Lahti

I went back to Finland in late August, 2025, my fourth annual visit, call it a pilgrimage, to the Sibelius Festival that is held every year in the small city of Lahti on Lake Vesijärvi, in South Eastern Finland. My first trip was because of the great composer, Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957), and his music has certainly brought me back to Finland as I get more and more involved in the great man’s work and his influence on contemporary classical music. Maybe I was always going to love Finland because I loved Sibelius, or was it the other way round, the two are now too intertwined to be unravelled. Both the composer and the country have many layers, but maybe at their heart is a still core that moves me and tells me to focus on the things in our lives that are often unspoken, but undemonstratively who we are. In Finland, I find myself questioning who I am, often silently celebrating the good things but also, searching for what I would like to become. As I am learning too who or what I’m not. Finland, increasingly, feels like my safe place.

When international politics is becoming more and more unstable, and when politics in so may countries has become bad-tempered and divisive, on news bulletins, I see Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb as the voice of reason, and when I visit the country, an apparently efficient working social democracy, Finland feels like a template for how the rest of us should be organising our lives.

Fairhair’s starter shield for two: Lingonberry-cured salmon, tarred Baltic herring, smoked duck, reindeer heart and beaver salami. Potato flatbread from Penttilä farm, sourdough bread, tarred lingonberries, game mousse and smoked perch mousse. Ash cheese from Jumo cheesery, salad with gooseberry vinaigrette, pickled cucumber, carrot chips and oat, tomato-basil salsa, herb- ­marinated beans and toasted pumpkin seeds.

You can have wine, but also, and probably better, either Harald’s strong beer, or mead.

I go once every year.

It was an inspiring time to be young, like Jean Sibelius in the fast developing world of Finnish classical music, and as it must have been for the young artists and architects like , Lars Sonck, who could run free in the brave new arts at the birth of a new nation.

The other windows were designed by the fourth of the young revolutionary artists who worked extensively on the cathedral, the Symbolist painter, Hugo Simberg (1873 – 1917), who based his designs on episodes from the Bible, such as the Holy Spirit descending as a dove at the baptism of Christ, and the Moses’ Burning Bush.

According to the Finnish artist, Jani Ruscica, his sculptural video installation Polynotknot (and they bloom) keeps changing its form, with its clips continuously and randomly shuffled into a new order. Within the imaginative fleshy shapes and masses one can discern a varying number of mouths, eyes and drawings on the skin. Subjectivities dissolve into a polyphonic rejection of linguistic expression and normative conceptions of the body, with the organically folding and piling figures remaining corporeally uncoded.’

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Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it’s open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.

I have always been involved with the arts world, from my student days, through many years making arts programmes for television, as a writer and, these days also as the artistic director of a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the ‘multi-player virtual world’ called Second Life, where I have the virtual name, Wolfgang Glinka.

Wolfgang Glinka and Colin Bell are interchangeable versions of the person known as Me, and my gallery, is an extension of many of the things I have done and others that I have dreamed of doing before anyone even imagined the enormous potential of virtual reality. Virtual reality, is as its name implies just another form of reality. Here, as you can see in my welcome notice to virtual visitors to the gallery, I have been able to curate an extraordinary group of artists from most branches of the arts – fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music. Actually all of my artistic passions.

Over the eight years of Glinka Gallery’s existence, and now in in fourth rebuild, we are getting bigger and bigger, the gallery has shown regular exhibitions by a family of regular artists, including our resident artist, Lash vv, creatives in both virtual and real worlds, who find freedom and support at what has now become more than a gallery, more of a creative arts centre.

We now have an ever-growing permanent collection of some of the work by our exhibitors over the years. I think of them as my friends.

I am a writer, a novelist and poet, and I have been experimenting here at the gallery with ways of putting poetry, in particular, on the walls, along with fine art. Therefore I have built specific spaces for poetry and created a role for a resident poet (Shyla the Super Gecko) who holds regular poetry reading events here.

I also put on exhibitions of my own work, especially my Fibs, short-form Fibonacci poems which lend themselves to life on the wall as well as on the page. They have their own home in the Fibonacci Gallery.

Here is my, well, Wolfgang Glinka’s short film of his, well my Fib, Reflections, published by The Fib Review and now also viewable on Youtube.

We also have a resident dance troupe, 21 Parakeets, directed by Joseph Nussbaum, a composer and choreographer, who has sought to make contemporary dance an equal partner here with fine art and poetry. His work is inspired by the wish to show challenging but also entertaining dance shows in our own custom built dance theatre, the Aviary Theatre, built by our buildings director, Tony Marino.

Since I’ve been running the Glinka Gallery, I have been able to develop my interest in photography, often too far down the list of my priorities, in a busy writing schedule. In the last eight years I have been pushing myself to make my photography an equal form of expression with my poetry. At first, I made photography exhibitions of my work mostly shot on foreign trips, buy recently I have developed my interest in photo-art, mostly known as digital photo-editing or image manipulation. This is a completely new world for me and I was excited to find I could attract a large audience for the first of my recent shows, Ecce Homo, (Behold the Man), an examination of masculinity at a time of crisis in male identity.

My most recent show is Dead Poets in Love, Queer Writers from Shakespeare to Burroughs. Here I am trying another experiment in bringing writing and photography together. This has been, maybe my longterm ambition for most of my life. In the gallery the texts float as an ethereal presence in front of my manipulated images of the writers themselves. In the movie of the show, I decided that it was better to leave out the texts. Maybe I will take this idea further in my next projects.

If the potential of the arts in the virtual world is new to you, and if you are interested to come to Glinka Gallery and to the other arts venues in the often under-estimated virtual platform, Second Life, https://secondlife.comhere is a brief look. We hope to see you there, maybe.

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The beautiful city of Ravenna, on the East Coast of Italy, in Emilia-Romagna, sits between Venice and Rimini, but is less crowded than its more famous neighbours. Once, however, it was the capital of Italy and one of the grandest cities of Europe.

That was a long time ago, in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, after the most glorious days of Ancient Rome, when the Roman Emperors had moved to Constantinople and the Goths, those people we still think of as barbarians and vandals, had invaded Italy, and Rome itself had been sacked, or as we say, after it had Fallen. The invading Goths forced the Roman emperors to leave Rome and set up a new capital at Milan, but that too became unsafe from attack, so, in the year 402, the Emperor Honorius (384 – 423) moved his court to Ravenna to the south. He transformed what had been a small swampy town built on piles on a series of small islands in a marshy lagoon, like Venice centuries later, and inland from the Adriatic Sea into one of the greatest cities and ports of Europe. It is now linked to the sea by the 18th century Candiano Canal

As a schoolboy, I thought people knew that Rome had fallen because they heard the bang, but history is never that simple. Ravenna is an example of that. I came here in a very hot June 2024, not sure what I would find, but generally, as they say, wowed by what was here. If it is nowadays a very civilised and gentle place, its position on the Adriatic Sea, facing the more civilised East, meant that between 35 and 12 BC, the town became Emperor Augustus Caesar’s principal Roman port at Classis, where he stationed the Roman Fleet.

The ancient port is now a series of ruins displayed in an open air museum, a vivid reminder of the glory and the fall of Rome.

The place is now a pleasant suburb of Ravenna, called Classe, a short train or bus journey from the city. It has one of Ravenna’s most magnificent basilicas, a few shops and a trattoria. It also has a glittering and spacious new museum which recounts the history of Ravenna with excellently designed installations.

Rome did ‘fall’ but it didn’t disappear, it remained the official capital of the land we now call Italy, even after the capital of the Roman Empire became Constantinople. The problem had been those Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and, especially Theodoric the Great (454 – 526), the King of the Ostrogoths (Western Goths), the Goths’ supreme military general, who became the de facto King of Italy after a series of invasions and skilled diplomatic treaties. He managed to become not only the conquering ruler of Italy but also its acknowledged ruler under the Roman Emperor in Constantinople. Was he a Barbarian? Well, most political leaders are barbarians, and he did his set of ‘bad’ things, but as he was also one of the most important figures in guaranteeing the continuation of Italian, and maybe European, culture after the so called Fall of Rome and before the rise of Charlemagne (748 – 814). Theodoric is important for us because he made Ravenna his capital and insured its magnificence much of which is still visible today.

If any of you are still thinking that those invading Goths were just rampaging barbarians, then you only have to visit the eight early Christian churches in Ravenna that are all on the World Heritage List. (See my next blog). The Ostrogoths were Aryan Christians, but let’s not go into the differences between them and the Orthodox Christians of Constantinople, or the Roman Catholic Christians of Rome, but, here in Ravenna, the three theological branches combined to produce, in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, some of the most magnificent surviving early Christian mosaics in the world history of art. Even if you are not interested in church history, or even any history, the sheer beauty of the art makes this place a must-see.

I will revisit these churches in the next blog because there is so much to see. I was lucky enough not only to visit all the sites, but to go to a concert held in the 2024 Ravenna Festival in one of those churches, the Basilica of San Vitale (547 AD)

The French early music group, Irini Ensemble, director Lila Hajosi, performed music by the great Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Du Fay (?1397 – 1474) and a number of his contemporary Greek Orthodox composers, to celebrate and mourn the glory and then the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It would be difficult to find a more beautiful setting for this music. Here’s a video of them singing this music, not in Ravenna, but at the Abbaye de Fontfroide, Narbonne, France.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8uaW3AvSdQ

Guillaume Du Fay’s 15th Century music felt positively modern after being immersed the 4th and 5th Centuries. I had been immersed in the Ravenna of 1400 years ago and it was easy to forget that Ravenna didn’t actually go to sleep after its extraordinary era of world dominance. If there was any danger of me forgetting the many interesting and dramatic centuries of Italian history since the death of Theodoric the Great, then this poster for a wacky art show here in the city centre, soon reminded me of some other celebrated names in the story of Ravenna.

Ravenna is proud of the poets who lived here. Dante Alighieri (c.1265 – 1321), author of Divine Comedy (Comedia Divina) which was partly written and completed in Ravenna when he’d escaped Florence, his home town, after falling out with its rulers over his opposition to the Papacy’s plans to rule all the Italian city-states. He was to live and die an exile, a political refugee, in Ravenna, where he is buried. Another poetic resident was the Englishman, Lord Byron, George Gordon Byron, (1788 – 1824), the great Romantic poet who, in the spirit of romance, came to live here (1819 – 1821) for the love of a married woman, Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli, and where he continued to write his epic poem, Don Juan, but also his Ravenna Diary. Teresa had to return to her husband but Byron wrote to her of his, or of their, love:  

“I love you, and you love me,—at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which is a great consolation in all events. But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us,—but they never will, unless you wish it.“

In 1822, he went to Greece where he died working in support of the Greek fight for independence and where he died of a fever in 1824.

Byron lived in a house that backed onto the Piazza San Francesco which is also the site of one of Ravenna’s great basilicas, the former Franciscan monastery, now the Basilica di San Francesco, where Dante’s funeral was held after his death from malaria in 1321.

The Basilica di San Francesco was built on the site of the original 5th Century church in 1261 when it was handed over to the Franciscans as a monastery. It suffered the fate of many Italian churches from that period by being given 18th century Baroque ornamentation. This was removed at the beginning of the 20th century in preparation for the 600th Anniversary of Dante’s death. It has restored the basilica to how it would have looked in the 13th century.

The Piazza San Francesco is also where I found the excellent Caffè Pasticceria Palumbo ://www.facebook.com/caffepalumbo/ a great place to stop and have a glass of beer and a cake, or even, of course, a coffee. The piazza is a good place to just sit in the sun or to find a spot in the shade to think about Byron and Teresa or Dante and Beatrice, or about anything you fancy. My walks round the city often led me here.

Classense Library, part of a Camaldolese monastery in central Ravenna, is an active civic and research library, one of the largest and oldest in Italy, and also the custodians of a uniquely complete collection of first editions of Dante’s works. The cloisters are also a lovely place to sit and read or to discuss university exams or just to sit and think.

Walking round the streets in Ravenna’s historic centre, there are, of course, restaurants and bars a plenty, but, one last Dante reference, I promise, you can also ‘Walk Ravenna with the Divine Comedy’, the Camminare Ravenna con la Divina Commedia – I loved this idea. At various stops along the way you can use the QR codes on your phone to stop and pause with extracts from Dante. Yes, Ravenna is a truly civilised place.

You can also stop and pause for a beer outside the Osteria Enoteca Ca’ de Vèn, or, better still, you could go inside for a fine meal based in Emiglia-Romagna culinary traditions. https://cadeven.it/

It was a very hot when I was in Ravenna, in June 2024, so it was not surprising that a drink al fresco was a popular pastime, not just for me. It was also possible to watch the football because Euro 2024 was in progress, and sadly, but philosophically, received here (well, this is Ravenna). On a humid night in the city’s main square, Piazza del Populo, Italy lost 1 – 0 to Spain.

In a street just off Piazza del Populo, is one of the best restaurants I found. Al Cairoli, in Via Cairoli, is friendly, stylish and the menu and wine list is gourmet class. It was a special experience – repeated.

https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/osteria-dei–ravennahttps://ristorantealcairoli.it/

Like the nearby Basilica di San Francesco, the 5th century Basilica di Sant’Agata Maggiore was considerably altered by an earthquake in the 17th century, with the loss of most of its mosaics. In the 18th century, there were further changes with the addition of baroque ’embellishments’, mercifully, these were removed in the late 19th century and early 20th century and further restoration was needed in the 1960s and 1980s to remedy the near destruction of part of the church during the Second World War. The result in 2024, for all the losses, is a beautiful and uncluttered church with sensitive attention given to the many original details that were discovered from the original building. An excellent example of what can be gained by such skilful restoration of much altered monuments. It is an oasis of peace.

Not far from Sant’Agata, there is another fine but traditional restaurant on a quiet side street in central Ravenna, Via Cerchio. Trattoria al Cerchio is charming and welcoming with a friendly and hard-working staff, great food and, a special and unexpected treat, framed quotes from Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron on the walls. Most of the clientele, with few exceptions, were Italian and many seemed to be regulars. It felt like the real Italian experience, even with English and Anglo-Irish writers on the wall. This place is well worth finding. I went there often and stayed longer than planned having an altogether excellent time. https://www.facebook.com/trattoriaalcerchio/?locale=it_IT

On the Via Roma, not far from where I was staying, is the Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna, MAR, where I caught an impressive exhibition of 20th and 21st century mosaics that proved, if it still needed proving, that Ravenna is still the true international capital of this art form. It was a surprise to me to learn that Ravenna’s twin city is Chichester, in my own home county of Sussex, where some fine Romano-British mosaics have been discovered. This twinning makes me doubly fond of Ravenna.

The 2024 Ravenna Festival sponsored the reorchestration of the American Minimalist composer, Philip Glass’s music for the third of his Qatsi Trilogy, Naqqoyqatsi (2002) when he worked with the American director Godfrey Reggio. Glass rearranged his score to be a closer match to his scores for the two earlier non-narrative films, Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Powaqqatsi (1988) (the names comes from the Hopi language – qatsi meaning life). The three films were screened on three consecutive nights, with Glass’ Philip Glass Ensemble playing along with the solo cellist, Erica Piccotti, the Orchestra della Toscana, the Choir of Siena Cathedral and the Children’s Choir from the Accademia del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The veteran conductor, a long-term Philip Glass collaborator, was Michael Riesman. It was a thrilling experience to see these still adventurous and modernist feature-length films with such a large group of musicians performing live in the beautiful Teatro Dante Alighieri (opened in 1852). The three films, now wearing the same musical clothes, made their full impact when screened as a live and truly epic three day event.

The Trattoria Il Buon Gusto, just outside the old city walls on Via Cesarea, is a small, owner-run and excellent restaurant, a kind of casa da casa, home from home, with informal and personal service that is also very reasonably priced. It was also only a very short walk from where I was staying. A great place. http://trattoriadelbuongusto.com/index.asp#chisiamo ↗

The city of Ravenna is near but not on the Adriatic Coast – it’s a twenty minute bus ride away – regular buses for the beach go from the Railway station. Look for Marina di Ravenna and the journey is easy.

This was June and very sunny and hot, so I was surprised to find the beaches so uncrowded during the week – and not over-crowded at the weekends. The sand is white and soft, the sea blue and warm, so there was every reason to make the journey here even if you don’t want to try the Ravenna fashion for Beach Tennis. I went to Big Mamma beach – well it was near the bus stop – and it was civilised, friendly, with loungers and umbrellas, a friendly bagnino, and perfectly good food and drinks. The swimming was truly wonderful.

Apart from trips to the sea and a bus ride to Classe, everything was easily accessible on foot in Ravenna and walking round this lovely city was an interesting pleasure in its own right.

I was staying by one of the ancient gates in the city walls, Porta Nuova, some of which still stand. I felt at home almost straight away and even my usual habits, such as morning martial arts practice, could carry on up there on my roof terrace dojo.

I will write about the sensational mosaics in Ravenna’s Unesco World Heritage sites in the next blog – here is the link. https://wolfiewolfgang.com/ravenna-the-mosaics-essential-sites-and-sights-to-see/

I came to Ravenna for the mosaics, of course, but after the Ancient Romans, the Goths, and the others, I was excited to find so much more and to discover that Ravenna is still a cultural capital for many of the things we still value, or should still value in Europe.

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At the beginning of 2020, I spent a week in Naples and visited the fateful ruins at Pompeii where you have to think about the disaster that befell the folks there in in the year 79 AD when the volcano Vesuvius erupted. Little did I know then that the year 2020 too was also going to be an annus horribilis. I walked round the ruins out of season when there are seldom many visitors in this, one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world. The sun shone and I thought of things ancient, mostly Roman and Greek. I thought about those ancient Greeks and Romans knowing that when I returned to England, I was going to a much-praised exhibition at the British Museum, Troy myth and reality.

While in Naples I visited the National Archeological Museum, a giant building that contains, amongst other things, many artefacts from Pompeii. There was also an exhibition of ancient classical statues that had been rescued from the bottom of the sea around Italy and Greece. I thought this guy looked like King Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and leader of the Greek army during the Trojan Wars. Actually, of course, I don’t think anyone knows what Agamemnon looked like – so grizzled and bearded will do

I played King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks during the Trojan Wars in a student production of a new dramatisation of Chaucer’s epic Trojan War poem, Troilus and Cresyde (written in the mid-1380s). I still have a production shot taken during the rehearsals. Maybe, without the John Lennon glasses and the roll-neck pullover, I was a dead-ringer for the old king, who knows. I got to sit on a throne and make sonorous speeches about battles and warriors – more fun than the real thing, I suspect, and it began a long fascination with the Trojan Wars, a subject, which until I sat on Agamemnon’s throne had, if I am honest, seemed a bit, well, academic. I was fully won over to Homer when I read, on a Greek beach, Alexander Pope’s English translation of The Iliad. So, it was a special pleasure when I went to the British Museum’s Troy exhibition, to see Pope’s handwritten first draft, complete with his diagram of Achilles’ shield. Oddly, perhaps, it was Alexander Pope, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare who first introduced me to their great predecessor, Homer, and the story of the Trojan Wars.

I knew about Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, and Agamemnon’s sister-in-law, who was either abducted, seduced, or simply fell in love with the young Trojan prince Paris, son of Trojan King Priam, who took her home to Troy, infuriating the Greeks and causing one of the most famous wars, that may never have happened.

I had seen Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy in the imperfect 1967 film of Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (1592), and, at that time, it was Elizabeth Taylor’s turn to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Marlowe’s Helen was the ultimate erotic temptation, a role she has taken through the centuries.

The Chaucer poem, Troilus and Cresyde, was based on a relatively minor character in Homer’s The Iliad , the earliest and, for most, the greatest account of Troy. Troilus, another young prince of Troy, son of King Priam, brother of Paris and Hector gets embroiled in the war between Trojan and Greek when he grows jealous of his betrothed, the Trojan princess, Creseyde , who is flirting with a Greek warrior. Shakespeare knew the Chaucer poem and wrote a play using the same plot line, Troilus and Cressida. I came to the Shakespeare by way of Chaucer on my way to Homer. A roundabout journey I know. Just like this blog where I am on my way to the Museum’s Troy exhibition that finished just before the UK pandemic lockdown in March 2020.

To give you a taste of the Shakespeare and also a brief catch up on the Trojan Wars, here’s the prologue to the play – rousing stuff.

Shakespeare rushes through the famous names from the Trojan Wars, we’ve heard of most of them even if we don’t know all their stories – Helen and Paris, poor old Menelaus, king of Sparta, Helen’s deserted husband, and his brother King Agamemnon, and the two superhero warriors Trojan Hector and Greek Achilles,

Most of what we know about these characters comes from three sources – Homer’s The Iliad and its post-fall of Troy sequel The Odyssey.

The Odyssey describes the various journeys of Odysseus (latin name Ulysses) who was another of the Greek warriors at Troy.

Odysseus tries to get home to his famously patient wife Penelope but the journey takes years and he has to endure many ordeals inflicted on him by the gods and by sorceresses, monsters, giants and seductive nymphs like the Sirens. When he finally gets home to Penelope he has many a good story to tell her about his odyssey.

The third important book on the aftermath of the Trojan Wars is the Roman epic poem Virgil’s The Aeniad (29 – 19 BC) which takes another famous Trojan hero, Aeneas on his escape from Troy to his destiny in Italy where he has to build a second Troy – Rome.

But, maybe after Helen, the famous famous figure from these books is the ultimate warrior, the almost invulnerable Greek hero, Achilles. the son of Peleus, the King of Phthia and a Nereid (a sea nymph), Thetis, who was said to have dipped her baby into the River Styx to make his body invincible, only to forget the heel that she was holding, the legendary Achilles’ heel, and thus laying him open to the fatal arrow shot by Paris, Hector’s brother and Helen’s lover.

Achilles’ other vulnerability was his love for his friend Patroclus and his grief and rage when Patroclus was killed by Hector.

We all know Achilles, Londoners see his 18 foot statue every time they take a bus round Hyde Park. Brad Pitt fans too, are familiar with Achilles’ particular type of masculinity

If The Iliad ends with blood, death and war, it begins with love and sex, Aphrodite (Latin name Venus), the goddess of love, taking part in a beauty contest with two rival goddesses, Hera and Athena, to find out who is the most beautiful of all the immortals. The judge is to be Paris, son of the Trojan King Priam, and the prize will be the most beautiful mortal woman in the world who is, or course, Helen of Troy who is already married to the King of Sparta, Menelaus, brother of King Agamemnon, the Greek leader. Paris takes his prize, Helen, back home to Troy. and the Greeks go in swift persuade to win her back. The result is, as we know, the Trojan War.

The heroes, heroines, victims and villains from Troy were all in London for the British Museum’s extraordinary exhibition, Troy myth and reality, their stories retold in works of art from four thousand years until modern times, and still retaining their fascination for us today.

Here’s the great man himself – well we don’t know that for sure any ore than we know what Agamemnon looked like – here’s the blind poet, Homer, another grizzled bearded one, who may not have been blind, who may never have existed or who might have been at least two different people, one the author or The Iliad and the other of The Odyssey. Whoever wrote these two epic poems probably did so between the years 800 and 750 BC – a very long time ago but several hundred years after the Trojan Wars that, sorry about this, might not have happened either, but if they did, it was some time between 1260 and 1180 BC. The City of Troy may or may not have existed either, but, since the late 19th century most archeologists believe that it did and that it was situated in a place known as Hissarlik in Asia Minor.

To an untutored eye, one ruined city looks much like another, so after Pompeii, I have to take the experts’ word on whether this is, or was, the ancient city Troy, four miles from the Aegean sea and four miles from the narrow waterway known as the Dardanelles, or in ancient times, as the Hellespont. Homer, whoever he was, had started something – ever since his time, people have craved to know where Troy was and what it was like. Maybe it wasn’t unlike that terrible battle also fought there in 1915.

It was also, maybe, the beach where Hector died.

The most famous archeologist involved in establishing the site of Troy, was also the most smooth-tongued and entrepreneurial, of the several Troy hunters roaming Asia Minor in the second half of the 19th century. the German Heinrich Schliemann, no beard this time, and not at all grizzled. He betted his, er, moustache, on Hissarlik being the place and, we now know that he was right.

Schliemann dug and he dug and, amazingly, in 1871, he started to find stuff. Artefacts, sometimes called plunder, known in his sensational language as The Treasures of Priam, most of which is now in a museum in Berlin – and some of it was exhibited at the British museum’s Troy, myth and reality.

The exhibition looked fantastic there in the museum, the lighting and design, in particular, but the captions, low down near the ground, caused a few problems for the crowds that were milling round each exhibit. Captions are a bit of a bore in general at block-buster exhibitions because it encourages clustering round the notices and blocking the view of the artworks. That is a mild complain, minuscule when compared to the battle that was going on outside.

In front of the building and sometimes inside, too, heroic warriors and a spectacular Trojan Horse, were fighting their own war. This time it was against the British Museum’s sponsors, those controversial oil-spillers, BP. I hear that the next exhibition, the global-warming conscious Arctic, will no longer have BP as a sponsor. Hurrah.

And then there were those pots! Grecian Urns, a veritable sideboard of ancient crockery.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
    When old age shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
    “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I knew Keats’ poem Ode on a Grecian Urn and I had certainly seen many red-figure and black-figure pots in various museums, but somehow I was unprepared for the glory, originality, minimalism and weirdness of these Trojan paintings. Sorry, if I offend, but I thought these two thousand year old pots upstaged all the other artworks in the exhibition. Judge for yourselves as you scroll down and look at the Trojan stories in these amazingly powerful paintings .

The Achilles stories were memorably displayed too, in three-dimensions First on an ancient silver cup, and then with various impressive and movingly carved sarcophaguses (sarcophagi) where the tragedies of The Iliad were recreated with an emphasis on grief.

Moving too were these carvings of the patient Penelope waiting mournfully for Odysseus.

I have tried to show some of my favourite exhibits and to do justice to the post classical period where possible and without giving the impression that nothing good happened in the arts after the year 100 AD. I have to say though that I was overwhelmed by the power of those works of art dating back thousands of years.

Achilles, Helen, Ulysses and the others live on, of course, in the work of modern artists in many genres – I am tempted to define modern as sometime the end of the 18th century, but forget I said that. Here are some of my favourites. Cy Twombly’s 1962 savage reduction of Achilles to a bloody arrowhead seething with anger was especially memorable.

I was intrigued too by Romare Bearden’s 1977 collage with its New World irony.

I also liked Eleanor Antin’s 2007 picture of the Judgement of Paris for its cunning mix of politics, wit and kitsch.

It was impressive how so many modern genres have found something new to say about those Greek heroes, whether it was graphic novels, Manga comics or the wonderful Shield of Achilles by Spencer Finch, built around lighting readings made at the beach were so many Trojans and Greeks fell,

Troy myth and reality was a comprehensive survey of so much art that has been inspired by Homer and Virgil in these four thousand years that I resist leaving out one of my passions – opera. Two Trojan French operas from the mid-10th century, one Offenbach’s classic send-up of the whole Trojan epic, La Belle Hélène, and the other Berlioz’s sublime and gigantic Virgil opera Les Troyens, where the catastrophe of Troy is powerfully caught when Cassandra and the women of Troy commit mass suicide at the end of act two. Try them, you might be surprised.

The amazing thing about writing this blog is just how much I have had to leave out….well that’s epics for you.

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There are two poems about Adam and Eve in my new poetry collection, Remembering Blue, this one, Eve, came together as a little film made in my home town of Lewes, UK. Maybe I’m a bit obsessed by our earliest, or maybe-not ancestors. There was always something that interested me about the fall from paradise, the punishment of having to live in our world, the real world. Actually, part of the interest was that people believed the story. If our world is a punishment, it’s of our own making, as today’s impressive idealistic young environmentalists tell us. We fell into paradise, not out of it, and then we messed it up. The real fall of man comes later.

The post Eve (and Adam) keep falling. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I went to one of those boarding schools where pupils were expected to pray every day even when the act of praying was, to me at least, a bit of a mystery. We spend what seemed like hours, (but what was probably only around ten minutes) on our knees in the dormitory every night before bed. Later, at my secondary school, there was a short morning chapel service every day and, yet again, there we all were, on our knees, often praying for forgiveness for sins we planned to commit as soon as the next opportunity arose.

It’s no surprise that my mind wandered at time like these. At first it was:

Who is this God? Can he really hear me? I don’t want to stop being proud of some things. Why are some sins more fun than other? Why do we have to be on our knees? The floor boards are very uncomfortable to kneel on. Are we meant to be this uncomfortable? How long is this going to last?

Then, when I realised that there was no escape from the torture, I just gave it to my fears. I thought of being beaten (‘bend over, boy!’) and then I thought of all those people, mostly kings and queens, from history books having their heads cut off. King Charles I’s execution gave me nightmares. Even he had to kneel like this, I thought.

Praying became something scary. Kneeling in a church pew, head bowed over the shelf where the prayers books go, it was like putting your head on the block. Don’t close your eyes – something bad will will happen.

These memories came back to me when I wrote the poem Kneeling that is in my newly published poetry collection, Remembering Blue. I thought I would make a short film of the poem too – here it is:

These days, I seldom kneel except when I’m doing the weeding.

Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing) can be bought in all the usual places – maybe it’s easiest to order online from Wordery who give free world-wide postage.

https://wordery.com/remembering-blue-colin-bell-9781908742704?cTrk=MTU4MTA4MjIwfDVkMzBhOTY1YTQwMTc6MTo1OjVkMzBhOTQzNWJjMDkxLjAzNDg4OTU1OjgzZTNlYjNl&fbclid=IwAR3b-2JitQhwRHeP77gwSr_V8egSKdczwZ-BMix97230qXZyiZ1rLgmTQKc

The digital edition is available on Kindle and can be ordered from Amazon in your country.

The post Kneeling can give you nightmares – I wrote a poem about it. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Last week, as part of the ‘virtual’ exhibition, Remembering Blue, at my ‘virtual’ gallery, Glinka Gallery, I took part in a wonderful event with the ever-inventive ‘virtual’ dance company, The Sway & Dance Troupe.

OK, what’s all this stuff about ‘virtual’? The creativity and originality of virtual worlds are not celebrated enough in the ‘real’ world. I have been lucky at my time in the ‘virtual’ world called Second Life. I have been working there with fellow writers, film-makers, musicians and artists for over ten years now and it has been a glimpse into not just the what-could-be but also the what-can-be done.

Last Saturday, on the roof theatre on top of my gallery, circling in outer space, we put on a live fully-choreographed dance show to a live audience from around the world, with poetry interludes from my newly published poetry collection, Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing). I assumed my alter-ego, Wolfgang Glinka, in reading my poems and was happy to play second fiddle to my amazing colleagues Joseph Nussbaum, Boris Twist, Bryan Trefoil, Spankster Cyberstar and Marly Moon from The Sway & Dance Troupe. No need for Broadway or London’s West End, if this can still be done in that other ‘virtual’ world.

Take a look at this live video of the event, When I’m Gone, filmed by the talented video artist, Akiko Kinoshi. I think you’ll see what I mean.

The post Poetry and Dance coming together in my ‘virtual’ world. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was sad to hear of Peter Fonda’s death, not just because he starred in Easy Rider, one of my favourite films, or just because he was unusual for a Hollywood star (in those days) to take an active role in the counter revolution of the late 1960s, but also because I have personal memories of the time when I met him and filmed him in 1986 when making the British TV documentary, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. He was fun and amusing and on my initial recce trip to meet him in Livingstone, Montana, he invited me to race him back to his ranch a few miles away. I had a big American car (can’t remember the make) and he had something fast and expensive. He sped off, a challenge I think, so I had to put my foot down to keep up with him. We spent the evening sitting in directors’ chairs, drinking Californian white wine, on the veranda of his house and watching the light fade over the Rocky Mountains. It was a truly memorable occasion. He was an old friend, it seemed, when we met again for the filming in Los Angeles. RIP Peter Fonda, you were a good man.

The post Remembering Peter Fonda – the easy rider appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

A few years ago I started to record myself reading some of my poems but also poetry by greater people than me. I moved away from this idea when I ran into computer problems and then forgot about these little videos until I revived my account at Youtube a few weeks ago.

This video is of my Haiku, written and performed long before I made it the introductory poem in my newly published poetry collection Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing).

I plan to do more poetry videos and this, I hope, will be my tentative toe in the water before I dive in and immerse myself.

Another recording from that time is Malcolm Arnold’s poem Dover Beach – always a favourite of mine and one that has always brought a tear to my eyes. Listening to my recording again, I think it isn’t half as bad as I thought it was. You can be the judges:

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My debut poetry collection is called Remembering Blue after a line in the opening poem, Haiku.

The poem was my first attempt at writing in this difficult Japanese short-form poetry style. I’m still not sure if I fulfil all the demands of Haiku traditionalists, but it works for me and it acts as an appropriate preface to the collection.

The poem had been around for a few years before it appeared in Remembering Blue – it has even been made into a little film by my talented friend Joseph Nussbaum in the virtual world Second Life. You can still see it on Youtube., along with other films he’s made with my poetry.

The paperback edition of Remembering Blue (published by Ward Wood Publishing) is, maybe, best purchased from Wordery for free worldwide postage:

https://wordery.com/remembering-blue-colin-bell-9781908742704?cTrk=MTU4MTA4MjIwfDVkMzBhOTY1YTQwMTc6MTo1OjVkMzBhOTQzNWJjMDkxLjAzNDg4OTU1OjgzZTNlYjNl&fbclid=IwAR3b-2JitQhwRHeP77gwSr_V8egSKdczwZ-BMix97230qXZyiZ1rLgmTQKc

The digital edition is available as a Kindle – buy it online from Amazon in your country.

The post My new poetry collection, Remembering Blue, begins with a haiku appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.