Plagues, Epidemics and Memorials - History Repeating Itself

Pestsäule - Plague Column - Vienna Austria

Travel is my passion,  and taking photos of my travels is my favorite hobby.   So when faced with social distancing and the threat of quarantine due to the COVID-19 virus, I find going through my travel photos and thinking of the beautiful places I have visited brings some sort of calmness to the madness all around me right now.  With all of the attention focused on Corona Virus today, I found myself being led to photos I have taken of Plague Memorials in Central Europe.  

Santa Maria della Salute, Venice Italy

Santa Maria della Salute on the Grand Canal in Venice

 In the summer of 1630 and up until 1631 a wave of the plague assaulted Venice killing nearly a third of its population.   As an offering for the city's deliverance from the plague the city vowed to build a church dedicated to Our Lady of Health, Santa Maria della Salute.  The city decided not to dedicate the church just to the plague or a patron saint.  They decided to dedicate it to the Virgin Mary who they believed was the protector of their Republic.  I visited Venice in the spring of 2002.   When I arrived in Piazza San Marco and walked to the water front of the Grand Canal this beautiful basilica dominated the horizon.   

Images of Santa Maria Della Salute

Church of All Saints - Sedlac, Czech Republic

Two years after my visit to Venice, I traveled to Prague in the Czech Republic in 2004.  I returned  again in 2015.  Both times I visited the Kostnice located in the village of Sedlac.   The Kostnice is an Ossuary or Bone Church.   It is named the Church of All Saints.   In all of my travels this is truly one of the most fascinating places I have seen. 

The cemetery and Church of All Saints - Sedlac, Czech Republic

  In the thirteenth century the Abbott of the Monastery in Sedlac was sent to the Holy Land in Jerusalem.  He returned with a mound of dirt believed to have come from Golgotha.  He spread the dirt over the Abbey cemetery.  Because of this dirt this became a very important burial location.  During the fourteenth century the cemetery was filled with bodies from the Black Plague.  A new chapel was built in the fifteen hundreds. Many graves were exhumed for the new chapel and the bones were stored in the basement of the new church.   In 1870 the history of these bodies from the Black Plague takes on a macabre and fascinating turn.   Frantisek Rint was a local woodcarver.  He was employed to organize the old bones that had been laying the basement for all of these years.  The bones were used to decorate the church.  Chandeliers, a chalice and altars were all transformed into bones.  Rint even signed his work by writing his name on the wall with bones.  

Signature of the artist

The plague Column of the Virgin Mary Immaculate in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic

Just a short walk from Sedlac is the village of Kutna Hora.  Located here is a Plague Column.  I have seen  several of these through out Europe.  This one was built as a reminder of the death from the plague of the early 1700's.  There is a statue of Mary on top of the column as on many Plague columns.  Many of these columns were built to honor Mary in hopes for protection from other plagues.  

Trinity Monument - Prague, Czech Republic

The Trinity Monument is another Plague Column in the Czech Republic.  This one is located in Prague's Lesser Town Square.   At one time there was a pillory and gallows here.  So this square is historically associated with death.  But now there is a monument here that memorialized the end of a disease that plagued the city of Prague.  After the outbreak of the early 1700's was finally under control, the city erected this Plague Column.

Pestsäule - Plague Column - Vienna Austria

The Trinity Column in Vienna is located on Graben, one of the main streets in the inner city.  It is one of the better know Plague Columns in Europe.  It was built after the great epidemic of 1679 and is one of the cities great pieces of art often compared to the work of Bernini in Rome.  While I was in Vienna I was not worried about the plague.  My luggage was lost and never arrived.  So I was concerned with buying underwear in a city where I did not speak the language.   I took photos of the monument without really knowing what it represented until I returned home and was doing research on my photos.   At the time of the plague the Habsburg emperor Leopold I fled the city but vowed to erect a mercy column if the epidemic would end. 

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.These churches and monuments were erected to memorialize the loss from the great plagues that challenged the western world in their time. They were also created to ask forgiveness for the sins they felt lead to these plagues and in hopes to protect their people from future epidemics. After the horrors of 9/11 we have build great monuments and displayed pieces of the World Trade Center in our major cities across the country. We have one here in Baltimore. In New York we have build a towering sky scraper complex to replace and memorialize the original World Trade Center. I am wondering tonight what will happen at the end of the current world wide pandemic. Will we be inspired to create art and memorial fountains to remember it? Will we learn from our greed and hoarding that is harming us now? Will our current leaders promise to build memorials to our sacrificies. Or will they build great monuments to themselves to brag about their self imagined great accomplishments in fighting this enemy? We will survive. We will recover. But will we learn from our mistakes?

Empty Tombs and Memorial Arches on South Mountain Maryland

Memorials and monuments fascinate me.  When I travel I take many photos of monuments and memorials.  I learn more history than I could ever learn from a text book by researching the stories behind the monuments I photograph.  Not only do the historical stories fascinate me but I am  also fascinated by the detail on the monuments.  When I photograph a monument I rarely just take one photo of the entire monument.  I also take closeup photos of the details on the monument.  The artist who created the memorial put the minute details there for a specific reason that is lost to casual viewer.  

On South Mountain near Burkittsville, MD there is a very unusual monument dedicated to noncombatant newspaper war correspondents.  Burkittsville is famous today for being the setting for the movie The Blair Witch Project. Historically South Mountain is known as the site of the Battle of Crampton's Gap.  It is one of three gaps on South Mountain where the Battle of South Mountain had been fought between Union and Confederate Forces during the early encounters of the Maryland Campaign.   

The monument was completed in 1896.  It is fifty feet tall and forty feet wide. The Moorish arch at the bottom of the memorial is 16 feet tall.  Above the Moorish arch are three Roman arches.  Each arch is nine feet tall and six feet wide.  The arches represent Description, Depiction, and Photography.  Next to the arches is a zinc copy of Bertel Thorvaldsen's Mercury About To Kill Argos.  This was created by the J.W. Fiske Company. 

Above the arches are two horses heads.  

On either side of the main arch are the heads representing Electricity and Poetry.  Under the heads are the words Speed and Heed. 

The monument is fascinating in itself. It's located on the Appalachian Trail makes it of interest also.  But the story and controversy connected to the monument are what truly make it fascinating to me.  The monument was built by George Alfred Townsend who was a war correspondent and novelist.  He bought the land on South Mountain and built home for himself at the site of the Civil War battle.  He built the arch as a memorial to himself and other war correspondence.  There are 157 names of war correspondences on the memorial.  However the names of those included on the monument have been questioned.  Timothy J. Reese, who is a historian and resident of Burkittsville, Md claims that many names do no deserve to be included, while many names that should be included have been ignored due to Townsend's prejudice towards the Confederate journalists of the time.  I have included an excerpt from one of Ree's articles at the end of this blog. 

Along with his home Townsend also built a tomb for himself on the property.  Ironically the tomb sets empty.  Townsend's wife died and was buried in Philadelphia.  Townsend died April 14, 1915 and was buried next to his wife in Philadelphia.  

Townsend's empty tomb

The story and the monument are both fascinating.  There is a lot written about George Alfred Townsend if you are interested in learning more about the man who created a controversial monument and left an empty tomb.

Below is the excerpt from Timothy J. Reese's 
"The Arch bears 157 names, compiled with unmistakable personal bias. Thirty-three of them cannot be identified. Twenty-two have no business being there at all, they being Townsend's personal friends, large contributors to the project, or persons with whom Townsend wished to ingratiate himself. Names were compiled through an imprecise, word-of-mouth method of random collection conducted by Townsend and his network of veteran news cronies. As a result, many names are absent, incomplete, misspelled, or misstated. Several prominent Union and Confederate journalists do not appear at all, overlooked or, in the latter case, omitted altogether due to Townsend's bitter anti-Southern bias. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1711#sthash.tc05ZDMw.d

Information from the Reese's article was taken from this link.    All photographs included in this blog are my personal photos.

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1711

The Hiker - Spanish American War Memorial - Baltimore

The Hiker - Spanish American War Memorial in Baltimore
E Fayette Street & N Lakewood Avenue (Street View)

I love monuments and memorials. When I travel if I see a monument  I have to take a photo of it. When I return home and start to label my photos I then take time to research the monument.  I have a learned a lot of history that I never saw in  a text book this way.  I've decided to so a series of blogs on some of the monuments from my home city of Baltimore.  One of Baltimore's nicknames is The Monumental City because of the number of monuments located here.  Some have become hidden or forgotten over the years.  But each is fascinating and has a unique story to tell.

"The Hiker depicts a hero stripped of his parade uniform and shown as a soldier reacting to the challenges of the battlefield."

This statue has a rich history that does not start with Baltimore.  The original statue  was created by Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson.  She created the statue to honor the American soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Philippine-American War.  The original statue was created for the University of Minnesota in 1906.  It became a very popular statue and copies have been made and placed in over 50 locations in the United States.  The one in Baltimore was dedicated on June 11, 1943 quite a few years after the original statue was created.

Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson was born in Massachusetts.   She was the student and wife of artist Henry Hudson Kitson.   She studied in Paris and became known for her work by the age of nineteen. The Hiker became her most famous work.

The statue stuck a cord with people.  Due to it's popularity in 1921 the Gorham Manufacturing Company in Providence, Rhode Island bought the rights to the statue.  They eventually cast at least 50 statues over the next 44 years including the one here in Baltimore.  

The Spanish-American War only lasted for ten weeks and is primarily remember for Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders.  However the conflict did spread to the Spanish owned Philippine Islands and the island of Guam.  The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898.  It gave the United States temporary control of Cuba and ceeded ownership of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine island to the United States.  So for me personally, with the historic reopening of diplomatic status with Cuba in 2015, this monument has great interest to me.  I am hoping to travel Cuba in the near future and explore the culture we have long ignored. 

Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson died in 1932 eleven years before the statue was dedicated in Baltimore.

The statue is 9 feet (2.7 m) tall and stands on a 6-foot (1.8 m) granite base, depicting a soldier clad in a period uniform with a campaign hat and a Krag-Jorgensen rifle

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"The Hiker depicts a hero stripped of his parade uniform and shown as a soldier reacting to the challenges of the battlefield."

Thoughts on Prague - Fred and Ginger - Wars and Bombs - And Learning to Travel

I visited Prague in 2004.  There is much about Prague that I really liked.  It's a fascinating city with a brutal past. Like a lot of European cities Prague suffered tragic bombings during World War II. During the Soviet era Russian troops and tanks marched down Wenceslaus Square to put down an uprising.  Two students set themselves on fire in Wenceslaus Square in protest of the Soviet invasion.  There is a very small memorial to these two men in Wenceslaus Square.  It's very small and close to the ground.  You can walk right past it without realizing it's presence.

The first student was Jan Palach. In August 1968 the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the reforms of Alexander Dubcek's government during what was known as the Prague Spring. The Prague born Jan Palach decided to make a sacrifice of himself in protest of the invasion. He set himself on fire, in Wenceslas Square on January 16, 1969. A month later (on February 25, 1969) another student, Jan Zajíc, burned himself to death in the same place. The memorial to these two men is very small and unassuming. If I had not been looking for the memorial I would have walked right past it without noticing it.




As I walked the streets of Prague I could not help but be amazed at the beauty and the history all around me. And I learned an important lesson from Prague. I was still a some what novice traveler and tourist in 2004. This was only my fourth time to travel abroad. I was still the wide eyed American walking around with his mouth open amazed at all that I could see. But Prague taught me to be aware of what I was looking at and try to understand what was being told to me.


The photograph on top of this blog is the Fred and Ginger Building in Prague. It is also known as the Dancing House. It does, at first glance, resemble Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers dancing.

The building is an example of deconstructivist architecture, with an unusual shape. But if you take some time and look closer the building looks like a structure that is falling down. The original building on the Ginger side was destroyed by a bomb during World War II. The Fred side of the building which is the neighboring house (with a small globe on the roof) was co-owned by Czech ex-president Vaclav Havel, who lived there from his childhood untilthe mid-1990s. You can almost see the bomb explosion as you watch the neighboring side collapsing. I first saw the building in a guide book when I was planning the trip to Prague. I did not read much about it's history or it's symbolism. But I was fascinated with the design of the building and could not wait to take photos of it.

As I continued walking along the water front past The Dancing House I saw this church with two very unusual steeples. I was very much fascinated with the unusual steeple with the two spires. It was unlike any other church I had seen in Prague. Prague has many beautiful churches and is known for it's skyline of spires. But this church just quietly sat in the background with no explanation. I took several photos of the church and unfortunately I did not take the time to find the name of the church. As I mentioned I was still a somewhat novice traveler. Unlike when I travel today with my digital camera and take hundreds of photos including street names and descriptive plaques on building, I was using film and had limited exposures. I took a bus out of Prague the following day to see an old castle in a neighboring town. I asked the guide on the bus about this church when we drove past it. He told me that a church sat in that location before World War II. It was destroyed by a bomb. He said when the church was rebuilt the steeples were designed to represent the point the bomb falling down to destroy the original building. When I walked back past the church the next day I could see the symbolism very clearly.




I learned a lot from my visit to Prague. I learned to look down for the small memorials on the ground that might be missed. I learned to look for meanings and memorials hidden in unusual architecture and church steeples. It really changed the way I travel and how I look at things in foreign locations. There is so much to see, so much to learn, and so much that can be easily missed if you don't take the time to ask questions and do some research.  

Finding something magical and wonderful everyday

St Clair Family Memorial - Rosslyn Chapel a photo by litlesam on Flickr.

I am a traveler.  I have found in my later years that there is a bit of the nomad in my spirit.  I don't really want to move away and live somewhere foreign.  But I am nomadic in nature and want to see, visit, and explore as many places as possible.  I never know where my travels will lead me and sometimes I am surprised at where I end up.  Three years ago my partner Mark and I took a journey to Scotland to visit a friend of ours name Sue.  She invited us to her home in the hills of Penicuik.  We were unfamiliar with the area, but we knew it was near Edinburgh which fascinated us.  Sue picked us up at the airport and took us to her home.  It was a beautiful estate with gardens, hills, wild animals, and two poodles.  We visited in January, which is not the best time to visit Scotland.  Scotland is cold and rainy most of the year, but January can be the worst.  We brought warm coats, and warm night wear for our visit.  Our first day at Sue's home she took us on a tour of the ground and we noticed a church off in the distance.  It was covered in scaffolding and under repair.  We asked her about the church and she told us it was "the" Rosslyn chapel of the Da Vinci Code fame.  What?  This was the church of The Holy Grail from the novel?  She told us yes it was that same church.  We were shocked.  We had no idea this church was near her home.  What a wonderful surprise.  It was walking distance from her home.  I love unplanned surprises like this.  We should have researched a little more and been prepared for this, but finding it by surprise was much more fun.

Being a Christian and raised in a conservative Christian Church seeing the church made famous by the Da Vinci Code was perplexing to say the least.  Being a traveler and exploring cultures and history this was a true find.  How does one separate the two.  Do I look at this chapel with its history and legends as just that, legends?  Or do I go explore the chapel hoping for some mind bogging experience.  I am a skeptic.  I have many beliefs that have been in my mind since childhood.  But this was no accident.  I was here completely unaware for a reason.  Is this the actual location where the descendants of Jesus survived.  Are the St. Clairs who still claim ownership of the property the true descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus?  There are so many questions without any answers.  But I did see the chapel.  And I saw the memorial and grave of The St. Clair family at Rosslyn.  It was an experience that I will never forget. 

I have been to many other places that have spiritual significance to many religions.  I have been to Fatima where the the legend of the Holy Mothers appearance is significant.  I have been to Machu Picchu where the Inca created a spiritual hiding place.  I have visited the locations of where my ancestors left Europe and immigrated to the United States.  All of these places have their importance and their mark on my history and my beliefs. 

But my friend Sue lives in a beautiful home in the hills of Penicuik where she sees the Rosslyn Chapel from her window everyday.  Its common place for her.  Does that make it any less special, or magical, or spiritual?  I don't know.  I worked in Washington DC for ten years.  I walked past the Capitol Building everyday on my way to work.  It became just another building I saw daily.  But to tourist on the visitors bus its magical and wonderful to see see the Capitol for the first time.  I look at my life each day and try to find something special.    I want to experience a Rosslyn Chapel everyday.  Some days its difficult to find that special moment.  But if I take time, reflect on my blessings, and forget about my problems, there is a Rosslyn Chapel in my horizon everyday.  Its my job to find it.