Favorite Posters from Around the World: Europe

This is the first of two or three travel blog entries. The photos here are all of Europe, going generally from West to East. These were taken from three separate trips to that continent.

As long as I am pursuing this theme of favorites I thought you might enjoy these posters I made from various places we have visited. The photo above is of Porto, Portugal, looking over the Douro River. (It might seem redundant to repeat the place-names, since they are on the images, but I do for those with slow connections)

These images were all post-processed with Gimp. A wonderful free application available in any OS.

Coimbra, Portugal. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Actually, the university is on the summit. An intriguing, ancient town with plenty of ups and downs. Also a Roman aqueduct.

Cordoba, Spain.

Also Cordoba, Spain. I could not decide which poster from this beautiful city to choose so I am showing both. George Borrow, in The Bible in Spain, describing this mosque in his visit in the 1830s, said that many of the pillars were fallen. Apparently major reconstruction has taken place.

Parma, Italy. And what did we find in a vending machine on the street? Parmesan cheese! A delicious wedge, not the crumbly bland shaker cheese from America.

The Vatican. Rome, Italy.

Strasbourg, France. A placid view of a city that has seen its share of turmoil. Germany and France both have plenty of half-timbered houses (Fachwerkhäuser in German).

Lübeck, Germany.

Bensheim, Germany, on the Bergstraße. The town of my birth, back when it was West Germany. A lot of memories here. Many warm days I would walk the path up the hill past these vineyards and – don’t tell anyone – take a couple or ten deliciously purple grapes.

Wittenberg, Germany. A significant site in Lutherland, along with Martin Luther‘s town, Eisenach. These were both in East Germany. Though not obvious in this photo, it seems that the eastern region of Germany has retained more of its historical structures, not modernizing as much as the West.

Slovenia. I could not say exactly where. Taken from the bus from Austria to Ljubljana.

Trebinje was a pleasant introduction to Herzegovina. Plenty of ancient stone buildings seen, some centuries old, along the riverwalk leading to the arch bridge east of downtown.

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, seen from the Yellow Bastion. On the right bank of the Mivjacka River, about in the center of this view, was where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, the crime that sparked World War One.

It was not really that cold when we visited here so I was surprised to see snow on some of the hillsides surrounding the city. But looking closer I saw that the “snow” was white gravestones. Thousands of them, from a much more recent war.

Ohrid, Macedonia, a peaceful corner of the country. The bird drying his wings in the foreground is the Pygmy Cormorant, Microcarbo pygmaeus, is found only in south-east Europe and parts of western Asia.

Timisoara, Romania. This is the city where in 1989 the government tried to take away the priest. But the parishioners surrounded the entrances of his church (not seen here) and protected the priest from arrest.

Fagaras, Romania. We saw this beautiful cathedral as we were just passing through. This structure is more impressive to visitors than to many of the locals, who know that it is only a recent construction and consider it garish, ill-proportioned, and kitschy. I let you decide.

Sibiu, Romania. Neighborhood Watch? Many roofs in the center of this town have these “eyes”. Aside from this unique feature, Sibiu is picturesque and interesting. They have retained many of the old buildings, including a good part of the city wall.

Chisinau, Moldova, is maybe the best city to see plenty of Soviet-era statues and monuments. Also, to the north of the city, is the largest cemetery in Europe, including graves of many World War Two dead. Several of the gravestones are fascinating to explore. On some of them I saw laser-etched the deceased holding, variously, a guitar, a cigarette, vodka, or a Kalishnikov!

Confession time. I thought this view was of Transnistria but it is only the border (the bushes in the foreground are Transnistria!). The view is of Bendery Fortress and the city behind it is Bender, the last city of Moldova. Hmm. Should I bother reworking the poster? You just cannot believe everything you see on the Internet!

We already had a hotel booked in Tiraspol, Transnistria, but customs would not let us two passengers in. Our crime? Being American and, thus, obviously contagious with Corona Virus. The rest of the van went in. This is when the Corona Virus first started causing travel problems. We had to flag another van returning to Chisinau.

A few days later we were able to go through Transnistria, not getting off, on our way to Odesa.

Lviv, Ukraine. Looking down maybe the main avenue of the city. This city oozes architecture on several streets and ancient alleys. This is the main street from our apartment to the historic center of the city. And, unlike many Ukrainian towns, “historic” means more than just a plaque or a place name of what *used* to be. This city escaped much of the destruction of the last two world wars. But there were fires. Most of the Gothic churches were destroyed in the two major fires in, I think, the 15th and 16th century, leaving mainly Baroque and Roccoco structures.

There was so much to see in Lviv so I am going to wax a bit wordy. The Opera House, for example An enterprising German architect managed to fit that beautiful building right near the center of the city – by building it over a swamp. For a while there was some unsettling settling of the structure. Thankfully it stopped.

During the last day or so of the Nazi occupation all 40 of the opera orchestra were surrounded and forced to play the “Tango of Death” and were then stripped and shot, one by one.

When this building was constructed the city was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It has since belonged to Poland, Ukraine, Germany (for a short months starting with Operation Barbarossa), the Soviet Union and the Ukraine again. During this time the name changed from Lemberg to Lvov to Lviv. And “The Ukraine” has changed to just “Ukraine”.

The city has many old doors with carefully crafted woodwork and curiously overwrought iron. Some of these doors are centuries old.

Train Station. Kharkiv, Ukraine, about twenty miles from Russia. I hate to think what this looks like now.

Kharkiv, Ukraine. This is not a composition shot. I walked through the square until I could get both structures in one view. The cathedral, Svyato-Krestovozdvyzhenskyy Nyzhnyy Khram, and the Independence Monument.

This is the end of the European posts. Next I will show some from Asia.