#Belgrade.
I am back in Serbia now, just embarking on another Balkan tour for Atlas Obscura – which will take us through Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, and then back to Serbia again by the end of next week.
We have already seen some incredible things, and we’ve heard from several of the many expert guest speakers who’ll be joining us over the course of this trip.
I don’t always talk about these tours as much as I should. The main reason for that is – it’s incredibly hard work to make them happen, and it tends to take my full attention each day, from morning to night. But over these next weeks I’m going to try to share daily updates from the road…
Starting with these, some assorted impressions from Belgrade.
1. House of Mihailo Petrović
2. Statue of Despot Stefan Lazarević
3. Russian Tsar Tavern
4. Inside the Genex Tower
Odessa Catacombs, Ukraine.
7 September 2013.
The first time I visited Ukraine, I didn't stay for that long. It was 2012, and I stopped in Kyiv for just a few days before taking the train on to Moscow, travelling around Russia for a month, then spending a month in Kazakhstan after that.
But those few days made a big impression on me, so in 2013 I went back to see more of Ukraine. I travelled through Lviv, Kyiv, down to Odessa, and spent some time exploring Crimea too.
I took these photos exactly 10 years ago today – my first trip into the Odessa Catacombs, one of the world's largest urban labyrinths, with a total length of tunnels believed to extend as far as 2,500 km. We spent something like 10 hours underground that day, only seeing a fraction of the network... but it was long enough to start getting a feel for just how insanely large this system is.
"A Brutalist Xanadu beneath pink skies, where strange children play in the rivers of wine."
Don't worry – I don't plan to start posting AI images on a regular basis. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't find the whole thing incredibly interesting.
There's a tool you can use to check if your photos or art have been used in AI training sets – and mine very much have, again and again and again. Playing with these AI images, from time to time I’ve been experiencing weird feelings of deja vu… just the odd balcony, or the angle of a stairwell, that feels uncannily familiar.
Visually, I quite enjoy some of the results… like this one. Though on a philosophical level it troubles me to think that all these different buildings and monuments, each with their own artists, history, meaning, symbolism, and context, are effectively just being put into a blender by AI and turned into generic Brutalist soup.
But then, is that so very different to what human artists at Hollywood studios do? Stripping the meaning away from architecture, and using it as raw material to tell completely different stories. I get the same feeling every time I see Buzludzha presented as an evil villain’s lair… or see some revolutionary Yugoslav monument as the ruined totem of a futuristic dystopia. In some ways you could say AI art is more honest – because at least it's not injecting its own political interpretation.
The Disneyfication of Skopje, North Macedonia.
Wonderful, raw, authentic concrete is slowly consumed by plastic, plaster and fake pillars. The “Skopje 2014” project, aimed at remodelling the whole city in this new style, is reported to have cost the country in the region of €560 million. I took this photograph of the ongoing work in summer 2016.
From iconic works like the National Palace of Culture (NDK) and Hotel Rila, to some less visited gems tucked away in the suburbs... in this new article, I’ve explored 10 of the most noteworthy examples of Modernist architecture in #Sofia, #Bulgaria.
Read the full guide on TravelMag, at: /articles/modernist-architecture-sofia
“Let the pathways leading here, to the legendary Buzludzha Peak… never fall into disrepair.”
- Todor Zhivkov at the opening ceremony, 23 August 1981.
The Buzludzha Memorial House – the “People’s Monument,” as it was conceived by architect Georgi Stoilov – is 42 years young today.
For my PhD I wrote a 700-page thesis about this building, exploring its past, present, and its future. I’m currently working on adapting that into a format which is a bit more pleasurable to read. It’s coming...
For now though, here are some of my favourite photographs from dozens of visits to Buzludzha Peak over the last decade.
1. Buzludzha in a snowstorm, December 2018.
2. Inside the Ritual Hall, February 2015.
3. The outer gallery shrouded in fog, March 2015.
4. New graffiti reads “The Bulgarian Chernobyl,” March 2016.
5. Mosaics in the Ritual Hall, October 2017.
6. Inside the tower’s red star, October 2017.
7. Decayed mosaics on the outer ring, September 2017.
8. The sun sets on the saucer, October 2016.
This time last month, I attended an exhibition of art by Maria Prymachenko, inside the Ukrainian House International Convention Centre in Kyiv. Don't get me wrong, the art was great... but I confess I spent a lot of my time there gazing up at this ceiling instead.
Yesterday was the 79th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising. Over these two months towards the end of WWII, 250,000 civilians would lose their lives, and 90% of the city’s buildings would be destroyed.
The Warsaw Uprising Monument, pictured here, was designed by Jacek Budyn with sculptor Wincenty Kućma, and unveiled on the 45th anniversary in 1989.
