Porto, from atop Torre dos Clerigos
High over Portugal
In brief: We were thoroughly smitten with Portugal and its two major cities on our first visit ever. Here is what we saw and what we observed. How could we have missed out on Portugal…
Gulbenkian museum
A Garden and Delights in Lisbon
We took a recommendation and went to the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, a private collection by an developer of oil fields in Iraq early in the 20th century. Chinese screen, Gulbenkian Assyrian panel, Gulbenkian As befits…
Enjoying cafes at the Prizren riverside
Kosovo: The Ties that Bind
Kosovo is newly emerging as a country, the latest from the former Yugoslavia to be independent - barely so with the ongoing help of NATO and the US since the 1990s. There’s a lot of…
Memorial to Vladika Njegos
Rise and Fall: Montenegro’s Mountain Men
Mountains are in the name of the country, as Crna Gora, or black mountain, from the Venetian title, monte negro. They dominate the landscape, from the very edge of the sea to the innumerable limestone…
Carved wood Orthodox iconostasis, Berat
Tracing Cross-Currents in Albanian Antiquities
In our post about Albanian history (click here to read), we noted all the cross-currents of culture affecting the country – from its Illyrian origins, through Greek and Roman control, the influence of Byzantine and…
Albanian couple
Albania Today: Beauty and the Beast
So many people we meet, interested in going to Albania, are both curious and somewhat fearful about it. They imagine a third world country or extreme deprivation or some such horror because of Albania’s 40…
Honoring Partisan resister, Durres
Albania: Middle kingdom, dark descent
Albania’s history can read like a tale out of Tolkien’s Ring trilogy. It starts before the 4th century BC with the sophisticated tribes loosely known as the Illyrians. The land since then has been at…
Predjama Castle, Impregnable since 13th c.
Slovenian Time Travel
During our first five days in Slovenia, we time traveled through 50 Million years - from the karst caves still being shaped by their rivers, to a Neanderthal era musical instrument, to the remains of…
Town hall square with Cathedral, Ljubljana
Passing through Ljubljana
In prior years, we had circled around Ljubljana a few times on the highway while heading to other places, with only its hilltop castle visible from far off. When we finally headed into the city…
Blustery Cape Kolka
The Baltic’s Three Jewels – Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn
We planned on six months in the Baltic countries – Latvia, Lithuania and our home base of Estonia – though we weren’t completely sure how we would fill up those months. What we found were…
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