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How can anyone know what a city looked like four hundred years ago, when almost every building is gone? For New Amsterdam, the answer is a single remarkable document: a map called the Castello Plan, drawn in 1660. It is…
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At the entrance to Solomon's Temple stood two enormous bronze pillars, each around nine and a half metres tall, crowned with ornamented capitals rising several metres more. They are named, individually, in the old…
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Almost everyone in the world will know Wall Street in NYC, but why does this famous street have this name? Why is Wall Street called Wall Street? This question is rather easy to answer if you imagine standing at the…
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In a colony where a single misunderstanding could tip trade into war, one of the most important people in New Amsterdam was a woman who could speak to both sides. Her name was Sara Roelofs, and from a house near the…
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Imagine standing inside Solomon's Temple, the First Temple of Jerusalem, nearly three thousand years ago. Gold covers the walls. The menorah burns, the table of the showbread stands ready, and the golden altar of…
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Solomon's Temple was not one room. It was a sequence, ring within ring, each one closer to the sacred than the last, and closed to almost everyone before the very end. Standing at its outer edge, an ordinary person in…
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Imagine standing in the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens, around 320 BCE. The stone seats climb the south slope of the Acropolis, packed with spectators. It is a festival of Dionysos, and on the stage below, one of the…
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Across the province of Drenthe stand dozens of hunebeds, giant stone tombs older than the pyramids of Egypt. They are the oldest monuments in the Netherlands. But the people who raised them, the hunebed builders, and…
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Imagine standing on the Acropolis in Ottoman times, in the year 1805 to be specific. It is the very spot where, in our Classical reconstruction, the Panathenaic procession once reached the Parthenon in its painted…
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It is one of the most repeated stories about the Acropolis. After the Ottomans took Athens, so the tale goes, they turned the Erechtheion, the elegant temple guarded by the six Caryatids, into a harem for the garrison…
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For more than two thousand years the Parthenon stood almost intact. It had survived as a temple, a church and a mosque, keeping its roof, its walls and nearly all its columns through war, fire and one empire after…
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Imagine standing on the Acropolis three hundred years ago. The Parthenon rises ahead of you much as it always has, but a slender minaret climbs from its southwest corner, and the call to prayer drifts out across the…
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