To listen to an audio version of 'The Light of Birds' please click on the play button. They're returning, wave after wave of them spilling over the delta of the Evros River. The sky is streaked with sharp-winged falcons, with storks whitening the meadows when they descend, with flocks of ibis that close like black umbrellas on … Continue reading The Light of Birds, Evros Delta
Category: Travel
In Memoriam: Berlin, part 2
On the night of November 23rd, 1943 Allied bombers destroyed much of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church at the heart of Charlottenburg, Berlin. Built by the Kaiser at the end of the 1800s in honour of his father, the church lay largely entombed by its own fallen stone. All that remained was a shattered shell and … Continue reading In Memoriam: Berlin, part 2
City of Glass and Other Dreams: Berlin, part 1
"Berlin is a city condemned always to become, never to be." - Karl Scheffler, 1910 Perhaps no other city has taken up as much imaginary space over the last century as Berlin. It is a city forever in flux, not in the gradual, accumulated ways of most urban spaces, but with sudden, violent reinventions. Berlin … Continue reading City of Glass and Other Dreams: Berlin, part 1
The Long Ridge Down
Empires of any kind eventually slide, having risen within the shifting and fickle orbit of political, social, economic and religious realities. It's in the nature of things to fade so that what once seemed eternal exists only as memory, or as a scattering of stones. The traces mark the land with ruins and clues, half-hidden or submerged, … Continue reading The Long Ridge Down
Enduring Time
Two things were of particular interest to me when we travelled to Tetovo in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and they both concerned longevity. While one was a religious building that had withstood a devastating 17th century fire, armed ethnic conflict and the changing fortunes of shifting political borders, the other was a religious … Continue reading Enduring Time
Julian Hoffman 