Friday, January 25, 2013

North Ossetia City of the Dead | Atlas Obscura

North Ossetia City of the Dead | Atlas Obscura

North Ossetia City of the Dead

This ancient village and its adjoining cemetery have a beautiful history of death and remembrance

Memento Mori, Catacombs, Crypts, & Cemeteries, Relics and Reliquaries
0
Contributors:ekoptev
Reaching this mystifying destination requires a three hour drive, taking you down a dangerous and hidden road befitting of a journey to the City of the Dead.
The village of Dargavs, or the City of the Dead, has an ancient cemetery where people that lived in the valley buried their loved ones along with their clothes and belongings. The valley stretches for 17 kilometers, and the cemetery contains almost 100 ancient stone crypts.
Ossetians say that it helps them understand of how people lived 400 years ago. It is a very mysterious place with a lot of myths and legends. It attracts tourists from nearby, as well as all over the world. It was once believed that if anyone tried to get to the city they would never emerge alive.
Due to the difficulty in finding or traveling to the location, there are not a lot of tourists at any given time. The local superstitions probably have little to do with the lack of popularity, although they do still linger. Archeologists are also very interested in exploring the site more completely, as there have been interesting items found that have attracted some scientific attention.
People who did not have anyone to bury them long time ago would just wait in the massive cemetery until their death. Locals bemoan the young generation's attraction to bright cities, contending that the young are missing out on a lot. Russia has a lot of truly unique places to offer but these historic sites do not attract much attention.
If however one spends some time in North Ossetia, they say it's possible to feel the ancient vibes around the city and its surrounding area. Once you get to the city, you will find what at first appears to be lots of little white houses, but are actually stone crypts, the oldest dating back to the 16th century. In front of every crypt there is a well that was used to tell if a person "made" it to heaven. Visitors drop a coin into the well, and if the coin happened to hit a stone at the bottom of the well, it was said to be a good sign.
Local legends have it that in the 18th century, a plague swept through Ossetia. The clans built quarantine houses for sick family members, who were provided with food but not the freedom to move about, until death claimed their lives. It was a very slow and painful way to go, and in the City of Death they stay.
Posted by at

Mysterious Volgograd Balls

Mysterious Volgograd Balls | Atlas Obscura

Mysterious Volgograd Balls

Volcanic irregularity? Odd erosion? Alien eggs? Local legends compete to explain these strange orbs

Natural Wonders, Geological Oddities, Natural Wonders, Natural Wonders
0
Contributors:ekoptev
Ever since these mysterious spherical objects were found in Mokraya Olkhovka, legend and mystery has surrounded them.
The first theory of their origin was that they were the eggs of a dinosaur. That idea was tossed out by scientific study, which concluded that they consist of metal, silicon and sand, not baby dinosaur. Another legend was that they could have been the product of a unique volcano that produced not just steam, but minerals that fell into these unusual shapes, but that didn't pan out either. Adding to the intrigue, the balls were located very close to each other and looked very alike, each having the same shape and size as the last, which undoubtedly led to the go-to answer for anything without a crystal-clear origin- aliens.
Further investigation reveals that Kazakhstan and New Zealand also has some of these "eggs" hidden in their remote areas. While conspiracy theorists sometimes insist these are deposits from another planet, they actually do have a scientific explanation.
The scientific term for these ancinent "eggs" is "concretions", and they are a fairly common, if not captivating, phenomenon. They are formed when mineral cement precipitates in spaces between sediment. They occur within layers of strata that has already deposited, and resist erosion so that as the centuries roll by, these pockets of spherical concretionary cement remain after everything else is washed away
Posted by at

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

•RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32 Finalists Revealed‏

RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32 Finalists Revealed‏

 
 
Paizo.com
Posted by at

Richard III: Visions of a villain?

Richard III: Visions of a villain? - Telegraph

Richard III: Visions of a villain?

As archaeologists prepare to announce the discovery of Richard III's remains, Alastair Smart looks for clues to the king's much-maligned character in early portraits of him.


Maligned: An unknown artist’s copy of an original portrait of Richard III (1520, Royal Collection)
 By
8:00AM GMT 20 Jan 2013
Comments127 Comments
Poor old Richard III. King for a mere two years, two months in the 1480s, he was a brave and astute military leader, who also introduced the nation’s first form of legal aid. Yet, still he’s the most reviled monarch in our history, his name even finding its way into cockney rhyming slang to denote excrement.
In large part, this is down to his depiction in Shakespeare’s Richard III (1592) as a “poisonous bunch-back’d toad”, who has his two young nephews murdered in the Tower of London to assure his position as king. No matter that no historical evidence for such a crime exists.
Our grim fascination with Richard shifted to another level in September, when archaeologists – seeking his lost remains near the site of his killing by Henry Tudor’s forces at the Battle of Bosworth – hailed potential success under a car park in Leicester. They will confirm their results, with considerable hoo-ha, any day now.
Drawing on biased historical accounts like Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (1519) – which basically amount to Tudor-legitimising propaganda – Shakespeare’s Richard is a limping hunchback with a withered arm: as deformed in appearance as he was in character. This indeed is how posterity “remembers” him, and much of the current fuss in Leicester has surrounded one particular skeleton’s curved spine.
Yet, how accurate was Shakespeare’s description of Richard really? And can contemporary imagery help us judge? Sadly, no portrait of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, survives from his lifetime. However, the Society of Antiquaries does possess the earliest copy of one, from 1510, in which an earnest, upright Richard has no deformity whatsoever.
This is entirely in keeping with contemporary written sources, which speak only of his being short and lean: the Scottish ambassador complimented “so great a mind in so small a body”, while the Silesian knight Nicholas von Popplau observed that Richard “hardly touched his food”.
Demonisation began soon after his death, though, with the tinpot historian John Rous, who – keen to ingratiate himself with Henry VII, the new king – portrayed Richard as an anti-Christ: born with fully grown teeth and hair, as well as “uneven shoulders, the right higher [than] the left”.
Thomas More followed Rous’s lead, albeit switching the abnormality from right shoulder to left, presumably to play up Richard’s sinister side (sinister being Latin for left). A second Society of Antiquaries portrait, from 1550, duly depicts Richard with an unnaturally raised left shoulder. He also holds a broken sword, symbol of his broken kingship.
The hunchback tag now stuck, perhaps helped by the fact that Richard’s personal emblem was a wild boar – a naturally humpbacked animal – and the distinction between man and symbol grew blurred.
Most surviving portraits of Richard (20 or so in total) come from the late 16th century, when the fashion in great halls across the nation was to display a set of images of each English monarch chronologically. These were produced cheaply and formulaically in workshops, and based on a pre-established likeness: in Richard’s case a portrait from 1520 currently in the Royal Collection.
It is a work of subtle but significant slander. As would thereafter become the norm in pictures of him, Richard has uneven shoulders, villainously thin lips and malevolently narrow eyes.
Recent X-ray analysis reveals, though, that these slanderous touches were actually added soon after the painting was first completed. It seems to have started out simply as a copy of a now-lost portrait of Richard from life, only for alterations to be demanded by someone high up at the court of Henry VIII (in whose collection the picture was inventoried).
Shakespeare, then, was merely completing, with typical embellishment, a job already started by artists and historians – immortalising Richard III as a crookback Machiavel and implicitly championing his vanquisher, Henry VII, as founder of a heroic new dynasty: the Tudors. It’s a dynasty we associate to this day with thrusting England out of the Middle Ages and into the modern world.
Posted by at
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)