Author Archives: Blue Guides

So what is the Turkish Van?

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The Turkish Van is not a mode of transport. It is a domestic feline animal, otherwise known as the Van Cat from its home in the Van region of eastern Turkey. It is said that the cats first came to Europe from the Middle East, in the wake of returning crusaders, and thence, in the 20th century, made their way to the United States.

Van Cat, embroidered in Chinese silk

The cats are recognised by their long bushy tails and fluffy white coats, often with brown markings on the head and tail (the all-white ones are very beautiful but breeders complain that they are prone to deafness). Uniquely, their fur is resistant to water: the Van cat is an enthusiastic swimmer. Their other peculiarity, which makes them startling to look at, is their tendency to have eyes of odd colours: one blue, the other tawny.

Statue of the municipal mascots of the town of Van, cat and kitten (photo by Paola Pugsley)

Paola Pugsley’s guide to the Van region of Turkey is published in digital format as Blue Guide Eastern Turkey.

The Honey Of Hybla

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An important preservative as well as sweetener, honey was an indispensable ingredient in the Classical kitchen. Along with the bees of Mount Hymettus and Mount Ida in Greece, the wild bees of Mount Hybla in the province of Ragusa, Sicily, were the most celebrated source of honey in Antiquity. They and their produce became a literary byword for all things exceptionally sweet and good, eventually coming to represent poetry itself. Citing Theocritus (c. 300 bc), the founding father of the pastoral idyll, the American 19th-century nature writer John Burroughs expanded on the subject in his Locusts and Wild Honey: ‘Sicily has always been rich in bees.

The idylls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees, ‘flat-nosed bees’ as he calls them in the Seventh Idyll, and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world’s goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoe cherishes Adonis are ‘honey-cakes’, and other tidbits made of ‘sweet honey’. In the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when a couple are married, the attendants place honey in their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.’ In his first Eclogue, Virgil described the ideal lullaby for old age to be the murmuring of Hybla bees. Ovid compared women’s hairstyles to their numberlessness. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with some sarcasm Cassius remarks that Mark Antony’s fine words ‘rob the Hybla bees and leave them honeyless’.

In one sonnet John Keats longs to sweeten his song by sipping the dew on ‘Hybla’s honied roses’ in the moonlight. Fanny Trollope, disappointed in business in the US, made euphemistic use of the honey’s proverbial qualities in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832): ‘During nearly two years that I resided in Cincinnati, or its neighbourhood, I neither saw a beggar, nor a man of sufficient fortune to permit his ceasing his efforts to increase it; thus every bee in the hive is actively employed in search of that honey of Hybla, vulgarly called money; neither art, science, learning, nor pleasure can seduce them from its pursuit.’ That pursuit was possibly not far from the mind of James Leigh Hunt when he published a popular volume of Sicilian divertimenti simply entitled A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla in 1848. The actual thing can in fact still be purchased, in different varieties according to the flora of the season: the satra honey is derived from wild thyme; zagara honey from citrus flowers.

Extract from Blue Guide Sicily © Blue Guides, All Rights Reserved. For more Sicily posts, see here.

A Grumpy Visit to Westminster Abbey

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One of the things about London that always delights and impresses visitors from overseas is the fact that the great national museums are free. It delights and impresses me, too. Just think of the British Museum. Think of all that responsibility. The duty of the curators to all those works of art is immense. The cost of conserving them, keeping them proof from theft, must be prodigious. Not to mention the salaries for all the other staff, the cleaning, the heating. Yet as visitors, we are not burdened with any of that. It’s free. And they maintain an impeccable website too. How do they manage it?

Westminster Abbey, on the other hand, the great Collegiate Church of St Peter, costs £18 per adult per visit. Of course, it is a similarly rich repository of history and heritage. And it faces similarly enormous costs of upkeep. The fabric of the building, its delicate monuments, ancient woodwork, paintwork, stonework, stained glass. Heating bills, cleaning bills, feather dusters. It is also a place of worship. Lest anyone forget this, every hour, on the hour, a disembodied recorded voice rings out across the fan vaulting enjoining us to bow our heads and pray. And it has cost us all £18 to get in.

Perhaps I wouldn’t mention this twice in a single paragraph, though, if I felt amply compensated by the experience of having been there. But I don’t. Despite the steep ticket price, large sections of the Abbey are roped off and you soon find yourself herded along a demarcated one-way route a bit like shuffling up a RyanAir check-in line. And the vergers are intransigent. ‘I’m sorry!’ A uniformed arm is politely but firmly held out across my scurrying person, ‘That part of the Abbey is closed!’ I had wanted to see one thing in particular. I knew it was somewhere in the south aisle. Access was barred. But I had paid £18! That is an expensive way to be told to shove off.

Of course, I am not in charge of maintaining the Abbey and I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I know the vergers are only doing their job. One of them, in the Lady Chapel, was charming and helpful. The others, even as they said ‘No’, mostly said it with a smile. But still, I was a visitor and I had a sub-par ‘visitor experience’. Wouldn’t it be more logical to do one of the following: Either let the Abbey be free, but because it is a functioning church, reserve the right to close parts of it off and boot sightseers out when services begin. This is what they do in St Peter’s in Rome, and if you haven’t paid you can’t with all conscience object if sections are out of bounds. Or, charge a hefty admission fee, but then admit that it’s a museum, as they do in the major churches of Venice and Florence. And for goodness sake allow visitors to see what they’ve paid for. Where exactly in the south aisle IS the monument to Sir Godfrey Kneller? I’m not going to pay another £18 on the off chance that it might not be roped off next time. But unlike the British Museum, Westminster Abbey does not maintain an impeccable website. It lacks a properly marked-up floorplan showing who is buried and commemorated where. Is this because it is assumed that no one really wants to know? Or is it because the chances, for a visitor, of being able to see the monuments of his or her choice are so slim that it honestly isn’t worth it?

The Abbey also operates a no-photo policy, which is galling. I would have loved to take a few pictures. I’m not talking about setting up a tripod or blinding other visitors with my flash. I’m talking about snapping epitaphs with my telephone. In St Peter’s (Rome), photography is allowed and it gives visitors enormous pleasure. In Westminster Abbey it is rigorously prohibited, and instead, visitors are informed glibly that there is a wide selection of postcards in the Abbey shop. Postcards?! I didn’t want a postcard. I had hoped to be able to take a close-up shot of the extraordinary Nightingale memorial, by Roubiliac (1761), so I could study it at home. Or perhaps illustrate a short comparison in this blog with Bernini’s Alexander VII monument (1678) in St Peter’s (Rome). In both monuments, the draped skeleton of Death emerges from below to threaten the commemorated mortal with an intimation of their end (in the Bernini monument, Death’s instrument is an hour glass; in the Roubiliac, it is a spear). But while Pope Alexander sits tight, unmoved by the premonition, Mrs Nightingale faints into the arms of her appalled husband. These descriptions all a bit meaningless without a picture, aren’t they? But in Westminster Abbey there is strictly no photography; and the ruling is stubbornly policed. Oh well, there is a wonderful archive image of the Nightingale tomb here, on this excellent Spitalfields blog. And here (below) is the Bernini (photo © Jean-Pol Grandmont). Roubiliac had certainly seen the Bernini work. Nine years before he designed the Nightingale, in 1752, he had achieved a long-cherished ambition to visit Rome. By all accounts he didn’t stay very long, but it was enough. Presumably the authorities at St Peter’s permitted him to use a sketch book.

The Pike: by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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Reviewed by Charles Freeman, historical consultant to the Blue Guides:

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Pike is a long (644 pages of text) biography of the extraordinary Italian poet, and—well one can hardly begin to say what else—Gabriele d’Annunzio. The only thing that disappointed me about it was its title. Although this was indeed a nickname given to d’Annunzio, ‘Pike’ suggests a cunning fish lurking in the weeds before rushing out to snap up its prey. But d’Annunzio was an extrovert superstar, flourishing through his poetry and plays and flamboyant gestures, not least his lording over the Italian seizure of Fiume at the end of the First World War. He emerged young in the 1890s as a poet of great sensitivity, whose works still resonate among Italian nationalists. Yet his early works also show an obsession with the ‘heroic’ individual, a composite figure that owed as much to his personal frustrations as to Nietzsche. D’Annunzio had a genius for sniffing the emotional currents that swept through an emerging and unfulfilled nation and so was idolized by the young. Condemnation by the Church for the immorality of his ‘heroes’ simply added to his appeal.

The many ambiguities of d’Annunzio arise not only because of his supreme talent in the use of words. He was also a man of courage whose survival from a number of dramatic flights in the rickety planes of the early 20th century can only be seen as miraculous. Again he was totally unscrupulous in his extraordinary extravagance and insatiable sex-life. Women found him impossible to resist. At first he appeared to specialise in entanglements with the separated wives of minor aristocrats, to the fury of their fathers and husbands. The most successful love of his life, almost a permanent relationship, in fact, was with the actress Eleanor Duse, whom he romantically met in Venice on a gondola at dawn. Each had an utter confidence in their own genius that sustained the heights of their passion—and inspired d’Annunzio to become a dramatist. By the time of his literary success, however, there was little room for fidelity: new lovers were passing through beds still warmed by their predecessors. His hyped-up literary style was employed to full effect in describing the intimate details of these encounters, which took place in over-heated houses furnished with an overload of flowers, Persian carpets, Japanese porcelain and a large and well-thumbed library. D’Annunzio was as gargantuan in his ability to devour books as he was to devour women. Bailiffs cleared everything out from time to time until a fresh influx of cash allowed him to restock his villas with new purchases.

By the beginning of the First World War, d’Annunzio had developed an unhealthy obsession with the glory of death in the cause of Italy. In a less troubled age, it would hardly have resonated but once again he caught the mood, and must be partly held responsible for forcing Italy’s disastrous entry into the war. Scouring the battlefront on the Karst, the limestone plateau north of Trieste that was to see the pitiless slaughter of the ill-prepared Italian army, he revelled in the piled corpses. There was not much here to achieve other than swooping about in aircraft. It was the truncated peace that gave him his opportunity to find a role. The refusal to allow Italy to spread into the new Yugoslavia allowed him to seize control as dictator of Fiume. In the short term this was the culmination of his career, but it was a success that was gradually dissipated through his administrative incompetence and the seeping away of any international support for Italy’s expansion. His bluster proved to be just that. But it was here, in the frustrations of failure, that fascism was able to get a hold. Hughes-Hallett brings out an unexpected side of Mussolini, who showed surprising skill in flattering and cajoling d’Annunzio while at the same time sidelining him. There is a good photograph of the two walking together, d’Annunzio stooped (but still sexually insatiable) in the park of the Villa Cargnacco on Lake Garda (whose upkeep and expansion by the state he had persuaded Mussolini to finance). Here eventually, apparently to the vast relief of Mussolini, who knew that d’Annunzio was the only person able to upstage him, the heroic poet died in 1938.

D’Annunzio should, of course, have died many years before during one of his escapades in the air, in the crush of a tumultuous crowd or at the hands of an outraged husband. But he survived and his readiness to write down almost every detail of his daily life as well as the enormous publicity every action of his generated have given Hughes-Hallett vast resources to draw on. She has handled them with aplomb and has achieved the remarkable feat of showing that this was a human being whose life seemed to defy reality. The Pike was a worthy winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

Smoothly off the buffers

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Last night was the launch party of Blue Guides’ Smoothly from Harrow: A Compendium for the London Commuter. About 70 people squeezed themselves into the book-lined basement at Stanfords to raise a glass to our latest publication—the hot crush seemed oddly appropriate for the subject matter, as was the fact that one of the planned readers missed her moment because of leaves on the line outside Pinner (or some other London Transport meltdown).

Author Chris Moss with Southern Railway driver Andrew Cook.

The author, Chris Moss, had promised us no speeches, but in a few words he still managed to name-check Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Betjeman, Ray Davies and Waterloo Station. The book is rather like that, although special mention should also go to the superb photography and London Transport Museum‘s wondrous posters.

Brian Daughton and Bob Greig then read their ‘Commuter Confessions’ (extracted from the book) to a clearly sympathetic audience of fellow-travellers, and we all briefly contemplated following Bob back to Devon where he now lives—or maybe strangling him.

But, no, as Chris writes in the book, the commuter is the ‘low-key hero of our times’ and ‘the key witness of all that passes in the capital and its environs’. And so we left Stanfords with the book well launched—and headed heroically for the Northern Line.