Constructed out of steel rings, two giant human figures – one male , one female – stand on the seafront. Periodically, the two halves of this eerie outsize couple, each eight metres tall, move slowly towards each other. Briefly, the rings interlock and the figures fuse. Then, inexorably, they glide apart again.
Boyd Tonkin
This gallery looks, and feels, like the Sistine Chapel of the Anthropocene.
As for the crowds that throng the Stalin Museum in Gori on a fine spring day, they prove that the fascination the Soviet dictator exerts on posterity remains undimmed.
Did I really see the Taj Mahal? Of course, I did. After all, I have the memories, the photographs, the companions to prove it.
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1805/06-1887) ended a long life full of jokes and paradoxes with a final farewell jest.
In Thessaloniki, you can easily taste at least some of the sedimented past.
In March 2017, students of Edwardes College in Peshawar won admiring reviews for their production of Antigone by Sophocles. The young actors enrolled at this late-Victorian foundation – now affiliated to the University of Peshawar – live in a province of Pakistan where the tragedy’s backdrop of fratricidal strife, family division and murderous combat between clashing sources of authority could hardly feel more urgent.
After the ‘reconquest’ of Spain by Christian rulers, millions of Muslims and Jews who had lived in the Iberian peninsula for many centuries converted, more by force than choice, to the new monopoly religion of these lands. However, their customs, their rituals, their languages – and above all their food – proved impossible to eradicate.
It is a characteristic of the city of strangers, the global metropolis, that it throws disparate people together and asks them – often without much external support – to forge a community out of coincidence.
In almost all its historic iterations, utopia for some implies dystopia for others.