history

Amerigo Vespucchi

As mentioned earlier, I got a chance to see a beautiful ship Amerigo Vespucci docked in Limassol port last weekend. I’ve taken a few pictures, which, unfortunately, don’t do the ship any justice. The real thing is quite something.

Update: I’ve also uploaded these pictures to Flickr.

Who is Sergey Brin?

Here is a snippet from a TV program “To Tell The Truth” where people try to guess which one of the three candidates is Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Many people will have tough time to do so even today. The video is from 2000.

Victory Day photography

I’m catching up with some of my RSS subscriptions, so this is a few days late. On May 9th, Russia and other ex-USSR countries celebrate the Victory Day over the Nazi Germany in the World War II. Big Picture has an excellent collection of photos covering the celebrations.

Cyprus PIO online presence expanded

Cyprus Mail reports:

GOVERNMENT spokesman Stephanos Stephanou yesterday presented six Press and Information Office (PIO) websites which aim to internationally promote Cyprus and make the task of searching for information a bit less daunting.

The websites are:

Press and Information Office website – the main PIO website which is updated daily with all government announcements.
PIO Press Releases – a search engine for government announcements archives. Even though most of the documents I came across are in Greek, I still like the way search results are presented (see screenshot below).
Aspects of Cyprus – a large presentation about Cyprus, covering history, culture, politics, economics and more. It includes a few videos and more than 300 photographs.
Peri Kyprou – the Greek version of the Aspects of Cyprus.
Cyprus Film – a 40+ short films produced by PIO and other government offices.
Elections 2011 – a website built specifically for Cyprus parliamentary elections of 2011. This will probably be obsolete after May 22, but I wouldn’t know for sure as the website is in Greek only.

Pages of history

Yesterday I came across this collection of nostalgic photographs that bring back memories from the USSR times. I was too young to see some of those images in real life, but they still have meaning to me. Most though are as they were back then.

Yet, these are staged photographs of some every day items. Today I came across something much more real and something much more dramatic. It is again a collection of images, but in a video form. The video shows the staggering difference between the modern day Saint Petersburg and Leningrad (as it was called back then) during the Siege. As Wikipedia puts it: “It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history and one of the most costly in terms of human casualties”. It lasted for 872 days and it took lives of millions of people. As per Wikipedia: 1,017,881 were killed, captured, or missing and 2,418,18 wounded or sick from the Red Army forces. Civilian casualties are in the numbers of 642,000 during the siege and 400,000 at evacuations. These are only those numbers that were verified. In reality that was much more.