Seeking the World’s Soul

Amis­sos — Sam­sun, Turkey (http://archive NULL.kira­ha­gen NULL.com/c/kirahagen/gallery/Amissos-Samsun-Turkey/G0000HbQ6ac3rfz4) — Images by Kira Hagen (http://archive NULL.kira­ha­gen NULL.com/c/kirahagen)

The Eng­lish Club vis­ited Amis­sos on a cool Novem­ber after­noon. The the win­try sun­light was fad­ing fast, and slid golden over the twin tumuli atop the hill above the old har­bor, slowly fad­ing to twi­light blues as it sank behind the coastal moun­tains. The air was cool, a faint breeze blow­ing in from the sea. Sit­u­ated  to give panoramic views of the West­wards from Sam­sun, the city seemed, for once, tran­quil in the Black Sea dusk.

Amis­sos is the name of the ancient set­tle­ment which pre­ceded mod­ern Sam­sun. It was a trad­ing port in Hel­lenis­tic times, and famed as belong­ing to the home­land of the Ama­zons. Samsun’s mod­ern cit­i­zens use the name mainly to mean the site of two tombs and a mod­ern cafe some­what East of the city, and also to denote the oth­er­wise invis­i­ble his­toric fore­bear of the ram­shackle mod­ern town.

The tumuli are named Kalka­nca and Baruthane, accord­ing to the Direc­torate of Cul­ture and Tourism’s Sam­sun hand­book, and may have been used as light­houses; from a cer­tain angle the two mounds align and only one is vis­i­ble, appar­ently indi­cat­ing an ancient har­bor entrance. Claims have been made that the hills were used as tem­ple spots for Roman dieties as well.

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Long time since I posted any­thing on here. A word­press upgrade broke the old “Options” theme I was using, and I’ve been fid­dling with mak­ing the blog pre­sentable again since then, on and off. Mosty off as I was spend­ing a lot of time job seek­ing, then get­ting ready to move, and finally mov­ing from Min­neapo­lis to Samsun.

Sam­sun is a small city on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey — friendly, mid­dle class, full of obser­vant Mus­lims, and a bit dull. I’m teach­ing Eng­lish at a pri­vate girl’s school out­side town, and my hus­band is doing the same at a boy’s school under the same man­age­ment. Peo­ple are friendly, the food is *great*, there’s noth­ing to spend money on, and a year here should let us recover eco­nom­i­cally from the deba­cles we’ve had to deal with since leav­ing Moscow.

I’m going to be post­ing a lot more travel writ­ing and catch­ing up on older pho­to­graphic work, so do want to find a good way to present all this mate­r­ial… which I guess means fuss­ing with Word­press more.  I’ll try to post more often, anyway.

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Stat­ues cov­ered in plas­tic drap­ing at the Louvre

I love watch­ing art restora­tion work in progress, espe­cially when the tech­ni­cians are actively work­ing on things. These stat­ues were in a wing of the Lou­vre that was under­go­ing repairs and cov­ered in a great deal of dust. The plas­tic draped over them made me think of bridal veils.

In other news, I’m updat­ing this site with a new theme (my old one broke) and upgrad­ing to Gallery3 from Gallery2 — not exactly a pain­less process so far; it’s still in beta and I’m jump­ing the gun a bit…

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Liv­ing his­tory Viking combat

This is my favorite shot from the Gorodets liv­ing his­tory fes­ti­val in 2006. It always makes me think I should title it, “No shit, there I was…” The guys fight­ing are mainly col­lege stu­dents who do this as a hobby. It’s live steel, dull weapons but oth­er­wise real. My hus­band joined the group and got to find out exactly how authen­tic Viking re-enactment com­bat can be when he took an axe direct to his shin bone and had to be car­ried out of the woods on his shield.

The really annoy­ing thing about that… I mean other than the four months fol­low­ing of bring­ing him beer and cof­fee while be propped up his cast… was that we’d just watched “300” before he went out to the event. And I quoted Queen Gorgo to him as he went out the door, “Come back with your shield, or on it!”. Sigh. And now he’ll never, ever let go of the blood­stained thing.

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Spent the week­end in Ely, up by the Cana­dian bor­der in North­ern Min­nesota. I was the “prom pho­tog­ra­pher” for the Muk­luk Ball! The day after I spent half an hour (far too lit­tle time, but peo­ple were wait­ing for me…) pho­tograph­ing wolves at the Inter­na­tional Wolf Cen­ter (http://wolf NULL.org). The one in this pic­ture is a year­ling pup that was enjoy­ing the sun a great deal! It kept rolling over and putting its legs up in the air to sun its belly.

My favorite photo from the day is this next one, of the alpha wolf, Shadow, walk­ing past the den with a big chunk of deer spine in his mouth. How­ever, I’m not sure that my view­ers want some­thing that bloody on the front page so I’m includ­ing it lower down here… … Read more

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Two boys work on a dredg­ing boat in the Danube Delta, Romania

Some boys work­ing on a dredg­ing boat in the Danube Delta, Roma­nia. Dredg­ing is highly dis­rup­tive of the frag­ile delta envi­ron­ment, but I love the time­less­ness of this photo — peo­ple have always worked on rivers, often start­ing very young. The boys could as eas­ily have been work­ing on the Mis­sis­sippi as on the Danube.

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Bucharest (http://archive NULL.kira­ha­gen NULL.com/c/kirahagen/gallery/Bucharest/G0000bO1jdxNAx3A) — Images by Kira Hagen (http://archive NULL.kira­ha­gen NULL.com/c/kirahagen)

I have my first pho­tos from Bucharest up now… hon­estly didn’t take that many pic­tures in the cap­i­tal; it’s the sort of place that walk­ing alone with a DSLR doesn’t seem like the best of ideas. That said, the town has a crum­bling ele­gance that was very grace­ful. Every cor­ner held promises of strange­ness and won­ders — they used to call Bucharest the Paris of the East, though it made me think more of pho­tos I’ve seen of Havana. Cer­tainly the heat bore more rela­tion to a trop­i­cal island than main­land Europe!

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Medieval Gate and Clock Tower in Sighisoara, Romania

Just got back from a trip to beau­ti­ful Roma­nia. I shot over 4,000 pic­tures on a 10 day trip and have a lot of edit­ing ahead of me now! Man­aged to see a lit­tle of Bucharest, Tran­syl­va­nia, the Danube Delta, and the Machin Munti National Park, and over­all had a very sat­is­fy­ing bit of travel.

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We had a great anniver­sary day yes­ter­day — spent it out at a mid­dle ages fes­ti­val that was like a mini Ren­Fest but with more alco­hol and more chil­dren with weapons. We got some very fine mead in a stoneware bot­tle, reuasable as an oil lamp with the appro­pri­ate wick, for 12 euros and sat on the river bank watch­ing goth­lings flock and sip­ping it slowly. Mmm… excel­lent stuff. Good mead is like dis­tilled sunlight.

There was a bless­ing cer­e­mony of a newly built Viking river boat, a small demo com­bat, and then a long walk home along the river­bank. Six years. We may be pere­nially broke, but we’re rich in experiences.

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I’ve been pretty busy this week try­ing to get some web soft­ware work­ing — back in April when this blog crashed so did 4 other bits of online soft­ware I was run­ning, and I’m finally get­ting them back up to speed. Any­way, I’ve been work­ing with some mod­els this week, includ­ing Tony who wanted some shots in his Viking gear. I’ve got 2 uploaded cur­rently but will get some more up shortly. I’m try­ing some new soft­ware called Zen­photo for online gallery man­age­ment — it doesn’t allow prints but it should be indexed by Google, which Zen­fo­lio isn’t, some­thing of a prob­lem. So maybe I’ll put my stock pho­tos in Zen­photo and casual shots in Zen­fo­lio — and what is it with the “Zen” thing anyway?

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