Got to sing in church for the first time in years, in a style that is a bit foreign to me (Ukrainian scores in Czech; I did Greek and Georgian in the past), but it was fun! Kind of unusual to retune so fast and so often, I prefer it modal, but still fun!

A lovely neopagan (or rather druidic, I think, in the sense of Czech neo-Druids socieity) artifact on one of the mountains nearby. The spirit goes where it wishes!

The "from X till Y" phrase in Czech is so nicely symmetrical! Kinda almost like parentheses: OD X DO Y

Round-Headed White Thorn (thistle) on the slopes of the Hare-Town Mountain near the White River

til Van Gogh used to write illusrated letters about art to his brother Theo source: www.upworthy.com/how-one-woma...

Which is really a shame, as at least that single book that we rundomly have is quite cool, and this tripply psychedelic illustrations genre is so interesting! Amazon's algo goes crazy on them, and pretends to be selling a single 12-pages book for 200 Eur, while having 46 happy reviews. Yeah. Sure.

We randomly have one book from this series (published in 1975), my kid liked it, then I opened the flyleaf, and it contains a full list of all characters. Responsible Rabbit! Vain Vulture!! Positive Pig!!! But sadly a single book is like 30€ as they are US only, and were never republished :(

Case in point: a shared memorial that almost works (but I would have framed it a bit differently)

An interesting update: if whipping your beloved's posterior with a twig is no longer fun enough, you can also use a sausage for the same purpose! (The brand can be roughly translated as "Easter-timed butt-whipping salami")

A small bite-sized chapel in the village of Oparno, near Velemin, Czechia

Erster is coming, and so Czech supermarkets sell Easter Whips: a special tool for men to whip young women on the butt (I kid you not!) to promote fertility. $3 for a longer whip, $2 for a shorter one. Check out Wikipedia to see that I'm not making it up! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_...

Chapel of the Holy Trinity (Kaple Nejsvětější Trojice) in Skalice, Czechia, late 18th century

Case in point. I'm again in the land where fortunately all local texts are Always given with a helpful translation. You can't read Czech? No problem at all, don't you worry, here's the same thing in Slovak!!

One could be mistaken that maybe "cheap chapels" are small (with roadside shrines as an extreme case of it), but it really not the case! Say Shinto has famous, ancient, named shrines that are tiny, are kept _inside_ temples en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachiba... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamamus... 6/

Now curiously, Christianity also has a word like that, even tho I never heard people stressing the theological implications of it. Christians have chapels! And similarly, the word "Chapel" covers the whole range of spaces, from communal, to private, to symbolic. A scared space of uncertain size 4/

This separation of sacredness from function is refreshing to a westerner, for whom religion is habitually about a gathering, a scheduled meeting. Don't get me wrong, gatherings are fun! But in much of western Christianity utility overshadows otherness, the creation of a dedicated space, a window 3/

The coolest thing ever is that it's obviously a gradient, the space, the enter-ability is absolutely irrelevant. There are shrines for your eyes only, shrines that one person could enter, and up to huge buildings. The scale seems irrelevant 2/

I love words "shrine" and "chapel" as they can mean two almost opposite things. Let's start with a shrine. The building on the left is a Shinto shrine. But the small roadside hokora on the right is a shrine as well! One can be entered, the other can't. One is a space, the other is an object? Well 1/

A map of Turkiic languages by sub-administrative region. The case of Crimean Tatar is fun. It has three major dialects: Nogai (northern), close to Kazakh, low-prestige. Tat (central) close to Balkar, high prestige. Yalıboylu (southern) was so affected by Turkish, it belongs to a different branch!

(Wikipedia sounds a bit contradictory about whether Dongba and Bon are the same religion. On the script page it seems like they are, on the religion page it says that Dongba stems from Bon, but is separate. Whom to believe? Here's a photo of a Dongba temple!) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba

Dongba symbols are a system of pictographic glyphs used by the Bon priests of the Naxi people in southern China. Dongba is largely a mnemonic system, and cannot by itself represent the Naxi language; different authors may use the same glyphs with different meanings en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_...

Some Koplystulpai in landscapes Allso see a collection of old archival photos (sadly in low res) here: www.tradicija.lt/koplyteles/m...

Koplytstulpis is a type of a roadside / column / wayside pillar shrine from Lithuania. Typically made of a wooden log with a small chapel-like space on top, and a roof. I love how archaic (?) and magical they look! Note that Koplytstulpis is a recognizable word: a direct cognate of "Chapel-Stele"

Visited Warsaw, attended two church services after work. Didn't understand anything (I don't know the language, and don't know enough about the praxis), but enjoyed being there. The churches are big and cold, but solid somehow.

Some pictures of the Arwad city: www.pbase.com/dosseman_syr...

Huh, this was already tried in some places, like the island of Arwad in Syria that are naturally limited to a rock outcrop and so practiced tight population control (you couldn't marry until enough people died, bringing the population below the target). It's "fun" seeing this come to Switzerland!

Yazidi temple Cim'aya Merave in Bacin, Turkey. The village was populated by Kurds of the Şemikan tribe, who now all emigrated. They return once a year on May 29 to celebrate a day of Şîxadî: a 12th century saint, a founder of Yazidism, and an avatar of Tawûsî Melek. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HIM...

CW for AI-generated slop, but these are some product ads from Temu, and somehow I find them so interesting! They represent a Chinese out-of-context out-of-culture idea of Western Christianity (of what would sell to Christians), and it's both very recognizable and so wildly off, I kinda love it :)

When a tool to create the final form of art is by itself art, perhaps even more so. Left - a gingerbread mold, right - a printing plate for Pavlovo shawls (both - 19 century russia). Below - a mold for goden ornaments (the page gives zero info except that it is "Asian" lol)

I don't even plan to attempt to learn any Arabic, haha, I was just reading about the history of Koran, and there's a sentence that I can read, and then - microscript. Like I can't even focus on it, it's a blur. And it made me wonder whether it's my brain that is at fault, or the typography :)