From Hunger to Guillotine: The French Revolution

Execution of Louis XVI at the Place de la Révolution, Paris, 21 January 1793. Contemporary engraving.

Europe likes to imagine its revolutions as clean turning points: old world out, new world in.
The French Revolution was nothing of the sort. It was noisy, contradictory, intoxicating—and deeply human. It did not begin with blood, but with paper: with lists of complaints, with hunger, with words that—once printed and repeated—acquired a force of their own.

A pressure cooker ready to burst

By the late 1780s, France was a kingdom running on fumes. Decades of war had hollowed out the treasury: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), and—most ruinously—financial and military support for the American War of Independence. Victory abroad had produced bankruptcy at home.

The tax system deepened the fracture. Nobles and clergy enjoyed exemptions, while peasants and urban labourers carried the fiscal burden. Bread—always bread—had become scarce and ruinously expensive after poor harvests in 1787–1788. Hunger ceased to be private suffering and became public anger.

Material hardship alone, however, does not make a revolution. What truly destabilised France was expectation. Enlightenment ideas—circulating through salons, pamphlets, Masonic lodges, and provincial academies—had been shaped by thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. They promoted ideas of rational government, citizenship, legal equality, and popular sovereignty.

When Louis XVI convened the Estates-General in 1789, he meant to resolve a fiscal crisis. Instead, he exposed a crisis of legitimacy. The cahiers de doléances—the lists of grievances drafted across the kingdom—were explosive. People no longer pleaded for mercy; they demanded laws, rights, and accountability. Once expectations begin to rise faster than institutions can adapt, history accelerates.

From reform to rupture

The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 is often remembered as a spontaneous eruption of rage. In reality, it was symbolic theatre with irreversible consequences. The fortress itself mattered less than what it represented: arbitrary royal power, suddenly vulnerable.

What followed was not a straight line but a widening spiral. Feudal privileges were abolished. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed universal principles of liberty and equality. The king was recast as a constitutional monarch—then, slowly and fatally, redefined as an enemy of the nation.

By 1792–1793, France was at war with Europe—and with itself. Externally, revolutionary France faced the War of the First Coalition, fighting Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, and others who feared the spread of revolutionary contagion. Internally, counter-revolutionary uprisings and royalist conspiracies multiplied.

Fear hardened into policy. Suspicion became civic virtue. The revolution radicalised because it felt surrounded, betrayed, and unfinished. This was the moment when newspapers ceased merely to describe events and began to mobilise readers, compressing time, moral nuance, and restraint into urgent calls for action.

Ink, anger, and the street

Revolutionary Paris was flooded with print: pamphlets, posters, journals—cheap, fast, emotional. None more influential than L’Ami du peuple, written by Jean-Paul Marat.

A notorious example appeared in early September 1792, when Marat warned that imprisoned “enemies of the people” would soon rise against the Revolution. He named generals, ministers, and aristocrats, arguing that pre-emptive violence was an act of public salvation. Within days, the September Massacres followed. Whether Marat caused them or legitimised them remains debated—but his words undeniably shaped the moral climate.

Marat did not inform his readers; he warned them. He named enemies. He framed violence as prevention. His writing remains uncomfortable because it is effective: short sentences, absolute moral divisions, no space for doubt. The world is split between the people and their enemies, and hesitation itself becomes betrayal.

Alongside him, Le Père Duchesne spoke in the voice of the street—coarse, furious, deliberately vulgar. It sounded like Paris shouting back at power.

By contrast, Révolutions de Paris attempted to narrate events rather than inflame them. Its reports of the journées of August 1792, for example, describe crowds, rumours, and violence with a degree of narrative distance—an excellent source if you want a contemporaneous account that still resembles storytelling.

Words mattered because they collapsed the distance between thought and action.

Terror as a system

The execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 shattered the final restraints.

Regicide changed the nature of the Republic overnight. It was now absolute—or doomed.

The Terror did not erupt spontaneously; it was organised. Revolutionary tribunals, surveillance committees, denunciation lists. The guillotine was not a mob weapon but an administrative one. What makes this period so unsettling is not merely its brutality, but its logic. Violence was redefined as moral hygiene. Death became a tool of clarity.

Even so, the revolution devoured its own prophets: the men who had given it its language, its moral certainty, and its sense of inevitability. Jean-Paul Marat, whose writings in L’Ami du peuple taught Parisians to see violence as civic necessity, was murdered in 1793. Jacques Hébert, the voice of radical popular anger and editor of Le Père Duchesne, was sent to the guillotine in 1794. Maximilien Robespierre—a lawyer, architect of the Terror, and believer that virtue and terror were inseparable instruments of republican purity—followed them to the scaffold soon after.

The revolution could not stop proving its own purity.

After the fire

By 1795, France was exhausted. Power passed to the Directory, a five-man executive body meant to stabilise the Republic and prevent both royalist restoration and popular dictatorship. It promised order and delivered corruption, political paralysis, and reliance on military force.

Stability returned only with a general who understood both revolution and discipline: Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon closed the revolutionary chapter while exporting its consequences. By “exporting,” contemporaries meant conquest—but also institutions. Legal equality before the law, secular administration, rationalised taxation, and codified civil rights travelled across Europe with French armies. The revolution failed to remain democratic, but it succeeded in making the old order impossible to restore unchanged.

France never fully recovered from 1789. It learned to live with a dangerous idea: that legitimacy flows upward from the people—and that crowds, once awakened, do not easily fall silent again.

The “Conclamatio” Relief – A Roman Farewell Reimagined

Funerary Ceremony, called the Conclamatio — marble relief made in northern Italy around 1500–1515, a Renaissance imitation of an ancient Roman scene showing the ritual calling of the deceased’s name at a funeral. The work is now held in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

The Scene

This marble relief, created in northern Italy around 1500–1515, is a Renaissance imitation of an ancient Roman work. Now housed in the Louvre, it depicts the conclamatio — the moment in a Roman funeral when family and attendants called aloud the name of the deceased.

At the center lies the body on a klinē, surrounded by mourners and musicians. Two figures raise wind instruments, amplifying the chorus of grief. Beneath the couch rest a pair of sandals and a small dog — tokens of loyalty and life left behind. To the left, a ritual flame burns; above, a draped cloth marks the threshold between the living and the dead.

The Meaning

The conclamatio confirmed death and released the deceased from the world of the living. It was both ritual and recognition — the collective voice of family ensuring that memory began where life had ended. Though carved a millennium and a half after the Roman original, this Renaissance piece captures the essence of the ancient rite: solemnity, movement, and human emotion rendered in stone.

The sculptor’s aim was not to copy but to evoke — to translate the lost sound of ritual into enduring silence. By showing grief as action, not sentiment, the relief bridges two worlds: the classical past and the reflective spirituality of the early sixteenth century.

Reflection

The “Conclamatio” relief reminds us that mourning was once a public act — a communal acknowledgment that someone had lived, and had left. Even as a Renaissance reimagining of antiquity, it preserves the universal impulse to give voice to loss. Across centuries, the echo of that final call still seems to resonate from the marble itself.

Further Reading

• Marie Erasmo, Reading Death in Ancient Rome

• Katherine Carroll, Living Through the Dead

• William H. Heller, Roman Funerary Ritual and Social Memory

La Brocante du Vézelien

La Brocante du Vézelien.

In shadows cast by time’s old hand,
La Brocante waits, a ghost in sand.
Her windows cracked, her paint a sigh,
Yet treasures sleep where dust runs dry.

The door creaks tales of years gone past,
Of once-loved things that couldn’t last.
But step inside, the past will hum,
In faded light, where dreams become.

Beneath the wear, a quiet charm,
Where memory rests in gentle harm.
La Brocante calls, in whispers frail—
A forgotten shop with stories pale.

The Monks Who Collected the World — Steyl’s Holy Zoo

Stuffed animals at the Missiemuseum in Steyl — a 19th-century vision of faith, science, and the irresistible urge to collect the world.

In the late 19th century, the quiet monastery of Steyl on the river Maas became the unlikely center of a global enterprise. The Missionaries of the Divine Word sent brothers and priests to every corner of the world — to preach, to teach, and, as it turned out, to collect. From the tropics and the savannas, from jungles and islands, they shipped back not only souls saved but animals stuffed.

What began as a pious wish — to show the richness of God’s creation — soon grew into something much larger. Crates arrived from China, Indonesia, New Guinea, and Africa, filled with birds in brilliant plumage, coiled snakes, monkeys, and even big cats. In Steyl’s Missiemuseum, they were arranged behind glass: lions beside antelope, parrots beside penguins, all labeled with elegant handwriting and missionary pride.

Over time, the collection grew into a menagerie of wonder and contradiction — part natural history, part sermon, part obsession. The monks called it education; visitors might have called it awe. Looking at it today, with rows upon rows of creatures staring out through dusty glass eyes, one senses how missionary zeal and Victorian collecting fever merged into a single act of devotion — and domination.

The result is astonishing and a little unsettling: a frozen ark, a world gathered in faith and fervor. In Steyl, the brothers tried to bring God’s creation home — and ended up capturing the wildness of an entire world inside the stillness of glass.

Five Classic Geysers in a Spanish Window

Five classic geysers (León, Spain).

Somewhere in León, I stop before a small shop window. Behind the glass hang five classic geysers, displayed like relics from another age — white, rounded, solid, and strangely human. They look as if they still belong to a world where things were built to last and gas was simply there.

I think of home — of how in The Netherlands we talk of little else but transition. No more gas, no more burning, no more delay. Every boiler, every flame, every old system has become a symbol of guilt.

Here, though, no one seems in a hurry to erase the past. These quiet machines just wait for someone who still buys them, still needs them, is still dependent on them.

I catch my reflection in the glass: the street behind me, cars passing, the faint trace of my own doubt. Maybe progress isn’t only about moving forward. Maybe it’s also about remembering the warmth we’re trying so hard to replace.

The Tree of Jesse in the Wormser Dom

The Tree of Jesse in the Wormser Dom.

The relief of the Tree of Jesse in the Cathedral of St. Peter (Wormser Dom) presents the genealogy of the Holy Family with remarkable depth and grace.

At the base lies Jesse of Bethlehem, father of King David, from whose side a small tree trunk emerges. From this trunk rises a tangled yet elegant vine, filling the pointed Gothic arch with twisting branches and leaf-like crockets.

Along these branches sit or stand a succession of royal and prophetic ancestors of Christ, each set within the foliage:

• King David, often depicted with a harp

• King Solomon, wearing a crown and holding a scepter or book

• Other kings of Judah such as Hezekiah, Josiah, or Zedekiah, marked by regal insignia

• The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, holding scrolls with messianic prophecies

• Figures sometimes identified as the Virgin’s parents, Joachim and Anne, or other key ancestors named in the Gospel genealogies

High above them all, at the tree’s flowering crown, sits the Virgin Mary enthroned with the Christ Child, the final and perfect bloom of Jesse’s lineage.

Flanking the arch are additional full-length figures:

• Evangelists or apostles, recognizable by their books or scrolls

• A bishop or abbot in mitre and vestments, possibly representing a donor or the ecclesiastical authority who commissioned the work

This exuberant Gothic carving is far more than decoration. It transforms Isaiah 11:1—“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse”—into a vivid three-dimensional family tree. Its carefully portrayed kings, prophets, and evangelists link the Old Testament to the New, proclaiming Christ as both heir of David and fulfillment of ancient prophecy.

A City Woven Around a Theatre: Roman Cartagena Revealed

The Roman Theatre of Cartagena (Spain).

At first glance, Cartagena doesn’t give much away. Traffic, shops, everyday life — and then a doorway draws you inside a modern building that quietly functions as a museum. What begins as an exhibition visit slowly turns into something else.

You move upward first, not down. On the upper floor, a long, enclosed passage opens — a tunnel that leads you forward in time as much as in space. And then, almost without warning, the Roman theatre appears.

You emerge halfway into the structure, suspended between the highest rows of seats and the orchestra below. It is an unusual entrance, and a deliberate one. Rather than discovering the theatre under the city, you enter it within the city — inserted into its surviving geometry.

A stage for a rising empire

The theatre was built at the very beginning of the Roman Empire, during the age of Augustus. Its scale alone tells a clear story. This was not a peripheral town. Carthago Nova was prosperous, strategically located, and confident enough to claim a monumental public building at its core.

Roman theatres were never just places for entertainment. They were instruments of civic identity. To build one was to declare that this city belonged to the Roman world — culturally, politically and socially.

Politics carved into space

In antiquity, visitors passed beneath inscriptions honouring the imperial family before taking their seats. The message was subtle but constant: Rome was present here, watching, legitimising, ordering the city’s public life.

Inside, society was arranged in stone. The best seats lay closest to the orchestra, reserved for those whose status mattered. Architecture reinforced hierarchy long before a word was spoken on stage. Even today, standing among the tiers, that logic remains visible and instinctively readable.

Architecture that directs attention

Roman theatres are machines for focus. The rising cavea pulls your gaze downward, towards the orchestra and the stage. Movement, sightlines and sound were carefully controlled. Cartagena’s theatre still demonstrates this with remarkable clarity.

Behind the stage once stood a richly decorated architectural façade, filled with columns and statues. Performances unfolded within a setting designed to communicate order, authority and permanence — values Rome was eager to project.

Rediscovered, not reconstructed

For centuries, the theatre disappeared beneath later construction. Houses, streets and churches reused its stone and obscured its form. It was not dramatically destroyed, but slowly absorbed by the city that grew on top of it.

Its rediscovery in the late twentieth century returned a missing chapter to Cartagena’s story. Today, the museum route does not try to recreate the illusion of a buried ruin. Instead, it guides you carefully into the structure itself, allowing the theatre to reveal its scale and logic gradually.

A city that faces the sea

Carthago Nova is a Mediterranean harbour city, outward-looking and well connected. Trade, administration and wealth passes through its port. The theatre belongs to that identity: public, ambitious, confident.

What makes the visit especially powerful is the contrast. Modern buildings press close around the ancient structure. The theatre is not isolated; it coexists with the present. You do not step back into a distant past — you step into a layer of the city that still shapes it.

Rome here is not a postcard ruin. It is architecture that still commands space, attention and meaning.

Jeffrey Epstein and the Architecture of Kompromat

How Power Uses Sex as an Instrument of Control

Kompromat: Evolutionary impulse supplies the hook; social taboo supplies the trap.

When the story of Jeffrey Epstein is retold, it often dissolves into lists of names, flight logs, and denials. That misses the deeper point.

Epstein matters not because he was exceptional, but because he exposed a structural truth about power — and about human nature itself.

Who Jeffrey Epstein Was

Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier whose wealth, client base, and business model were never clearly explained, yet whose access to global elites was extraordinary. Over several decades, he moved inside the inner architecture of elite power, where politicians, financiers, academics, celebrities, and royalty converged. He owned multiple high-security properties, operated private aircraft, and cultivated a reputation for absolute discretion, while nobody knew where his wealth came from.

Behind this façade, Epstein ran a system that systematically abused and trafficked underage girls. Court records and survivor testimonies describe a pattern of recruitment, grooming, payment, coercion, and reuse. Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 in Florida for soliciting prostitution and procuring a minor for prostitution and served about 13 months for this under a lenient plea deal. Arrested again in 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges, Epstein died in jail before trial. His death closed a criminal case, but it did not close the questions his life raised about elite impunity, private power, and institutional silence.

The Girls at the Centre

At the centre of Epstein’s operation were girls, many of them underage. They were recruited, groomed, paid, coerced, and reused. Their exploitation was not accidental. It was instrumental.

To understand why, one must look beyond scandal or personality and briefly — uncomfortably — toward evolutionary biology.

Why Young Girls Are the Ultimate Lever

From an evolutionary perspective, youth signals fertility, health, and reproductive potential. Across cultures and eras, these signals have exerted a powerful pull on male psychology — often stronger than reason, reputation, or long-term self-interest.

At the same time, those very signals place young girls in the opposite position socially. They are the individuals most in need of protection. They sit at the intersection of maximum biological attraction and maximum social vulnerability.

That contradiction is precisely why exploitation here is so effective.

When powerful men are drawn into sexual situations involving young girls, several forces collide:

• deep evolutionary drives

• absolute social taboo

• severe legal consequences

• irreversible reputational damage

The result is not merely transgression, but total vulnerability.

Closed Worlds, Open Leverage

Epstein’s homes, planes, and private island functioned as sealed environments — spaces stripped of ordinary safeguards. Inside them, boundaries softened. Escalation felt gradual. Silence felt mutual.

This is how kompromat works in practice. Not always through explicit blackmail, but through uncertainty: What happened? Who saw it? What exists?

Fear of exposure does not require exposure. Evolutionary impulse supplies the hook; social taboo supplies the trap.

Why Royals Matter

The association between Epstein and Prince Andrew, followed by Andrew’s settlement with a victim, became emblematic for a reason.

Royalty embodies two extremes at once:

• elevated status

• catastrophic reputational fragility

A compromised royal threatens not just an individual, but an institution built on legitimacy, continuity, and deference. The instinctive response is protection: deflection, minimisation, procedural fog.

This is not conspiracy. It is institutional self-preservation.

Trump, Epstein, and the Logic of Exposure

Epstein’s close social relationship with Donald Trump has been extensively documented. Trump publicly described Epstein as a friend in the past, socialised with him in elite circles, and appears alongside him in multiple accounts of New York and Florida high society.

Beyond social proximity, Trump has long been surrounded by publicly reported hypotheses concerning:

• opaque financial dependencies

• extensive ties to Russian and post-Soviet capital

• and persistent stories and allegations involving sexual misconduct

Some of these allegations have led to civil cases or public settlements; others remain unresolved or contested. What matters here is not adjudication, but structure.

The connection is not evidentiary but systemic.

Intelligence and power systems have long understood that the most effective leverage does not create desire — it exploits existing drives. Whether through debt or sex, the principle is the same: exposure plus dependency equals influence.

Evolution supplies the weakness. Systems of power merely learn how to use it.

The Unspoken Contract of Silence

Elite worlds function on an implicit understanding: discretion is virtue; curiosity is danger.

Once someone has crossed an absolute boundary — especially one involving the exploitation of the young — silence becomes self-enforcing. People comply not because they are ordered to, but because their own instincts warn them what disclosure would cost.

This is governance without commands.

The Enduring Lesson

The Epstein affair was not primarily about sex, nor even about crime alone. It was about how deeply human biology can be weaponised inside modern power structures.

Young girls worked as leverage because evolution made them irresistible — and civilisation made their exploitation unforgivable.

That combination produces the strongest form of compromise there is.

Epstein is dead. The architecture he revealed remains.

Its core materials are ancient, and unsettlingly simple: desire, protection, fear — and silence.

The Oppidum Saint-Vincent in Gaujac (France)

Plan of Oppidum Saint-Vincent at Gaujac, showing Iron Age ramparts, Roman monuments, and later medieval occupation layers. After J. Charmasson, published plan.

The ruins of the Roman baths at Oppidum Saint-Vincent, their low stone walls still tracing heated rooms and pools, set against the wooded hills that once framed daily life on the oppidum.

From down in the valley near Gaujac, the forested crest of Oppidum Saint-Vincent gives little hint of its past. Only when you climb it does the hill begin to speak. Saint-Vincent is not a single archaeological site, but a hillside shaped and reshaped by human lives for more than a thousand years.

The story begins around 425 BCE, when Gallic communities took possession of the summit and enclosed some twelve hectares with a defensive wall. This was an oppidum: a fortified hilltop settlement typical of Celtic Gaul. Oppida were not refuges in panic, but centres of authority, combining defense, habitation, ritual and trade. From Saint-Vincent, the Rhône corridor could be watched and controlled, and contacts reached as far as the Greek port of Massalia, modern Marseille. Archaeology reveals houses, storage areas and a striking ritual feature known as the “altar of ashes,” hinting at ceremonies that bound community, land and belief together.

By the early fourth century BCE the site was largely abandoned, its walls left to weather. But the hill was not forgotten. Around 120 BCE, as Roman power advanced into southern Gaul, Saint-Vincent was deliberately reoccupied. Its defenses were reinforced, transforming the old oppidum into a stronghold once more, now facing a new political horizon.

That horizon became Roman around 40 BCE, when Lepidus granted Saint-Vincent the status of oppidum latinum. The hilltop was reshaped into a Romanised town structured by terraces. Public life concentrated around a forum with porticoes, baths were built, and a monumental sanctuary—traditionally called the “Temple of Apollo”—dominated the sacred space. At this moment, Saint-Vincent was not merely inhabited; it was important. Its religious role drew pilgrims from across Narbonensis during major festivals, reinforcing both its political and spiritual status in the region.

The prosperity did not last. In the later third century CE, a series of earthquakes struck the region. The urban fabric of the hilltop suffered badly, and the Roman town gradually emptied. Yet even abandonment did not end the site’s usefulness.

Remains of the medieval village at Oppidum Saint-Vincent: dry-stone houses and enclosure walls built by quarrymen and stonecutters between the 10th and 12th centuries, reusing the fabric of the ancient city.

During Late Antiquity, in the fifth and sixth centuries, Saint-Vincent entered a quieter but crucial phase. Parts of the old ramparts were repaired or rebuilt using simpler masonry and reused Roman stone. These walls are often referred to as “Visigothic,” and while the term survives, it deserves nuance. Saint-Vincent did not become a Visigothic city. Instead, it functioned as a hilltop refuge, a place of temporary safety for populations from the surrounding plain in an unstable world. The walls of this period speak not of empire, but of pragmatism: repair what already exists, defend what can still be defended.

In the Middle Ages, the hill found yet another role. Around a small church dedicated to Saint Vincent, families of stonecutters and quarrymen settled on the summit. The abandoned monuments of Roman antiquity became quarries; blocks once shaped for temples and baths were repurposed for houses, walls and paths. Stone moved again, but with new meanings and new hands.

What makes Saint-Vincent compelling today is precisely this continuity through change. It was never erased and rebuilt from scratch. Instead, each generation worked with what was already there—walls reused, terraces adapted, ruins transformed into resources.

Some members of SECABR (Société d’Étude des Civilisations Antiques Bas-Rhodaniennes) enjoying lunch at the site of the Oppidum Saint-Vincent.

That layered history is why the presence of SECABR (Société d’Étude des Civilisations Antiques Bas-Rhodaniennes) matters so much. Their quiet stewardship—walking the site, monitoring erosion, sharing knowledge—continues a tradition that is as old as the oppidum itself: caring for a place because it matters. Where once councils met and pilgrims gathered, people still come together, not to defend or to rule, but to remember.

At Saint-Vincent, the walls no longer protect against enemies. They protect against forgetting.

More Information:

• SECABR (Société d’Étude des Civilisations Antiques Bas-Rhodaniennes)

Somewhere between the gondola and the next glass of wine

Somewhere between the gondola and the next glass of wine.

The Next Generation of Bomberos of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Spain)

The Next Generation of Bomberos of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Spain).

They stand there in the bright Andalusian light—Sanlúcar’s newest firefighters in training, a mix of nerves, pride, and that unmistakable spark of people who’ve chosen a life of stepping forward when others step back. These trainees aren’t just learning how to fight fires; they’re learning how to read a crisis, trust each other, and serve a community that depends on them.

The Silent Prophets Above the Gate of Chains (Santa María de Ciudad Rodrigo, Spain)

The silent guardians of the Puerta de las Cadenas of the Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo (13th century).

Above the Puerta de las Cadenas of the Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo stretches a striking frieze of Old Testament figures, carved in stone like a solemn assembly presiding over the cathedral’s northern entrance. According to Sendín, the sculptor gathered Abraham, Isaiah, the Queen of Sheba, Solomon, Ezekiel, Moses, Melchizedek, Balaam, David, Elijah, Saint John the Baptist, and Jeremiah—twelve figures who together trace the long arc of biblical history.

At the beginning stands Abraham, the patriarch of faith, followed by Isaiah holding the scroll of prophecy. The Queen of Sheba, crowned and elegant, brings a rare feminine presence, representing the nations recognizing divine wisdom; beside her, Solomon embodies that wisdom in royal calm. Ezekiel appears with the intensity of a visionary, while Moses—marked by his staff or the tablets of the Law—represents the covenant and its commandments.

Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king who offered bread and wine, stands close to Balaam, the foreign prophet compelled to bless Israel. Their inclusion highlights the ways God’s voice, in medieval understanding, could emerge from unexpected places. David, with his crown and poetic bearing, re-establishes royal lineage before the frieze turns to Elijah, the fiery prophet taken to heaven in a whirlwind.

Only one figure belongs to the New Testament: Saint John the Baptist, the final herald before Christ, the bridge between old and new. The cycle closes with Jeremiah, carved in a gesture of lament, embodying the sorrow and longing that permeate Israel’s story.

Why place this assembly above a cathedral door? In the Middle Ages, façades were meant to teach. These prophets form a visual overture to the Gospel proclaimed inside, affirming that Christianity rises not in isolation but from a long, unfolding tradition. Together they create a threshold of memory and meaning: a carved chorus of voices preparing the visitor to step from the world into the sacred story beyond the gate.

The Cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo (13th century) with the Puerta de las Cadenas.

A Vessel with Two Faces: Bird and Deer at El Tolmo de Minateda (Spain)

Painted Iberian crater, El Tolmo de Minateda, early 1st century BCE. Bird and deer appear on opposite sides of the vessel, forming a symbolic dialogue placed in a funerary context.

In the first half of the 1st century BCE, in what is now southeastern Spain, a large painted vessel was placed in a grave at El Tolmo de Minateda (Albacete). It was not an ordinary container. This crater — a Greek vessel form reinterpreted by Iberian potters — was chosen to accompany someone into death.

What makes it remarkable is that it speaks in two images, one on each side.

On one face, a bird with outstretched wings stands upright, surrounded by flowers and vegetal motifs. On the opposite face, a deer lowers its head, calm and contained, again framed by floral elements. Both images were painted deliberately, each occupying its own panel, as if inviting the viewer to walk around the vessel and read it in the round.

This crater comes from a funerary context, and that matters. In Iberian ceramics from El Tolmo, birds and deer are not random decorations. Archaeological research shows that deer appear almost exclusively in burial contexts, where they are often interpreted as psychopomps — animals associated with transition, guidance, and the passage between worlds. The bird, frequently depicted with spread wings, may echo similar ideas of movement between earth and sky.

Together, the two animals form a quiet visual dialogue: land and air, stillness and motion, body and soul. This is not storytelling in the modern sense, but symbolic language, meant to work within ritual rather than explanation.

By the time this vessel was made, Roman power was already present in Iberia. Yet the imagery is deeply local. The form may echo the Mediterranean world, but the meaning belongs to the community that buried its dead here, using symbols that had carried weight for generations.

This crater was never meant for display. It was made to stand beside ashes, to protect, to accompany, and perhaps to explain what words could not.

Two animals. One vessel.
And a final journey, told in clay.

The Idol of Rena: A Human Face from Deep Prehistory

The idol of Rena (Archaeological Museum of Badajoz, Spain).

If you travel through the quiet plains of Extremadura, it is hard to imagine that beneath this landscape lay some of Europe’s richest Copper Age communities (about 2500 BCE). Among their most intriguing creations is the Idol of Rena—a small, beautifully carved human figure now displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Badajoz.

Carved from pale, marble-like stone, the idol shows a stylised human form: straight legs, a narrow torso, and arms bent inward at the waist. The incised face suggests brows, a strong nose, and faint tattoos. On the back, zigzag lines evoke hair or a head covering. It is unmistakably human, but abstract enough to feel symbolic and enigmatic.

A Regional Tradition of Human-Shaped Figures

The Rena idol belongs to a remarkable group of anthropomorphic figures found across southern Iberia. These objects are rare and carefully crafted, usually discovered in or near significant Copper Age settlements. Extremadura stands out as the region with the largest concentration, especially around the great site of La Pijotilla.

Although similar idols appear in Almería, Jaén, Cádiz, Sevilla, and Portugal, the marble idols of Badajoz have a distinct style and a strong sense of local tradition. Most show the same rigid posture, emphasised brows, tattoo-like markings, and stylised hairlines.

Symbol, Ancestor, or Social Marker?

What these idols represent remains uncertain. Earlier generations imagined gods or a Mother Goddess, but modern interpretations see them more as expressions of identity, status, or leadership emerging within increasingly complex societies. The consistent posture—arms forward, gaze direct—may have conveyed authority or belonging rather than depicting a literal individual.

Whatever their meaning, these figures sit within a broad symbolic world that also produced slate plaque idols, engraved cylindrical figures with large eyes, and many other ritualised objects. Taken together, they show a society experimenting with the human image as a powerful carrier of meaning.

Why the Idol of Rena Endures

Today, the Idol of Rena feels small, quiet, and intimate. Yet it speaks of a world in transition—one where early farming communities were reshaping their landscapes, forming new social ties, and expressing their beliefs through stylised art.

In the absence of writing, figures like this are among the few messages we have from those communities. And the Idol of Rena, with its calm presence and careful craftsmanship, still carries a trace of the human stories it once embodied.

Further Reading

• J.J. Enríquez Navascués – Nuevos ídolos antropomorfos calcolíticos de la cuenca media del Guadiana.

• Víctor Hurtado – Ídolos, estilos y territorios de los primeros campesinos en el sur peninsular.

• K. Lillios & V. Gonçalves – Studies on Iberian plaque idols.

• C. Scarre – The Human Past.

Saints for the Shoemakers

A 16th-century tile panel from Plasencia

In a quiet corner of an exhibition you may suddenly meet two saints who feel surprisingly close to everyday life: Crispinus and Crispianus, the patron saints of shoemakers. The object that introduces them is an antique religious tile panel from Plasencia, possibly dating to the 16th century. It is devotional art, yes, but also a proud nod to craft, labour, and the dignity of skilled hands.

The panel shows the two brothers as holy figures, yet their fame is rooted in a very earthly story. According to tradition, Crispinus and Crispianus were Christian missionaries who supported themselves by making shoes. Their workshop became a kind of silent sermon: work honestly, live modestly, help others, and hold on to faith even when it costs you. That combination made them a natural spiritual home for guilds of cobblers and leatherworkers across Europe.

If the Plasencia panel is indeed 16th century, it sits in a fascinating moment: the age of strong urban identities, powerful guilds, and public devotion. Tiles were more than decoration. They were durable, visible, and meant to be lived with—perfect for chapels, convents, guild buildings, and private homes. A tile panel like this could function as an image for prayer, but also as a statement: this trade has a place in the moral order of the city.

What makes such an object compelling today is its double voice. On one level it speaks the language of saints and salvation. On another, it whispers about workshops and streets: the smell of leather, the rhythm of tools, the daily economy of a town like Plasencia. The saints stand there not as distant miracle-workers, but as companions of working people—patrons of a profession that literally shaped the shoes on which society moved.

Seen now, centuries later, the panel becomes a bridge between devotion and craft. It reminds us that religious imagery was often deeply practical: it blessed the things people did all day, every day. And in that sense, Crispinus and Crispianus still do their work—quietly guarding the makers.

Between What Is Said and What Is Understood

High-context and low-context cultures explained through everyday life

Image generated with ChatGPT.

You leave a conversation with the feeling that everything was clear. Nothing dramatic was said, no disagreement surfaced, the exchange felt polite, even warm. Later, you discover that the other person took something entirely different from it. No one lied. No one acted in bad faith. And yet, something essential was missed.

Most of us recognise this — while travelling, visiting family, dealing with neighbours, or moving between regions and countries. We tend to explain it away as “culture,” temperament, or personality. But beneath these moments lies something more fundamental: different ways cultures carry meaning.

To make sense of this, anthropologists often distinguish between low-context and high-context cultures. The terms describe where a culture expects meaning to live.

In low-context cultures, meaning is carried mainly by words. Communication is explicit. What is said or written matters most, because shared assumptions cannot be taken for granted.

In high-context cultures, meaning is carried largely by context. Much is understood without being said. Relationships, shared history and social cues carry more weight than explicit wording.

Most societies fall somewhere in between. Misunderstandings arise when people assume their own way of carrying meaning is universal.

With that in mind, many everyday frictions suddenly become easier to recognise.

In low-context cultures, words are expected to do the heavy lifting. If something matters, it should be stated clearly. Precision is not coldness; it is care. Written language, exact phrasing and explicit explanations are trusted because they reduce ambiguity.

In high-context cultures, meaning often lives outside words. Tone, timing, gesture and silence matter as much as speech. Saying everything out loud can feel unnecessary or even awkward — as if you are questioning what everyone already understands.

Neither approach is superior. They evolved under different social conditions. Low-context communication works well in societies where people interact frequently with strangers and move easily between roles and places. High-context communication thrives where relationships are long-term and shared experiences run deep.

Tension appears when these worlds meet.

To someone from a low-context background, high-context communication may feel vague or evasive. “Why don’t they just say it?” To someone from a high-context background, low-context communication can feel blunt, insensitive or oddly distrustful. “Why does everything need to be spelled out?”

These reactions are rarely about manners or intelligence. They reflect different assumptions about where meaning belongs.

You can sense this difference when moving across regions. In some places, a direct statement is welcomed as honest and respectful. In others, the same sentence may feel abrupt or even offensive. A carefully phrased hint may feel perfectly clear to one person and completely insufficient to another. Neither is wrong — they are listening for meaning in different places.

This difference also shapes how people understand responsibility.

In low-context cultures, responsibility is closely linked to explicit statements. If something was said, agreed or written, it carries weight. Responsibility can be traced back to a moment of expression.

In high-context cultures, responsibility is more relational. It emerges from shared understanding rather than explicit declaration. Calling something out directly can feel disruptive, as if it threatens the relationship itself.

This is why misunderstandings can be so persistent. One person believes everything was clear. The other believes nothing was settled. Both interpretations make sense — within their own cultural logic.

History offers many echoes of this tension. Written law alongside customary law. Urban centres governed by charters next to rural communities guided by tradition. These were not only legal differences, but differences in how meaning itself was organised.

Understanding high-context and low-context communication does not eliminate conflict. What it offers is insight into why good intentions so often fail to land as intended.

Meaning is not always contained in words. Sometimes it lives in what surrounds them — and noticing that can change how we listen, how we travel, and how we live with difference.

The Saint-Léonard Relic Mural in Honfleur

Krug’s 1899 marouflé mural in Église Saint-Léonard, Honfleur, commemorates the transfer of a relic of Saint Léonard—patron of prisoners and freedom—in radiant Renaissance-style gold.

Step inside the Église Saint-Léonard in Honfleur and a luminous wall painting commands attention. Created in 1899 by artist Krug on a toile marouflée (canvas bonded to wall), it records the transfer of a relic of Saint Léonard, patron of prisoners and liberation.

Saint of Chains and Freedom

Saint Léonard, a 6th-century noble turned hermit near Limoges, was famed for freeing captives who invoked his name. Pilgrims long sought pieces of his relics. For this bustling port—often battered by war—the relic’s arrival was a promise of protection and safe return.

Ceremony in Gold

The mural shows a solemn procession led by Bishop Hugonin of Bayeux: robed clergy, incense, and faithful figures glide across a gold ground reminiscent of Fra Angelico. It is at once a historical record and a devotional icon, celebrating the day Honfleur welcomed its saint.

Catholic Revival

Painted during the post-1870 Catholic resurgence, the work reflected a desire to strengthen faith through art and memory. More than a century on, the mural still speaks of hope and deliverance, its silent pageant glowing in the church’s soft light.

The flamboyant Gothic façade of Église Saint-Léonard in Honfleur, crowned by its 18th-century octagonal bell tower.

A 4th-Century Voice from Extremadura: The Tombstone of Pascentius

The tombstone of Pascentius (Archaeological Museum of Badajoz, Spain).

In the Archaeological Museum of Badajoz, a single limestone slab gives us an unusually intimate glimpse into late Roman life in the 4th century AD. Found in the necropolis of Torrebaja near Pueblonuevo del Guadiana, the tombstone of Pascentius reflects a moment when Christianity was reshaping the spiritual landscape of Roman Hispania.

Beneath a Chrismon carved between two palms, the text unfolds in long, elegant lines. Here is the core of the inscription:

Latin Text

PASCENTIVS AMA
TOR DEI CVLTORQVE FI
DELIS EX HAC LVCE MIGRAV
IT ANNORVM XXVIII
PROTINVS VT VOCEM AV
RIBVS PERCEPIT CARMIN
A CRISTI RENVNTIAVIT M
VNDO POM PISQVE LABEN
TIBVS EIVS FERALENQVE
VITAM TEMVLENTIAEQVE PO
CVLA BACCHI SOBRIVS VT
ANIMVS SPECVLARETV
R AETHERIA · REGNA · CVM I
N ISTO · CERTAMINE · FORTIS
DIMICARET · ACLETA PLACVI
T NAMQVE · DEO · VT · EVM · A
RCIRET · ANTE · TRIBVNAL DA
TVRVS · EI · PALMAM · STOLAM
ADVQVE · CORONAM · VOS
QVI · HAEC · LEGITIS · ADVQVE
SPE DELECTAMINI · VANA · D—
—SITE IVSTITIAM · M—
—OLITE C—

Translation

Pascentius, lover and devoted servant of God, departed from this light at the age of twenty-eight. As soon as he heard in his ears the voice of Christ, he renounced the world and its fading vanities, the pleasures of life, and the intoxicating cups of Bacchus, so that with a sober spirit his soul might contemplate the heavenly realms.

He fought bravely in this struggle, and since it pleased God, he was summoned before His tribunal to receive the palm, the robe, and the crown.

You who read this, and who delight in a vain hope—do not allow injustice to be done to him.

Even in its brevity, the inscription reveals a full story: a young man turning decisively toward the Christian life, rejecting the social spectacles and indulgences of the Roman world, and entering what his community saw as a spiritual contest. The final line—addressed directly to the reader—reminds us that tombstones were not only memorials but moral messages, intended to shape the living as much as to honor the dead.

Sixteen centuries later, Pascentius’ voice still reaches us from his stone in Badajoz.

Surviving Deception: The Picaresque World of Lazarillo de Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes is a Spanish novel, published anonymously in 1554, that exemplifies the picaresque genre—a style of storytelling that follows the adventures of a roguish yet resourceful protagonist, often of low social standing, who must rely on wit and cunning to survive in a corrupt and unjust society. The story revolves around Lázaro, a poor boy born near the river Tormes, who, after losing his father at a young age, is sent by his mother to serve as an apprentice to a blind beggar. This cruel master forces him to endure hardship, but in doing so, also teaches Lázaro the harsh realities of life. Quickly, the boy learns that deception and trickery are sometimes his only means of survival.

Like many picaresque protagonists, Lázaro moves from one master to another, each encounter offering a glimpse into the different layers of Spanish society. He serves a miserly priest who hoards food while his servant starves, compelling Lázaro to develop clever ways to steal. Later, he becomes the attendant of a proud yet destitute nobleman who values his dignity above basic survival, leaving Lázaro to beg on his behalf. He also crosses paths with a corrupt seller of indulgences, whose manipulative schemes reveal the deep-seated hypocrisy within religious institutions.

Throughout his journey, Lázaro adapts, using whatever means necessary to improve his circumstances—whether through deception, strategic flattery, or sheer resilience. Eventually, he secures a stable position as a town crier and marries a woman with ties to a local priest, seemingly achieving some level of social respectability. However, true to the picaresque tradition, his success is tinged with irony, as it comes at the cost of his moral integrity and forces him to accept the very corruption he once struggled against.

With its sharp satire and unfiltered realism, Lazarillo de Tormes exposes the hypocrisy of the church, the rigid class divisions, and the daily struggles of the lower classes in 16th-century Spain. As one of the earliest and most influential picaresque novels, it presents a world where survival depends not on noble ideals, but on the ability to navigate a society built on illusion and deception.

Saint Expédit: A Wall of Gratitude

Saint Expédit, Église Saint-Pierre in Bordeaux (France).

We met him in a quiet chapel of the Église Saint-Pierre in Bordeaux (France)— a young Roman soldier standing almost casually, one knee bent, a cloak gathered in his hand. This is Saint Expédit, patron of people who cannot wait for tomorrow.

But what gives this shrine its power is not only the statue. It’s the wall behind him, tiled with small marble plaques, each carved with a simple word: MERCI.

A century of whispered relief, arranged like a mosaic.

Some plaques are formal, some abbreviated to initials, some marked with dates long before we were born. Others simply say “MERCI” — nothing more, yet somehow enough. Together they form a quiet ledger of fear, hope, and fulfilment.

According to the old legend, Expédit was a Roman soldier who, on the brink of converting to Christianity, faced a whisper of doubt urging him to delay. He refused. Faith, he decided, was for today, not some comfortable tomorrow. Ever since, people have come to him when hesitation is no longer possible.

In Bordeaux, this devotion feels very much alive. The flowers at his feet, the votive card leaning against the plinth, the steady growth of plaques over decades — all of it tells the same story: someone was in trouble, asked for help, found it, and returned with a piece of marble to say thank you.

A simple statue.
A wall full of human stories.
And a saint who still stands for the courage to act — not later, but now.