The Quire Screen

This is just a section of the screen separating the Nave from the Quire at York Minster. There are statues of fifteen kings of England, from William the Conqueror to Henry VI, on either side of the arch separating the two parts of the church. The statues were carved in the late 1400's by William Hyndeley, except for the statue of Henry VI, which was seen as Lancastrian propaganda during the Wars of the Roses, and was defaced, removed, and untimately replaced in the 19th century.

The statues in this picture depict Henry III, Edwards I, II, and III, Richard II, and Henry IV and V.

Trinity College

Trinity was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, whose statue adorns the Great Gate in the picture on the right. (One thing that did strike me about what little I saw of the Cambridge colleges was how many statues they had adorning their facades, which you don't see much of in Oxford.)

The Great Court, on the left, is described as the largest enclosed courtyard in Europe. It's famous for the Great Court Run, the attempt to run all the way (339 metres, 371 yards) around the court before the clock can finish striking twelve. (This was depicted in Chariots of Fire, although Harold Abrahams never actually made the run.)

The fact that it's called the Great Court, rather than the Great Quad, is one of the little language differences between the two universities, like calling the person who cleans your room a scout (Oxford) or a bedder (Cambridge), and your classes tutorials (Oxford) or supervisions (Cambridge). What you are most likely to notice in this picture is how brown it is. I think it only rained once the entire month I was in England, and not for very long, and though Yorkshire was still fairly green, even there we skipped a planned visit to a waterfall on the excursion to the Dales because there wasn't any actual water in the falls.

More Newstead Abbey

Some exterior shots of the enormous main house, plus a bust of the poet in one of the gardens.

Newstead Priory (it was never an abbey, but the owners who acquired it after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries thought that an abbey sounded grander than a priory) dated from the 12th century, founded by Henry II as part of his penance for the murder of Thomas á Becket.

Windsor

Queen Victoria surveying her Empire from the front of Windsor Castle.

I'm not supposed to be here; I'd planned to be in Yorkshire, seeing Haworth Parsonage and York Minster. But a case of appendicitis that turned out not to be appendicitis derailed everything.

I'm fine, but I was under doctor's orders to stay in Oxford just in case, and I couldn't have handled wrestling all of my luggage on and off of the three trains it takes to get to Haworth anyway. So I'm in Windsor and flying home tomorrow, and longer explanations will have to wait.

In the meantime, this statue is so well placed that wherever you are on Peascod Street, the pedestrian mall full of shops and restaurants heading downhill from the castle, the queen appears to be watching—and judging.

Maybe you really don't need that sultana scone after all.

Unknown soldier memorial

A closer look at the memorial. (The bright sun and shadows from the trees made it hard to read the inscriptions.)

Garryowen

Someone at the trading post recommended that we come here since we couldn't visit the park. This is a few miles down the highway from Last Stand Hill, and was the location of Sitting Bull's camp before the battle.

Wikipedia tells me that the town is privately owned, and has a population of 2 (which may explain why the GPS got so confused when we were trying to find it.) There's a small museum, and a tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which may (or may not—there is apparently some doubt about this) contain the skeleton of a cavalry soldier found in 1926 when an irrigation ditch just outside of Garryowen was being repaired.

Garryowen started as a railroad station on the Little Bighorn River, where supplies for the local forts and homesteads could be delivered. The name referred to an Irish song that was the marching song for the 7th Cavalry Regiment.

Cristo Redentor

Even on a sunny day, with blue skies and puffy clouds, I wouldn't have been that impressed by the statue. It's colossal, of course; those outstretched arms are 28 meters across—almost 100 feet. But you lose the scale seeing it up close. If I'd had to guess how tall it was I would have said maybe fifty feet, but it's twice that. You really get a much better sense of the drama of it from a distance, or in the many photographs taken from the air.

There's a tiny chapel inside the pedestal, which was packed with people trying to get out of the rain, and I sat there for a while. I much preferred the painting there to the statue outside.

Homeless Jesus

But I did love this outside the cathedral: a status of Jesus as a homeless man (identifiable only by the wounds on his feet), created by a Canadian artist, Timothy Schmalz.

More of the emperors

A very battered Claudius, from the array of emperors at the baths, and another look at JC in profile.

Julius Caesar

The terrace around the main pool in the Roman Baths has statues of some of the emperors and governors. They're not Roman; they were added by the Victorians before the grand opening of the complex in 1897.

This statue of Julius Caasar is even more recent; the original Victorian statue was pushed into the pool by vandals in the late 1980's. It made me laugh because it looks so much like Ciaran Hinds, who played Caesar in the HBO series Rome.

Two angels

The Bodleian

I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.

That's the oath I had to recite in order to get my reader's card for the Bodleian.

Every college at Oxford has its own library, but the Bodleian is the main research library for all of the colleges. There are three main buildings: the Weston Library, which is new and houses special collections, the Radcliffe Camera, and the Old Bodleian.

This is the entrance to the Old Bodleian. That jolly-looking fellow is the Earl of Pembroke, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford in the 17th century. Thomas Bodley, who rebuilt the library in the late 16th-early 17th centuries after it had been stripped and abandoned during the Reformation, has to settle for the plaque over the doorway. And of course having the library named for him.

Artemis

The two large statues of Artemis in the museum were by far the most interesting exhibits. The Temple of Artemis that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World had been recognizably Greek, at least according to the models in the museum; this goddess most definitely was not. Instead of the virgin huntress with the short tunic and a quiver and bow, the Ephesian Artemis looked almost Egyptian.

This statue is from the first century AD, and those odd egg-like protuberances on her chest probably represent the amber beads that decorated earlier statues and not, as I first assumed, a couple dozen extra breasts.

I think that's a fitting end to Ephesus: something strange and completely unexpected.

I had at least heard of these two

These statues in the museum are of Augustus and Livia. Many of the statues in the museum looked like something out of a bad dream; that neck on Livia is a particularly good—or maybe I mean particularly bad—example. She reminds me of the Tenniel Alice in Wonderland after eating the cake that made her grow.

Say what?

That statue of Marcus Aurelius is a fine example of good Roman art; however, this depiction of Hades and Persephone just made me laugh. Who knew that the three heads of the fearsome Cerberus were all the size of chihuahuas?

Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them

By 36 BC Knossos was a Roman colony. I love this bust of Marcus Aurelius in the museum.

The pediments

Pictures can't really capture the impact of these; when you walk into the room with these pediments on opposite walls, it's jaw-dropping.

The eastern pediment, on top, depicts a chariot race, while the western pediment depicts a well-known battle between humans and centaurs (Apollo, in the center, is looking at the humans indicating that he's on their side.) I'm not a classicist, though I like knowing all the mythological details behind the art, but in this case, the pediments could have depicted an early version of a particulary contentious Black Friday sale and I would love them just as much.

Downtown Cartago

This is the view from the ruins of Santiago Apóstol in central Cartago.

There have been a series of churches on this site since the sixteenth century, most of them destroyed by earthquakes. The guidebooks point out that the church that's there now isn't technically a ruin because it was never finished. It was to have been the only Romanesque style church in Costa Rica, but after yet another earthquake in 1910 it was abandoned.

There is a legend that two brothers, one a priest, fell in love with the same woman. The priest killed his brother with a knife during Mass, and though he vowed to build a church to atone for his sin, the church was destroyed by an earthquake a year later, as was every subsequent church on the site, which is taken as proof that it is cursed.

Saturday reflections

Grand Central Terminal, seen from across 42nd Street.

Another Memphis, another sphinx

 

Memphis was the capital of Egypt during the Old Kingdom, and we stopped there on the road between Giza and Saqqara.

There are several temples there, but we didn't see them, visiting only the museum. It has a colossus of Rameses II that's displayed lying on its back because its feet were broken off, but my pictures of it aren't very good. 

I like this sphinx though. It's much smaller than the one at Giza -- weighing in at a mere 90 tons -- and not as old, but you can get much closer to it.

And that's the end of Egypt, unless the travel gods allow me to return one day.