śmigus-dyngus

The second day of Bright Week—the Octave of Easter, is a public holiday in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia as an extension of Eastertide and events sometimes traditionally include egg races and other activities to use up, put away the festoonery—a pretty practical idea, which in parts of central Europe, including parts of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine they had down to a science, once at least though the practise seems to be less and less common.
Called in Polish above and Oblévačka in Czech, “Wet Monday” (or simply Dyngus Day by diaspora) was chance for adolescents to throw water on each other and flirtatiously beat each other with willow branches that made up traditional egg trees and decorative boughs. With suspected roots in pagan fertility ceremonies and the welcoming of spring countered by Christian missionaries trying impose their religion on the natives, linguists conjecture that śmigus refers to baptism—an involuntary or unwanted one at that, going all the way back to the conversion of Mieszko I, the Duke of the Poles in 966 (coincidentally also on this day)—and Dingnis—from the old German for ransom—refers to the tribute that one can pay in leftover eggs to avoid getting doused or whipped.

абетка

Though never a serious contended to replace the Cyrillic variant of the Ukrainian alphabet, several times throughout history Latin scripts have enjoyed compelling fashionability and, always politically fraught, prompting studies into ornithological reform (see also) and sometimes the outright Romanization of the language.
A generalized Latin script called Łatynka was proposed and precipitated an intense public debate, the War of the Alphabets, especially along the country’s western frontier regions where there was an abrupt divide between writing traditions in the mid-nineteenth century and again became en vogue during the early years of the Soviet era—at one point some seventy new scripts were adapted for the Uralic, Iranian, Slavonic, Mongolian, Korean and Chinese written languages of the USSR, following the lead of Turkey. Publications, mainly for the benefit of border communities, during that phase—until development was halted and reversed by Joseph Stalin—incorporated letters from Czech and Polish alphabets and was called Abecadło.

aus tradition grenzen überschreiten

With illustrious alumni including H, Angela Merkel, Robert Schumann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Tycho Brahe, the University of Leipzig is one of the world’s most storied and preeminent institutions of higher learning and second longest in existence only to that of Heidelberg (1386) in Germany and was officially founded on this day in 1409 to provide a new alma mater to German-speaking academics that had fled the reformation movement agitated by Jan Hus in Prague with the endorsement of the papacy.
To ensure the university’s independence and scholastic freedom from state influence, the founders gifted the institution first three then a total of eight nearby villages as sources of revenue, an arrangement that continued through the nineteenth century. Pictured here is the Paulinerkirche, which served as the university’s anchor since the beginning, until its demolition by the government of East Germany in 1968 but rebuild in modernist style in 2012 as the Paulinum (das Aula und Universitätskirche Sankt Pauli) with the former dormitory high rise—meant to suggest an open book, now City-Hochhaus beside. The above motto translates, (from) a tradition of crossing borders and was one of the first institutions to allow female guests to audit classes, eventually awarding its first doctor of jurisprudence degree to a Russian graduate student called Anna Yevreinova in 1873 and during the transition period of the decline and eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, many from the newly independent republics turned to Leipzig as an administrative and educational model.

herrnhuter stern

We’re getting ready to hang up our Moravian stars as the first festoonery of the season and the process of constructing the lantern and piecing together the paper cones is always an engaging ritual.
The decoration and design originated in the 1830s in a Moravian church (see also) boarding school for boys near the town of Görlitz to impart students with a lesson in geometry—the twenty-six-sided star being called a rhombicuboctahedron. Around 1880, an alumnus of the Pædagogium made the stars and their instruction manuals for sale in his bookstore and his son went on to open a factory in 1897 in the village of Herrnhut under the auspices of the church that makes and distributes the stars to this day.

sametová revoluce

Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of what had been inscribed on calendars across the globe as International Students’ Day, when in 1939 Nazi forces stormed the University of Prague and arrested over twelve hundred pupils and professors, the series of demonstrations that precipitated from this gathering, massing to a half a million people, turned against the Communist ruling party of Czechoslovakia.
The first large-scale and enduring rally since the Prague Spring, the peaceful Velvet Revolution, riot police often rebuffed with flowers and the spirit of change being something quite infectious and not limited to the metropolitan areas, the name for the movement being selected by the dissident students’ translator Rita Klímová (*1931 – †1993) and later the country’s last ambassador to the US before splitting into its constituent republics, and continued through the of the year, unseated the ruling Old Guard, opened the borders and brought about the first democratic elections held in the country since 1946 with rebel poet and human rights activist Václav Havel (*1936 – †2011) voted into the office of president on 29 December.

upward mobility

Via Weird Universe we are introduced to this rather intriguing and ingenuous business architectural feature in the June 1948 issue of Popular Science and left wanting to know more. Only a few column inches are dedicated to this structure with a corner office that moves up and down the building’s fourteen storeys (the rest of the staff used paternosters) located in Zlín but we were able to find out a bit more.
The town itself urban utopia (see also) and a manufacturing anchor of the Moravian region in large part due to the shoemaking factory founded by siblings Tomáš, Anna and Antonín Baťa in 1894, the skyscraper was build as the administrative headquarters for their successful footwear brand. The third tallest pre-war building in Europe executed in Constructivist style, it is now known as Building № 21 (Číslo 21) and cherished as a cultural monument, houses offices of the regional government. Going abroad during the World War II, the boss never had a chance to use his mobile office and there’s unconscionably no indication whether this seeming unique idea was ever tried anywhere else or why such an idea was abandoned.

eurorando

Founded on this day in 1969 in a lodge on a popular hiking trail through the Swabian Jura (Schwäbische Alb), the Europäishce Wandervereinigung, the European Ramblers’ Association, la Fédération européenne de la randonnée pédestre was formed by founding members representing walkers’ clubs from West Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Belgian.  Now headquartered in Kassel and with offices in Prague, more than fifty-eight area- and regional-organisations from thirty European states sponsor regular outings and maintain, marking and signposting a vast network of long distance hiking trails (some seventy thousand kilometres worth across an active membership of some three million individuals, see previously). The so called E-Paths are not for virtual exploration, but rather are trails that cross a minimum of three countries.

prager botschaft

To prevent further exodus to the West Germany via Prague, the government of East Germany closed its border with Czechoslovakia on this day in 1989 after some seven-thousand political refugees had camped out on the grounds of the West German Embassy and were granted safe passage on special trains bound for the BDR. The Velvet Revolution is fomenting at the same time as unrest in Berlin, Leipzig and elsewhere ensues and once the border is reopened a month later, another group of East German asylum-seekers cross into Hof, a West German frontier town.

weltzeituhr

On this day in 1969, to commemorate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the founding of the DDR, the iconic structure also known as the Urania World Clock (for the Uraniasäule that was destroyed in the war which it replaced as a public timepiece) was unveiled to the public in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz as part of a plan to modernise the square and make it a showcase for the world. Envisioned by Czechoslovakian designer Erich John, the metal rotunda supported by a twenty-four-sided column representing the main time zones of the Earth displays the current time for one hundred forty eight cities, periodically updated to reflect contemporary geopolitics. The turret mechanism is in constant motion but it is imperceptible except in time-lapse.

遍地開花

After the storming of the Legislative Council building on the 1 July anniversary of the 1997 return of the former UK crown colony of Hong Kong to China, protesters have embraced non-violent ways of continuing to express their displeasure and fear that the residents of territory will see liberties erode further.
Taking a cue from the Lennon Wall in Prague, activists have canvased any available space with colourful self-adhering notices, an outlet that’s passive and anonymous enough to keep most individuals out of danger but still one that the authorities cannot easily ignore and now the symbols themselves incite rallies around pro- and anti-government camps. The title refers to the spontaneity of the walls as “blossoming everywhere.” These mosaics, with tens of thousands of missives advocating for freedom and democracy, originate from a central display in Hong Kong five years earlier, erected during the Umbrella Movement, a seventy-nine day occupation of the city to demand transparency in municipal elections—which were perceived to be controlled by Beijing. Protesters carried umbrellas to shield themselves from tear gas that the police lobbed at them to break up the crowds.

martini & rossi asti spumanti

Along with many other candidates including the mines of the Erzgebirge / Krušnohoří and the Roman Limes, Italy (previously) hopes that after a decade’s long campaign for inclusion to add the Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene outside of Venice to the UNESCO register of World Heritage Sites. The grape variety, the glera, is a Slovenian import and until 2009 (when effervescent prosecco was granted its denominazione di origine controllata label, the title beverage has its own protected designation and is made from Moscato grapes) was called Prosek. Proposals will be submitted to the commission in Paris at the end of the month.

of bastions and batteries

Constituted in part from some of the last remains of a medieval fortification (a bastion, the defensive ring around Felsenburg Neurahen) but mostly a series of naturally occurring but artfully linked observation platforms, the bridge located high in the sandstone mountains (die Elbsandsteingeberger) of Saxony represents one of the first purpose-built tourist attractions, having existed in this form for some two hundred years.
H and I recently had the chance to hike around and explore some of the trails in this area, known as the Saxon Switzerland, der Sächsische Schweiz, and take advantage of the accommodations that developed over the decades and informed what we have come to expect—for better or worse, from a destination, its renown presaged by romanticised depictions in travel guides and paintings—though nature conservancy also went hand in hand with promoting tourism and now is the centrepiece of an expansive national park and preserve.  Click on the images to enlarge.

Also not failing to deliver, next we toured the Fortress Königstein, located on the towering promontory that dominated our campsite, as we’d appreciate later. A centuries’ old enclosed ensemble asserts its control over the Elbe, forming the one of the largest fort in Europe, located on a tabletop hill (Tafelberg).

Casements and batteries aside, the Königstein owes its long existence and many iterations to a reliable water supply won through an incredibly deep well (one hundred and fifty two metres, excavated by hand with two horse power and the second deepest in Europe) that allowed the occupants of the fortress to survive and outlast what would otherwise be a crippling siege and a matter of waiting the defenders out.

6x6

spitzmaus mummy in a coffin and other treasures: Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum’s guest curators, Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf

siss-boom-bah: antique Japanese fireworks catalogues

invaderz: a twist on the classic arcade game whose advancing armada evolves (relatedly) during play

a declaration of future independence: antiquarian JF Ptak shares the scarce text of Czechoslovakian president Edvard Beneš’ nullification of the Munich Agreement, which was promised to usher in “peace in our time”

not the stockholm syndrome: Swedish capital takes a stand on the privatisation of public spaces (previously), via Super Punch

暦:dioramist and art director Tatsuya Tanaka (previously) is sharing a daily calendar of his miniatures assembled from the everyday, via Nag on the Lake   

das münchner abkommen

On this day—with negotiations continuing through the night and on to the next morning—in 1938 Italian il Duce Benito Mussolini, France’s Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler at a conference in Munich to lend a façade of legitimacy to Nazi Germany’s long-standing goal of annexing the newly-coined territory of the Sudetenland, lands with an ethnic Germany majority along the borders with the also freshly minted Czechoslovakia.
Despite the conspicuous absence of any representation of the Soviet Union or the Czech government or outlandish claims including Czechoslovakia being accused of plotting to exterminate the Sudeten Germans and being characterised as a vassal state of France created for the express purpose of being a base of operations for the French armed forces to overrun and finally vanquish Germany, afterward Chamberlain praised the summit as heralding “peace in our time,” though many others (including president Edvard Beneš and the Czech people) saw it as a dangerous and precedential tactic of appeasement. German diaspora who had mostly set up trading operations in Hapsburg lands suddenly found themselves in foreign lands after World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bereft of much of the freedoms and privilege (reportedly) accorded to Prussian subjects prior. Because of the nature of their import/export business, these Germans living abroad were more affected than the native populations by the economic downturn of the Great Depression and their demands for autonomy—with the backing of the German government—became more and more shrill.

hungersteine

Weeks of drought conditions have precipitated significant drops in the water level in rivers and lakes across Europe, including the Elbe (Labe), where near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic at Děčín carved boulders, normally submerged, have been exposed. Known as hunger stones, the engravings mark historic droughts and thus failed harvests that have occurred over the past six centuries. While such memorials lends some perspective to our times, the extremes we are experiencing now and unprecedented in combination with intense temperatures that overtax the resilience of ecosystems when there’s no relenting.

pražská jar

Fifty years ago, the reform efforts of the government of Czechoslovakia were brought to a standstill and reversed with the invasion of the Soviet Union with the materiel support from three other Warsaw Pact nations, with some two-hundred thousand troops and two thousand tanks and the arrest of First Secretary Alexander Dubček, with many more fleeing into exile, who spearheaded the movement known as the Prague Spring.
Over time, a half a million troops would occupy the country, advancing from beyond the country’s borders after an ostensibly successful round of negotiations concluded earlier in the month, coming an unexpected shock to the people of Czechoslovakia who believed that their interpretation of socialism, a mixed system that held protections for individual freedoms of expression might be the way forward. The Soviets saw the push for political liberalisation and move towards decentralisation of economic and foreign policy as a threat to the Eastern Bloc’s cohesion as a unified front against bourgeois values.

the long game

Digg directs us to a fascinating article from The New Republic that traces the deep history of the KGB and successor organisation’s preening of their unwitting Manchurian Candidate, possibly going all the way back to Trump’s 1978 marriage to Ivana and subsequent visits to Czechoslovakia, with the real estate mogul becoming a person of interest who might provide insights into the soft power of celebrity.
Indeed, however, their plant turned out to be something like The Americans, only tawdry and dim and in reverse with the realisation that Trump and his circle had not only the potential for ingratiating themselves to politicians with the power to influence policy-makers but had were fools for flattery and the American oligarchs, the parasitical rich whose fortunes would not have materialised without heavy government subsidies and corporate bequests of to hollowed out institutions and services that the state used to provide, might be enlisted as statesmen themselves—either directly or indirectly.  There’s an exchange from 1986 recounted that would have otherwise appeared too dumb and conceited to be believed until this year with Trump fishing for information on nuclear weapons as a way to get a primer on how Gorbachev so he might be able to convince Reagan to invest Trump with plenipotentiary powers as an ambassador to the Soviet Union and of course, to open a hotel.  Arrogantly, Trump laid claim to his familiarity and confidence by linking himself to the administration through the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort & Stone who had helped orchestrate Reagan’s 1984 re-election victory who Trump had recently retained. It’s easy to concede that such vanity wouldn’t make for a plum asset. 

bierkönig

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals, we are introduced to a comprehensive and exhaustive collection of drink coasters, beermats and other bar paraphernalia from around the world. A casual curator myself, I was really engrossed with the history—the first non-saucers made from high grammage pasteboard were produced in the town of Magdeburg in 1880 as a way to primarily protect tables from condensation but quickly became a vehicle for advertising and other messaging spreading from Europe outward.

time & temperature

Coudal Partners’ fresh signals direct our attention to this rather gorgeously designed and presented global weather service called Ventusky, founded in 2006 and headquartered in Plzeň. Available also as an app, the dynamic forecasts are fully customisable and there a lot of aggregated meteorological data to sift through and recombine.

eisheilige oder in like a lion, out like a lamb

This day marks the last in the triplet of saints’ days, commemorating early martyrs and bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries, traditionally part of weather lore throughout much of central and northern Europe known collectively as the time of the ice saints, when Spring had begun in earnest but there was yet the danger of a cold snap.
Though there’s some variance according to one’s whereabouts, the consensus seems to give the title to Boniface (Saint Mamertus in Nordic countries), Pancras and Servatius whose feast days fall on the 11th, 12th and 13th. Respectively patrons of bachelors and converts, service-sector jobs and health, rheumatism and foot problems, this cadre seem to have little to do weather prognostication, like groundhogs (Candlemas) or the Seven Sleepers (used to forecast summer weather) and their dates were all shifted a bit to the left when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian way of reckoning dates and we all lost ten days but there is certainly the chance for strange, destructive weather this late in the season—especially for the micro-climates that cleave to the valleys and foothills, which asserted itself just the day before yesterday by dumping a frightening large amount of hail on a village just a few kilometres away and causing storm surges in Hamburg.