Category: museums

Zagreb: The world’s shortest tram and the Museum of Broken Relationships

October 21, 2018 • 2:15 pm

On my last free day in Zagreb, I went to the Museum of Broken Relationships, and was very glad I did. I combined that with a gratuitous but important ride on the Zagreb Funicular (Zagrebačka uspinjača). Reputedly the shortest public-transport funicular in the world, it’s only 66 meters long and takes 64 seconds to make a very short climb—a climb you could make by walking up the adjacent stairs in about two minutes. (It travels from the “lower town” to the “upper town”.) It was built in 1890 and was originally steam-powered but now runs on electricity. In 1969 it was renovated, taking four years to resume operation. Preserving the original appearance and much of the “constructional properties,” it’s now a national cultural monument.

I wanted to film the ride, so I bought a 5-kuna (80¢) ticket and rode it up. Here are some photos and a film of the ride.

The entrance (yes, that’s the top right above):

The ticket:

View from inside going up:

Side view (I love the old-fashioned shape). There’s only one rider; after all, you can walk down in a minute!

Top view: There’s a trip every 10 minutes, with one car going up and the other down. Here they pass each other:

And the video of the whole trip—just about a minute long:

Close to the upper “station” of the tram is one of the strangest and most affecting museums I’ve seen, The Museum of Broken Relationships. Opened in 2010 (there’s a knock-off copy in Los Angeles), it highlights objects involved with unsuccessful relationships, along with written statements from those involved about the meaning of those objects. The stories are almost all deeply moving, and not all of them are about amorous relationships. There are failed parent-child relationships, with parents dying, children being estranged, and so on. Wikipedia adds this:

In May 2011, the Museum of Broken Relationships received the Kenneth Hudson Award, given out by the European Museum Forum (EMF). The award goes to “a museum, person, project or group of people who have demonstrated the most unusual, daring and, perhaps, controversial achievement that challenges common perceptions of the role of museums in society”, rating the “importance of public quality and innovation as fundamental elements of a successful museum”. The EMF’s judging panel noted:

The Museum of Broken Relationships encourages discussion and reflection not only on the fragility of human relationships but also on the political, social, and cultural circumstances surrounding the stories being told. The museum respects the audience’s capacity for understanding wider historical, social issues inherent to different cultures and identities and provides a catharsis for donors on a more personal level.

Here’s the entrance. It’s not a large museum; you can see everything in about an hour even with careful reading, but I’m told that the Museum has a huge collection donated largely by heartbroken lovers, and it’s stored in a warehouse (they rotate some of the items):

Some explanation about the items, and an interior view. Note the asymmetrical sex ratio of donors (lower right):

I’m going to show just three items and their explanation today; I figured that I have enough photos to put up one object per day for at least ten days. I think they’re more poignant when displayed singly like that.

Object #1 and explanation (each one gives the duration of the relationship):

Object #2 and explanation:

Object #3 and explanation:

There’s a book, too, in which people leave their own tales:

“We will never break off!” I don’t think that’s a good prediction. . . .

 

More to come. . . .

 

Reader’s wildlife (museum) photos

May 2, 2018 • 8:15 am

Today we have a change of pace: reader Robert Seidel sent some photos from London’s Natural History Museum, a wonderful Victorian museum that I’ve visited twice. Robert’s descriptions are indented:

I thought you might enjoy these photos I recently took at London’s Museum of Natural History. It’s a fantastic place, build on request of chief curator Richard Owen to house the natural history collection of the British Museum. Owen is perhaps best known today for his fervent opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution (the only one of his enemies who annoyed him, as old Charles stated, and he was not an easy man to annoy) and his comically wrong reconstructions of dinosaurs. But this magnificent building shows a much different side of him: A man deeply in awe of nature, who wanted to share that awe with everybody. Though he would probably have framed it in a religious way, it is a monument to the spiritual aspects of science, and for wanting to share that feeling with the public he must have been quite a visionary.

Anyway, I’m blathering. The photos:

Skeleton of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) suspended from the ceiling of the entrance hall. That hall is huge, and intentionally made to look like a cathedral.

A lovely bit of interior decoration. The whole place is covered in these, also an idea of Owen. I think he even provided the templates.

The London Archaeopteryx. One of the most significant fossils ever discovered, and perhaps the one most fraught with history. The first transitional form to be recognized, it was purchased by Owen so that he could properly describe it and put an end to the “missing link” nonsense. Unfortunately for him, Thomas Huxley also got in on the game. . .

Thomas Huxley. The sculptor really went with the “Darwin’s Bulldog” theme here. His statue and that of Owen are facing each other, and it seems like he’s about to lurch at poor Owen.

The clenched fist of Thomas Huxley:

Owen himself, managing to look both genial and a bit shifty, in a Cardinal Richelieu way:

Old Charles, being his unassuming self. One can only speculate what Owen would have thought about the presence of this statue in his museum.

Watercolour drawing of the  kakapo [Strigops habroptila] by John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912).

As lagniappe, we have an astronomy photo from reader Tim Anderson in Australia:
This is a narrowband image of the Running Chicken Nebula (IC2944) comprising fifteen 300-second exposures in each of the Ha, O3 and S2 wavelength bands using 7nm filters. The image was processed by applying the “Hubble colour palette” (Ha green, O3 blue, S2 red)