Gate of Hohenschönhausen prison. The East German Stasi’s (Ministry for State Security) secret prison in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen locked up and interrogated some 11,000 enemies of the state for crimes as terrible as criticizing government policy, listening to Western music, and simply wanting to emigrate. Originally a makeshift basement prison run by the DDR’s Soviet overlords, the...
At Hendaye on the Atlantic. Did I know what I was getting into…? I’m back at my desk after hiking the length of the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean: just under 800 km, with 51,000 metres of elevation gain and descent, in 35 days. I wanted to do this high traverse as a sort of farewell-to-Europe after 15 years living on the continent, six of them in Malta and the rest in...
Waiting for the Nightjet to Paris My attempt to reach the Pyrenees by train failed before it began. I had planned to go to the Atlantic end of the Pyrenees this week, where I would begin a long mountain hike. Here’s how it looked on paper. I would hop an expensive ÖBB Nightjet from Berlin at 7:04pm on Tuesday, arriving at Paris Est at 9:38 the next morning, alongside other...
Malbork Castle Winter darkness still shrouded the streets as we trudged through the centre of Gdansk to the railway station, with a quick stop at a well-lit bakery for coffee and sandwiches to go. An hour on the train passed in a sleep-deprived blur of green fields and grassy embankments that opened into castle views right before we pulled into the station. The red brick bulk of Malbork caste...
Along the Motlawa River I spent a few days in northern Poland between Christmas and New Year. I don’t have time to write it up properly thanks to a flurry of podcast recording and work on a new book, but I want to give you a few brief impressions. Perhaps it will inspire a trip of your own. I blew a big chunk of my savings on a series of long flights in November, so travel options were limited...
Pamela Petro Pamela Petro is an American writer obsessed with a country she visited by chance. She first went to Wales as a graduate student in her early twenties. The place felt deeply familiar from the moment she arrived, as did the sense of longing that permeates its landscape and stories, both recent and ancient. The Welsh have a word for this acute presence of absence, an untranslatable term...
Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer’s history of East Germany changed the way I look at the late twentieth century word I grew up in, and put a human face on the other side of the Cold War. Eighties movies and television portrayed it as a vast open-air prison populated by monotonous grey blurs without individuality or agency — and it was widely militarized, watched over by the Stasi and by a nervous...
Julian Evans Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its crumbling baroque beauty, and with its distinct personality as a self-contained world: part stage set and part port city on the make, a place where the boundaries between the actual and imaginary were continually blurring. He also fell in love with a local...
Thomas Swick Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. He suffered bleak winters in gloomy concrete apartment blocks, and he experienced two very different worlds: the closed-door life of spirited friends huddled over tables at home, and the empty windswept boulevards of an Eastern European capital without street life. He also lived through events that would be seen as...
The 13th century house we rented in Le Faget As my travels in the southwest of France come to a close, I want to tell you about a remarkable 13th century house I rented in the tiny village of Le Faget (pop. 306), around 31km from Toulouse. It was one of those rare AirBnB finds that is utterly unique, extremely comfortable, and surprisingly inexpensive for the value on offer. I knew from the...