery as a young child. “We worked side by side all those years,” Bruce says. He was proud when his son was eventually offered the opportunity to run Walter’s Camp: “It took him a while to decide, but I told him, I’ll be with you.” At the camp, Simon created a legacy by training young Nisg̱a’a, Bruce adds. As a reporter, I only knew Simon superficially and briefly, but I was charmed by his quiet sense of humor, patience with my never-ending questions, and reserved warmth. Thank you, Simon, and rest well. Reporting for this article was made possible by an award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
One of Jože Plečnik's last creations in Ljuljana was a renovation, in 1952, of a former monastery of an order of Teutonic knights into an outdoor concert venue. The complex included a small church, three monastic cloisters, a prior’s residence, and enclosed gardens. Ideally situated in the city center at the end of Vega Street—an area Plečnik had redesigned with the vision of making it an arts hub—it was a prime location. Plečnik converted the monastery’s vegetable garden into an outdoor theater. For the main performance space, he designed a stepped open-air seating arrangement inspired by ancient Greek theaters. However, unlike the steep, semi-circular seating of classical theaters, Križanke required a proscenium arch format with a gentler slope. He deliberately kept a low wall around the performance area and created a public garden beyond it, allowing those unable to afford tickets to still enjoy the music from outside. One of his most inventive and striking designs at Križanke was a smaller, secluded space known as “The Devil’s Court.” Nestled between the presbytery and cloister walls, this area featured low benches running along the walls beneath four vertical rows of embedded lamps. During the day, these lights—resembling hooded drainpipes—are unassuming. But at night, when the interior lights are turned off and only the wall-embedded lamps are illuminated, the effect is mesmerizing. The walls seem to dissolve, replaced by a constellation of floating lights, transforming the space into something almost celestial. Today, Križanke is a vibrant cultural venue, hosting numerous concerts and serving as the home of Festival Ljubljana, an annual event that brings world-class classical music to the city.
The city slogan for the trilingual Transylvanian town of Satu Mare is "More than you think." The town's population is a mix of Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians, and the local architecture boasts some epic Brutalist beauty. The building is still in use, hosting the city council and city hall. This prime example of socialist Brutalist architecture in Satu Mare is the Administrative Palace. The building stands a proud 97 meters tall in the center of the Transylvanian town of Satu Mare. From the top you can see all the way to Hungary. The three smaller towers alongside the high tower are meant to represent the three cultures of Satu Mare: the Romanians, the Hungarians, and the Germans. The high tower itself is meant to represent their unity. It was designed by architect Nicolae Porumbescu and he was assisted by local Ludovic Gyüre. About 1,000 construction workers worked on it for over a decade between 1972 and 1984. For a short while, the Administrative Palace was the tallest building in Romania, and it remains the highest building in the region.
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