MPJ

Part of Serbia lands below Danube river is pretty mountainous, with complex geology especially in eastern parts where Carpathian and Balkan mountains collided and over eons formed Serbian Carpathians with total of 14 independent mountain ranges in existence today. These rocks date back to the Proterozoic Eon (2.5 billion - 541 million years ago) with limestones and dolomites mainly formed from late Jurassic to early Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago. There are dozens of large caves within these mountains and many with tourist paths built to visit and admire their beauty and history. Two of them we visited last week and they both gave us extraordinary experience and impressions. However, the first cave in this blog story belongs to the one formed in the foothill of an ancient volcano of the nowadays mountain of Bukulja in western Serbia, although the recent paper posted a theory that the mountain is much younger (15 million year ago) and instead formed in tectonic process...

In pre-Christian mythologies of the western and northern tribes and their pagan beliefs, female deities were not uncommon. Take for instance old Gaul's Matres or Valkyries of the old Norse mythology and of course all the goddesses from the history of all polytheistic religions around the globe. But perhaps the most interesting of them all are, you guessed, the fairies. They are not actually deities per se and rather belong to the spirit realm of the afterlife and dead, but still you can find them, in one form or another, in almost all religious legends and myths. The city where I was born, the valley it resides and the river that splits it in half are no different. The history of this area is, metaphorically speaking, very colorful and full of wonders, all the way to the beginning of the Neolithic era, and over the centuries this valley literally saw lots of different cultures and deities. One of them, originates way back to the Celtic Gauls and their tribe named Scordisci who live...

Last year, during our visit to Cretan site of Knossos and their wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated in large part to the one of the greatest peaceful periods in human history, I didn't hide admiration for old Minoans and their way of life. I even said I would move to Crete without second thoughts if I had a time machine, mainly to avoid hostility of the world order we are currently living in today. At the time, considering only European continent, I was under impression that cultures like Minoan were rare and the Bronze Age society we glimpsed on Crete was maybe walking on the edge of being the only one in the history of mankind. To say the least, I couldn't be more wrong. Only couple of millenniums before during the late Neolithic period, known as Chalcolithic or simply the Copper Age, there was an old European society that lived for centuries and also flourished in peaceful harmony and perfect equilibrium with nature, themselves and their immediate land where they buil...

My great-great-grandfather was born in 1845 and he spent his entire life through the turmoil of the second half of the 19th century. Little is known about his life - after all life in rural Serbian villages in past times wasn't really documented well and literacy among majority of people wasn't something our ancestors could be proud of. However, what was a major disadvantage for most people turned to be a great opportunity for my great-great-grandfather. Beside being literate and educated, he was gifted with a human property only few others possess. He owned a strong and melodic voice that would probably guaranty him at least a radio-host job if he was born a century later. Anyhow, one of his tasks was to read newspapers, various dispatches and communiques while standing in the center of village square surrounded with neighbors and people from nearby settlements. Soon enough he earned valuable prominence in his family and his children decided to devote our family name to him. E...

It is definitely not easy to answer this simple question with a word or sentence. Perhaps the best and only answer I could think of is that "it would make perfect sense" for the imminent future of humanity in 21st century and beyond. However within current world order we are living in today, it is far from being applicable for one 'teeny-tiny' reason - it would require canceling of what is well rooted today. The political system of Nation-State governmental polity that in one form or another exist almost everywhere on the planet. To cease that from existence is one of those Sisyphean tasks that is almost unimaginable to achieve. In simple words, in order to make City-State the only governmental polity we would have to nullify countries and to erase borders from the maps. Not only that, it also means the politics and politicians would have to reduce its influence and their numbers significantly which is also a task comparable to the impossible efforts from the mythical...

Have you ever thought about first ever practiced team sport on a grand scale? Perhaps, like mine, your first thought could be some competition within ancient Olympic games, right? Well, no, old Greeks didn't like team sports at all - instead their first athletes competed within what we consider today as individual sports or disciplines. Boxing, racing, running, jumping, wrestling, throwing and similar individual competitions or fighting. However, on the other end of the world and perhaps in the more or less the same time, ancient Chinese practiced sport competition just the same and during the Han Dynasty around 3rd century BC it was documented a game that resembles very much to modern football or soccer if you will. It was called Tsu'Chu with kicking the ball in the field in the team effort and with the goal of putting the ball in the net. But perhaps millennium before Tsu'Chu, on the third ancient continent, the origin of another modern sport was invented first and it was...

I read about a man once, and I honestly couldn't remember who he was, but in the nutshell he returned from the tourist trip with tons of photos and when his friends asked him why he didn't upload them online yet, he said that he needed to enrich them with words first, otherwise they would be just a pile of nice colored moments taken in time and saying very little or nothing at all about the trip and all the sites he visited. The same is with me and the same truth goes with videos as well. Let me be honest about watching other people videos online and browsing private photos uploaded to social media - I am simply not impressed with many of them, because they lack the story. With me, there is no point of uploading a nicely taken photo of you and your friends in front of some historic place or monument and explain nothing about where were you, why were you taking that photo or without saying little something about the place itself. With videos it goes even further - filming a Yo...

History of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge who among others were the first to take several images per second in one effort - all in scientific purpose back then - to study locomotion of birds, animals and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first who took series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less in the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun shaped camera capable with one trigger pull to capture 12 images in a row within one single second and store them all on the single 90mm film. He used his gun to study various motion of animals, fish and insects within his so called 'animated zoo', including dropped cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet. ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera It was not long after initia...