Matthew Carr The Pyrenees is one of the great European landscapes. It cuts across the mouth of the Iberian peninsula, forming the border between France and Spain. It’s been a place of beauty and of terror; a passage for refugees, dissidents and resistance fighters; and the cradle of both religious heresy and religious pilgrimage. This fascinating region is too often overshadowed by the...
Jacob Mikanowski I’ve always found the history of Eastern Europe difficult to come to grips with compared to Western Europe. The history and culture of Spain, France and Italy seem to fall within clearly defined boundaries. We know what French or Italian food is, with all its regional variations, and we have a sense of French and Italian film or literature. Eastern Europe is different. Its...
Barney White-Spunner (Photo by Millie Pilkington) Berlin has always been a uniquely nonconformist corner of a remarkably orderly country. It was the capital of Prussia, but its rulers preferred to live on its forested outskirts rather than in their palaces on the Spree. It came to symbolize Nazi Germany, but Hitler despised its rebellious, irreverent, freethinking residents. And for more than 40...
Joseph Roth Joseph Roth was one of the foremost European writers of the 20th century, and he wrote one of the period’s greatest novels. He wrote about the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of dispossessed people whose homeland was destroyed. His journalism captured fleeting moments with universal implications, and the social conflict, cultural upheaval, and acceleration of the inter...
I went back to Canada for a couple weeks in October to visit friends and family. This journey required six flights — three in each direction — every one of which was delayed. I traveled on three airlines: Lufthansa, Air Canada and SwissAir. All failed in multiple ways despite charging me far more money and delivering far less than in the past, with the exception of physical discomfort which...
Edith Durham, Albania’s ‘mountain queen’ When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains in Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their “mountain queen” for her staunch advocacy of Albanian independence and her love of its people. I’d stumbled across a copy of her 1909 book High Albania while preparing for my trip, and...
Bayonne, where tall half-timbered buildings reflect their greens and reds in the Nive I spent my last Basque days in Bayonne, where tall half-timbered buildings reflect their greens and reds in the Nive and Adour rivers. The riverside has a Middle Ages feel about it. It’s easy to imagine those same narrow buildings gazing down at the water traffic that made the city such an important commercial...
Inspecting bikinis on the Grande Plage Biarritz was once synonymous with glamour. Not just your run-of-the-mill glamour, either, but royal glamour. It started in 1855, when Napoleon III’s wife Eugenie built a palace on the beach. Empress Eugenie was born in the Spanish city of Granada, and her husband wanted her to have a home close to the border of her old country so she wouldn’t...
Surf’s up on the Silver Coast Winding mountain roads overburdened with speed cameras and toll booths led us over the edge of the Pyrenees and into France, where we’d take a brief detour from Basque country to swim on sparsely populated beaches up the coast. The geography flattened into an unremitting expanse of pine forests sheltered by massive sand dunes, and beyond them, beaches that...
I drove back to the barbershop in Zejtun a month after we left the village. The door rattled aside on its warped metal track. The chihuahua behind the counter barked and glared. An old lady reclined in a chair like the sheeted dead. I smiled and said hello to the receptionist, and she smiled too. But when the barber turned to look at me, he staggered back a step and froze. The smile...