Büyükada is the largest of the nine Princes’ Islands located in the Sea of Marmara, so close to the city of Istanbul that they are considered its neighborhoods. Its barely 5 square kilometers, where motorized vehicles are prohibited, boast some historical monuments, Byzantine churches and monasteries, along with a mosque, an abandoned amusement park, and […]
Architecture
Posted inArt, Middle Ages
The Chartres Cathedral’s great labyrinth
About 80 kilometers southwest of Paris stands the city of Chartres, one of whose main cultural attractions is its Gothic cathedral built between 1194 and 1220. It was built in the same place where other churches and cathedrals had been before, the first one around 360 A.D., all of them destroyed by fires: the first […]
Posted inMiddle Ages
The plan of Saint Gall, the largest known architectural drawing of the High Middle Ages that was never built
The abbey of Saint Gall ( Sankt Gallen in German) was founded in the year 613 in the town that today bears his name in Switzerland by an Irish monk, Gallus of Hibernia. It would be one of the main Benedictine monasteries in Europe for many centuries. It flourished under the patronage of Pepin the […]
Posted inArt, Culture
The wrought iron bar chain that saved the Amiens Cathedral from collapsing
The Amiens Cathedral, listed as a Historical Monument in 1882 and included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981, is a reference in its style and also has a series of curious elements that make it particularly interesting. One of them is the famous labyrinth that paves the floor of the nave; another, the […]
Posted inAncient Egypt, Archaeology
The solar alignment that occurs twice a year in the temple of Abu Simbel
Three millennia ago Egypt was at the height of its Empire. After the war campaigns of Senusret III and a period of splendour and Egyptian pax during the government of Amenhotep III, and having saved a phase of weakness and decadence led by pharaohs like Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the times of splendour returned with the […]