There are dowsers, whose hazel wands will tremble, not only for water, but also for gold and bronze and iron, even for bones or an urn-full of human dust. Archaeologists have used these mysteriously gifted persons as the truffle-hunter uses his dog or his learned sow, to nose out the ...
Read More

Seeking out Maya masterpieces in Yucatán Head off the beaten track in Mexico and you might be rewarded with some magnificent Maya archaeology, as Tom St John Gray reveals. The Spanish have built a city here and called it Mérida, because of the strangeness and greatness of its structures. In ...
Read More

Sami Redux …I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. W B Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1928) The arrival of a parcel from Amazon awakens memories of magical summer days last year. Inside is Brian and Eileen Anderson’s Walk and Eat Kefaloniá, an evocative pocket ...
Read More

The millennia-long story of a Croatian cave Magnificent Vela Spila overlooks the town of Vela Luka, which spreads around an L-shaped bay on the island of Korčula on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. The imposing cavern yawns to accept the visitor down into its depths, where archaeologists from the EUH2020-funded Mend the ...
Read More

Richard Hodges investigates pestilence and climate chaos in the eternal city The trams rumbling along the Viale Trastevere wake me. The bell announcing morning prayers at San Crisogono tolls a little later. From my terrace, I can see the Ponte Garibaldi and the many roofs stretching away to the distant ...
Read More

Lucia Marchini explores sacred sites in the sultan’s city. The year AD 532 was an eventful one in the history of Constantinople, and one it is still easy to revisit through some of the sites in the modern city of Istanbul. Spurred on by the rival charioteering factions the Blues ...
Read More

Seeking a Byzantine rebirth All Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or stream without a battle or a myth, a miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller’s path at every ...
Read More

Richard Hodges traces different journeys in the 8th century AD Berlin seems an unlikely place to discuss the 8th century AD in Europe. Yet a galaxy of scholars has been drawn to the stolid Bode Museum on Museum Island in the heart of the German capital to do just this ...
Read More

Caitlin McCall explores Roman remains in the land of Dido, Hannibal, and Caesar. Tunisia, with its glorious sandy beaches wedged between Algeria and Libya on the north coast of Africa, covers an area roughly two-thirds the size of the UK, but with just one-sixth its population. Such a ratio of ...
Read More