The Algarve should stop measuring tourism success simply by how many more visitors it can attract, according to the region’s tourism chief, who says the focus must now shift to
The post Algarve tourism boss: ‘Double-digit visitor growth should no longer be the focus’ appeared first on Portugal Resident.
Airbnb has changed its rules to limit what property hosts may ask guests to do – including when it comes to cleaning. The updated guidelines state that hosts can now set seven standard house rules and can also add other “reasonable” requests. Airbnb states that guests – who are required to pay a cleaning fee […]
The post Airbnb new rules: Hosts can no longer ask guests to clean before checking out appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
Kristin Idaszak | Longreads | October 22, 2026 | 3,741 words (13 minutes)
The city of the dead is the obverse of the society of the living, or rather than the obverse, it is its image, its intemporal image. For the dead have gone through the moment of change, and their monuments are the visible sign of the permanence of their city.
—Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death
Shortly after I graduated from college, my best friend sent me a postcard from the Sedlec Ossuary, a Catholic chapel formally named the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Kutná Hora, a town about an hour east of Prague. The postcard depicted the chapel’s interior: a chandelier of bones flanked by two towers of skulls. On the back she wrote, “The chandelier alone contains all the bones in the human body. Thanks to the plague, we have this work of totally weird art!”
Immediately I started planning my own trip to Kutná Hora—a place made prosperous by silver mining but famous for its bone church—and arrived with the zeal of a pilgrim. Today the town has 20,000 residents, but in its 14th-century heyday it boasted almost four times as many souls. The late Middle Ages was a tough time to be alive, between the Black Death, various crusades and holy wars, and famine—not to mention the labor conditions of silver mining. Kutná Hora was also a popular place to die, and all the villagers wanted to spend eternity at the medieval Sedlec Abbey. After one of the crusades, an abbot had brought back a handful of soil, supposedly from Golgotha, and strewn it on the abbey grounds. Burial in that soil was believed to grant quicker access to heaven, which led to an overcrowded cemetery. The solution? Build a subterranean chapel to house the remains. And then a half-blind monk, in the wake of a terrible plague, exhumed the victims and used them to redecorate.
An ossuary is any repository for human remains, but it’s also the term for a holy site that serves this function. Another name for this kind of church is charnel house, which to me evokes the image of an abattoir. Death historian Philippe Ariès connects the term to the French idiom une vieille carne, translated as an old nag or a tough piece of meat. It’s apropos: These buildings enshrine human remains as décor in macabre, otherworldly, electrifying memento mori.
Forty-thousand bodies’ worth of bones. Probably more. My brain buckled at the magnitude.
Four months later, I found myself in the Czech Republic. A coat of arms made out of bones greeted me when I arrived at the bone church. Upon closer inspection, the heraldry included a skeletal bird, its slender beak playfully pecking out a long-disintegrated eye from an empty socket. As I descended the stygian steps from the ticket kiosk, I took in the pyramid of bones that guarded the four corners of the room.
The chapel seemed to exist in a perpetual gloaming, the air hushed and cool. The sheer presence of so many human remains disoriented me; they surrounded me on every side. Forty-thousand bodies’ worth of bones. Probably more. My brain buckled at the magnitude. The remains took on an animated quality—not in a Halloween-y, top hat–wearing, dancing skeleton sense; nor in an eerie, horror movie sense; but in the sense that each one radiated a life force.
I loved it. I loved being surrounded by skeletons and weird art and death.
Death and the afterlife fascinated me. I devoured stories of women who visited the underworld and returned—Alcestis, Eurydice, Persephone—and philosophers and poets who broached the subject—Nietzsche, Camus, Dante. Thanatos, my favorite philosophy professor called it. The death drive. But I had no sense of the fragility of my own body. My knees did not yet make those alarming soft pops; the permanent ache had not settled into my shoulder; my heart wouldn’t sputter erratically in my chest for another decade. The allure was intellectual and emotional, certainly not embodied. Like climate change or menopause, I understood mortality conceptually, but it didn’t feel real.
I’d like to tell you that my visit to the Sedlec Ossuary changed everything, that after my trip I appreciated life’s transitory nature. Or that it gave me a premonition of what lay in store for me, my own brushes with death that were to come.
It did not.
While I was underground, I felt temporarily transported and transformed—or at least, I had a flicker of understanding: I sauntered into the chapel with the hubristic notion of a young artist that my words would become immortal. The bones confronted me with the truth. My legacy would be deposits of calcium and protein and collagen. My art wouldn’t endure, but these nameless victims of plague and famine and war—they did. It humbled me.
But I left the ossuary’s insights with the dead. In my early 20s, I didn’t need the bone church to convince me to suck the marrow out of each day. I went to grad school, became a playwright, got married, traveled to all seven continents. Somewhere in there, I relegated the bone chapel to memory.
In the summer of 2020, I got sick with a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia. I had so many episodes of VT I lost count, and any one of them could have ended in cardiac arrest. These events were indescribably painful and frightening. They enervated me, sapping me of my strength, vitality—eventually my will to persevere. My life became very small.
Mortality was no longer an abstraction: I was scared of what would happen to me when I died. Of how much it hurt. Of the nothingness of bones.
In the years that followed my initial descent into illness, I rarely left home. At the time I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, a third-floor walk-up. Climbing the stairs could, unpredictably, trigger a cardiac event, and so unless I had to leave for work, I spent most of the time in my living room. I can close my eyes now and return to that place. I’d painted the walls a shade of cornflower blue I grew to loathe. The television tottered precariously on an ancient table. Cherry-stained bookcases lined the wall. The top of the bookcase displayed a golden Japanese fan with a cloud tree painted on it. Next to it stood a penguin pitcher I bought on my honeymoon in Tierra del Fuego. Three vintage-style travel posters advertised Antarctic destinations: Beagle Channel, Lemaire Channel, Paradise Harbor.
That room was the real ossuary.
One of my favorite Greek tragedies is Euripides’ Alcestis, in which the eponymous heroine journeys to Hades in her dying husband’s stead. The god Apollo tricks the Fates so that her husband, the king, can live if he can find someone to take his place in the underworld. There’s an exchange I think about a lot: “Possible to say she is both alive and dead,” her servant reports, and the chorus leader, understandably confused, asks, “How could someone die and keep on living?” This is how I felt—alive but dead. Already in Hades. I’d escaped my fate, like the king, but my true self, the intrepid, curious, wonderstruck version of me? She was in the underworld with Alcestis.
The play takes a strange turn when Heracles arrives amid his twelve labors. During a supremely awkward evening of drunken revelry at the palace, he figures out what’s going on and hustles to the graveyard to wrestle death and bring Alcestis back.
I didn’t have a demigod to save me. But I didn’t want to be lost and gone.
The allure was intellectual and emotional, certainly not embodied. Like climate change or menopause, I understood mortality conceptually, but it didn’t feel real.
Sitting in my apartment day after day, surrounded by artifacts from the world I used to inhabit, was slowly killing me. I was afraid of things that had caused my VT, which meant I was afraid to go to the grocery store. I was afraid of taking a yoga class. I was afraid to simply be outside if it was really hot out. Finally I reached a breaking point. I could drop dead in the peanut butter aisle, or I could drop dead seeing the world. Staying at home wouldn’t save me. The threat resided inside my own chest.
I formulated a drastic plan to return to the land of the living. I took time off teaching and planned a sabbatical to travel and write. I couldn’t hide in my house if I rented it to someone else, if I jetted to the other side of the world. Instead of crossing the River Styx I ferried myself across the Pacific Ocean, and then the Atlantic. The final stop on my sabbatical was leading a study abroad in the Czech Republic, to attend an international scenography and performance festival. The ossuary didn’t really fit into the rest of the itinerary, but I wanted to give my students the experience I’d had all those years ago.
Though contemporary visitors can experience ossuaries as disturbing or revolting, they didn’t start out that way. In The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses, Paul Koudounaris traces their proliferation in Europe during the 13th century as a storage solution to the medieval Christian problem of where to keep the dead safe for their resurrection. There were more bodies than places to put them. Death preoccupied the medieval imagination. After the Bubonic plague, medieval artists began portraying its grotesque physicality: images of rotting corpses, poetic descriptions of worm fodder. You get the sense they would’ve painted the stench if they could. Is it any wonder that these decomposed cadavers eventually became the artistic medium itself?
Dozens of bone chapels sprang up across Europe by the 17th century, in a confluence of theology and aesthetics that seems morbidly inevitable. During the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism leaned into opulent and lavish Baroque art. It also leaned into corporal mortification, the kind that now shows up in mass-market thrillers as a fetishization of pain and suffering.
The appetite for gaudy-verging-on-gauche bone art swelled when the Romantics arrived on the scene in the 19th century. Gothic literature supplanted the medieval Ars Moriendi; a secular touchstone of this cultural moment is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Today, the Sedlec Ossuary has benefitted—or suffered from—the kitschification of gothic art, popping up in surprising places like The Young and the Restless and the “uninvolving and cliché-ridden” vampire B movie Blood and Chocolate.
Romanticism also marked the rise of a phenomenon now known as “dark tourism,” which refers to the practice of visiting sites associated with disaster, war, atrocity. Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon coined the term in 1996, in reference to tourism spawned by John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Scholars often point to concentration camps and Chernobyl as the field’s quintessential sites. Yet it’s a concept as old as tourism itself, dating back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a group of pilgrims travel to the site of Thomas Becket’s murder. During the Grand Tours of the Romantic era, visits to places like the Paris catacombs (an underground labyrinth containing the bones of some six million people) and Pompeii (mass grave by way of volcano) came into vogue as a way to cultivate the Sublime.
It can’t be an accident that this coincided with the proliferation of ossuaries. I have to believe not everyone went to charnel houses for the sake of holy contemplation. Prurience is not an invention of the digital age, even if we have elevated it to new heights (or denigrated it to new social media-inflected nadirs). I imagine gentlewomen in whalebone corsets and dilettantish young men titillating their companions with stories of the macabre.
The contemporary case for dark tourism—sometimes called thanatourism—is that it refutes any attempt to forget or whitewash history. It’s one of the few ways we can meaningfully encounter death and atrocity. Before I got sick, I went to Auschwitz as well as Hiroshima. The power of these sites is undeniable. They serve as monuments to some of modern history’s darkest moments and have been carefully transformed into vehicles for education, reflection, and solemn commemoration. I went because it felt important to bear witness to the horrific crimes against humanity that occurred there. But I’ve also participated in dark tourism less consciously, and perhaps you have, too. I’ve seen an Ai Weiwei art installation at Alcatraz, toured the Colosseum where murder was a matinée, peeked into the bakeries and brothels of Pompeii, strolled through Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. I skipped Hell’s Museum, which a friend recommended in Singapore, and wish I’d skipped a ghost tour of Savannah, Georgia—what made it haunting was the way the city’s bloody history of enslavement and oppression was repurposed as entertainment for partiers carrying to-go cups of watered-down vodka.
The counterargument is self-evident: It leaves these sensitive sites vulnerable to exploitation. The suffering of one group commodified as a cocktail party anecdote for another. The exit through the gift shop.
This is how I felt—alive but dead. Already in Hades. I’d escaped my fate, like the king, but my true self, the intrepid, curious, wonderstruck version of me? She was in the underworld with Alcestis.
It would be a neat narrative if the newest wave of dark tourism had gained traction after the pandemic, when there was a momentary reintegration of death in our day-to-day. In actuality, it flourished before COVID spread, before ambulances drove through empty city streets and bodies piled up in overcrowded mortuaries, before corpses were stashed in refrigerated trucks in New York City because the morgues were beyond capacity. And now, when those months and years have receded like a bad dream and no lessons were learned, it’s hard to attribute a newfound reverence for mortality to this renewed appetite for dark tourism.
I never thought about what I was doing as morbid. I gravitated to many of these attractions unconsciously, often because I wanted to understand history—and history is littered with corpses. But I think back uneasily to the casual way these sites were slotted into my itineraries. I remember the okonomiyaki place I went to after the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the hole-in-the-wall with the cheerfully ursine line cook, but not how I possibly could’ve been hungry.
The impetus for this flavor of tourism isn’t monolithic. Some dark tourists are processing their personal or ancestral experiences, some are genuinely curious, some don’t even realize they’re doing it, and some are rubberneckers. Regardless of motivation, one effect of present-day dark tourism under global capitalism is the Disneyfication of death.
The first months of my sabbatical were rocky. Fear dogged me through the streets of Sydney, Mumbai, Athens. A few weeks before I went back to the Czech Republic to lead my study abroad, I went to another bone chapel, in a small town east of Lisbon called Évora. Visitors flock to Évora for its prehistoric megaliths and Roman temple to Diana, but I’d driven across Portugal to see the charnel house. My GPS misled me through the hot, dusty town, and I circled around the temple and its remaining Corinthian columns—which seemed dropped into the town square like an abandoned film set—until I found the Capela dos Ossos.
The 17th-century Capela has more bling than Sedlec, from azulejo tiles to ceiling frescoes, with skulls where cherubs might usually repose. (Other charnel houses put the Capela to shame in their ostentation, such as the skeletons at the German Basilica of Waldsassen wearing jewel-encrusted gold costumes, which were originally posed with chalices with dried blood at their feet.) The chapel is crammed, floor to illustrious ceiling, with bones stacked horizontally, so only the knobs show. Lined with osteological columns, the architecture echoes the ruined temple to the pagan goddess in the town beyond. Before you even enter there’s a Dantean inscription: Nos ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos.
We bones that are here await yours.
I found the inscription strangely comforting as I entered the inner chamber. The first interpretive sign explained the function of a bone chapel as a memento mori: “It is expected to serve as a consolation to some and news to others.”
Lucky them, I thought.
I appreciated the aesthetics of the Capela dos Ossos, but it lacked the Hadean quality that engendered my near-mystic experience at the Sedlec Ossuary. Afterward, I continued on my sabbatical still mistrustful of my body, still afraid to move through the world.
Finally I reached a breaking point. I could drop dead in the peanut butter aisle, or I could drop dead seeing the world. Staying at home wouldn’t save me. The threat resided inside my own chest.
But when I got to Prague, something shifted. It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t walk into the bone chapel and have an epiphany. A logjam loosened in my psyche. Shepherding a group of young adults in a foreign country, I couldn’t hide in the hotel or confine myself to strictly prescribed routes and routines. For many of them it was their first trip overseas, and overwhelmed, they looked to me for guidance.
At 7 a.m. one morning, 20 students piled onto a bus to Kutná Hora. On the drive, I strove to impart my love of bone churches: Ossuaries aren’t morbid (okay, well, they are, but they’re not only morbid); they highlight the brevity of our lives to help us live more intentionally. But in a kind of punk rock way. Carpe fucking diem. The students were curious but respectful. Some found it moving, others creepy.
When we arrived, the bone chapel was different than I remembered. Tentatively, I descended into the brightly lit space below. In the open area of the chapel, monitors now played a video of renovators handling the bones. The video explained a restoration project to shore up the building’s structural integrity and preserve the skeletons. The foundation is unstable and has started sinking since it was built sometime in the 14th century. In the Baroque period the Czech-Italian architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel redesigned the ossuary as it exists today, and it wasn’t until the 1860s that a carpenter named František Rint created the bone art, including the famous chandelier and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms that reproduced the heraldry of the local aristocrats.
That wasn’t the origin story I’d learned years ago, about the monk and the plague—was the monk even real? The crepuscular lighting and gloom were gone. Where was the ambience? How could you commune with the dead like this?
Behind me, another busload of tourists arrived, and another, and another. Tourists overran the chapel, their guides speaking into little microphones in various languages while they snapped photo after photo. At the entrance, the lone employee said in English, no photos allowed. Everybody ignored her.
Snap.
Desensitized, they gawked without seeing.
Snap.
No photos, repeated the ticket taker.
Snap.
The scores of tour groups weren’t part of my memory.
The contemporary case for dark tourism—sometimes called thanatourism—is that it refutes any attempt to forget or whitewash history. It’s one of the few ways we can meaningfully encounter death and atrocity.
Through a side door I climbed the stairs into an outdoor cemetery. The videos of the restorers kept replaying in my mind. It’s one thing to envision an apocryphal monk constructing pyramids of bones, it’s another to watch footage of archaeologists cleaning them and then putting them back in the pile. One of my students was minoring in archaeology and, as we strolled through the cemetery, she told me that ethical and legal restrictions governed archaeologists’ handling of human remains. It was obvious once she said it, but I hadn’t thought about it. The videos had close-ups of hands in nitrile gloves cleaning the dirt off the bones. Afterward, the bones were soaked in lime solution, which is also how Rint first prepared them in the 1860s. His chlorinated lime solution is the reason the Sedlec Ossuary’s decorations have remained relatively white over the years, while bones in other ossuaries have browned with age. The archaeologists also have the benefit of video mapping to help them rebuild the pyramids once the bones are cleaned and restored.
It must take incredible dedication for these archaeologists to put themselves in this proximity with death. To sustain that intimacy day after day—I know the cost.
I resented the crowd of tourists I’d left thronging the chapel. More than that, I felt a sense of superiority. Now that I was ready for the ossuary to transform me, I’d found an atmosphere that was more carnivalesque than sacred.
But as I meandered among the headstones in the fresh air, it occurred to me: Did I really think that none of those tourists had ever lost a parent or child or partner, ever grieved, ever had a near-death experience of their own? Did I really think my proximity to death, my awareness of its phalanges drumming on my shoulder, had given me some privileged access to the charnel house’s true meaning? To the contrary, after I got sick, I guarded my life like a dragon hoarding a treasure pile in a dark cave, and it moldered away, unspent. Those bones had more vivacity than I did.
For the medieval peasants whose skeletons limned the walls, death was a prolonged nap until everyone woke up during the rapture. There was a fluidity between death and the afterlife. These days it seems so much more final. (Per Ariès, once it was tame and now it is wild.) Much has been made of the deathbed’s move in modern society from the home to the hospital: out of sight, out of mind. Ossuaries thrust mortality squarely in your line of vision. They ask that you regard death as a transition, not a terminus. Not something to guard against hyper-vigilantly, but a natural part of a cosmic continuum.
It was time to live again.
Going back to the Sedlec Ossuary was not some purifying rite. It was an ordinary day. The tourists streamed past me, discussing where they were going for lunch. The students had moved on, browsing for trinkets at the shop across the street. I recoiled at the kitschy skull mugs and shot glasses, but when I got home, I wished I had a memento mori to put next to the penguin.
After Heracles brings Alcestis back from the underworld, she’s silent for the remainder of the play. Still sacred to the god of the dead, she cannot speak until three days have gone by, Heracles explains. I think there might be other reasons she stays silent. Maybe she preferred it down there. Maybe she left some irretrievable part of herself behind. Maybe she found the light above a little too harsh, the music too loud, the colors too saturated; found herself attracted to dusk, to intertidal zones, lintels, liminal spaces. Or maybe she has nothing left to say.
When I got home, I went through my old photos. I couldn’t figure out if my memories of Sedlec were real until I found a photo of myself, painfully young, standing in the semi-dark underneath the chandelier, its bones glowing white—either from the camera flash or an out-of-frame light source. I look half-happy, half-haunted, like I’m about to say something, but I can’t remember what.
Kristin Idaszak is an internationally produced and award-winning playwright and essayist whose recent work explores the intersection of ecology and chronic illness. She is a 3Arts Awardee, two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, and the former Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Goodman Theatre. She received the Kennedy Center ACTF Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. Her essays appear in The American Scholar, Fourth Genre, HowlRound, and elsewhere.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
Cyber security and digitalisation of the tourism sector will come firmly under the spotlight at a major industry event next month.
The World Tourism Forum is a key gathering of experts and stakeholders who will converge on Brussels on 9/10 … Read more
Frédéric DELORCA
Avec son climat subtropical qui permet d’avoir plusieurs récoltes de fruits par an et ses plages de sable fin sur les bords de la Mer Noire, et ses chemins de randonnée à travers les forêts profondes et les sommets enneigés du Caucase, l’Abkhazie, ancien lieu de villégiature de la nomenklatura soviétique, pourrait être un paradis touristique inscrit au catalogue de toutes les agences de voyage comme la Thaïlande et Acapulco.
Elle l’est chaque année pour plus d’un million de touristes russes (surtout depuis que la guerre d’Ukraine complique leurs voyages à travers le monde). Mais pour les médias mainstreams d’Europe occidentale, ce petit pays de 250 000 habitants, qui a fait sécession de la Géorgie en 1993 au terme d’une guerre de libération de David contre Goliath, n’est qu’une enclave qui serait purement et simplement annexée par les Russes et vouée à l’isolement et à l’embargo, jusqu’à ce qu’il ait retrouvé le giron de ses anciens maîtres à Tbilissi.
Pourtant l’hypothèse d’une réunification relève de la pure politique fiction. Ni les 50 % d’abkhazes ethniques qui ont payé le prix du sang pour s’opposer à la politique assimilationniste des Géorgiens, ni les autres communautés (Arméniens, Russes, Grecs, Mingréliens) n’aspirent au retour de la Géorgie. Plus de trente ans de séparation entre les deux pays, l’Abkhazie s’est habituée à vivre loin de Tbilissi. Et les fièvres anti-russes attisées par l’Union Européenne et l’Amérique qui périodiquement enflamment Tbilissi (comme lorsqu’en 2008 le nationaliste Saakachvili, l’ex-patron de Raphaël Glucksman, avec le soutien de Washington, avait lancé ses troupes contre l’Ossétie du Sud, une autre entité qui s’était séparée de son pays) ne sont pas de nature à combler le fossé.
La question aujourd’hui pour le peuple abkhaze est de savoir comment construire un avenir pour soi-même quand on n’est reconnu que par quatre Etats : la Russie, le Nicaragua, le Vénézuéla et la Syrie… Si Taiwan n’est pas membre de l’ONU, cela n’empêche pas les Taiwanais de voyager à travers le monde, de même les Kosovars dont le pays n’est pas reconnu par l’Espagne ou par la Roumanie peuvent quand même se rendre dans l’Union européenne. Les Abkhazes ne bénéficient pas de ce genre de facilité. Car à l’absence de reconnaissance de leur Etat au niveau international s’ajoute une double peine liée au fait qu’ils sont assimilés par la propagande occidentale à une sorte d’axe du mal pro-russe. Du coup, non seulement leurs passeports ne sont pas reconnus (à tel point qu’ils ne peuvent même pas se rendre dans la Turquie voisine), mais ils subissent de plein fouet les sanctions économiques ciblées vers leur grand frère du Nord.
L’équation sommaire « Abkhazes = alliés des Russes », est pourtant plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît. En 1996 Eltsine avait placé l’Abkhazie sous embargo, et si Poutine se pose plutôt en protecteur, les Abkhazes veillent à ce que cela ne se fasse pas au détriment de leur souveraineté. En novembre 2024 par exemple, les manifestants à Soukhoumi étaient parvenus, en mode « gilets jaunes » à renverser le gouvernement jugé trop pro-Russe en envahissant le siège de ses institutions. Dans ce pays où tout le monde est prêt à défendre sa liberté avec les armes, l’achat des terres reste interdit aux étrangers, ce qui le préserve aussi de la spéculation et des excès du capitalisme cynique qu’il soit russe ou globalisé.
Avant de définir quel degré de proximité les Abkhazes doivent entretenir avec leur protecteur russe et avec les autres pays de la région, l’urgence première pour ce peuple est de desserrer sur un plan strictement humanitaire l’étau qui les étrangle, et qui fait que, par exemple, même le fait d’aller se faire soigner à l’étranger pour des soins médicaux (quand le système sanitaire local est largement défaillant) peut relever du casse-tête (car même la détention d’un passeport russe ne vous garantit pas un droit d’être soigné gratuitement à Sotchi).
D’une façon très significative, l’initiative pour desserrer cet étau a été prise par un collectif citoyen ancré dans la diaspora abkhaze en Turquie, une communauté issue de l’exil d’Abkhazes qui ont fui au XIXe siècle les massacres tsaristes. Cette communauté, qui compte environ 500 000 membres a progressivement repris conscience de ses racines caucasiennes dans les années 1990. En son sein l’avocat communiste Anit Baba a lancé en juin dernier une pétition pour convaincre le gouvernement turc d’autoriser les ressortissants d’Abkhazie à venir dans ce pays, et en vue du rétablissement de la liaison maritime entre Soukhoumi et les ports turcs.
Cette campagne a connu un succès immédiat dans les partis de gauche turcs, et même au sein de mouvements de droite, ainsi que dans les diverses communautés ethniques minoritaires comme les Kurdes et les Arméniens. Même la parti kémaliste qui dirigeait le pays dans les années 1990 a signé son soutien, sans oublier des organisations professionnelles comme l’union des barreaux de Turquie (les avocats), divers intellectuels et artistes etc.
Le succès de cette campagne est tel que le collectif « Fin de l’Isolement de l’Abkhazie » souhaite aujourd’hui étendre sa dynamique au monde entier en lançant un appel international contre l’enclavement de l’Abkhazie. Des comités en ce sens se constituent en Europe, en Asie, en Afrique, aux Etats-Unis. Le soutien à la pétition Ouvrez les portes verrouillées de la Mer Noire – mettez fin à l’isolement ! doit être l’occasion à la fois de tendre la main à ce courageux petit peuple qui depuis des siècles a résisté à toutes les tentatives d’asservissement et d’assimilation, et un moyen de dénoncer la politique occidentale qui applique un deux poids deux mesures entre les peuples « alliés » et les peuples « ennemis », en condamnant sans état d’âme ces derniers à l’oubli et à l’étranglement. Plutôt que de servir de supplétif à l’impérialisme de l’Union européenne en Géorgie, la France et les autres pays francophones s’honoreraient de plutôt choisir dans le Caucase le non-alignement et aider les Abkhazes à sortir du blocus économique et administratif. C’est ce que les citoyens doivent demander en signant cette pétition.
Lien pour la pétition (en français) : https://atlasalternatif.over-blog.com/2026/10/petition-pour-la-fin-de-l-isolement-de-l-abkhazie.html
Publié à l’origine par Le Grand Soir
Operations at Chios Airport runway will be temporarily suspended from mid November 2026 to mid March 2027 due to upgrade of infrastructure works. According to an announcement by the Greek Civil Aviation Authority (HCAA) suspension is scheduled from Sunday night, November 15, 2026 to March 15, 2027, due to works to extend, improve and upgrade […]
The post Chios airport suspends operation for four months appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
A decision by the Ministry of Infrastructure & Transport has raised the fixed taxi fares from the airports in Athens and Thessaloniki Taxi: New fares €50 for a trip from the ATH International Airport to downtown Athens. The fares change concerns, among others, the predetermined fares for routes from the airports of Athens and Thessaloniki, […]
The post New taxi fares from airports in Athens and Thessaloniki appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
In this essay at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, writer and professor Samuel Autman reflects on tourism and privilege, especially in a time of xenophobia; traveling as a Black queer American; and the idea of not fully belonging wherever he goes. The sections in Autman’s piece are organized as terms and conditions in a legal agreement, reminding us that when we cross borders, we navigate different cultural and social scenarios, written and unwritten rules, and people who view us as foreign—no matter how at home we might feel.
I found myself asking harder questions about the young men around him, about the relationships, the patronage and the blurred line between generosity and dependency. Mark had paid for many of them to study law, medicine or business. He had even helped one man living in the United States without legal status by paying for him to attend a Spanish-language school.
None of it suggested scandal or anything obviously illegal. But parts of it no longer sat comfortably with me.
Port authorities imposed a sailing ban from the ports of Lavrio and Rafina in south-eastern Attica on Friday, August 14, 2026, while some ferry itineraries from the port of Piraeus were cancelled on Friday morning due to gale-force winds. Mostly affected by the strong winds are the islands in the Aegean Sea and Crete. Modifications […]
The post Sailing ban, ferry itineraries modifications due to gale-force winds appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
The Hellenic Hoteliers Federation (HHF) acknowledges the significance of establishing the special spatial planning framework for Tourism as a necessary tool for national sector planning, according to a relevant announcement. However, the HHF has expressed concern that key provisions of the framework continue to rely on horizontal restrictions, that fail to adequately take into account […]
The post Greek Hoteliers Federation: Tourism spatial framework lacks realism appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
Login