Category: Travel

Brodzany, a small village in the Tekov region of Slovakia, bears an unlikely connection to the “founder of modern Russian literature,” Alexander Pushkin. His brother-in-law, Gustav von Friesenhof, owned a 17th-century Renaissance manor in the village, and his family was deeply influenced by the writer’s work and creativity. Von Friesenhof’s daughter Natalia von Oldenburg, in […]

On October 23, 1989, a massive Ilyushin IL-62 jetliner touched down on a short stretch of farmland in rural Brandenburg. The grassy strip at Stölln was less than 900 meters (2,900 feet) long, and after careful planning and rehearsal flights, the plane, nicknamed “Lady Agnes,” landed safely, an aviation stunt that has since entered the […]

There are countless points where lines of latitude and longitude intersect, but very few are marked, let alone made accessible. Just outside the city of Hangzhou, in a quiet patch of Fuyang District, lies one of the rare geodetic “perfect crossings”: the exact point where 30°0’0” N meets 120°0’0” E. Marked by an official concrete […]

The ship graveyard on Ōtamahua, also known as Quail Island, in Lyttelton Harbour, New Zealand, holds the remains of more than a dozen vessels abandoned between the 1880s and 1950s. After years of service, these ships were later scuttled in the shallows, leaving haunting silhouettes of Canterbury’s maritime past. Among the best known are the […]