Lost Buildings 1 - Alexandria and Berlin

Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989
(photo from thecommune.co.uk)

All around the world, buildings vanish every day, as do other manmade structures. Some losses are notable. Nobody is likely to mourn the loss of the Berlin Wall, which for 28 years divided not just the city of Berlin but the surrounding countryside for 100 miles, before inexorable political change led to it being torn down in 1989.

On the other hand, the Ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt was deliberately burned down by Christian fanatics in 391 AD after Emperor Theodosius outlawed 'paganism'. This barbaric act lead to the loss of a thousand years of learning.  It was only with the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its eventual translation, 22 years later, that the way to read the hieroglyphic writing of the Ancient Egyptians was re-learned.




The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina 2006 (my Photo)

I saw the Berlin wall as a teenager and happily re-visited, with my own children in July 1990, to observe its demise. There was some left then and I have a piece which I picked up from beside the Brandenberg Gate. And as if to celebrate a brave new world, in Egypt the Library of Alexandria, lost almost 1700 years ago, was finally replaced by a superb new library, designed in 1989 by Norwegian architects from the Olso and New York Snǿhetta practice.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina Interior 2006 (my Photo)

This modern building, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which I was lucky enough to visit in 2006, is a beautiful low pyramid of glass and steel housing a multilingual library. It seemed popular and well used when I visited, I sincerely hope that Egypt's current political, religious and social disruption doesn't damage this beautiful and essential  repository of learning.  The Egyptian people deserve to live with education and erudition freely available and if it can remain associated with great architecture, so much the better.

Between the world famous extremes of the Berlin Wall and the Great Library of Alexandria, many smaller, less significant structures also fall, sometimes almost unnoticed and their loss is often nothing to do with either religion or politics. I'll talk about some of them in a week or two.

Before the Age of the Poets...

Sunset, El Nil - Picture of the week for 4 April 2012

El Nil has been Egypt's most important thoroughfare for millennia. It remains vital to modern Egyptians, quite apart from the tourist vessels which carry visitors from Cairo to Aswan, providing jobs and income for some of the locals. Whether the shipping is ancient or modern, the River remains beautiful.






 The sailing boats are felucca, traditionally used for fishing, transporting goods and today also for tourists. The Felucca is generally a smaller vessel than the sea-going dhows which ply the oceans between the Red Sea and India, though Feluccas are used in the Red Sea and also the Mediterranean.


Photographs taken from a second floor balcony overlooking the river at Luxor (2006).

The Sphinx Twice, Pictures of the Week 9th March 2012

The Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, Giza 1951
Photograph by Captain John Sinclair Gilbert RAMC.

Searching through my father's old photographs, which I'm slowly cataloguing and copying for posterity - well for the family anyhow - I came across this handsome black and white print ( he printed them himself) taken early in his army career.

The Sphinx in front of the Great Pyramid, Giza
Photograph by Susan Gilbert, March 2006

I already had my own versions of this image, shot from almost the identical location 55 years later! My father's is the better composition, he captured a superb cloud formation to enhance the picture, giving the ravaged giant statue a brooding air. I am still quite pleased with my shot, because of the horseman.

The poor old Sphinx - yes she is old, four and a half thousand years old is about as precise as can be ascertained - suffers severly from sand blown erosion. She has been extensively restored, to keep her  going a bit longer. She probably isn't even a she, but a representation of the Pharoh Khafre, whose Pyramid is the second largest at Giza.

She is certainly nothing to do with the legendary Sphinx, who posessed a lion's body, woman's head, the wings of an eagle and devoured those who could not answer her riddles. Giza's Sphinx never had wings and that story was anyway part of Greek mythology, not Egyptian. The word Sphinx is Greek and was only applied to her thousands of years after her creation.

She is probably one of the wonders of the world which will be lost in the not too distant future, and for once I don't believe we can blame global warming, though we are still mainly to blame. A highly knowledgeable tour guide, Magdi, who was an Egyptian historian, told us that the Sphinx was almost completely buried in sand dunes for many centuries, which protected her from the worst effects of erosion from wind blown sand, until enthusiastic Western archaeologists dug her out. During one of the wars of the past two centuries she was also used for target practice, further damaging her face.

Library, Alexandria - Picture of the Week for 25 November 2011

The Romans burnt down the Library in Alexandria, which was one of the seven wonders of the world. Modern Egyptians have built another, which is certainly one of the most wonderful buildings I've ever seen. 

I hope Egypt will soon be a stronger more united country.

More pictures of the new Alexandria Library will follow.

Obelisk, Aswan - Picture of the Week for 9 November 2011

The 1200 ton Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan, Egypt

Having briefly obsessed about pylons last month it seems logical to move on to the obelisk (…look up your Egyptology..!) My Picture for this week shows the Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan. This massive slab of southern Egypt's finest granite lies still embedded in the quarry where it was created.  If the stonemasons had been able to finish it, this obelisk would have stood over 40 metres high and weighed almost 1200 tons. This would have made it the largest obelisk ever created by Ancient Egyptian technology. [The Washington monument at 169 metres tall claims to be the world’s largest obelisk, but that isn’t either ancient or monolithic; it was constructed from many pieces of stone in the nineteenth century.]

Ancient obelisks were created not just by carving, but also by trapping water inside drilled holes in the granite and allowing expansion caused by the sun’s heat or by lighting fires over the holes to then crack the stone. In the case of the Unfinished Obelisk, cracks appeared in the wrong places, the great obelisk was fatally flawed. As a result there is nothing to give us an indication of when it was carved or under which Pharaoh. There is an assumption that it was intended for the temple complex at Luxor.

Even had their stonemasons successfully completed their task, the Egyptians might have never been

Pylons - Reaching for the Clouds

                                                                           Pylons in procession, Romney Marsh, Kent

In the UK we have a love/hate relationship with very tall structures, yet they have been with us for hundreds of years. At 123 metres our tallest historic spire, on Salisbury Cathedral, was completed in 1333 and has long ceased to attract controversy, though when it was built there were probably local sceptics who disparaged it as a ludicrous and unnecessary French folly. It is probably about time we came to terms with the fact that all environments are likely to feature something man-made which is a lot taller than we are, be they TV masts, wind turbines, cathedral spires or tower blocks.

Today most of us live happily with trees and church towers, but for some reason, not with phone masts and especially not with pylons. In Ancient Egypt, the Pylon was a giant gateway into a temple, consisting of two monolithic structures joined by a smaller bridge beneath which worshippers passed to enter the temple. The symbolic idea was they passed between two hills, into the valley where the sun rose.

                                                 The Pylon at Edfu leading intothe Temple to Horus, on the Nile

Unlike in Ancient Egypt, here and now the pylon merely transports electricity and, though this can warm us like the sun god’s rays, our pylons don’t quite carry the same cultural or spiritual kudos. Is anybody indifferent to them? They do have their admirers, headed by photographer Flash Bristow, who began the Pylon Appreciation Society in 2005. Her website  http://www.pylonofthemonth.org/ carries some impressive photographs for those who are pylon minded!

I first fell for pylons in my teens, when visiting Romney Marsh. There, the pylons process in orderly lines from the bulk of Dungeness Nuclear power station. They disperse in many directions across the flat, green landscape, providing a fascinating spectacle to this budding photographer.