History’s Quietest Icon: The Many Faces Pierrot

“I’m Pierrot,” once said the late, great David Bowie: “I’m Everyman”. We all know his face: white like the moon, his only friend, with sad black lines drawn around the eyes, smudged by a teardrop or two. He’s dressed in an oversized white shirt with ruffles and pompoms and a little white pointed hat. Pierrot…

Digging Up Egypt’s Not So Ancient WWII Surrealist Movement

Cairo, 1938. Around 140,000 British troops occupied the city, and World War II was ready to burst. Thirty-seven artists and writers gathered to fight against a rising Fascist ideology, British colonial rule, and the local conservative art scene. The first inklings of Surrealism already simmered under Egypt’s troubled surface, as artists and writers corresponded with…

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The Azores: Secrets of Europe’s Hawaii

Lost in the Atlantic Ocean, nine islands thrust out of the depth of the sea in a fiery birth created by seismic activity. The archipelago of the Azores, said by some to have even been the fragments left behind from the lost continent of Atlantis – the sunken land said by Plato to have been…

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Meet Alma Mahler: Composer, Lover, Muse, Sex Doll and Liar

Alma Mahler was no ordinary woman: She shared her first kiss with Gustav Klimt, kept diaries that offered an insight on fin de siècle Vienna the same way Anaïs Nin’s journals did for 1930s Paris with the same (if not more extreme) fabrication, and drove her ex-lover to such madness he commissioned a sex doll…

An 8th World Wonder without Tourists: Georgia’s Ancient Cave Cities

From the top of the ridge, a dusty wind blows south, sweeping down and across the endless desert-like plains in Azerbaijan. A narrow path cuts through the dried up shrubbery that shakes with each passing of stamping feet (recommended to scare away poisonous snakes). A rusty railing cuts down the already narrow path marking the border between Georgia…

Lost to the Iron Curtain: The Avant Garde Artist the World Forgot

Paris may have been the artistic hub of Europe’s cultural life and modern ideas at the beginning of the 20th century, but a majority of its greatest thinkers and artists actually came from abroad, from places such as Spain, the US and even further away, like Russia and its surrounding countries. Across the Black Sea around…

Take a Peek Inside the Original Grand Budapest Hotel

On the busy streets of the Grand Boulevard, the Corinthia Hotel blends in with the decadent architecture of downtown Budapest. Located amidst the bistros and elegant apartment blocks punctuated by traffic and the yellow tram that never sleeps, it’s easy to miss out of the beauty of this old hotel. But if you take a…