Cloak Bridge

For those who are interested in this intruiging man a paperback  is recommended; alas,  not yet in English." Navraty do Polynezie po Štefánikovych stopach", by Frantisek Kele and Miroslav Musil. Collected and rendered in verse by Richard Neugebauer, illustrated by Ladislav Hanka. The authors retraced the early 20th century transcontinental odyssey of Milan Rastislav Štefánik and were intrigued by the man who, in his own words, would "gladly exchange my stars of general for the real world of stars." From the highest summits of Europe to the Polynesian paradise, they tried to perceive the people and places through the eyes of Štefánik. The result is an intimate, lavishly illustrated and captivating account of the adventure.

NOVAK 299. PORTRAIT OF ARNOST DENIS:

Ernest (Arnošt) Denis (Nîmes 1849-Paris 1921)  was a French historian. Denis became known as a specialist of Germany and Bohemia, and played a major role in the establishment of the Czechoslovak  State in 1918. He is considered to be one of the most highly regarded twentieth-century historians of the Slav world in France. A Memorial Tablet and Bust has been erected (2003) in Prague (Malostranske namesti 27).

NOVAK 301. ARRIVAL OF PRESIDENT T. G. MASARYK:  Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue, 1850-1937, Czechoslovak political leader and philosopher, first president and chief founder of Czechoslovakia. He is revered by most Czechs and was internationally recognized as a great democratic leader. Born in Moravia, Masaryk received (1876) his doctorate from the Univ. of Vienna and married an American, Charlotte Garrigue. His first important work, Der Selbstmord als sociale Massenerscheinung der modernen Civilisation [suicide as a mass phenomenon of modern civilization], was published in 1881, and in 1882 he became professor of philosophy at the new Czech Univ. of Prague. He launched (1883) a monthly review, The Atheneum; became associated temporarily with the liberal nationalist Young Czech party; assumed the editorship (1889) of as [time], a political journal; and was elected (1891) to the Austrian parliament and the Bohemian diet. In 1893, he turned away from parliamentary activity to devote himself to the political education of his people. Disciples had gathered around him, and they launched (1900) the Czech Peoples party (later the Progressive party), based on Masaryk's ideas. Known as the Realist party, it emphasized the economic and social foundations of political power and strove for Czech equality, suffrage, and autonomy; the protection of minorities; and the unity of Czechs and Slovaks.
In 1907, Masaryk was reelected to parliament. He did not openly advocate independence at this point, but favored the transformation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a federation of self-governing nationalities. He also called for an end to anti-Semitism and opposed (1908) Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. At the outbreak of World War I, Masaryk fled abroad and, with Eduard Benes, formed the Czechoslovak national council, which in 1918 was recognized by the Allies as the de facto government of Czechoslovakia. Traveling widely during the war years, Masaryk raised funds in the United States for the Czech cause, and in Russia he organized (1917-18) the Czech Legion, an independent Czech army composed largely of former prisoners of war. The national council, of which Masaryk was president, maintained close secret contact with Czech nationalist leaders (notably Charles Krama) at home. Upon the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I, Masaryk became (1918) the first president of the Czechoslovak republic. He was reelected in 1920, 1927, and 1934. An extensive land reform was one of the first acts of his government. He steered a moderate course on such sensitive issues as the status of minorities (particularly the Slovaks and Germans) and the relations between church and state. In foreign policy, he fully backed his foreign minister, Benes. Masaryk resigned in 1935 because of his advanced age, and Benes succeeded him.  

NOVAK 302.  WELCOMING OF  PRESIDENT T.G. MASARYK:  See note Novak 301.  

NOVAK 303.  WELCOMING OF PRESIDENT T.G. MASARYK:  See note Novak 302.

NOVAK 308.  REIMS 1919, CATHÉDRAL:  

Tavik Frantisek Šimon went after Worldwar I back to his beloved second homeland France,  he had not seen since the outbreak of the war in 1914. He made some moving drawings and graphicart of the ruined city of Reims. First you can read in this article an introduction about the war. And then about Reims.

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World War I (1914-18), also known as the Great War, conflict, chiefly in Europe, among most of the great Western powers. It was the largest war the world had yet seen.
Causes:
World War I was immediately precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. There were, however, many factors that had led toward war. Prominent causes were the imperialistic, territorial, and economic rivalries that had been intensifying from the late 19th cent., particularly among Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.
Of equal importance was the rampant spirit of nationalism, especially unsettling in the empire of Austria-Hungary and perhaps also in France. Nationalism had brought the unification of Germany by "blood and iron," and France, deprived of Alsace and Lorraine by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, had been left with its own nationalistic cult seeking revenge against Germany. While French nationalists were hostile to Germany, which sought to maintain its gains by militarism and alliances, nationalism was creating violent tensions in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; there the large Slavic national groups had grown increasingly restive, and Serbia as well as Russia fanned Slavic hopes for freedom and Pan-Slavism.
Imperialist rivalry had grown more intense with the "new imperialism" of the late 19th and early 20th cent. The great powers had come into conflict over spheres of influence in China and over territories in Africa, and the Eastern Question, created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire, had produced several disturbing controversies. Particularly unsettling was the policy of Germany. It embarked late but aggressively on colonial expansion under Emperor William II, came into conflict with France over Morocco, and seemed to threaten Great Britain by its rapid naval expansion.
These issues, imperialist and nationalist, resulted in a hardening of alliance systems in the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente and in a general armaments race. Nonetheless, a false optimism regarding peace prevailed almost until the onset of the war, an optimism stimulated by the long period during which major wars had been avoided, by the close dynastic ties and cultural intercourse in Europe, and by the advance of industrialization and economic prosperity. Many Europeans counted on the deterrent of war's destructiveness to preserve the peace.
War's Outbreak:
The Austrian annexation (1908) of Bosnia and Hercegovina created an international crisis, but war was avoided. The Balkan Wars (1912-13) remained localized but increased Austria's concern for its territorial integrity, while the solidification of the Triple Alliance made Germany more yielding to the demands of Austria, now its one close ally. The assassination (June 28, 1914) of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo set in motion the diplomatic maneuvers that ended in war.
The Austrian military party, headed by Count Berchtold, won over the government to a punitive policy toward Serbia. On July 23, Serbia was given a nearly unacceptable ultimatum. With Russian support assured by Sergei Sazonov, Serbia accepted some of the terms but hedged on others and rejected those infringing upon its sovereignty. Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, rejected the British proposal of Sir Edward Grey (later Lord Grey of Fallodon) and declared war (July 28) on Serbia.
Russian mobilization precipitated a German ultimatum (July 31) that, when unanswered, was followed by a German declaration of war on Russia (Aug. 1). Convinced that France was about to attack its western frontier, Germany declared war (Aug. 3) on France and sent troops against France through Belgium and Luxembourg. Germany had hoped for British neutrality, but German violation of Belgian neutrality gave the British government the pretext and popular support necessary for entry into the war. In the following weeks Montenegro and Japan joined the Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and Belgium) and the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). The war had become general. Whether it might have been avoided or localized and which persons and nations were most responsible for its outbreak are questions still debated by historians
From the Marne to Verdun:
The German strategy, planned by Alfred von Schlieffen, called for an attack on the weak left flank of the French army by a massive German force approaching through Belgium, while maintaining a defensive stance toward Russia, whose army, Schlieffen assumed, would require six weeks to mobilize. By that time, Germany would have captured France and would be ready to meet the forces on the Eastern Front. The Schlieffen plan was weakened from the start when the German commander Helmuth von Moltke detached forces from the all-important German right wing, which was supposed to smash through Belgium, in order to reinforce the left wing in Alsace-Lorraine. Nevertheless, the Germans quickly occupied most of Belgium and advanced on Paris.
In Sept., 1914, the first battle of the Marne took place. For reasons still disputed, a general German retreat was ordered after the battle, and the Germans entrenched themselves behind the Aisne River. The Germans then advanced toward the Channel ports but were stopped in the first battle of Ypres; grueling trench warfare ensued along the entire Western Front. Over the next three years the battle line remained virtually stationary. It ran, approximately, from Ostend past Armentières, Douai, Saint-Quentin, Reims, Verdun, and Saint-Mihiel to Lunéville. Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the Russians invaded East Prussia but were decisively defeated (Aug.-Sept., 1914) by the Germans under generals Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Mackensen at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. The Germans advanced on Warsaw, but farther south a Russian offensive drove back the Austrians. However, by the autumn of 1915 combined Austro-German efforts had driven the Russians out of most of Poland and were holding a line extending from Riga to Chernovtsy (Chernivtsi). The Russians counterattacked in 1916 in a powerful drive directed by General Brusilov, but by the year's end the offensive had collapsed, after costing Russia many thousands of lives. Soon afterward the Russian Revolution eliminated Russia as an effective participant in the war. Although the Austro-Hungarians were unsuccessful in their attacks on Serbia and Montenegro in the first year of the war, these two countries were overrun in 1915 by the Bulgarians (who had joined the Central Powers in Oct., 1915) and by Austro-German forces.
Another blow to the Allied cause was the failure in 1915 of the Gallipoli campaign, an attempt to force Turkey out of the war and to open a supply route to S Russia. The Allies, however, won a diplomatic battle when Italy, after renouncing its partnership in the Triple Alliance and after being promised vast territorial gains, entered the war on the Allied side in May, 1915. Fighting between Austria and Italy along the Isonzo River was inconclusive until late 1917, when the rout of the Italians at Caporetto made Italy a liability rather than an asset to the Allies. Except for the conquest of most of Germany's overseas colonies by the British and Japanese, the year 1916 opened with a dark outlook for the Allies. The stalemate on the Western Front had not been affected in 1915 by the second battle of Ypres, in which the Germans used poison gas for the first time on the Western Front, nor by the French offensive in Artois-in which a slight advance of the French under Henri Pétain was paid for with heavy losses-nor by the offensive of Marshal Joffre in Champagne, nor by the British advance toward Lens and Loos.
In Feb., 1916, the Germans tried to break the deadlock by mounting a massive assault on Verdun (see Verdun, battle of). The French, rallying with the cry, "They shall not pass!" held fast despite enormous losses, and in July the British and French took the offensive along the Somme River where tanks were used for the first time by the British. By November they had gained a few thousand yards and lost thousands of men. By December, a French counteroffensive at Verdun had restored the approximate positions of Jan., 1916.
Despite signs of exhaustion on both sides, the war went on, drawing ever more nations into the maelstrom. Portugal and Romania joined the Allies in 1916; Greece, involved in the war by the Allied Salonica campaigns on its soil, declared war on the Central Powers in 1917.
America's Entry and Allied Victory:
The neutrality of the United States had been seriously imperiled after the sinking of the Lusitania (1915). At the end of 1916, Germany, whose surface fleet had been bottled up since the indecisive battle of Jutland, announced that it would begin unrestricted submarine warfare in an effort to break British control of the seas. In protest the United States broke off relations with Germany (Feb., 1917), and on Apr. 6 it entered the war. American participation meant that the Allies now had at their command almost unlimited industrial and manpower resources, which were to be decisive in winning the war. It also served from the start to lift Allied morale, and the insistence of President Woodrow Wilson on a "war to make the world safe for democracy" was to weaken the Central Powers by encouraging revolutionary groups at home.
The war on the Western Front continued to be bloody and stalemated. But in the Middle East the British, who had stopped a Turkish drive on the Suez Canal, proceeded to destroy the Ottoman Empire; T. E. Lawrence stirred the Arabs to revolt, Baghdad fell (Mar., 1917), and Field Marshal Allenby took Jerusalem (Dec., 1917). The first troops of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), commanded by General Pershing, landed in France in June, 1917, and were rushed to the Château-Thierry area to help stem a new German offensive.
A unified Allied command in the West was created in Apr., 1918. It was headed by Marshal Foch, but under him the national commanders (Sir Douglas Haig for Britain, King Albert I for Belgium, and General Pershing for the United States) retained considerable authority. The Central Powers, however, had gained new strength through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (Mar., 1918) with Russia. The resources of Ukraine seemed at their disposal, enabling them to balance to some extent the effects of the Allied blockade; most important, their forces could now be concentrated on the Western Front.
The critical German counteroffensive, known as the second battle of the Marne, was stopped just short of Paris (July-Aug., 1918). At this point Foch ordered a general counterattack that soon pushed the Germans back to their initial line (the so-called Hindenburg Line). The Allied push continued, with the British advancing in the north and the Americans attacking through the Argonne region of France. While the Germans were thus losing their forces on the Western Front, Bulgaria, invaded by the Allies under General Franchet d'Esperey, capitulated on Sept. 30, and Turkey concluded an armistice on Oct. 30. Austria-Hungary, in the process of disintegration, surrendered on Nov. 4 after the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto.
German resources were exhausted and German morale had collapsed. President Wilson's Fourteen Points were accepted by the new German chancellor, Maximilian, prince of Baden, as the basis of peace negotiations, but it was only after revolution had broken out in Germany that the armistice was at last signed (Nov. 11) at Compiègne. Germany was to evacuate its troops immediately from all territory W of the Rhine, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was declared void. The war ended without a single truly decisive battle having been fought, and Germany lost the war while its troops were still occupying territory from France to Crimea. This paradox became important in subsequent German history, when nationalists and militarists sought to blame the defeat on traitors on the home front rather than on the utter exhaustion of the German war machine and war economy.
Aftermath and Reckoning :
World War I and the resulting peace treaties (see Versailles, Treaty of; Saint-Germain, Treaty of; Trianon, Treaty of; Neuilly, Treaty of; Sèvres, Treaty of) radically changed the face of Europe and precipitated political, social, and economic changes. By the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forced to acknowledge guilt for the war. Later, prompted by the Bolshevik publication of the secret diplomacy of the czarist Russian government, the warring powers gradually released their own state papers, and the long historical debate on war guilt began. It has with some justice been claimed that the conditions of the peace treaties were partially responsible for World War II. Yet when World War I ended, the immense suffering it had caused gave rise to a general revulsion to any kind of war, and a large part of mankind placed its hopes in the newly created League of Nations.
To calculate the total losses caused by the war is impossible. About 10 million dead and 20 million wounded is a conservative estimate. Starvation and epidemics raised the total in the immediate postwar years. Warfare itself had been revolutionized by the conflict
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(At first some info from 1909, also before the war, when the city was still intact) REIMS (Rheims), a city of north-eastern France, chief town of an arrondissement of the department of Marne, 98 m. E.N.E. of Paris, on the Eastern railway. Pop. (1906) 102,800. Reims is situated in a plain on the right bank of the Vesle, a tributary of the Aisne, and on the canal which connects the Aisne with the Marne. South and west rise the "montagne de Reims" and vine-clad hills. Reims is limited S.W. by the Vesle and the canal, N.W. by promenades which separate it from the railway and in other directions by boulevards lined with fine residences. Beyond extend large suburbs, the chief of which are Cérès to the N.E., Coutures to the E., Laon to the N. and Vesle to the W. Of its squares the principal are the Place Royale, with a statue of Louis XV., and the place du Parvis, with an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc. The rue de Vesle, the chief street, continued under other names, traverses the town from S.W. to N.W., passing through the Place Royale.
The oldest monument in Reims is the Mars Gate (so called from a temple to Mars in the neighbourhood), a triumphal arch 108 ft. in length by 43 in height, consisting of three archways flanked by columns. It is popularly supposed to have been erected in honour of Augustus when Agrippa made the great roads terminating at the town, but probably belongs to the 3rd or 4th century. In its vicinity a curious mosaic, measuring 36, ft. by 26, with thirty-five medallions representing animals and gladiators, was discovered in 1860. To these remains must be added a GalloRoman sarcophagus, said to be that of the consul Jovinus and preserved in the archaeological museum in the cloister of the abbey of St Remi.

The cathedral of Notre-Dame, where the kings of France used to be crowned, replaced an older church (burned in 1211) built on the site of the basilica where Clovis was baptized by St Remigius. The cathedral, with the exception of the west front, was completed by the end of the 13th century. That portion was erected in the 14th century after 13th-century designs-the nave having in the meantime been lengthened to afford room for the crowds that attended the coronations. In 1481 fire destroyed the roof and the spires. In 1875 the National Assembly voted £80,000 for repairs of the façade and balustrades. This façade is the finest portion of the building, and one of the most perfect masterpieces of the middle ages. The three portals are laden with statues and statuettes. The central portal, dedicated to the Virgin, is surmounted by a rose-window framed in an arch itself decorated with statuary. The "gallery of the kings" above has the baptism of Clovis in the centre and statues of his successors. The towers, 267 ft. high, were originally designed to rise 394 ft.; that on the south contains two great bells, one of which, named "Charlotte" by Cardinal de Lorraine in 1570, weighs more than II tons. The façades of the transepts are also decorated with sculptures-that on the north with statues of the principal bishops of Reims, a representation of the Last Judgment and a figure of Christ (le Beau Dieu) while that on the south side has a beautiful rose-window with the prophets and apostles. Of the four towers which flanked the transepts nothing remains above the height of the roof since the fire of I481.

Above the choir rises an elegant bell-tower in timber and lead, 59 ft. high, reconstructed in the 15th century. The interior of the cathedral is 455 ft. long, 98 ft. wide in the nave, and 125 ft. high in the centre, and comprises a nave with jisles, transepts with aisles, a choir with double aisles, and an apse with deambulatory and radiating chapels. It has a profusion of statues similar to those of the outside, and stained glass of the 13th century. The rose-window over the main portal and the gallery beneath are of rare magnificence. The cathedral possesses fine tapestries. Of these the most important series is that presented by Robert de Lenoncourt, archbishop under Francis I., representing the life of the Virgin. The north transept contains a fine 'organ in a Flamboyant Gothic case. The choir clock is ornamented with curious mechanical figures. Several paintings, by Tintoretto, Nicolas Poussin,, and others, and the carved woodwork and the railings of the choir, also deserve mention. The treasury contains the Sainte Ampoule, or holy flask, the successor of the ancient one broken at the Revolution, a fragment of which it contains.
The archiepiscopal palace, built between 1498 and 1509, and in part rebuilt in 1675, was occupied by the kings on the occasion of their coronation. The saloon (salle du Tau), where the royal banquet was held, has an immense stone chimney of the 15th century, medallions of the archbishops of Reims, and portraits of fourteen kings crowned in the city. Among the other rooms of the royal suite, all of which are of great beauty and richness, is that now used for the meetings of the Reims Academy; the building also contains a library. The chapel of the archiepiscopal palace consists of two storeys, of which the upper still serves as a place of worship. Both the chapel and the salle du Tad are decorated with tapestries of the 17th century, known as the Perpersack tapestries, after the Flemish weaver who executed them.
After the cathedral, which it almost equals in size, the most celebrated church is St Remi, once attached to an important abbey, the buildings of which are used as a hospital. St Remi dates from the 11th, 12th, 13th and 15th centuries. The nave and transepts, Romanesque in style, date mainly from the earliest, the façade of the south transept from the latest, of those periods, the choir and apse chapels from the 12th and 13th centuries. The valuable monuments with which the church was at one time filled were pillaged during the Revolution, and even the tomb of the saint is a modern work; but there remain the 12th-century glass windows of the apse and tapestries representing the history of St Remigius, given by Robert de Lenoncourt. The churches of St Jacques, St Maurice (partly rebuilt in 1867), St André, and St Thomas (erected from 1847 to 1853, under the patronage of Cardinal Gotisset, now buried within its walls), are all of minor interest. Of the fine church of St Nicaise only insignificant remains are to be seen.
The town hall, erected in the 17th and enlarged in the 19th century, has a pediment with an equestrian statue ot Louis XIII, and a tall and elegant campanile. It contains a picture gallery, ethnographical, archaeological and other collections, and the public library. There are many old houses, the House of the Musicians (13th century) being so called from the seated figures of musicians which decorate the front.
In 1874 the construction of a chain of detached forts was begun in the vicinity, Reims being selected as one of the chief defences of the northern approaches of Paris. The ridge of St Thierry is crowned with a fort of the same name, which with the neighbouring work of Chenay closes the west side of the place. To the north the hill of Brimont has three works guarding the Laon railway and the Aisne canal. Farther east, on the old Roman road, lies the fort de Fresnes. Due east the hills of Arnay are crowned with five large and important works which cover the approaches from the upper Aisne. Forts Pompelle and Montbré close the south-east side, and the Falaise hills on the Paris side are open and unguarded. The perimeter of the defences is not quite 22 m., and the forts are a mean distance of 6 m. from the centre of the city.
Reims is the seat of an archbishop, a court of assize and a sub-prefect. It is an important centre for the combing, carding and spinning of wool and the weaving of flannel, merino, cloth and woollen goods of all kinds, these industries employing some 24,000 hands; dyeing and "dressing" are also carried on. It is the chief wool market in France, and has a " conditioning house " which determines the loss of weight resulting from the drying of the wool. The manufacture of and trade in champagne is also very important. The wine is stored in large cellars tunnelled in the chalk. Other manufactures are machinery, chemicals, safes, capsules, bottles, casks, candles, soap and paper. The town is well known for its cakes and biscuits.
History-Before the Roman conquest Reims, as Durocortorum, was capital of the Remi, from whose name that of the town was subsequently derived. The Remi made voluntary submission to the Romans, and by their fidelity throughout the various Gallic insurrections secured the special favour of their conquerors. Christianity was established in the town by, the middle of the 3rd century, at which period the bishopric was founded. The consul Jovinus, an influential supporter of the new faith, repulsed the barbarians who invaded Champagne in 336; but the Vandals captured the town in 406 and slew St Nicasus, and Attila afterwards put it to fire and sword. Clovis, after his victory at Soissons (486), was baptized at Reims in 496 by St Remigius. Later kings desired to be consecrated at Reims with the oil of the sacred phial which was believed to have been brought from heaven by a dove for the baptism of Clovis and was preserved in the abbey of St Remi. Meetings of Pope Stephen III with Pippin the Short, and of Leo III. with Charlemagne, took place at Reims; and here Louis the Debonnaire was crowned by Stephen IV. Louis IV. gave the town and countship of Reims to the archbishop Artaldus In 940 Louis VII. gave the title of duke and peer to William of Champagne, archbishop from 1176 to 1202, and the archbishops of Reims took precedence of the other ecclesiastical peers of the realm.

In the 10th century Reims had become a centre of intellectual culture, Archbishop Adalberon, seconded by the monk Gerbert (afterwards Pope Silvester II.), having founded schools where the "liberal arts " were taught. Adalberon was also one of the prime authors of the revolution which put the Capet house in the place of the Carolingians. The most important prerogative of the archbishops was the consecration of the kings of France-a privilege which was exercised, except in a few cases, from the tune of Philip Augustus to that of Charles X. Louis VII. granted the town a communal charter in 1139. The treaty of Troyes (1420) ceded it to the English, who had made a futile attempt to take it by siege in 1360; but they were expelled on the approach of Joan of Arc, who in 1429 caused Charles VII. to be consecrated in the cathedral. A revolt at Reims, caused by the salt tax in 1461, was cruelly repressed by Louis XI. The town sided with the League (1585), but submitted to Henry IV. after the battle of Ivry. In the foreign invasions of 1814 it was captured and recaptured; in 1870-71 it was made by the Germans the seat of a governor-general and impoverished by heavy requisitions. Reims has a university founded by Pope Paul III in 1547. Jean Baptiste Colbert and St. John Baptist de la Salle were born in Reims.
During World War I, heavy bombing, which nearly leveled the city, destroyed the interior of the cathedral, including most of the irreplaceable stained-glass windows. Restored, partly with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, it was reopened in 1938. The town hall (17th cent.) and the old Church of St. Remi (11th-16th cent.) were also gravely damaged. With the rebuilding of the town a lot of the unique historical character disappeared. The American influence is prevalent here - much aid was given for the rebuilding, including the services of an American architect who is largely responsible for the grid layout of the center of the town.. Andrew Carnegie built the library, Rue de Rockefeller running out from the Cathedral square remembers the man who gave for the rebuilding after the heavy bombing of the Notre Dame.
In World War II, on May 7, 1945, German emissaries signed the unconditional surrender of Germany at Allied headquarters in Reims.
In 1990 the city had a population of 185,164, it lies in the Marne dept., NE France, in Champagne. The center of the champagne industry, Reims is situated amid large vineyards. Before the champagne industry took on its present proportions in the 18th cent., the chief products of Reims were woolen textiles. They are still important, and there are many other industries.

The city nowadays: from Clovis to Louis XI, most of France's Kings were crowned in the Gothic cathedral. It was the decision by the French royal court to stage coronations in the cathedral which led to 'champagne' (wine) becoming popular among the nobility of Europe as they were treated to the "king of wines" during the festivities.

Opposite the station, in Square Colbert and at the l. end of the Promenades, is the Roman Triumphal Arch (3rd cent.), known as the Mars Gate (caissons carved under the vaults). At Rue Roosevelt, no. 10, is the Room of the Surrender of 7 May 1945. The Rue Mars ends at the Town Hall (17th cent.), opposite is the Rue de Tambour (at no. 22 is the Gothic house called "House of the Counts of Champagne") and Place du Forum. On the left Vergeur House (13th, 15th, 16th cent.), set up as a museum of old Reims. To the r. of the place (Rue de l'Arbalète), the Renaissance House (1545) where Jean Baptiste de la Salle was born. Take Rue Colbert which ends at Place Royale (built in 1760 to plans of Legendre). In the centre a statue of Louis XV; the statues of the pedestal are by Pigalle. To the end of the place, Rue Cérès, where at no. 30 is the Ponsardin House (beautiful rear façade; interior in Louis XVI style; souvenirs of Colbert). Rue Carnot no. 13 has the entrance to the Chapter courtyard (1530). At Rue M. Dormay is St Jacques church; its portal and lower parts from the 14th cent.; the chancel and side chapels are 16th century. Near the church is the Erlon Place, the commercial centre of the town (see note Novak 308).
[Novak 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318 and 323 depict Reims, too.]

NOVAK 309.  REIMS, 1919 OVER A RUINED CITY:  See note Novak 308.

NOVAK 310.  REIMS 1919, SOUTH TOWER OF THE CATHÉDRAL:  See note Novak 308.

NOVAK 311.  REIMS 1919, RUINED CATHÉDRAL:  See note Novak 308.

NOVAK 312.  REIMS 1919, LOST HOUSE:  See note Novak 308.

NOVAK 313.  REIMS 1919, PLACE D’ERLON:  See about Reims and WW I note Novak 308.  Place d`Erlon, the most important square of Reims and before the terroristic destructions of the Germans from 1914-18 its splendid heart, is entirely-rebuilt after WW 1; nowadays (2003) it is the main pedestrian zone in town, lined with attractive brasseries, cafes and ice-cream shops. It is named after Jean Baptiste Drouet.  

After the first Restoration he was named commander of the 16th military division, but he was soon arrested for conspiring with the Orleans party, to which he was secretly devoted. He escaped, however, and gave in his adhesion to Napoleon, who had returned from Elba. The emperor made him a peer of France, and gave him command of the I. army corps, which formed part of the Army of the North. In the Waterloo campaign d'Erlon's corps formed part of Ney's command on the 16th of June, but, in consequence of an extraordinary series of misunderstandings, took part neither at Ligny nor at Quatre Bras. He was not, however, held to account by Napoleon, and as the latter's practice in such matters was severe to the verge of injustice, it may be presumed that the failure was not due to d'Erlon. He was in command of the right wing of the French army throughout the great battle of the 18th of June, and fought in the closing operations around Paris. At the second Restoration d'Erlon fled into Germany, only returning to France after the amnesty of 1825. He was not restored to the service until the accession of Louis Philippe, in whose interests he had engaged in several plots and intrigues. As commander of the 12th military division (Nantes), he suppressed the legitimist agitation in his district and caused the arrest of the duchess of Berry (1832). His last active service was in Algeria, of which country he was made governor-general in 1834 at the age of seventy. He returned to France after two years, and was made marshal of France shortly before his death at Paris on the 25th of January 1844. 

NOVAK 314.  REIMS 1919, AN ALLEY WITH THE CATHÉDRAL:  See note Novak 308.

NOVAK 315.  REIMS 1919, REMAINS OF OLD GATES:  See note Novak 308. The oldest monument in Reims is the Mars Gate (so called from a temple to Mars in the neighbourhood), a triumphal arch 108 ft. in length by 43 in height, consisting of three archways flanked by columns. It is popularly supposed to have been erected in honour of Augustus when Agrippa made the great roads terminating at the town, but probably belongs to the 3rd or 4th century.

NOVAK 316.  REIMS 1919, IN RUINS:  See note Novak 308.

NOVAK 323.  CATHÉDRAL OF REIMS AFTER THE WAR:  See note Novak 308.

NOVAK 326.  SNOW IN  AMSTERDAM, THE KOEPELKERK:  See about Amsterdam note Novak 104. 
The history of the Koepelkerk goes back to 1668 when the then famous architect Adrian Dortsman started the construction of the dome-shaped church. An eye-catching detail was and still is the swan on the small tower on the top of the beautiful copper roof. The swan is the symbol of the Lutheran Church. On 18 September 1822 the church burned down almost completely and it took four years to rebuilt it. In 1830 magnificent Bätz organ was installed and, even today, is still highly appreciated by experts. A lot of artists depicted the church and it romantic neighbourhood, a. o.  Vincent van Gogh and Tavik Frantisek Šimon. In 1935 the church ceased to be a place of worship for the Protestant community and remained abandoned for forty years. After a major facelift in 1975 it became a conference hall for theRenaissance Amsterdam Hotel. 3 February 1993 there was again fire. In 1995 the church was completely renovated. It is a pity and shameless that a lot of valuable old buildings in the neighbourhood have been  destroyed recently to make place for  worthless inartistic new buildings. 

NOVAK 338. PORTRAIT OF JOSEF MANES:

Josef  Manes.

NOVAK 341.  LEDA ( PIERRE  LOUYS):  

The story from Greek mythology of Leda and the Swan: Leda was Queen of Sparta. Noted for her great beauty, she liked to bathe in the river Eurotas, where Zeus, King of the gods, first saw her. To be close to her, Zeus metamorphosed into a white swan, and made a fierce eagle pretend to be pursuing him. Taking pity on the swan, Leda took him under her arms to protect him, not knowing that the great white bird was the mightiest of the gods. Zeus proceeded to seduce her and following their union, Leda brought forth two eggs. One of the eggs produced Helen (the future Helen of Troy) and Pollux. From the other, came Castor and Clytemnestra, the children of her husband Tyndareus. Two of the off springs become War Gods, Castor and Polydeuces, and the other two become mortal women, Helen and Clytemnestra. Helen is later kidnapped by the Trojans, which caused the war between the Trojans and the Greeks. This in turn causes the destruction of Troy by Agamemnon, King of Argos, who was later killed by Leda's other daughter, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife. Agamemnon, victor of the Trojan War, sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to Artemis in return for a fair wind to Troy, for which act Clytæmnestra murdered him in his bath. Her other two children, Elektra and Orestes then, with some ado, avenged their father: the subject of Euripides' Oresteian Trilogy.
The story of Leda and the Swan fixed the amorous connotation of swan symbolism for centuries to follow. [It should be mentioned that some versions of the tale instead claim that it was the goddess Nemesis who laid the egg from which Helen hatched. Additionally, some ancient sources state that Polydeuces was also the son of Zeus, while his twin brother Castor was Tyndareus's child.]

"LEDA AND THE SWAN" by William B. Yeats (1865-1939) a noted Irish poet, playwright, born at Sandymount, near Dublin, Ireland.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs ?
And how can body, laid in that white rush
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies ?

A sudden shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop ?

from THE TOWER, 1928

NOVAK 344.  ENTRANCE TO THE PARIS MARKET-HALL:  The print depicts a scene at the Halles, N.E. of the Louvre. On the paper in the middle of the print you can read the word "AVIS" (=message). 
Once upon a time there was a Cemetery, called the Cemetery of the Innocents because its church was dedicated to the Holy Innocents, the children killed by Herod after the birth of Jesus. It was just outside Paris. Then the city grew and engulfed it. By 1785 there were more dead people in Paris than live ones. At the side of the cemetery was a charnel-house, a place where bones were put when a grave was opened because, through lack of space, it had to be re-used. (This is still standard practice in France, where the basic plot in a cemetery is sold for a five-year term.) Near the charnel-house was a drinking-fountain, the Fontaine des Innocents. Opposite was a church, Saint-Eustache. In 1785 the charnel-house was pulled down and the cemetery dug over. 1,200,000 skeletons were removed and taken across town to the Catacombs. The site then became the central food market of Paris. Under Napoleon III the architect Baltard built a cast-iron covered market there, known as Les Halles.
By 1968, this market was too small and too central to cope with the needs of six million Parisians, and it was moved out to Rungis, in the southern suburbs, leaving behind it a vast empty space in the heart of Paris. The argument over what to do with it went on for the next twenty years. First, the whole site was excavated to a depth of eighty feet, producing the largest hole in Europe. In this space were installed seven underground floors of shops, offices, car-parks and stations. The nucleus of the shopping centre, Le Forum des Halles, opened in September 1979. There is a new park, its alleyways named after poets, its entrances built of iron in the style of Baltard. At the North side of the park a sort of arena faces the church of  Saint Eustache [see note Novak 387].

NOVAK 347. PORTRAIT OF PAVLICEK (Little Pavel).

Pavel  Šimon (1920-1958).

NOVAK 348.  PLACE DE LA BASTILLE, PARIS:  See note Novak 249.

NOVAK 349.  RUE ROYALE AND LA MADELEINE, PARIS:  The neo-classical La Madeleine is north of Place de la Concorde at the end of Rue Royale. The monumental staircases on the south side has one of the best panoramas of Paris, down rue Royale, to place de la Concorde, across la Seine to l'Assemblée Nationale. In 1764 it was decided to build a church dedicated to St Mary Magdalene, but the work dragged on until the Revolution. Napoleon decided to pull down the first building and put up instead a temple consecrated to the glory of the soldiers of the great army. The work was entrusted to the architect Vignon. After the fall of the Empire, Louis XVIII decided to return the building to its original purpose. In 1828, the architect Hervé took Vignon`s place. Finally, in 1842, the church was finished. It has the form of an ancient temple. The building is large and perfectly proportioned, being 354 ft. long, 141 ft wide and 90 ft high. The 52 Corinthian columns which surround it are 66ft high.They support a sculptured frieze. The side walls are further ornamentated with niches in which the statues of various saints have been placed. 

[Novak 243 and 429 depict La Madeleine and Rue Royale, too.]

NOVAK 350.  NOCTURNE IN STRAMBERK:  Stramberk in N-E Moravia, is a town with a decidedly medieval character, now scheduled as a historic site. The first documents mentioning the town date from 1211. Koutoc Hill which dominates the town, has a small belfry at the summit; from the top we have a magnifique view of the whole town, its narrow streets, its small, mostly wooden cottages nestling under the bastions of the castle, and of the castle itself which is surmounted by the 13^th  century “Stramberska truba” keep. The walls and the Truba tower were rebuilt into an out-look tower in 1903. The folk architecture of wooden cottages, built in the 18^th  and 19^th  centuries, makes this part of Štramberk unique throughout the country. Most of the cottages have also been declared Cultural Treasure. The District Folk-History Musuem offers palaeolithic exhibits excavated from Kotouc and Sipka. Some of the exhibitions are devoted to the castle and town. Many unique samples of folk costumes and other historical collections are shown as well. The large Gothic castle dates from the beginnig of the 14^th  century. During the hussite movement it was a strategic point in Middle Moravia. At the end of the WWII the castle was destroyed by fire.
In nearby Sipka Cave a child`s jaw dating from the Neandertal era has been found, as have been weapons and decorative objects of the period of the old Celts.In Štamberk, next to the square, you can see seasonal exhibitions of paintings by Zdenek Burian, a world- famous artist and illustrator of adventure stories, that were inspirated by the excavations in Sipka Cave. These exhibitions were first displayed in 1992.

NOVAK 351.  PLACE DE L`ÉTOILE IN THE RAIN, PARIS:  The square on the top of the Chaillot Hill has been known as Place de l`Étoile since the eighteenth century. Étoile means star, and already in those days five avenues met there. In 1854 the square was redesigned with twelve avenues. In the centre of the star stands the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile. In 1806 Napoleon asked the architect Chalgrin to construct a gigantic triumphal arch in honour of the French Army. The top of the Chaillot hill had to be levelled, and the foundations gave some difficulty, so that by the time the new Empress Marie-Louise arrived in 1810, the arch was only a few feet high. As the Emperor insisted that his bride must drive into Paris through this new gateway, Chalgrin had to get friends from the Theatres of Paris to construct a fake arch of wood and canvas for the occasion. When Napoleon was defeated and exiled in 1814, work stopped, not to be started again till Louis-Philippe ordered it in 1832. It was finished in 1836. In 1840 the body of Napoleon I was carried through in a procession and a snowstorm on its way to the Invalides. In 1854 the twelve avenues were completed by Baron Haussmann. In 1920 the Unknown Soldier was buried under the centre of the Arch. Now the square is called Place Charles de Gaulle. [See also note Novak 93.]

NOVAK 352.  NOTRE-DAME IN WINTER, PARIS:  See note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185.

NOVAK 354.  SALOME ( O.WILDE):

The irate peer left a card at Wilde's club addressed: "To Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite" (sic). Wilde, taking it that the writer meant "Sodomite," sued for libel. However, after a sensational trial, Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour for homosexual practices. Wilde's treatment by the public, press and the judiciary had been a monstrous injustice, the punishment meted out to Wilde was harsh and brutal beyond any reason;  the prison system of the time being generally cruel, not just to unfortunates like Wilde, but young children guilty of nothing more than poverty and hunger. Sent to Wandsworth Prison in November, 1895, Wilde was subsequently transferred to Reading Gaol. Bankrupt and ruined in health, Wilde left prison in 1897 and settled, bitter and broken, in Paris under the pseudonym "Sebastian Melmoth" (the name of his favourite martyr from Melmoth the Wanderer, a novel written by his great-uncle, Charles Maturin, in 1820). Of his time as a prisoner he wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).

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The Salomé legend has its beginnings in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark (Matthew 14: 3-11, Mark 6: 17-28), which relate the beheading of John the Baptist at the instigation of Herodias, wife of Herod, who was angered by John's characterization of her marriage as incestuous. In both accounts, Herodias uses her daughter (unnamed in scripture but known to tradition, through Josephus, as Salomé) as the instrument of the prophet's destruction. According to the Gospel of Mark:
. . . when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains and chief estates of Galilee. And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, "Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee." And he sware unto her, "Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto half of my kingdom." And she went forth and said unto her mother, "What shall I ask?" And she said, "The head of John the Baptist." And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, "I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist" And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake and for their sakes that sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought, and he went and beheaded him in prison. And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel; and the damsel gave to her mother. (6: 21-28, King James Version)

Clearly, if we are to follow this account, all guilt rests with Herodias, and such was the prevailing belief until the Baptist became a more widely venerated saint, with the result that the image of Salomé became increasingly negative.
The Salomé theme was a prominent one in both literature and the visual arts until the end of the Renaissance, when its prominence began to lessen, until it was revived in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Herne, whose Atta Troll served to inspire an entire series of explorations by such divergent authors as Flaubert, Mallarmé and Huysmans, ending with Oscar Wilde's Salomé. 

Those who are interested in the English version of this tragedy in one act, original written in French, and translated by his friend Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, find the text after the notes of Novak's catalogue.

NOVAK 357.  RAG-DEALERS UNDER THE PONT NEUF, PARIS:  See note Novak 398.

NOVAK 362.   DAUGHTER OF  A WEREWULF:  in a book from Rachilde [= pseudonym for the French female author Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1862-1853)], A. Novak, Prague.
Under the assumed name Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860/62?-1953) wrote over sixty works of fiction, drama, poetry, memoir, and criticism, including Monsieur Vénus, one of the most famous examples of decadent fiction. She was closely associated with the literary journal Mercure de France,[together with her husband Alfred Valette she set up the journal], inspired parts of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and mingled with all the literary lights of the day. Prosecuted for obscenity in her novel Monsieur Venus, Rachilde, an apparently genteel young woman from a provincial bourgeois family, burst onto the French literary scene in 1884 amid scandal. This story of a sadistic transvestite and her pretty male lover was the first in a long series of novels, plays and stories dealing often in the most macabre and sensationalistic terms with sadism, gender inversion, and sexual desire. At the heart of the French literary world, Rachilde's life and writing defied patriarchal rules, particularly in relation to female sexuality, but she consistently and vehemently rejected feminism. Her extraordinary life and work, including a vast output as a literary reviewer, offer a prism through which to view the vibrant social and cultural history of France from the belle époque to the Second World War. After 1889 she held salon at the revue littéraire "Le Mercure de France", rue de L'Échaudé, in Paris later rue de Condé. The epoch of the classical toilets had passed and Rachilde cut her hair à la garçonne. Her salon attracted young wrirers like Jules Renard, Pierre Louys, Emile Verhaeren, Jean Moreas, Francis Carco, André Gide, Henri Bataille, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, Léon Bloy, Rémi de Gourmont, Joris-Karl Huysman, Henri Gauthier-Villars (called Willy), Jean Lorrain, Laurent Tailhade and Paul Léautaud. [for an excellent biography read: "Rachilde. Decadence, Gender and the Woman Write", 224pp 10 b/w illus, bibliog, index, by Diana Holmes Professor of French, University of Leeds;or: "Rachilde and French Women's Authorship. From Decadence to Modernism", 303 pp by Melanie C. Hawthorne, associate professor of Modern Languages at Texas A&M University, College Station.

NOVAK 370. QUAI DES GRANDS-AUGUSTINS:  

NOVAK 371.  QUAI AUX FLEURS, PARIS: 

NOVAK 374.  ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSELLER AT  NOTRE DAME DE PARIS:  See note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185 about Notre Dame.  About booksellers note Novak 56.

NOVAK 377. ROSE WINDOW OF  NOTRE DAME, PARIS:  About Notre Dame see note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185. About the rose Novak 170.

NOVAK 380.  COUR DU DRAGON, PARIS:  In the quarter Montparnasse , which was  the artists' area and sheltered several workshops, could be found the Court of the Dragon. From 1650-1717 the Académie Foubert existed at the crossing of Saint-Benoît/Rue des Egouts. It was demolished in 1730 and at this site the picturesque Cour du Dragon was built. The site is to be found at Rue de Rennes 50, between Place Saint-Germain-des Prés, Rue St-Benoît, Boulevard Saint-Germain, Rue de Rennes and Rue du Dragon. It was one of the two royal academies that remained after the decret of Louis XIV of 22 December 1690. Opened at the end of the eighteenth century to house workshops and houses, this yard gave onto Rue de Rennes by a manificent rococo porch topped by a sculptured dragon. It is  the work of Paul Ambroise Slodtz . [Slodtz,  Paul Ambroise  (* 2.7.1702 Paris-† 16.12.1758 Paris), son of the sculptor Sebastien Slodtz, from an, in origin Flemish, family of sculptors. He made the sculpture in 1732, it is haut-relief in stone (polychrome); the dimensions are 1.90 m high, 2.95 long and 1.35 deep. Décor de la clef de l'arc servant de souche au balcon du portail de l'hôtel particulier du financier Antoine Crozat (1655-1738), construit par l'architecte Pierre de Vigny (1690-1772), de 1728 à 1732 et situé à l'entrée de la cour du Dragon (disparue), rue de l'Egoût (actuelle rue de Rennes).1955 acquired by the Louvre as a gift (N° inventaire  RF 2749). The Hôtel was demolished in 1935.]
The court was demolished in 1930/35, and since 1958 a concrete building took the place of its entry on Rue de Rennes. The dragon, which was taken down in 1957, can be seen in the Louvre museum, in the Richelieu court. Formerly St Margaritha, who glorified over a dragon, was worshipped in this quarter. The Rue du Dragon got her name in 1808.

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Robert W. Chambers (26 May 1865 - 16 December 1933; American artist and writer, primarily of popular romantic fiction); In the Court of the Dragon [from The King in Yellow, 1895], excerpt: "…….I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the rue de Rennes to the rue du Dragon. It is an "Impasse;" traversable only for foot passengers. Over the entrance on the rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon. Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends that give on the two streets. Hugegates, swung back during the day into the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken pavement collects unsavory pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of second-hand dealers, any by iron workers. All day longthe place rings with the clink of hammers, and the clank of metalbars. Unsavory as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort,and hard, honest work above. Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone. When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone. I had to walk awhile before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and I took it. From the Arc to the rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour, especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the mercy of Sunday fete makers. There had been time before I passed under the Dragon's wings. to meet my enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, now refuge was close at hand. Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our concierge and his wife walked about among them with their black poodle, keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned their greetings and hurried in. All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in which the gas burned dimly. My apartment was at the top of a house, half way down the court, reached by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of passage-way intervening. I set my foot on the threshold of the open door, the friendly, old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw him, ten paces off. He must have entered the court with me. He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the time had come. Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by the entrance on the rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should escape. It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down he court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway, and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an archway; it was that of avault. The great doors on the rue du Dragon were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened had arrived: it gathered and boredown on me from the fathomless shadows; the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless I set my back against the barred doors and defied him." The presence of this fantastic animal predestines quite well the location of an encounter with a fiendish being, such as the one related in In the Court of the Dragon. Chambers makes a precise and accurate description of the place, mentioning the old high houses with shaky stairs and the blacksmiths' shops, but curiously speaks of an iron dragon and not a stone one". …. ========================================================================================================== 

Extract of " La vie en fleur "(1922) by Anatole France (1844-1924; recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature, born in Paris, France. His original name was Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault): " ….Le mercredi, jour de congé, ma mère me laissait sortir l'après-midi seul avec Fontanet qui lui inspirait une entière confiance. à un certain égard, elle n'avait pas tort : Fontanet ne faisait jamais de sottises, mais, volontiers, il en faisait faire aux autres. Ma mère ne pouvait pas pénétrer le caractère de Fontanet, qui se montrait toujours à son avantage devant elle et déployait ce qu'il faut d'hypocrisie pour obtenir l'estime du monde. Nous profitâmes de cette confiance pour aller visiter la veuve Bargouiller. La rue de Rennes n'était pas encore percée et l'on pénétrait dans la Cour du Dragon par une rue étroite, sous une voûte où se tordait un effroyable dragon. Il existe encore; c'est un morceau d'un très bon style Louis XV. On l'a peint en vert. Il serait plus beau dans le gris de la pierre. Au temps lointain dont je parle, il était peint d'un rouge vif qui en augmentait l'horreur. Et il semblait que sa gueule enflammée fît un vacarme épouvantable, car, en s'en approchant, on entendait un bruit auprès duquel celui des moulins à foulon, qui effraya tant Sancho Pança, passerait pour un doux murmure. Ce tapage étourdissant était produit, à la vérité, par des centaines de marteaux qui battaient le fer ensemble. Ce passage, habité par des cyclopes, est hérissé de grilles peintes en rouge comme le dragon de la voûte. Nous cheminions à travers ce fer retentissant. L'aventure promettait d'être assez merveilleuse. Enfin, vers le bout du passage, au numéro indiqué par La Chesnais, nous poussons une porte et nous pénétrons dans des ténèbres gluantes, nous respirons une odeur de moisissure et nous nous heurtons à de vieux fûts, à des échelles, à des planches pourries. Le bruit des marteaux sans nombre, qui nous étourdissait tout à l'heure, nous parvient assourdi et nous rassure. Après quelques instants, nos yeux, s'accoutumant à l'obscurité, découvrent un escalier tournant très rapide, où pend, pour soutien, une grosse corde grasse. Après avoir monté à tâtons une vingtaine de marches, nos mains touchent une porte ; ne trouvant pas de sonnette, je gratte doucement. Fontanet frappe plus fort. -qui frappe ? Demande une voix rude. -nous. -que demandez-vous ? -Madame Bargouiller. Des pas approchent lentement, la serrure grince, la porte s'ouvre. Madame Bargouiller paraît rougeoyante, coiffée en nid de vipères, la poitrine mal contenue par une camisole à fleurs. La chambre carrelée servait de cuisine et de chambre à coucher ; un grand lit, un petit, un buffet de bois, quelques chaises de paille en composaient l'ameublement. Une de ces chaises n'avait que trois pieds. Des ustensiles de cuisine et des images de sainteté étaient pendus aux murs. Des bouteilles et des verres sales garnissaient la cheminée. La veuve nous demanda d'une voix adoucie ce que nous voulions. …. "

NOVAK 385.  NOTRE-DAME IN TWILIGHT, PARIS:  See note Novak 96, Novak134 and Novak 185.

NOVAK 386.  PONT MARIE IN WINTER,  PARIS:  The Pont Marie was one of the group of three bridges designed to open up the Ile Saint Louis when its urbanisation began in the 17th century. It joins the island to the right bank and is the counterpart to the Pont de la Tournelle, along the same axis but on the left bank side. This system was completed by the Pont Saint Louis joining up with the Ile de la Cité. This bridge was the due to the obstinacy of the enterprising Christophe Marie, who as early as 1605 proposed its construction and after whom it is named. 

Owing to disagreements between the owners of the houses and the administration responsible for bridge maintenance, the structure quickly fell into disrepair and during the night of 1st March 1658, the Seine in flood carried off both arches on the Ile Saint Louis side along with the twenty houses built on them. This disaster claimed sixty lives, quite apart from the loss of property and buildings. It was only in 1660 that a wooden bridge restored a link, along with a toll-gate in order to finance the rebuilding of the stone structure. This only began in 1667 after Colbert intervened and the two arches were at last finished in 1670. The houses were not however rebuilt. Indeed the memory of the disaster of 1658 led to the demolition of other houses in 1740, fearing a further accident due to flooding. The decision taken in 1769 to do away with all constructions on the bridges of Paris led to their complete disappearance in 1788. As of this date, the structure underwent no particular changes. Like most of the old stone bridges, its "hump" was gradually reduced, in particular during the restoration of 1850 to 1851, but this did not significantly change its appearance. Since then, the Pont Marie has retained the appearance we know today. It is curious to note that the eight niches which have decorated the structure since the 17th century have never been filled with statues.
Construction date: October 1614 first stone laid - completed in 1635. Two arches on Ile Saint Louis side collapsed in March 1658 - Repaired in 1670.
Total length: about 92 m between abutments.
Address: Quai d'Anjou, Voie Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris.
The Isle of  St Louis is the result of a land-making operation. In 1630, three contractors, the engineer Marie and two associates, Pouletier and Le Regrattier (whose names have been given to a bridge and two streets on the island) undertook to join two islets, the Isle of Cows and the Isle of our Lady, then unbuilt upon;this was to form a new part of the city, which was to be stricktly regulated. In the 17th and 18th cents., the Isle was covered with private mansions which have, for the most part, retained their former aspect. 

NOVAK 387.  ÉGLISE SAINT-EUSTACHE, PARIS:  St Eustache (1532—c. 1650), though its construction displays many Gothic characteristics, belongs wholly, with the exception of a Classical façade of the 18th century, to the Renaissance period, being unique in this respect among the more important of French churches. The church contains the sarcophagus and statue (by A. Coysevox) of Colbert and the tombs of other eminent men.
The church is named after St. Eustace; his date of birth unknown, he died 29 March, 625. He was second abbot of the Irish monastery of Luxeuil in France, and his feast is commemorated in the Celtic martyrologies on the 29th of March. He was one of the first companions of St. Columbanus, a monk of Bangor (Ireland), who with his disciples did much to spread the Gospel over Central and Southern Europe. When Columbanus, the founder of Luxeuil, was banished from the Kingdom of Burgundy, on account of his reproving the morals of King Thierry, the exiled abbot recommended his community to choose Eustace as his successor. Subsequently Columbanus settled at Bobbio in Italy. Three years after his appointment (613), when Clothaire II became ruler of the triple Kingdom of France, the abbot of Luxeuil was commissioned, by royal authority, to proceed to Bobbio for the purpose of recalling Columbanus. The latter, however, setting forth his reasons in a letter to the king, declined to return, but asked that Clothaire would take under his protection the monastery and brethren of Luxeuil. During the twelve years that followed, under the administration of the abbot Eustace, the monastery continued to acquire renown as a seat of learning and sanctity. Through the royal patronage, its benefices and lands were increased, the king devoting a yearly sum, from his own revenues, towards its support. Eustace and his monks devoted themselves to preaching in remote districts, not yet evangelized, chiefly in the north-eastern extremities of Gaul. Their missionary work extended even to Bavaria. Between the monasteries of Luxeuil in France and that of Bobbio in Italy (both founded by St. Columbanus) connection and intercourse seem to have long been kept up.  

NOVAK 388.  BIRD MARKET, PARIS:

NOVAK 389. SNOWY ROAD: Road to Zeleznice (near Jicin)

NOVAK 394: SELF-PORTRAIT.

T.F. Šimon (1877-1942).

NOVAK 396, PORTRAIT OF RUDOLF RUZICKA:

Rudolph Ruzicka  (1883-1978). Emigrated to the US from Czechoslovakia with his parents at the age of ten. He received some drawing instruction at the Hull House in Chicago before leaving school and becoming an apprentice wood engraver. Between 1900 and 1902 he worked for several Chicago firms and attended classes at the Art Institute. He moved to New York in 1903 and worked for the American Bank Note Company and the Calkins and Holden advertising agency. During this time he also attended classes at the Art Students League. In 1910 he receive d his first major commission for System magazine. He had several exhibitions throughout his career including the “Premiere Exposition” of the Societé de la Gravure, Paris, Anderson Galleries, New York, Grolier Club and the Century Association, New York. In 1935 his work was in an exhibition sponsored by the AIGA and he was awarded the AIGA Gold Medal. He moved to Massachusetts in 1948 and then eventually settled in Vermont. At the age of ninety he created the “Dartmouth Medal” for the American Library Association.

NOVAK 397. QUAI ST-MICHEL, PARIS:

NOVAK 398. PONT NEUF, LA CITÉ:  

The statue of Henri IV mounted on a horse stands on this platform, replacing - at Louis XVIII's wish - the one broken up by the revolutionaries, which dated back to 1614. At the request of Henri IV, above the second arch was the "La Samaritaine" pump which provided the Palais du Louvre, the Tuileries and the neighbourhoods with water from the Seine. On its main face there was a bas-relief in gilded bronze of the meeting of Christ and the Samaritan at Jacob's well. The building was topped by a bell tower and an astronomical clock, which were demolished and replaced a century later.  

[Novak 357 and 401 have the same bridge as subject.]

NOVAK 400.  BOURSE DU COMMERCE, PARIS:  The Paris Produce and Commodity Exchange through eight centuries of history.
I . The Era of the Hôtels (XIIIth - XVIIIth centuries):
The building, constructed at the beginning of the XIIIth century, belonged to Jean II de Nesles, one of the most powerful nobles in the kingdom. Since his marriage to Eustache de Saint-Pol was childless, he transferred his ownership of the Hôtel to Saint-Louis, who, in turn, gave it to his mother, Queen Blanche de Castille.
The Hôtel belonged to our kings until 1296, when Philippe le Bel gave it to his brother, Count Charles de Valois, d'Anjou and d'Alençon. The Hôtel was then willed to his son, Philippe de Valois, who, in 1327, offered it to the King of Bohemia, John of Luxemburg, son of Emperor Henry VII. He became attached to the place and made it his main residence.
Upon John of Bohemia's death, the l'Hôtel came back to the Crown via the marriage of his daughter Bonne de Luxemburg to Prince Jean de Normandie, future King of France (Jean II le Bon). Charles, his son, the future Charles V, transferred the Hôtel to Amadeus VI of Savoy in the Treaty of 1354.
For reasons unknown, the Hôtel did not pass to Amadeus' heir, as stipulated by the Treaty. Louis, Duke d'Anjou, son of King Jean, was the owner until his death in 1384. His widow, Marie de Chatillon (House of Blois) sold the 'Hôtel for 12,000 livres in 1388 to Charles VI, who offered it to his brother Louis, Duke de Touraine and d'Orléans.
The Hôtel, the favorite residence of successive Dukes of Orléans, was renamed the Hôtel d'Orléans. One of the Dukes of Orléans, who was to become Louis XII, got rid of parts of the estate before being crowned King.
Through his preaching, a Cordelier (Franciscan friar) named Jean Tisseran, the confessor of King Charles VIII, converted a great number of debauched women. Touched by their redemption, the Duke of Orléans gave them a part of the Hôtel in 1498. This portion of the building became a convent where two hundred cloistered women lived; for eighty years it was called the "Convent of the Repented Daughters".
The remainder of the Hôtel was divided between Duke of Orléans' Constable and Chancellor.
These gifts were confirmed by letters of patent dated June 16, 1499.
In 1572, Catherine de Medicis acquired the entire site and commissioned improvements from the architect Jean Bullant, designer of the Chateau of the Grand Condé, who transformed it into a magnificent palace. The "Convent of the Repented Daughters" was moved to the rue Saint-Denis. Her "death near Saint-Germain, in the ruins of a great house", had been predicted to the Queen. It so happened that the Tuileries Palace was located in the parish of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Well-known for her superstition, the Queen chose to reside in the Hôtel d'Orléans, located in the parish of Saint-Eustache.
The Queen's Astrological Column is today the only intact remnant of that era. It is said that, from the top of this column, the Queen and her Florentine magus Rugierri scrutinized the stars to preside over the destiny of the kingdom.
In 1601, twelve years after Catherine de Medicis' death, the Hôtel was sold by her heirs to Henri IV's sister, Catherine de Bourbon.
On Catherine's death, Charles de Bourbon, the Duc de Soissons, purchased the Hôtel and named it after himself. Marie de France, the wife of Thomas de Savoy, Prince of Carignan, inherited the Hôtel de Soissons from his father, Charles de Bourbon.
Victor Amadeus of Savoy, Prince of Carignan, heir to the Hôtel de Soissons in 1718, was the last owner. A speculator in paper currency, a system instituted by the Scottish financier John Law, the Prince opened his gardens for the first time in 1720 to the Paris Stock Exchange. In 1740 the Prince, ruined, was forced to sell the entire estate to pay his creditors. The empty Hôtel was destroyed in 1748. The provostship saved the column from destruction by
purchasing it through the intervention of the prevost, Bernage.

II . The era of the Grain Market (XVIIIth - XIXth centuries):
During the XVIIIth century, France suffered repeated famines caused by droughts, which had as a consequence speculation in grains. To deal with this situation, the Public Authority decided to implement a genuine policy of grain storage. This decision led to the construction of a new covered market (halle) to replace the old ones dating from the Middle Ages.
The site of the now-razed Hôtel de Soissons was naturally chosen for the new covered Grain Market (Halle aux Blés). Indeed, its geographical location near the Seine River allowed easy transport of grains, which was carried out mainly by waterway. This project remained a dead letter for almost twenty years.
In 1763, King Louis XV granted the necessary letters of patent for the works, which were entrusted to the architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières. He erected a building inspired by neo-classicism reminiscent of the Roman Coliseum: a vast rotunda with a central courtyard open to the sky. Twenty-five arcades allowed access. The unloading of grain took place under six covered arches, which were equipped with windlasses leading to the storage areas located upstairs. The Medicis Column was included in the market, and is the only element cutting the facade's circular line. A fountain and a sundial were added.
The architect's originality consisted in using only stone, bricks and metal reinforcement, coupled with a system of light vaults.
Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières' ingenuity can be seen in the ascending spiral staircase, which was reserved to the grain porters and has remained to the present day. It is composed of two identical independent ramps, allowing ascent and descent without meeting, which made the task of the porters carrying the sacks of grain much easier. The same type of staircase can be found at Chambord.
The endemic increase in the population of Paris quickly caused the storage space to be insufficient. In 1783, twenty years after its construction, it was decided to erect a dome to protect the rotunda and to store goods. The works were commissioned from the architects Guillaume Legrand and Jacques Molinos. The Halle aux Blés thus became the largest vaulted space in France.
Destroyed by fire in 1802, the dome was not reconstructed until 1813, due to financial problems; the architect François-Joseph Bélanger designed in a metal framework.
In the XIXth century, grain transport by rail and its storage in warehouses on the periphery of Paris caused the Halle aux Blés to be abandoned in 1878.

III . The era of the Produce and Commodity Exchange (XIXth - XXth centuries):
Abandoned, the Halle aux Blés was to be razed. Fortunately, in 1880, a committee of shopkeepers, all members of the Chamber of Commerce, suggested transforming it into an official Goods Exchange. Indeed, unlike other large European cities, Paris did not have a venue exclusively devoted to commercial transactions. Moreover, the multiplicity of premises throughout the capital where quotations did take place led to a considerable waste of time.

He added a mezzanine and a floor inside the dome. Finally, he constructed a monumental portico decorated with a huge allegorical pediment executed by Croissy, representing the City of Paris surrounded by Commerce and Industry.
The project also included the erection around the building of statues representing the great cities of France, but the money for the financing was never collected.
The lower part of the dome was covered in brick masonry, on which was hung a huge canvas-backed painting located twenty meters off the ground, with a surface of 1,400 square meters.
This painting, composed of four panels symbolizing international trade, is a remarkable example of the decorative painting of public edifices of the time : the "Pompier" style (peinture Pompier). The four panels are separated by characters painted in trompe-l'oeil style by Alexis de Mazerolles. This work was carried out between 1886 and 1889.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CURRENT ACTIVITIES OF THE PRODUCE AND COMMODITY EXCHANGE
In 1994, the CCIP purchased the building from the City of Paris. The quotation activities remain, but there are fewer than in the past. Exchanges are still regularly held for free markets, but for futures markets, only the white sugar market is held here.

NOVAK 401.  SOUS LE PONT NEUF,  PARIS:  See note Novak 398.

NOVAK 402. QUAI DES ORFÈVRES, PARIS:  Quai des Orfevres is situated on the island Isle de la Cité in the Seine between the bridges Pont Neuf and Pont Saint Michel, opposite to the Quai des Grands Augustins. Orfèvre=goldsmith.

NOVAK 403. QUAI MALAQUAI,  PARIS:  This quai is situated opposite to the Louvre, at the other side of the Seine, between the bridges Pont du Carrousel and Pont des Arts. Here you find also bouquinistes.

NOVAK 407.  APSE OF  NOTRE DAME IN WINTER, PARIS:  See note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185.
  
NOVAK 414.  NOCTURNE IN TANGIER:  See note Novak 198. 

NOVAK 415.  SQUARE IN  KROMERIZ IN WINTER:  Kromeriz (Ger. Kremsier) is located in Moravia - eastern part of Czech Republic. The city, also called "Hana`s Athens" because of its beautiful historic landmarks, is an exciting example of different architectural styles and cultural history. The population is over 30,000 habitants living on both banks of river Moravia. Kromeríz stands on the site of an earlier ford across the river Morava, at the foot of the Chriby mountain range dominating the central part of Moravia. The gardens and castle of Kromeríz offer an exceptionally complete and well preserved example of a European Baroque princely residence and its associated gardens.
The word "Kromeriz" is of Slavic origin. It refers to someone respectable within his own tribe and famous even outside the territory in question.
In the Great Moravian Era (9th Century AD), the area accommodated a Slavic fortified settlement that guarded the important intersection of trading paths at a ford across the river of Morava. The old Salt Path - leading from the Austrian Salt Chamber to the north of Moravia - and the Amber Path - stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea - interlaced one another in these places.
This junction held its importance through the Romanesque age as a Slavic market town with homestead. Finally, Bishop Bruno of Schaumburg (1245 - 81) built the forts and walls and endowed the market town with the freedoms and privileges of a city. He founded a Chapter Church of Saint Maurice with the capitol and in the former market place he rebuilt a Parish Church of Virgin Mary. On the place of former Romanesque courts, he built an Early-gothic castle as a representative seat and centre of feudal organization of the Bishop of Olomouc.
In 1470 the town occupied by Hungarian army withstood a siege of King Jiří.
Bishop Stanislav Thurzo (1497-1560) originated the modifications of castle in a Renaissance style.
Kromeriz was conquered and plundered by the Swedish Marshal Torstenson in 1643 - only two years short of the end of the Thirty Years` War. The city along with the chateau were totally burned down and ruined. In 1645 Kromeriz was defeated by a new Swedish invasion and in that year, about 1200 people died of plaque. Out of 244 farmstead, only 69 remained inhabited though partly ruined. It took years and years for the city to recover from such a severe deadly blow. In 1665 a renovator of the town, Bishop Karel Lichtenstein from Kastelkorn, built an Episcopal Mint in Kromeriz, in the same year, he ratified privileges to Jewish community.
From 1665-1675 the Baroque Orchard - The Flower Garden was built.
1680.  The town was affected by plaque. In that and the following year, the town was closed because of the plaque epidemic. 
1725.  The town built the Holy Trinity's plaque pillar to remember the plaque in 1715-1716. Baroque rebuilding of the Parish Church of Virgin Mary continued in that time. The works continued until 1736.
1745.  Bishop Jacob Arnost from Lichtenstein reassured privileges to the Kromeriz Jewish community. In that year, Ferdinand Julius Troyer, a favourite person of Empress Marie Teresa, was elected Bishop.
About 1800.  Napoleonic army occupied the town of Kromeriz. Emperor Franz I. gave the town sixth market place.
1815.  Building of the bridge across the river Morava began.
1848-1849.  Constitutional Congress of Austria's Nations took place.
After 1850  the Fortification was torn down.
1855  Cardinal František Fuerstenberg founded a seminary - Archiepiscopal Grammar School. The Lower Gate, so-called Moravian or Vodní was torn down.
1870  The town received autonomous statue; it reached the level of Brno, Olomouc, Znojmo and Jihlava towns.
After 1870  The arcade was bricked up on the Great Square.
1880  After two years, building of a railway from Hulín to Kromeriz was finished.
1885  Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I. and Russian Czar Alexander II. got together in Kromeriz.
1905  Building of the Land Mental Asylum with the Chapel of Cyril and Metodeus was started. The area was finished in the following four years.
1910.  The Public Hospital in Kromeriz was opened. The Jewish synagogue was finished.
1938-1945.  Second World War. ..
After 1990.  Generous renovation of the historic town took place.
1997. In July, a part of the town was affected with flood.
1998. The gardens and the Chateau were placed on the UNESCO World Natural and Cultural Inheritance List.

The Kromeriz castle is a large originally rennaissance castle which was built on the place of a previous Olomouc bishop´s residence. The building was erected in 1686-1698 (under the rule of Karel Lichtenstein) according to a project of two Vienna architectures, F.Luchese and G.P.Tencalla. In 1752 there was an extensive fire in the chateau that badly damaged the interior. It was rebuilt into a baroco structure under the rule of the bishops Troyer, Egk and Hamiltona. More reconsructions were done later, i.e. the reconstruction of the chateau's tower in 1945-48. In 1948 the property of the Bishopric was nationalised and since that time the chateau has been treated by the state institutions. Some worthy collection of paintings, books, music stuff and coins are stored in the chateau. Moreover, the building is surrounded by two beautiful gardens (The Garden Below the Chateau and The Flower Garden) that are both considered as a nice illustration of garden architecture in the 17th-19th centuries.
A tour begins in the Hunting Hall and leads to the Pink Parlour with its rococo interior.
In the Czar's Room you can see the portraits of the Czar Alexander III, Marie Terezie and F. Josef. The most famous room of the chateau is the Parliamentary Hall where the assembly of the Austria-Hungariam Monarchy took place in 1848-49. The hall is considered as one of the nicest rococo halls in the Middle Europe. In the historical library you can admire many cabinets that are slightly covered by gold and held 88,000 books. There is also the gallery with its collection of European paintings of the 15th-19th centuries (Titian, Paolo Veronese, Ant. van Dyck, Lukas Cranach sr., H. Schönfeldt and others).

Besides the castle the town has a lot to offer:
St. Morris Cathedral  belongs to the Collegiate Chapter, founded by Bruno of Schaumburk in 1260 (the re-gothic arrangements were made by R. Volkler after 1836). 
St. John the Baptist Church (at Masaryk`s Square) of 1737 - 1768, designed by J.I. Cyrani of Bolleshaus, Janska street, leading to the castle, flanked with houses designed by G.P. Tencalla in the late 17th century. 
Church of Virgin Mary, established as a parish church in 1725 - 1736, designed by J.I. Cyrani of Bolleshaus; built by V. Plaska. 
 Mlynska Gate, used to interconnect the castle and city with the suburbs, where the granges, Mint-House, water tower and other buildings laid, re-arrangend in 1832, was attached to the castle via Guard House. Anton Arche comceived the gate in a neo-gothic style, though the core of building was retained in the origin form. Recent repairs have reveiled the Latin inscription: Bishop Charles strove for the renewal of the city.

 The impressing Great Square is surrounded with nice buildings and has some interesting features. The Marian Colum is situated in the middle of the square to commemorate the Plaque in 1680. St. Florián, St. Roch, and St. Maurice sculptures have early-Baroque forms. The column was renovated in 1716 as written in the pedestal.
The Fountain was founded by Bishop Karel Lichtenstein from Kastelkorn as a part of the water distribution system in 1655. In 1811, during the reconstruction   of the duct it was renewed and from that time it was reconstructed several times.
The Podloubí (Arcade) was originally around the whole square in one-floor buildings. In the second half of the 19th century, the arcade was changed into storehouses and shopping places. 
Monumental innovation took place in 1960’s.

The origin of the Town Hall goes back to the 1550-1611 according to a memorial tablet of cardinal František Ditrichstein. Originally one-floor building had a front face elevated to tower (41 m high) and two-side staircase. In 1850, the height of the building was raised and reconstructed in the pseudo-classicist style for Regional Office and Court purposes. Today’s appearance of adapted building is from the 1960’s, when it became a seat of municipal self-government again.
The Museum of the Kromeriz Region is situated in the house No.38. The building with arches and portal is built in the Renaissance style. It was built of two houses by cardinal Frantisek Ditrichstein in 1609. (In 1636-1643 it was a Jesuit seminary, then a feudal chapter house of Bishop administration). Now it is a seat of the Museum of Kromeriz Region and Max Švabinský Memorial.
[Novak 416 and 591 depict Kromeriz, too.]

NOVAK 416.  ALLEY IN KROMERIZ IN WINTER:  See note Novak 41

NOVAK 418.  PORTRAIT OF VACLAV HOLLAR:  Vaclav Hollar (Prague, 13 July 1607- London, 25 March 1677), one of the major Czech artists and humanists of the Baroque period. He completed no fewer than 2,740 drawings and prints (the National Gallery in Prague houses one of the largest collections in the world) and executed illustrations for about 40 books, including the complete work of Vergilius and Fables by Aesop. He is also called Wenceslaus Hollar.
Hollar's graphic work constitutes an extensive and historically reliable record of the land and people of Europe in this period. He is renowned for the astonishing variety of his subject matter and the vastness of his output. His themes are rooted in reality, and his portraits and still-lifes, as well as his landscapes, maps and records of historical events, serve as valid documents of the period. Amid the rhetoric of high Baroque art, Hollar was fascinated, instead, by subjects which focused on the particulars of everyday life: costumes, animals, insects and shells. These images are unique in their obsessive concern for form, style and technique. Although Czech, Hollar spent most of his life in western Europe. Born in Prague's New Town, his first etchings are ideal landscapes, composed of motifs synthesized from the Prague countryside. Hollar left Prague in 1627 to embark on a series of tours beginning in Stuttgart, Strasbourg, and Frankfurt and extending north into The Netherlands, where he gained inspiration for the majority of his seascapes. He worked for M. Merian in Frankfurt and for the Hogenberg family in Cologne, where, in 1636, he met the English envoy Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. Hollar became a member of the Earl's entourage and, thus, embarked on a seven-month journey which enabled the artist to devote his full energies to landscape drawing. His landscapes have a directness, simplicity and topographical exactitude atypical of the period. He settled in England in 1636 where, except for the years 1644-52 spent in Antwerp, he lived until his death in 1677. In England Hollar was appointed "HM Scenographer and Designer of Prospects".  E.g. he made a remarkable series of six large-scale prints recording the topography of London in the early 1660s. These sheets, when placed side by side, provide an invaluable panoramic record of the city before the Great Fire ravaged London in 1666.  

NOVAK 432.  NOTRE-DAME IN WINTER:  See note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185.

NOVAK 434.  BOATS AT  CONCARNEAU, BRITTANY:  See note Novak 192.

NOVAK 435.  PLACE DE LA CONCORDE,  PARIS:  See note Novak 129.

NOVAK 439.  LE MONT SAINT-MICHEL IN THE EVENING:  See note Novak 172.

NOVAK 1925AP4. PORTRAIT OF ELENORA KRACIKOVA-SOUMAROVA:

Eleonora Soumarova († ca. 1935). Mother of Vilma Kracikova (artist's wife).

NOVAK 442.  PONT SULLY IN WINTER, PARIS:   Pont Sully: there used to be two footbridges upstream from the île Saint Louis: one was the Damiette, on the right bank, the other was the Constantine, on the left bank. The latter was a suspension bridge that was built in1836 and collapsed twenty years later. A pedestrian crossing raised on piles joined the upstream tip of the island to the Quai Henri IV whose role was to protect from ice the boats moored in winter in the Port des Célestins, Saint Paul, on the small branch of the Seine. This did not disappear from the Parisian landscape until 1933. 

The public garden occupying the tip of the island and the reservation between the two bridges was, in the 17th and 18th centuries, an integral part of the formal garden which surrounded the magnificent Hôtel de Bretonvilliers, destroyed in 1840, whose splendours are described and painted in the history of the Quai de Béthune.
Construction dates: 1876.
Total length: bridge over the big arm, three arches of 46, 49 and 46 m; bridge over small branch, a 42 m wide central arch.
Address: quai Henri IV, quai Saint Bernard.

NOVAK 443.  BY THE SEINE IN WINTER, PARIS:  See note Novak 61.

NOVAK 444.  THE OLD BIBLIOPHILE, PARIS:  See note Novak 56.

NOVAK 445.  BRIC-A- BRAC, BRITTANY:  See note Novak 53.

NOVAK 446.  INSIDE THE CATHÉDRAL OF CHARTRES:    

The city of Chartres is famous for its magnificent two-spired Gothic cathedral (built 1194-1225), one of the architectural masterpieces of the Middle Ages. Notre-Dame de Chartres (the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres), perhaps the supreme monument of High Gothic art and architecture, dominates the town of Chartres (1990 pop., 39,595), the capital of Eure-et-Loir department in north central France, situated on the Eure River about 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Paris. In no other Gothic church of comparable size is the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass so harmonious and of such quality, owing to the comparatively short (1194-1220) period of construction for the major parts of the edifice. The present church, the sixth on the site, was begun immediately after the fifth church burned in 1194. People of every rank helped rebuild the church, with labor or with lavish benefactions. The new cathedral, 134 m (440 ft) long, incorporated the transitional Gothic facade and the south tower, both survivors of the fire, preserving the splendid sculptured bays of the triple Royal Portal (1140-50) and the three stained-glass windows (c.1155) above. The rest of the cathedral was directly inspired by Abbé Suger's Abbey of Saint-Denis in Paris; the walls, piers, and flying buttresses became a skeletal framework supporting the soaring vaults and enormous windows. Inside, the unearthly radiance of the stained glass, particularly the glowing "Chartres blue," fills the entire church. 

[See note Novak 111 , too.]

NOVAK 449.  TEMPESTUOUS SEA, BRITTANY:  See note Novak 128.

NOVAK 450.  LITTLE ARABIAN PLACE OF WORSHIP, MAROCCO:  See note Novak 198. 

NOVAK 451. ARABIAN POTTERS IN TANGIER:  See note Novak 198.

NOVAK 452.  GATES IN TANGIER:  See note Novak 198.

NOVAK 454. EGLISE SAINT-GERVAIS CHURCH IN WINTER, PARIS:

NOVAK 455.  PONT SAINT-MICHEL, PARIS:  Pont Saint Michel : The decision to build a bridge between the old Palais Royal on the Ile de la Cité and the left bank was taken in 1378. The first bridge, topped with houses, was completed in 1387 under the reign of Charles VI. It was then called Pont-Neuf or Neuf-Pont, or even Pont Saint Michel. It was damaged by the great thaw of 1408 and then rebuilt of wood with houses on it. On 9th December 1547, however, it was struck by several boats, collapsed and seventeen people drowned. It was rebuilt two years later and remained until 1616, when it was destroyed by ice along with a number of houses.
It was then replaced by a stone bridge built between 1618 and 1624, with four arches, including two central arches of 14 m and two side arches of 10 m. Its downstream tympanum is decorated with a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIII, while niches on either side are decorated with a Saint Michael and a Virgin Mary. This was without doubt one of the last bridges in Paris to retain its houses and they were only finally demolished in 1808.

NOVAK 456.  PALM FOREST, CEYLON:  Sri Lanka [Sinhalese=resplendent land], formerly Ceylon, officially Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, island republic (1995 est. pop. 18,343,000), 25,332 sq mi (65,610 sq km), in the Indian Ocean, just SE of India. It is an independent member of the Commonwealth of Nations. The capital and largest city is Colombo.
The island is called Lankadive in Sanskrit, Senerdib by the Arabs, Jehoo Tenesserim (=country of good pleasure) in Burmese,also Taniraparni (=island of the shady leaves), by the Greek Taprobane and by the inhabitants Singhala -dvipa (=Lion`s island). In the Brahminee literature it is known as Lanka. Only the Portuguese called it Zeylan.
Land and People: the pear-shaped island is 140 mi (225 km) across at its widest point and 270 mi (435 km) long. The narrow northern end is almost linked to SE India by Adam's Bridge, a chain of limestone shoals that, although partly submerged, present an obstacle to navigation. About four fifths of the island is flat or gently rolling; mountains in the south central area include Adam's Peak (7,360 ft/2,243 m) and rise to Pidurutalagal (8,291 ft/2,527 m), the highest point on the island. Sri Lanka has a generally warm subtropical climate; the average lowland temperature is 80°F (27°C), but humidity is high. Rainfall, largely carried by monsoons, is adequate for agriculture, except in the subhumid north. Administratively, the country is divided into eight provinces. In addition to Colombo, other important cities are Dehiwala-Mount Lavinia, Kandy, Galle, and Jaffna.
The population of Sri Lanka is composed mainly (about 75%) of Sinhalese, who are Theravada Buddhists; Hindu Tamils make up a large minority (some 18%), and there are smaller groups of Muslim Moors, Burghers (descendants of Dutch and Portuguese colonists), and Eurasians (descended from British colonists). The official language is Sinhalese (Sinhala); Tamil is a second national language, and English is commonly used in government. Education is free through the university level; the literacy rate is about 90%.
The country's economy is primarily agricultural; the emphasis is on export crops such as tea, rubber, and coconut (all plantation-grown). Cocoa, coffee, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, citronella, and tobacco are also exported. Rice, fruit, and vegetables are grown for local consumption. Sri Lanka is an exporter of amorphous graphite, its principal mineral industry. Petroleum refining is also important, and precious and semiprecious gems, mineral sands, clays, and limestones are mined. Substantial deposits of iron ore have not yet been exploited. The island's swift rivers have considerable hydroelectric potential.
Industry has been centered chiefly around the processing of agricultural products, especially the money crops-tea, rubber, and coconut. By the mid-1980s, however, textiles and garments had become Sri Lanka's biggest export. A great variety of consumer goods are also manufactured. The country is dependent on large amounts of foreign aid. Although coastal lagoons provide many sheltered harbors, only S Sri Lanka lies on the main world shipping routes. The port of Colombo, on which most of the country's railroads converge, handles most of the foreign trade. The United States, Japan, India, and the United Kingdom are the largest trading partners.
Sri Lanka is governed under the constitution of 1978. The president, who is popularly elected for a six-year term, is both the chief of state and head of government. Members of the 225-seat unicameral parliament are also elected by popular vote for six-year terms.
History: the most ancient of the inhabitants were probably the ancestors of the Veddas, an aboriginal people (numbering about 3,000) now living in remote mountain areas. They were conquered in the 6th cent. B.C. by the Sinhalese, who were originally from N India; the Ramaya, the ancient Hindu epic, probably reflects this conquest. The Sri Lanka chronicle Mahavamsa relates the arrival of Vijaya, the first Sinhalese king, in 483 B.C. The Sinhalese settled in the north and developed an elaborate irrigation system. They founded their capital at Anuradhapura, which, after the introduction of Buddhism from India in the 3d cent. B.C., became one of the chief world centers of that religion; a cutting of the pipal tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya was planted there. The Temple of the Tooth at Kandy as well as the Dalada Maligawa are sacred Buddhist sites. Buddhism stimulated the fine arts in Sri Lanka, its classical period lasted from the 4th to the 6th cent.
The proximity of Sri Lanka to S India resulted in many Tamil invasions. The Chola of S India conquered Anuradhapura in the early 11th cent. and made Pollonarrua their capital. The Sinhalese soon regained power, but in the 12th cent. a Tamil kingdom arose in the north, and the Sinhalese were driven to the southwest. Arab traders, drawn by the island's spices, arrived in the 12th and 13th cent.; their descendants are the Muslim Moors.
The Portuguese conquered the coastal areas in the early 16th cent. and introduced the Roman Catholic religion. By the mid-17th cent. the Dutch had taken over the Portuguese possessions and the rich spice trade. In 1795 the Dutch possessions were occupied by the British, who made the island a crown colony in 1798. In 1815 the island was brought under one rule for the first time when the central area, previously under the rule of Kandy, was conquered. Under the British, tea, coffee, and rubber plantations were developed, and schools, including a university, were opened. A movement for independence arose during World War I. The constitution of 1931 granted universal adult suffrage to the inhabitants; but demands for independence continued, and in 1946 a more liberal constitution was enacted.
In 1950 delegates of eight countries of the Commonwealth met in Colombo and adopted the Colombo Plan for economic aid to S and SE Asia. Riots in 1958 between Sinhalese and the Tamil minority over demands by the Tamils for official recognition of their language and the establishment of a separate Tamil state under a federal system resulted in severe loss of life. By end of the century, more than 60,000 people had been killed in the ethnic conflict.
Anuradhapura, or Anarajapura, city (1995 est. pop. 40,000), N central Sri Lanka, on the Aruvi River. Rice plantations and vegetable gardens surround the city, which is famous chiefly for its vast Buddhist ruins and as a pilgrimage center. Founded in 437 B.C., it was the capital of a Sinhalese kingdom and a Buddhist center until the 8th cent. A.D., when, after a Tamil invasion, it was abandoned in favor of Pollonarrua. Ruins include several colossal stupas (some larger than the pyramids of Egypt), a temple hewn from rock, and the Brazen Palace (so called from its metal roof). A sacred bo tree at Anuradhapura was grown from a slip of the tree at Bodh Gaya, India, under which Buddha reputedly attained enlightenment. The Archaeological Survey of Sri Lanka has its headquarters in the city.
Pollonarrua, or Polonnaruwa, ruined ancient city, NE Sri Lanka. Pollonarrua, beautifully situated on a lake, was once the most splendid city of Sri Lanka. It became a royal residence in the mid-4th cent. and the capital after the fall (late 8th cent.) of Anuradhapura. The city reached its height under the rule of king Parakrama Bahu I (1164-97), the last notable monarch of the Sinhalese dynasty. He embellished the capital with temples, stupas, and huge stone images of Buddha; among these is a famous colossal statue of the recumbent Buddha. Pollonarrua fell to the Hindu Tamils in the 13th cent. The name is also spelled Pollanarrua.
Jaffna, peninsula, northernmost part of Sri Lanka, separated from India by Palk Strait. The peninsula is densely inhabited, largely by Tamil-speaking people. Jaffna suffered under the Portuguese and Dutch occupations of the 17th-18th cent. Tobacco, rice, coconuts, palmyra palm, and vegetables are grown; fishing is an important occupation. The main industries are salt, cement, chemical, and tobacco production. The city of Jaffna (1995 est. pop. 135,000), on the southwestern portion of the peninsula, on Jaffna Lagoon, is a regional trade center with a small port. The Univ. of Jaffna is there. The city includes Nallur, capital of the independent Tamil kingdom conquered by the Portuguese in 1617.
The center of an independent kingdom from the 13th to the 15th cent., Jaffna was occupied by the Portuguese (1617-1658) and the Dutch (1658-1795) until the British conquest. Since the 1980s it has been the center of violent Tamil resistance against Sinhalese dominance in Sri Lanka.
Galle, city (1995 est. pop. 87,000), capital of Southern prov., extreme S Sri Lanka, on the Indian Ocean. An agricultural market center, it exports tea, rubber, coconut oil, cloves, and other products of the surrounding region. The city has a cement factory as well. Famous as a trade center for Chinese and Arabs by 100 B.C., Galle rose to prominence under Portuguese rule (1507-1640), when it became Sri Lanka's chief port. It was the capital of Sri Lanka under the Dutch (1640-56), whose original fort, built to guard the harbor, still stands. The city passed to the British in 1796. Its commercial importance continued until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the construction (1885) by the British of a modern harbor at Colombo. Since the 1960s congestion and labor problems at the port of Colombo have diverted some shipping to Galle
Colombo, largest city (1995 est. pop. 750,000) and capital of Sri Lanka, a port on the Indian Ocean near the mouth of the Kelani River. The original Sinhalese name, Kalantotta ("Kelani ferry"), was corrupted to Kolambu by Arab traders and was changed to Colombo by the Portuguese. The city's major sections are the old area of narrow streets and colorful market stalls; the modern commercial and government area around the 16th-century Portuguese fort; and Cinnamon Gardens, a wealthy residential and recreational area. Colombo has one of the world's largest manmade harbors. Most of Sri Lanka's foreign trade passes through the port. There are modern facilities for containerized cargo. Gem cutting is a Colombo specialty; other industries include food and tobacco processing, metal fabrication, engineering, and the manufacture of chemicals, textiles, glass, cement, leather goods, furniture, and jewelry. An oil refinery is on the city's outskirts. Colombo is also Sri Lanka's financial center; a major attempt was made during the 1980s to transform it into an offshore banking center.
 It was probably known to Greco-Roman, Arab, and Chinese traders more than 2,000 years ago as an open anchorage for oceangoing ships. Muslims settled there in the 8th cent. A.D. The Portuguese arrived in the 16th cent. and built a fort to protect their spice trade. The Dutch, also coveting this trade, gained control in the 17th cent. In 1796, Colombo passed to the British, who made it the capital of their crown colony of Ceylon in 1802. In the 1880s, Colombo replaced Galle as Ceylon's chief port and became a major refueling and supply center for merchant ships on the Europe-East Asia route. Colombo served as an Allied naval base in World War II and was made the capital of independent Ceylon in 1948. The Colombo Plan, an international program to aid the economic development of Asian nations, was launched at a conference there in 1950. Two faculties of the Univ. of Sri Lanka, several colleges and research institutes, an observatory, a national museum, Independence Hall (1948), and numerous churches, mosques, and Buddhist and Hindu temples are in Colombo; on the outskirts are two Buddhist universities. About half the city's population is Sinhalese; there are also Tamils, Moors, and small European and Indian communities. Festering violence between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils continued to claim lives through the 1980s.
Kandy, city (1995 est. pop. 108,000), capital of Central prov., Sri Lanka, on the Kandy Plateau. Once the capital of the Sinhalese Kandyan kingdom, it is now a mountain resort and market center for an area producing tea, rubber, rice, and cacao. The main part of the city overlooks a scenic artificial lake built by the last king of Kandy in 1806. Near the lake is the Temple of the Tooth, said to house one of Buddha's teeth. This sacred relic, brought to Sri Lanka in the 4th cent. (reputedly by a princess who hid it in her hair), may have been destroyed (1560) by the Portuguese. The relic, which has made Kandy a pilgrimage and tourist attraction, is honored in the annual Esala Perahera pageant. Kandy is noted for such local handicrafts as reed and lacquer work and silver and brassware. Although the city's history dates back to the 5th cent. B.C., it did not become the capital of the Sinhalese kings until 1592. It was temporarily occupied by the Portuguese (16th cent.) and the Dutch (18th cent.); but, as a stronghold, it remained free until 1815, when the British captured it and exiled the last king to India. A palace, an art museum, and a library are the remnants of the royal period. In the suburb of Peradeniya is the Univ. of Sri Lanka (1942) and the famous botanical gardens, noted especially for their orchids.
Since 1469 Senkadagala, later renamed as Kandy, was an important location in ancient
Sri Lanka, as it became the capital of the Kandyan Kingdom in the year 1562. From then up to 1815, nearly a dozen kings ruled from this city and during this period Kandy grew in importance not ony as an administrative centre but also as a main religious and cultural centre of Sri Lanka. The Temple of the Tooth was established in 1593 and the restoration of Higher Ordination of the Buddhist priesthood took place in 1753. The tradition was brought to Thailand (Siam) during the reign of King Kirthi Sri Rajasinghe who ruled Kandy from 1747 to 1781. The two most important Buddhist monasteries of the country, namely Asgiriya and Malwatta are in Kandy. From the time of King Kirthi Sri Rajasingha a number of Buddhist temples came to be built in and around the city of Kandy amidst some of the monuments that date back to the 14th century.
With the spread of South Indian influence and the establishment of the four devales (shrines of deities) Natha, Vishnu, Paththini and Katatragama, the city of Kandy began to acquire a distinctive character. The religious practices associated with the above shrines got gradually integrated with Buddhist rituals and ceremonies performed in this royal city. Nowhere can the embodiment of these be seen better than in the internationally reputed Paegant of Kandy known locally as the "Mahanuwara Esala Perahera". It has now become a widely acknowledged cultural symbol not only of Kandy but also of Sri Lanka.
From the 16th century Western expeditions began to come to Kandy either as invaders or visitors. To them Kandy was a formidable challenge and an inhospitable terrain, though they were mesmerized by its enchanting natural beauty.
Kandy is blessed by nature with an enthralling landscape marked by hills and valleys covered with lush vegetation. Often they are clothed by a thin veil of mist in the mornings and evenings making the entire surroundings romantic and alluring to the visitor and resident alike. The comfortable climate that prevails at an elevation ofabout 500 metres above sea level with year-round temperatures hovering around 78 F degrees or 25.5 C degrees has made it a much sought after place especially by those who have experiencedthe discomfort of the extremes of summer and winter in other parts of the world.
The meandering course of the country's longest river, "Mahaweli" draining this landscape has not only enhanced the natural beauty of Kandy but also has given it protection and water ever since it ws made the Royal Capital of the Kingdom.
After the capture of Kandy by the British in 1815 and the development of transport and communications, more and more people, both local and foreign, began to visit it for reglious observances and the enjoyment of their holidays. With the development of tourism, Kandy has now become an important destination not only in Sri Lanka, but also in South Asia. Its importance as a historical, religious and cultural centre, has made it an internationally reputed city.There are a few places which have cultural value which have not drawn tourist attention yet. 1-Rajapihilla (King's bath), 2- Ampitiua and Bokkawala inscriptions,3- Gallangolla Temple.
On Poya days (4 in a month) and other ceremonial occasions of Buddhist temples, devotees come to the city in bulks and most of all during the ten days of perahera (Cultural/Religious pageant) both foreign and local tourists come to Candy in masses; exceeding 100,000 heads per day. This situation is some what unmanageable to the city as well as to the council.
During the month of August, Kandy has a World famous pageant, (Esala Perehare) which is continuing for two weeks. Nearly 100,000-120,000 people come to the city (per day) to witness the paegant. As this paegant was continuing for over 100 years the citizens of Kandy are used to experienceing difficulties during this period.
The main heritage site, (The Temple of the Tooth Relic) is managed by the Central Cultural Fund. This is the main heritage attraction in Kandy. The restoration and other development activities in the temple premises is carried out by the Central Cultural Fund on advice and involvement of the Chief of the Temple (Diyawadana Nilame). Due to the terrorists attack in 1998, the Temple of the Toooth Relic was damaged heavily. After this incident, the government was actively involved in the restoration programme, and within one year, the restoration work was completed. As this was the most valuable heritage building in the country the coordination of this activity was not a problem.
The Kandy Lake is situated near the Temple of the Tooth Relic and it is very prominent in the city with its scenic beauty.
As a result of the visit of an UNESCO - working group in Kandy 1988 it has been proposed to integrate the historic town centre of Kandy on an extended scale into the responsibilities of the Cultural Triangle Project.
During the recent years the attention has been focussed mainly to the temple and palace complex and its close by surroundings. However the Eastern edge of the historic centre located within the 'Sacred Area' has been included in the programme earlier. The elaboration of an urban conservation survey forming the base for an extended future treatment of the entire inner historic city of Kandy, i.e.its Western part (outside the temple and palace complex), has been the subject of this survey conducted from June to September 1988. The definition of the bounds of the considered area has been determined by the traditional historic maps, mainly the map given by T.B. Keppitipola, based on the famous town map by J.Davy from 1821. It shows the area forming the residential and political centre of Kandy upto this day, in this way creating the necessity of a permanent adaptation of the changing conditions.
The special history of the development of the city of Kandy being the 1st residence of the Singhalese Kingdom - as well as the rapid changes of the political conditions after the capture by the Britishers in 1815 led to a rigorous renewal of the building structures in the 19th century. Therefore buildings dating back to the pre-colonial era can be found (partly in ruined state) within the temple palace complex only whereas such houses are completely missing in the appearance of the streets in the historic town centre.
Out of 18 Walauwas of the Kandyan Chiefs presented in T.B.Keppitipolas map there is no one left and the more modest houses of those days seem to exist only in remains hidden within the walls of their successors. The oldest buildings are those form the early British period (period I) representing about 6% of the total number (44 hours). Two basic types are to be distingushed.
1.  the traditional, mainly two-storeyed 'town house' with timber structures (galleries) at the front side (for instance: Quarter 16, No.3-7 D.S.Senanayake Vidiya) and 2. the massive one of two-storeyed residential house with a verandha or upper gallery formed by simple columns, vigorous rows of arches and modest decortions (for instance: Quarter 12, No.41-43, Deva Vidiya, Quarter 3, No.142-146, D.S.Senanayake Vidiya).
In dependence on the location and the size of the plot of land in some cases even the interior courtyards, partly with old sets of columns can still be found. A special concentration of such houses is shown in the Quarters 9 and 12, whereas the buildings of this period are to be found only sporadic in the other quarters, often changed by later allerations.
The number of houses built in the 2nd half of the 19th century (period II) is more extensive, including 166 buildings (i.e.20%). As increasing influence from western stylistic features, specially of the Victorian epoch can be stated by an increase in devorative elements and a tendency to more tough features and to monumentalism
The earlier modest columns are found more and more substituted by compact, massive forms towards the end of the 19th century. Some these buildings (for instance: the later aditons to the 'Queens's Hotel', several churches and respectable commercial buildings) are still forming important landmarks of the town centre of Kandy.
Apart from those there is a number of modest, sometimes droll timber buildings, mainly serving commercial storage purposes. Comprising 320 buildings, i.e. 40% of the total bumber, the structures developed or largely rearranged between 1900 and 1950 (period III) from the major part of the building stock. This period has obviously been a time of spontaneous development with a tendency to adapt the respective 'fashionable' stylistic features. Despite very different levels of achievement concerning the quality of the design some main features may be pointed out.
-turning away from the traditional tiled roof,
-shifting the eaves behind decorated front elevation walls by introducing gutters,
-trend to rough plaster decorations,
-increasing plasticity in the general shape of the buildings
-abandonment of open verandahs.
The tradition of constructing timber buildings has still been continued, some of thembeing strenuously decorated. The number of designs seeking the confrontation with the traditional features increases
rapidly (Quarter 13, No 66-72, 96-100 Dalada Vidiya).
The houses erected after 1950 (period IV) appear nearly equality extensive concerning the number of relevant buildings, but painfully stronger concerning their architectural impact, covering 34% of the total.The trend towards giving up the traditional building concepts and thus creating a kind of brak through in terms of urban scales is increasing yet (mostly concerning the height of the buildings). The tiled roof became completely 'out of fashion', characterless elevations, often horribly designed are interrupting the earlier homogeneous rown of
houses in the streets.Traditional building materials are still being used only for restoration and also for new constructions since they are the cheapest and the most valuable building materials, still the traditional building craftsmen are involved in the restoration work. The younger generation is involved and trained in traditional building crafts in critical project work sites. Only very few designs prove the possibility to respond to the typical characteristics and values of the historical town centre of Kandy (British Council Library, D.S.Senanayake Vidiya, People's Bank Building, Dalada Vidiya).
There is a higher density of valuable buildings along the main pedestrian access roads: Dalada Vidiya, Sir B.Soysa Vidiya, D.S.Senanayake Vidiya, Deve Vidiya, Temple Street. Therefore future planning should include the relocation of parking areas and traffic from these roads to less valuable places. One of the possible steps could be to declare the Sir B.Soysa Vidiya (Colombo Street) as a pedestrian and shopping area being the main access road to the Temple of the Tooth complex at the same time.
Kandy is a World famous city and it's significance for buddhism attract thousands of  local and foreign tourists every day.
About palms see note Novak 458.

NOVAK 457.  TWO SINGHALESE, CEYLON:  See note Novak 456.

NOVAK 458.  TWO LEAVES FROM CEYLON/ I, PALMTREES:  About Ceylon see note Novak 456. 
Palm, common name for members of the Palmae, a large family of chiefly tropical trees, shrubs, and vines. Most species are treelike, characterized by a crown of compound leaves, called fronds, terminating a tall, woody, unbranched stem. The fruits, covered with a tough fleshy, fibrous, or leathery outer layer, usually contain a large amount of endosperm in the seed (stored food). Although the palms are of limited use in the United States and other temperate areas, their economic importance in the tropical regions can exceed that of the grasses. Members of the family often furnish food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities of life for entire populations; an ancient Hindu song about the Palmyra palm (Borassus flabelliformis) of India enumerates 801 uses for the plant. Among the most important palms providing food and other products are the coconut, date, and sago. Palm sugar (jaggery) is obtained from the sap of several palms, e.g., species of Phoenix, Cocos, Arenga (in India), and Raphia (in Africa). Palm toddy, or wine, is made especially in Africa and Southeast Asia. The fruit of the betel palm provides the world’s most-used masticatory. Carnauba wax is obtained from a Brazilian species. Among the important palm fibers are raffia and rattan. Daemonorops draco yields dragon’s blood, a resin. Another palm-fruit product, tagua, is used as a substitute for ivory. Species native to the United States include the tall royal palm of Florida and Cuba (usually Roystonea regia in Florida) and the California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera) of the Southwest and Mexico, much planted as an avenue ornamental. The palmetto palm is the characteristic underbrush plant of the SE United States. Cabbage palm is a name applied to several species whose young heads of tender leaves are cooked as vegetables; these include the coconut palm, a royal palm (R. oleracea), and the cabbage palmetto (Sabal palmetto). The largest known plant seed, enclosed in a fruit weighing up to 40 lb (18 kg), is borne by Lodoicea maldivica, a palm of the Seychelles, sometimes called the Seychelles nut palm or the double coconut. Palm oil is the fat pressed from the fibrous flesh of the fruit of many palms, principally the coconut palm, the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), the peach palm (Bactris gasipaes), the babassu palm (Orbignya species, especially O. phalerata), and other South American species. Commercial palm oils are used for soaps and candles, lubricants, margarine, fuel, feed (chiefly the caked residue remaining after the oil has been expressed), and many other purposes. In the tropics much of the palm oil produced (often by crude extraction methods) is consumed locally. The total output of palm oil equals that of all other nondrying oils combined. The palm family is classified in the division Magnoliophyta, class Liliopsida, order Arecales.

NOVAK 459.  TWO LEAVES  FROM CEYLON/ II, ENTRANCE TO THE TEMPLE:  See note Novak 456.

NOVAK 460.  BROOKLYN BRIDGE, NEW YORK:  Brooklyn is a region that is separated from Manhattan by the East River. Around 1810, Brooklyn was a village of around 3,000 people. However, by 1850, Brooklyn's population had grown to 100,000, and many citizens commuted twice daily to Manhattan via ferry. By 1869 (when construction of the bridge began), many people agreed that ferries were not a time-efficient mode of transport. Ferries were also somewhat dangerous; during the winter, the East River would often freeze and make travel hazardous and time-consuming. Henry Cruse Murphy was the man who first recognized the need for a bridge. A respected lawyer and former mayor of Brooklyn, he drafted a charter to the New York State Legislature that would enable a private company to build a bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. He submitted it  on January 25, 1867, it passed a few months later, and construction began two years later. Murphy was the man most responsible for the construction, but he died only a few months before construction was finished, at 72. Some "interesting" designs were proposed by various engineers, but these were unrealistic and never saw the light of day. John Augustus Roebling, who would later become architect of the Brooklyn Bridge, emigrated from Germany to improve his life and circumstances. He was a bright student in his homeland. He settled in Deleware, and quickly started his own wire-rope business. In 1844, he received a contract to build an aqueduct over the Allegheney River. He built it with his own rope, and the Delaware Aquedect has stood for about 165 years, over the Delaware River in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. After the aqueduct, John recieved contracts for, initially, small bridges and later large suspension bridges. He would soon build a prolific occupation as a bridge builder, and his son Washington would assist and learn from his father

John became personally interested in a "Brooklyn Bridge" when he became caught in an ice jam in the East River when he was aboard a ferry. He proposed a suspension bridge over the East River to replace the Atlantic Avenue-Fulton Street Ferry. Roebling worked out every detail of the bridge, from its massive granite towers to its four steel cables. He thought his design entitled the bridge "to be ranked as a national monument… a great work of art." Initially, Roebling was met with cool reception by the city governments of New York and Brooklyn. He then approached William C. Kingsley, a Brooklyn businessman with political connections and publisher of the influential Brooklyn Eagle, who met the idea with enthusiasm. In turn, Kingsley enlisted the support of Henry Murphy. 
In 1867, a group of prominent leaders formed the New York Bridge Company "for the purpose of constructing and maintaining a bridge across the East River." Under the enabling act, the city of Brooklyn (which stood to benefit the most from the bridge) subscribed for $3 million of the capital stock, while the city of New York only subscribed for $1.5 million. The company was permitted to fix toll rates for pedestrians and all types of vehicles, receiving a profit of no more than 15 percent per year.
Responding to those who doubted the need for the bridge, Roebling responded that projected growth in the cities of New York and Brooklyn would necessitate the construction of additional bridges. Specifically, Roebling suggested future construction of the Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges further north along the East River. Two years later, in June 1869, the New York City Council and the Army Corps of Engineers approved Roebling's design. Later that month, while examining locations for a Brooklyn tower site, Roebling was standing on a pile of building material when a ferry clipped the stack of goods as it passed by. The pilings collapsed on his foot and crushed it. John Roebling later died died 16 days later of tetanus as a result of the injuries. (During its construction twenty-seven men died.)
Immediately following Roebling's death, his son, Washington was appointed Chief Engineer at the age of  32; he would spend the next 13 years of his life working on the bridge.

Earth was excavated from the bottom of the East River with the help of caissons. These were basically like huge hollow overturned boats that were lowered underwater and to the sea floor. The interior was illuminated by gas-fed lamps. Working conditions were terrible; humidity was high and the temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. Many workers died from "the bends" when they ascended from the bottom of the sea floor to the surface. Workers within these caissons broke up rock and dumped rock into wells, where the rock was lifted to the surface by a clamshell scoop.
Accidents were commonplace in these caissons. Early caissons were very flammable, and they could easily go up in flames for many reasons. For instance, the caulking between the wood boards was made of oakum, a highly flammable substance; the walls were made of nothing but wood. Sand and gravel were sucked out of the caissons by means of compressed air through metal pipes. The metal pipes curved (so the sand wouldn’t be blasted straight up into the air), but the sand eroded the pipes’ elbow. The workers placed a piece of granite above the pipe after the metal eroded.
Caissons were built so crews could clear away sand, silt, and unstable rock from the sea floor. Eventually, the caissons would be lowered far enough so as to reach rock as stable as granite. This rock would serve as the natural foundation for the Brooklyn Bridge. As the caissons descended farther below sea level, the air pressure within the caissons increased markedly from the pressure at sea level. The bends, an unknown disease at the time, caused many to die from the dangerous nitrogen gas that built up in workers’ bloodstreams. Only two caissons were ever constructed; one on the shore of Brooklyn, the other on the shore of Manhattan. After the caissons finally reached bedrock, the two towers’ construction began. The size of the towers below the water equals the size of the tower that can be seen above water, so construction was well advanced before almost any visible signs manifested themselves to the casual observer.
All compressed-air workers feared  the Caisson Disease (bends). At the time of the Brooklyn Bridge construction, little was known about the causes of these painful attacks--and little could be done to prevent them. Nearly all caisson laborers were inflicted with the bends to a certain extent. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, three people died and fifteen percent of those who got the bends were paralyzed to some degree. Some success with fighting the bends was acheived by a Dr. Janimet, on the St. Louis Bridge. He was the first American to hit upon the idea of slow decompression (the British and French had known it for years). Unfortunately, James Eads, the builder of the St. Louis Bridge, had a falling out with Washington Roebling and never imparted his discovery. Fear of the bends was what caused Roebling to halt the excavation of the New York caisson; he estimated that upwards of eighty men would die if he tried to excavate any further.
Washington Roebling himself did not escape the construction of the caissons unharmed. He had always been a man who liked to be on site during the construction, and often he could be found inside the caisson instructing others what to do and many times doing manual work himself. Washington Roebling actually spent more hours in the working chamber than anyone else for fear that any slip might prove to be disastrous. One afternoon in the summer of 1872, Washington Roebling had to be carried out of the caisson with caisson disease. From this point on, he remained painfully paralyzed and became known as "the man in the window," for he never returned to the site of the Brooklyn Bridge, but watched it through a spyglass from his townhouse. Roebling was determined to see the construction of the bridge to completion. He directed the construction from his townhouse; his wife Emily Roebling acted as an intermediary between the Colonel and his bridge.

In 1873, when the towers were about half-built, work on the anchorages commenced. The anchorages, which hold the cable in place, are made of limestone and granite, measure 90 by 119 by 132 feet, and weigh 60,000 tons. Beneath the stone, anchor plates are buried. Anchor plates are huge pieces of metal that hold the anchorages in place. The anchorages are about the size of an apartment building, and they are built about half a mile or so behind each of the towers. The Brooklyn tower was completed May 1875 and the New York Tower July 1875. Next, the metallic cables were strewn across the span. The strands were attached to iron shoes; the shoes would rotate and make one thick, stronger cable from man smaller cables. After this was completed, the shoes were removed. The wire itself was uniform, hand-made steel, bathed in muriatic acid and coated with zinc.
In August 1876, the two anchorages were linked across the East River for the first time by a wire rope. To commemorate this occasion, and to demonstrate the integrity of the wire rope, master mechanic Farrington crossed the East River riding on a boatswain's chair tied to the rope.
The suspended roadway's great "river span" was to be held between the towers by the four immense cables, two outer ones and two near the middle of the bridge floor. These cables would be as much as fifteen inches in diameter, and each would hang over the river in what is known as a catenary curve, that perfect natural form taken by any rope or cable suspended from two points, which in this case were the summits of the two stone towers. At the bottom of the curve each cable would join with the river span, at the center of the span. But along all the cables, vertical "suspenders," wire ropes about as thick as a pick handle, would be strung like harp strings down to the bridge floor. And across those would run a pattern of diagonal stays, hundreds of heavy wire ropes that would radiate down from the towers and secure at various points along the bridge floor, both in the direction of the land and toward the center of the river span.
The wire rope for the suspenders and stays was to be of the kind manufactured by Roebling at his Trenton (wire) works. It was to be made in the same way as ordinary hemp wire rope, that is, with hundreds of fine wires twisted to form a rope. The cables, however, would be made of wire about as thick as a lead pencil, with thousands of wires to a cable, all "laid up" straight, parallel to one another, and then wrapped with an outer skin of soft wire, the way the base strings of a piano are wrapped.
Deviating from tradition, Roebling introduced the use of steel, which he called "the metal of the future," for the four cables. At the time, steel was being used for construction of the railroads, but its use had not yet been used for major structures such as bridges. Until the Brooklyn Bridge was constructed, iron wire was used for suspension cables. Roebling defended his use of steel wire in an article in The American Railroad Journal, discussing the weaknesses of earlier iron-wire and chain suspension bridges and their vulnerability to destructive oscillation caused by high winds.

Four 15 3/4-inch cables are the backbone of the bridge. The decision to use steel instead of standard iron wire was a revolutionary proposal. Steel was regarded as a suspect material, not yet proven over time as was iron. In fact, at the time of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the use of steel in any structure in Great Britain was illegal. Steel would be vindicated as a tensile material in the Brooklyn Bridge, and, at the same time, as a compression material in the St. Louis Bridge.
Washington Roebling specified a tested wire strength of 160 ksi (twice that of iron), and required that the wire be galvanized, to resist corrosion by the salt air. Unfortunately, much of the wire that was actually used was not to specifications. The wire contractor had been substituting weaker (and cheaper) Bessemer steel for the desired crucible-cast kind. While justifiably outraged at the scam, Roebling had initially designed the cable to be six times stronger than necessary. He calculated that the condemned wire was still five times stronger than it had to be, and there was no need to remove the strands already in place.
The four cables support a dead weight (the deck and suspenders) of 13,240 kips--3,410 kips per cable. Each cable has an ultimate strength of 24,600 kips, but the maximum load on a single cable rarely exceeds 6,000 kips. This gives us a present-day factor of safety of about our. The river span is 1,595.5 feet, and the maximum sag over the river is about 130 feet. The length of each supported land span is 930 feet.

In February 1877, not long after the temporary footbridge was finished, work began on spinning the four cables at the Manhattan and Brooklyn anchorages. The four steel cables, which could each hold 11,200 tons, connect the anchorages with the Manhattan and Brooklyn towers, where the cables pass over saddles within the towers. Each main cable, which has a diameter of 15¾ inches, is comprised of 19 strands containing a total of 5,434 steel wires. Once the spinning of the four main cables was completed in October 1878, workmen strung wire ropes from the cables down to the bridge floor. More than 14,400 miles of wire were used for the suspender ropes.

Then, suspenders attached to small cross-sections of roadway were lowered from the two main cables. The workmen had to build each piece of bridge before they could continue. This was a little like laying track for railroads, except the "track" was elevated hundreds of feet from a body of water. After a couple of months, when the floorbeams was laid, the crew removed the footbridge.The makeshift footbridges the crews worked on during construction. Finally, more cable was criss-crossed from the main wires to reinforce the bridge. In addition, buildings near the entrances to the bridge were made.
From one end to the other, the Brooklyn Bridge measures 6,016 feet, including approaches. The long river span passes the tower arches at an elevation of 119 feet, gradually rising to 135 feet above the East River at mid-span to accommodate passage of even the tallest ships. (The 135-foot clearance soon became the standard for bridge construction.) Because of the elevation of the span above the East River and the relatively low-lying shores, the rest of the bridge, sloping down to ground level, had to extend quite far inland on both sides of the river to provide an easy three and one-quarter percent grade.

Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge to have a load capacity of 18,700 tons. He planned to run two elevated railroad tracks, which were to connect to elevated railroad systems in New York and Brooklyn, down the center of the bridge. On either side of the tracks, he designed four lanes - two lanes on two outer roadways - for use by carriages and horseback riders. Directly over the tracks, he provided an elevated promenade for pedestrians and bicyclists. To support the load, and to protect the span from high winds and vibrations, deep stiffening trusses were constructed. Indeed, construction was delayed because Roebling had to redesign the trusses for the heavier trains of the day.Construction of the bridge understructure, the stiffening trusses, and the roadway began in March 1879, and continued for four more years. The 1,595-foot main span would be the longest for any suspension bridge in the world, and would be more than 500 feet longer than John Roebling's Cincinnati-Covington Bridge.

On May 24, 1883, with schools and businesses closed, the Brooklyn Bridge, also referred to as the "Great East River Bridge", was opened. President Chester Arthur and Governor Grover Cleveland officially dedicated the Brooklyn Bridge before more than 14,000 invitees. Emily Roebling was given the first ride over the completed bridge with a rooster, a symbol of victory, in her lap. After the opening ceremony, anyone with a penny for the toll could cross the Brooklyn Bridge. On the first day, the bridge carried trolley lines, horse-drawn vehicles, and even livestock. Scores of people attended this spectacular ribbon cutting event.
The bridge opened to public on May 24, 1883 at 2:00 PM. Total of 150,300 people crossed opening day. People charged 1 cent to cross.
The bridge opened to vehicles on  May 24, 1883 at 5:00 PM after speeches at opening ceremony. Total of 1800 vehicles crossed on the first day. Vehicles charged 5 cents to cross. The first passenger train ran  September 1883 over the bridge; the last train in 1948.
However, amid the novelty, there was tragedy. On Memorial Day, 1883, a woman who was walking up the steps of the Manhattan side tripped, and her female companion screamed. The scream triggered off a rumor that the bridge was about to collapse. In the panic and resulting crush, 12 people were killed and 35 others were seriously injured. Ten years after the bridge opened, the city of Brooklyn annexed adjoining towns until it encompassed all of Kings County. In 1898, fifteen years after the bridge opened, the bridge helped unite Manhattan with Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island to form Greater New York. That year, the roadway was configured to allow trolleys and automobiles to travel in the outer lanes. By 1910, the penny toll on the Brooklyn Bridge was removed after the City of New York passed a law prohibiting the use of tolls to finance construction and maintenance of its bridges.In 1944, the elevated railroad trains that ran along the interior of the bridge ceased operation, and soon thereafter, the trolley lines ended service. When the elevated Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) lines stopped running in 1944, the trolleys moved from the shared lanes to the protected elevated tracks. A decade later, when the trolleys stopped running, the elevated tracks were removed, and the roadways were rebuilt.
Between 1944 and 1954, noted bridge engineer David Steinman oversaw a comprehensive reconstruction project that saw the inner and outer trusses strengthened, new horizontal stays installed between the four main cables, the railroad and trolley tracks removed, the roadways widened from two lanes to three lanes in each direction, and new approach ramps constructed. (Additional approach ramps to the FDR Drive opened to traffic in 1969.)

On May 24, 1983, the 100-year anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge was marked by parades, a flotilla of tall ships, and a massive Grucci fireworks show. President Ronald Reagan led a procession of vehicles across the bridge, repeating the route that President Chester Arthur had taken 100 years earlier.

Anchored across the lower East River by two Neogothic towers and a delicate lacework of steel-wire cables, the soaring lines of the Brooklyn Bridge have inspired countless architects, engineers, painters and poets to pursue their own expressions of creative excellence, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Georgia O'Keefe, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Lewis Mumford, Adriaan Lubbers (Amsterdam 1892-New York 1954; called ‘The Painter of  New York’) and the great Czech painter Tavik Frantisek Šimon (1877-1942).

NOVAK 1927 AP2.  UNDER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE, NEW YORK:  See note Novak 460.
Not in the original Czech version of Novak. In the English version listed as 460a.

NOVAK 461.  NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY: 

NOVAK 463.  THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE: 

The canals and railroads that spurred the transportation revolution of the 1820s and 1830s created a concomitant boom in the stock market as private corporations and state governments raised capital through stocks and bonds. The first railroad stock was traded in 1830, and throughout the nineteenth century, railroad stocks dominated the Exchange. It was moved to a 5-story building at 10 Broad Street in 1865. Since 1868, membership on the NYSE has been held as a valuable property. New members must purchase existing seats--now limited to a total of 1,366.

George Browne Post, died November 28, 1913, at his summer home in Bernardsville, New Jersey. He was born December 15, 1837 in New York City. He studied civil engineering at New York University and received his C. E. degree in 1858. He studied architecture with Richard M. Hunt and in 1860 formed a partnership with Charles D. Gambrill. Some of the buildings designed by him are the New York Cotton Exchange, New York Produce Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, College of the City of New York, Pulitzer Building, New York Building (New York City-Manhattan; 1889-1890), Western Union Building (New York City; 1873-1875), Equitable Life Assurance Co. Building (New York City; 1868-1870), Old Stock Exchange (Montreal), Wisconsin State Capitol, Manufacture and Liberal Arts Building at Chicago Exposition, and the residences of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Collis P. Huntington.
During his prolific career, George B. Post demonstrated innovative engineering skill, which facilitated his creation of large, open interior spaces as well as his pioneering work in the construction of skyscrapers. His Equitable Life Assurance Society building was the first office building to use elevators. In addition, his World Building and St. Paul building had the distinction of being the tallest buildings in New York at the time of their construction. One of his commercial masterpieces, the vast New York Produce Exchange, had an enormous sky-lighted hall. Most of these buildings have been demolished. The New York Stock Exchange survives as an example of his creation of uncluttered interior spaces through inventive use of steel supports 

NOVAK 464.  NOTRE DAME IN THE EVENING, PARIS:  See note Novak  96, Novak 134 and Novak 185.

NOVAK 465.  AU QUARTIER LATIN, PARIS:  See note Novak 247.

NOVAK 466.  JAPANESE GIRL:  See note Novak 496.

NOVAK 467.  THE ELEVATED,  NEW YORK:  The elevated railway used to be a way of railway-transport not over the streets, like tramways, not under the street, like subways, but above the streets. In Manhattan the sun never saw lengthy stretches of Pearl Street, the Bowery, Greenwich Street, West Broadway, Columbus Avenue, First Avenue, Second Avenue, and Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Avenues, since they were hidden beneath elevated lines (‘els’). In addition cross streets like 23rd, 34th, 53rd, and 110th also were under els for short stretches. From the early 1870s until 1903, Manhattan's elevated trains were powered by small steam locomotives. On November 21, 1900, multiple-unit, electric-powered trains were tested on the 34th Street Shuttle. Car 703 headed the test train. 
By April, 1903 all Manhattan elevated lines were electrified.
The oldest elevated line came to be known as the Ninth Avenue El, which began in 1867 and survived, in part, until 1958. While all trace of the Second, Third and Sixth Avenue Els have pretty much been eradicated since, except for the Third which met its Manhattan demise in 1955, the other els were torn down fairly early in the century.
Today, not a single New York el is in use. The subway has proved to be a better and safier way for transport.  

NOVAK 468. BROADWAY AND WOOLWORTH BUILDING,  NEW YORK:  Woolworth Building: Height: 793,5 feet (241,2 meters) Original owners: Frank W. Woolworth and the Irving Trust Company.  Architect: Cass Gilbert . Engineer: Gunvald Aus Company, Constructed 1910, opened April 24, 1913. 

The building became an instant monument, due both to the then very impressive height, and because of its gothic ornamentation. The height caused several challenges at the time: it was the first building to have its own steam turbines and it had the fastest elevators (30 in total). The tower was built to withstand a wind pressure of 200 mph. Special kinds of scaffolding were used to minimize the danger for the construction workers. 

Broadway is a famous thoroughfare in New York City. It extends from Bowling Green near the foot of Manhattan island N to 262d St. in the Bronx. Throughout its length Broadway is chiefly a commercial street. In lower Manhattan it runs through the financial center of the country; N of Union Square (14th St.) it passes a merchandising section; further N around Herald Square there are large department stores; finally around Times Square (42d St.), which has undergone significant redevelopment, it enters the theater district, or the “Great White Way,” the most storied portion of Broadway. Points of interest along Broadway include Trinity Church (Wall St.); St. Paul’s Chapel, built 1766 (near City Hall); the Woolworth Building (at Barclay St.); the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (64th–66th streets); Columbia Univ. (113th–121st streets); the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (168th St.); and Van Cortlandt Park (at the north end of the city). 
Broadway was laid out by the Dutch and was the principal street of New Amsterdam; its northern stretches in Manhattan were formerly called Bloomingdale Road.  Before the Revolutionary War, the Dutch who settled in the beautiful countryside, now known as the Upper West Side, called the area "Bloemendaal," meaning valley of flowers. Anglicized as Bloomingdale, this rural community was connected to the lower part of Manhattan by the Bloomingdale Road, its route largely echoed today by Broadway. Centuries before the arrival of European colonists, Downtown was home to a thriving Native American culture. 

The West End of the early nineteenth century was comprised of small, distinct villages, which existed independently of each other. The wealthy (though rapidly becoming less "country") estates continued to multiply, elegant mansions competing with the rocky landscape. Despite the gridding and numbering of the streets in 1811, landholdings and natural obstructions kept this innovation largely theoretical until the end of the century. The 1853 creation and construction of Central Park displaced residents of the site, changing the economic face of the West End. As squatters and lower-income tenants were forced to abandon the park, many simply moved west, building small shacks and lean-tos. Every year the growing population brought the suburb closer to the big city and by the end of the Civil War, the area once named Bloemendaal, or 'valley of flowers' was assimilated into New York City. Despite its increasingly metropolitan feel, the West End remained largely underdeveloped throughout the nineteenth century. The projects that were undertaken--the improvement and widening of Bloomingdale Road and its rebirth as the Boulevard, the laying of new sewage systems, and the extension of the elevated railroad up the West Side by way of Ninth Avenue--appealed to forward-looking land buyers and developers, who nonetheless remained cautious.

Major urban renewal, starting in the mid-fifties  was the first step in the revival of the Upper West Side; in particular, furious debate centered around the slum clearance undertaken to make way for Lincoln Center in 1959. Despite its unpopularity throughout the seventies, the Upper West Side maintained a sense of community, attracting artists, writers, and young families with its relatively low rents and neighborhood feel. The wealth of the eighties renewed the area, raising rents and drawing yuppies and their accompanying incomes; this influx prompted renovation of the grand old buildings of the earlier era.  

NOVAK 469.  JAPANESE GIRL:  See note Novak 496.

NOVAK 472.   THE HOROLOGE OF STARE MESTO:  Plate 2 of the book  'Praha'  (=Prague) by Jaroslav Vrchlicky.  
[See note Novak 143 and 474.]

NOVAK 474.   PORTRAIT OF  JAROSLAV VRCHLICKY:  

Jaroslav vrchlicky (1853-1912).

Plate 4 of the book  'Praha'  (=Prague) by Jaroslav Vrchlicky, pen-name of Emil Frída (Louny 1853-Domazlice 1912), Czech poet , dramatist and translator;  he was probably the most prolific of all Czech writers. Highly influenced by Romance culture, he spent time in Italy in 1875-6 as a tutor. His lyrics show an amazing mastery of language, while a vast cycle of historical epics probably contain his best work. But perhaps his greatest influence was exercised by his many translations of major European writers (He translated from Victor Hugo, Dante, Leopardi, Tasso, Goethe (Faust), Baudelaire, Petrarch, Shelley,Whitman, etc.).His numerous lyric collections contain a multitude of intimate, meditative and love verses, in a large variety of metres and stanza forms, In the spirit of Victor Hugo he attempted a vast cycle of “epic fragments” to encompass a poetic vision of ennobling human spiritual evolution (e.g. "Duch a Svet", 1878; "Zlomky Epopeje", 1886; "Bar Kochba", 1897). Among others he wrote poems relating to the region of Ceský Krumlov: "A Legend of Krumlov" - about the White Lady (collection "Thistles from Parnas", 1893), "A Legend from Zlatá Koruna", "Mr. Wok and the Devil" (both of them in a collection "The New Epic Poems", 1881, further lyrical collection of poems "Pastorals and Chansons", 1880; "The Sword of Damocles, 1912 and epic poems :"Myths", 1879-1880; "Fragments of an epos", 1886 and the drama "Hippodamie", 1883-1891 (trilogy) and critical essays. He also wrote the libretto for "Svatá Ludmila (Saint Ludmila)", an Oratorio, written by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak in 1886 and the libretto for his opers Armida in 1904. Also he wrote the words of "The Romance of Spring ", a Cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra, Op 23 by Fibich. Also the words of the cantate "Amarus" (2.12.1900, Kromeríz), and " Vecné evangelium (The Eternal Gospel)" (5.2.1917, Prague) by the Czech componist Leos Janacek. A bronze bust of him by Ladislav Saloun is placed in the Pantheon of the National Museum in Prague probably in 1912. His "Noc na Karlstejna ( =A Night at Karlstein)"  was filmed in 1973.

NOVAK 475.  ENTREE DU LOUVRE:  

NOVAK 476.  MOUNT FUJI IN JAPAN:  Mount Fuji [also called Fujiyama (=the Never-dying Mountain), or Fuji-san] is a volcano, 12,389 ft (3,776 m) high, in central Honshu, Japan, about 70 miles W.S.W. from Tokyo; its southern slopes reach the shore of Suruga Bay. 

Mt. Fuji, the highest mountain in Japan, instead of being a single structure, is actually a group of superposed cones. Fuji Volcano consists of three different volcanoes; Komitake, Ko-Fuji (Older Fuji Volcano) and the present Shin-Fuji (Younger Fuji Volcano) which lie one upon the other. In addition, the volcano is studded with parasitic cones and flank openings amounting collectively more than one hundred although most of them are too small to be unsightly excrescences in the landscape of the host mountain.

 Its last major eruption took place from December 1707 until January 1708. Fuji consists mainly of basaltic lava (about 50% silicon dioxide), and is, according to geologists, a dormant; it is the archetype of the stratovolcano. A stratovolcano is a volcano composed of both lava flows and pyroclastic material (pyroclastic: pertaining to fragmented (clastic) rock material formed by a volcanic explosion or ejection from a volcanic vent; pyro=fire). Fuji has erupted at least 16 times since 781 AD. Most of these eruptions were moderate to moderate-large in size. The most recent eruption was in 1707-1708 from a vent on the southeast side of the cone. The eruption ejected 0.8 cubic km of ash, blocks, and bombs; the ashes were thrown as far as Tokyo. Fuji had two large eruption  in 1050 and 930 BC.
The very name Fuji is probably derived from Huchi, or Fuchi, the Aino Goddess of Fire; the country round Fuji formed part of Aino-land, and all Eastern Japan is strewn with names of Aino origin. 

The beauty of the snowcapped cone, broken by a crater some 2000 ft (600 m) in diameter and ringed by lakes and virgin forests, has inspired  Japanese poets and artists throughout the centuries. There are hardly any Japanese printmakers who did not make a print design of Mount Fuji. Probably the most famous series of prints showing the sacred mountain, are the Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai Katsushika (1760-1849). The twentieth century saw a renaissance in Mt. Fuji prints. The Shin Hanga art movement had a number of famous artists who tried the subject like Kawase Hasui or Hiroshi Yoshida. Also many lesser known artists like Gihachiro Okuyama made wonderful images of the majestic mountain. 
The Japanese see Mount Fuji as a sacred mountain. Mount Fuji is said to have arisen in a single night. The place where the earth was taken is Lake Biwa. A fire ceremony is conducted each year on August 26, which has its origin in the myth of Konohana Sakuya Hime. Therefore it was and still is a destination for pilgrims. Under the old Shinto religion it was a kind of a once in your life religious obligation to ascend the sacred mountain - in white clothes. When Buddhism came to Japan, Fuji simply converted from a Shinto to a sacred Buddhist mountain - otherwise status unchanged. The mountain is regarded as some kind of incarnation of a deity. Until the nineteenth century women were not allowed to climb Mt. Fuji. For them and for those who were not healthy and strong enough to climb the real Mount, the Japanese built miniature Fujis - small hills shaped after Mt. Fuji. 

According to statistics, the mountain is climbed by 200,000 to 400,000 people per year. Thirty percent of them are not from Japan. Practically, the official mountaineering activity is only from mid-July to the end of August. The weather is stable, there is no snow at the mountain- top and many mountain-huts are open. However, the mountain-trail may be partly closed in early July, because of snow near the summit. Hardly anyone climbs it during the off-season because of the harsh weather.There are 4 trails leading to the summit. Most climbers go up to the 5th stage by bus or car. From there they climb on the Kawaguchiko trail to the summit in about 5 hours and descend on the Subashiri trail in about 3 hours.  The area around the dormant volcano was declared a National Park in 1936 - the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park; the foothills of the mountains are now a resort area with winter skiing and other sport activities. History of Mt.Fuji: tens of millions of years ago, when the archipelago of Japan was separated from the continent, Fossa Magna was formed. After that, Mikasa Sanchi was formed. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, Komitake volcano is formed by a volcanic eruption. Tens of thousands of years ago, Ko-Fuji volcano repeated eruption, covering Komitake. Shin-Fuji volcano was active for a long time, until Mt.Fuji got her recent form.

NOVAK 478.  JAPANESE  TORI GATE IN  KYOTO IN WINTER:  Few Japanese cities can rival the former imperial capital of Kyoto for quantity and beauty of historical buildings and artifacts. Kyoto is located to the west of Tokyo, approximately 2 ½ hours by bullet train. Kyoto was built from the ground up to be the capital city for the Emperor Kammu in 794. It was originally called Heian Kyo, which means peaceful, safe capital. Kyoto remained the most important city in all of Japan all the way until 1600, when the Tokugawa family seized power and established Tokyo as the Shogunal capital and served as the imperial capital from 794-1867, whereas Tokyo only came to prominence as the shogunal capital since 1600. Kyoto was at its height, however, during the Heian Era (794-1185), when there was no military dictatorship to share power with. Kyoto was modeled after the Tang Dynasty Chinese capital of Changan: rectangular, with straight, bisecting streets and the imperial palace in the northeast corner, unlike its predecessor Nara a limit was placed on Buddhist temples to keep them from overwhelming the capital (one of the possible reasons the emperor moved the capital from Nara to begin with). The strategy was successful for centuries, but you could never tell by modern Kyoto. Like Kamakura and Nara, Buddhist temples and art are everywhere. In fact, there are a seemingly limitless supply of famous temples, shrines, gardens, battle sites and the like in Kyoto, giving it a feeling not unlike Rome: you turn the corner of a modern street and bump into something a thousand years old. Unlike Rome, however, the ancient buildings are not ruins. They are not, however, usually the original buildings either. Fire has long been the nemesis of the Japanese, with their wood and paper architecture, and it has claimed almost all of Japan's historical buildings at least once through the centuries. What nature didn't take, the firebombings of World War II finished off, such that it is now uncommon to find a building built before 1945 which has stood untouched since its construction (Himeji Castle, just outside Kyoto, comes to mind as a rare exception). Nonetheless, even the rebuilt structures are usually centuries old, and completely true to their original ancestors. That the Japanese rebuild these cultural treasures exactly as they stood before is a great tribute to their fondness for their cultural past. In addition to the imperial palace and shogun's castle (ca. 1569), Kyoto is home to the famous Zen rock garden at Ryoanji Temple (ca. 1450), the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (ca. 1397), and the Honnoji Temple where national hegemon Oda Nobunaga was assassinated by one of his own generals in 1582. It is ironic that the site of Nobunaga's death is now surrounded by a very modern shopping center. Nobunaga despised Buddhist sects and went on a campaign in the late 1500s to exterminate them. Nobunaga won those battles, but it now seems the merchants - not the warriors or priests - have won the war. In Kyoto you will also find the fabulous Heian Jingo Shrine (built for the 1100th anniversary of the founding of Kyoto in 1895)  the entrance to which is marked by an enormous Torii gate.  But Kyoto is famous for more than its battle sites and palaces. In fact, to the average Japanese, it is more famous for its ancient fashion. The clothes and customs of the court ladies and court gentlemen of the Heian Era were immortalized in Murasaki Shikibu's 11th century novel The Tale of Genji. Kyoto was also home to the fabled geisha and their junior geisha-in-training, called maiko. Japanese geisha are often mistakenly believed to be prostitutes; in fact, they were high-class entertainers who often had the option of bedding with very select clients. The prostitutes who Westerners confuse with geisha were called oiran, and when they reached the pinnacle of their profession (achieving the first rank and the title Yoshino Dayu) they often also had the option of refusing clients. Geisha and maiko still exist today in Kyoto's ancient pleasure quarter, Gion, but a foreigner without a zillion dollars and serious connections can forget about even finding the establishments, much less gaining entrance. Easier to find and enter is the Kyoto National Museum, which contains exhibits of art, religion and culture dating back to the Jomon Era (7,000-250 B.C.). Even if a person is not interested in Japanese history, Kyoto has much to recommend it. During early April, the cherry blossoms paint the parks and temples pink. In fall, their complexions change to fiery red and orange. There are interesting hot spring resorts in nearby Arashiyama, which are so secluded they can be reached only by boat. The Heian Era novel The Tale of Genji was written by one of the earliest female novelists in the world, Murasaki Shikibu, Kyoto aristocrat in the 900s. It paints an incredibly detailed picture of court life in 10th-century Kyoto. Life in Heian Era Kyoto continues to live in Japanese memory as the true ideal of Japanese aristocratic style. Heian Era Kyoto was so aristocratic and cultured that Japanese of the day considered there to be "two" Japans: Kyoto and everywhere else! People in Kyoto speak Japanese with a Kansai, or Western, dialect. If you speak Tokyo Japanese, they will have no problem understanding you, but you might not understand them! Major cities near Kyoto include Osaka, Kobe and Nara Kyoto is home to one of the most prestigious universities in Japan, Kyoto University.

NOVAK 479.  COMMERCIAL STREET IN  KYOTO, JAPAN:  See note Novak 478.

NOVAK 481.  ANTICKE POVIDLY (ANTIK STORIES) ( P. LOUYS ): Pierre Louys (Gent 1870-Paris 1925), writer of a lot of erotic work, a.o. the poem Chansons de Bilitis (1894) and the novel Aphrodite (1896); he was a friend of the French composer Debussy.

NOVAK 483.  NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS IN THE NORNING:  See note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185.

NOVAK 486.  INDIAN TYPE IN A  TURBAN:  See note Novak 221.

NOVAK 487.  ENTRANCE TO THE BUDDHIST TEMPEL OF KANDY, CEYLON:  About Ceylon (Sri Lanka) see note Novak .... 
Buddha [Sanskrit=the enlightened One], usual title given to the founder of Buddhism. He is also called the Tathagata [he who has come thus], Bhagavat [the Lord], and Sugata [well-gone]. He probably lived from 563 to 483 B.C. The story of his life is overlaid with legend, the earliest written accounts dating 200 years after his death.
Early Life.
His given name was Siddhartha and his family name Gautama (or Gotama). He was born the son of a king of the Sakya clan of the Kshatriya, or warrior, caste (hence his later epithet Sakyamuni, "the sage of the Sakyas") in the Himalayan foothills in what is now S Nepal. It was predicted at his birth that he would become either a world ruler or a world teacher; therefore his father, King Suddhodana, who wished Siddhartha to succeed him as ruler, took great pains to shelter him from all misery and anything that might influence him toward the religious life.
Siddhartha spent his youth in great luxury, married, and fathered a son. The scriptures relate that at the age of 29, wishing to see more of the world, he left the palace grounds in his chariot. He saw on successive excursions an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a mendicant monk. From the first three of these sights he learned the inescapability of suffering and death, and in the serenity of the monk he saw his destiny. Forsaking his wife, Yashodhara, and his son, Rahula, he secretly left the palace and became a wandering ascetic.
Enlightenment.
Siddhartha first studied yogic meditation under the teachers Alara Kalama and Udraka Ramaputra, and after mastering their techniques, decided that these did not lead to the highest realization. He then undertook fasting and extreme austerities, but after six years gave these up fearing that they might cause his death before he attained illumination. Taking moderate food, he seated himself under a pipal tree at Bodh Gaya and swore not to stir until he had attained the supreme enlightenment. On the night of the full moon, after overcoming the attacks and temptations of Mara, "the evil one," he reached enlightenment, becoming a Buddha at the age of 35.
Founding of Buddhism.
Leaving what was now the Bodhi Tree, or Tree of Enlightenment, he proceeded to the Deer Park at Sarnath, N of Benares (Varanasi), where he preached his first sermon to five ascetics who had been with him when he practiced austerities. They became his first disciples. The first sermon, known as "the setting into motion of the wheel of the dharma," contained the basic doctrines of the "four noble truths" and the "eightfold path."
For the remainder of his life he traveled and taught in the Gangetic plain, instructing disciples and giving his teaching to all who came to him, regardless of caste or religion. He spent much of his time in monasteries donated to the sangha, or community of monks, by wealthy lay devotees. Tradition says that he died at the age of 80. He appointed no successor but on his deathbed told his disciples to maintain the sangha and achieve their own liberation by relying on his teaching. He was cremated and his relics divided among eight groups, who deposited them in shrines called stupas.
Buddhism.
Religion and philosophy founded in India c.525 B.C. by Siddhartha Gautama, called the Buddha. There are over 300 million Buddhists worldwide. One of the great world religions, it is divided into two main schools: the Theravada or Hinayana and the Mahayana.
Theravada ("Teaching of the Elders") Buddhism (called "Hinayana," the "Lesser Vehicle," by the Mahayana): in India, 5th century BC to 1st century AD. 
Theravada Buddhism, emphasizing personal salvation through one's own efforts, is presently practiced in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. These places preserve the Buddhist canon, the Tripitaka (the "Three Baskets"), in the Pali language. During the Theravada period, Buddhism also spread into Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Indonesia; but all those places subsequently converted to Islam. 
Mahayana Buddhism - 1st century AD - 6th century AD (India), chiefly in China, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea and Japan, characterized by eclecticism and a general belief in a common search for salvation, sometimes thought to be attainable through faith alone.
A third school, the Vajrayana, 6th century AD - 11th century AD (India), also known as Tantric or esoteric Buddhism, characterized by the practice of mandalas, mantras, and mudras. Emphasizes more female figures, while always balancing the male and female symbolism, has a long tradition in Tibet and Japan. Buddhism has largely disappeared from its country of origin, India, except for the presence there of many refugees from the Tibet region of China and a small number of converts from the lower castes of Hinduism.
Basic Beliefs and Practices.
The basic doctrines of early Buddhism, which remain common to all Buddhism, include the "four noble truths": existence is suffering (dukhka); suffering has a cause, namely craving and attachment (trishna); there is a cessation of suffering, which is nirvana; and there is a path to the cessation of suffering, the "eightfold path" of right views, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Buddhism characteristically describes reality in terms of process and relation rather than entity or substance.
Experience is analyzed into five aggregates (skandhas). The first, form (rupa), refers to material existence; the following four, sensations (vedana), perceptions (samjna), psychic constructs (samskara), and consciousness (vijnana), refer to psychological processes. The central Buddhist teaching of non-self (anatman) asserts that in the five aggregates no independently existent, immutable self, or soul, can be found. All phenomena arise in interrelation and in dependence on causes and conditions, and thus are subject to inevitable decay and cessation. The casual conditions are defined in a 12-membered chain called dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) whose links are: ignorance, predisposition, consciousness, name-form, the senses, contact, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age, and death, whence again  ignorance.
With this distinctive view of cause and effect, Buddhism accepts the pan-Indian presupposition of samsara, in which living beings are trapped in a continual cycle of birth-and-death, with the momentum to rebirth provided by one's previous physical and mental actions. The release from this cycle of rebirth and suffering is the total transcendence called nirvana.
From the beginning, meditation and observance of moral precepts were the foundation of Buddhist practice. The five basic moral precepts, undertaken by members of monastic orders and the laity, are to refrain from taking life, stealing, acting unchastely, speaking falsely, and drinking intoxicants. Members of monastic orders also take five additional precepts: to refrain from eating at improper times, from viewing secular entertainments, from using garlands, perfumes, and other bodily adornments, from sleeping in high and wide beds, and from receiving money. Their lives are further regulated by a large number of rules known as the Pratimoksa. The monastic order (sangha) is venerated as one of the "three jewels," along with the dharma, or religious teaching, and the Buddha. Lay practices such as the worship of stupas (burial mounds containing relics) predate Buddhism and gave rise to later ritualistic and devotional practices.
Early Buddhism.
India during the lifetime of the Buddha was in a state of religious and cultural ferment. Sects, teachers, and wandering ascetics abounded, espousing widely varying philosophical views and religious practices. Some of these sects derived from the Brahmanical tradition (see Hinduism), while others opposed the Vedic and Upanishadic ideas of that tradition. Buddhism, which denied both the efficacy of Vedic ritual and the validity of the caste system, and which spread its teachings using vernacular languages rather than Brahmanical Sanskrit, was by far the most successful of the heterodox or non-Vedic systems. Buddhist tradition tells how Siddhartha Gautama, born a prince and raised in luxury, renounced the world at the age of 29 to search for an ultimate solution to the problem of the suffering innate in the human condition. After six years of spiritual discipline he achieved the supreme enlightment and spent the remaining 45 years of his life teaching and establishing a community of monks and nuns, the sangha, to continue his work.
After the Buddha's death his teachings were orally transmitted until the 1st cent. B.C., when they were first committed to writing. Conflicting opinions about monastic practice as well as religious and philosophical issues, especially concerning the analyses of experience elaborated as the systems of Abhidharma, probably caused differing sects to flourish rapidly. Knowledge of early differences is limited, however, because the earliest extant written version of the scriptures (1st cent. A.D.) is the Pali canon of the Theravada school of Sri Lanka. Although the Theravada [doctrine of the elders] is known to be only one of many early Buddhist schools (traditionally numbered at 18), its beliefs as described above are generally accepted as representative of the early Buddhist doctrine. The ideal of early Buddhism was the perfected saintly sage, arahant or arhat, who attained liberation by purifying self of all defilements and desires.
The Rise of Mahayana Buddhism.
The positions advocated by Mahayana [great vehicle] Buddhism, which distinguishes itself from the Theravada and related schools by calling them Hinayana [lesser vehicle], evolved from other of the early Buddhist schools. The Mahayana emerges as a definable movement in the 1st cent. B.C., with the appearance of a new class of literature called the Mahayana sutras. The main philosophical tenet of the Mahayana is that all things are empty, or devoid of self-nature. Its chief religious ideal is the bodhisattva, which supplanted the earlier ideal of the arahant, and is distinguished from it by the vow to postpone entry into nirvana (although meriting it) until all other living beings are similarly enlightened and saved.
The bodhisattva is an actual religious goal for lay and monastic Buddhists, as well as the name for a class of celestial beings who are worshiped along with the Buddha. The Mahayana developed doctrines of the eternal and absolute nature of the Buddha, of which the historical Buddha is regarded as a temporary manifestation. Teachings on the intrinsic purity of consciousness generated ideas of potential Buddhahood in all living beings. The chief philosophical schools of Indian Mahayana were the Madhyamika, founded by Nagarjuna (2d cent. A.D.), and the Yogacara, founded by the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu (4th cent. A.D.). In this later Indian period, authors in different schools wrote specialized treatises, Buddhist logic was systematized, and the practices of Tantra came into prominence.
The Spread of Buddhism.
In the 3d cent. B.C. the Indian emperor Asoka greatly strengthened Buddhism by his support and sent Buddhist missionaries as far afield as Syria. In succeeding centuries, however, the Hindu revival initiated the gradual decline of Buddhism in India. The invasions of the White Huns (6th cent.) and the Muslims (11th cent.) were also significant factors behind the virtual extinction of Buddhism in India by the 13th cent.
In the meantime, however, its beliefs had spread widely. Sri Lanka was converted to Buddhism in the 3d cent. B.C., and Buddhism has remained its national religion. After taking up residence in Sri Lanka, the Indian Buddhist scholar Buddhaghosa (5th cent. A.D.) produced some of Theravada Buddhism's most important scholastic writings. In the 7th cent. Buddhism entered Tibet, where it has flourished, drawing its philosophical influences mainly from the Madhyamika, and its practices from the Tantra.
Buddhism came to SE Asia in the first five centuries A.D. All Buddhist schools were initially established, but the surviving forms today are mostly Theravada. About the 1st cent. A.D. Buddhism entered China along trade routes from central Asia, initiating a four-century period of gradual assimilation. In the 3d and 4th cent. Buddhist concepts were interpreted by analogy with indigenous ideas, mainly Taoist, but the work of the great translators Kumarajiva and Hsüan-tsang provided the basis for better understanding of Buddhist concepts.
The 6th cent. saw the development of the great philosophical schools, each centering on a certain scripture and having a lineage of teachers. Two such schools, the T'ien-t'ai and the Hua-Yen, hierarchically arranged the widely varying scriptures and doctrines that had come to China from India, giving preeminence to their own school and scripture. Branches of Madhyamika and Yogacara were also founded. The two great nonacademic sects were Ch'an or Zen Buddhism, whose chief practice was sitting in meditation to achieve "sudden enlightenment," and Pure Land Buddhism, which advocated repetition of the name of the Buddha Amitabha to attain rebirth in his paradise.
Chinese Buddhism encountered resistance from Confucianism and Taoism, and opposition from the government, which was threatened by the growing power of the tax-exempt sangha. The great persecution by the emperor Wu-tsung (845) dealt Chinese Buddhism a blow from which it never fully recovered. The only schools that retained vitality were Zen and Pure Land, which increasingly fused with one another and with the native traditions, and after the decline of Buddhism in India, neo-Confucianism rose to intellectual and cultural dominance. From China and Korea, Buddhism came to Japan. Schools of philosophy and monastic discipline were transmitted first (6th cent.-8th cent.), but during the Heian period (794-1185) a conservative form of Tantric Buddhism became widely popular among the nobility. Zen and Pure Land grew to become popular movements after the 13th cent. After World War II new sects arose in Japan, such as the Soka Gakkai, an outgrowth of the nationalistic sect founded by Nichiren (1222-82), and the Risshokoseikai, attracting many followers.

NOVAK 488.  MOUNT FUJI SEEN FROM THE SEA:   See note Novak 476.

NOVAK 490.  SUNSET, CEYLON:  See note Novak 456 and Novak 487.

NOVAK 491.  SINGHALESE, CEYLON:  See note Novak 456 and Novak 487.

NOVAK 492. INDIAN BEGGARS, CEYLON:  In order to secure that extinction of desire which alone could lead to Nirvana, Buddha prescribed for his followers a life of detachment from the comforts, pleasures, and occupations of the common run of men. To secure this end, he adopted for himself and his disciples the quiet, secluded, contemplative life of the Brahmin ascetics. It was foreign to his plan that his followers should engage in any form of industrial pursuits, lest they might thereby be entangled in worldly cares and desires. Their means of subsistence was alms; hence the name commonly applied to Buddhist monks was bhikkus, beggars. Detachment from family life was absolutely necessary. Married life was to be avoided as a pit of hot coals, for it was incompatible with the quenching of desire and the extinction of individual existence. In like manner, worldly possessions and worldly power had to be renounced—everything that might minister to pride, greed, or self-indulgence. Yet in exacting of his followers a life of severe simplicity, Buddha did not go to the extremes of fanaticism that characterized so many of the Brahmin ascetics. He chose the middle path of moderate asceticism which he compared to a lute, which gives forth the proper tones only when the strings are neither too tight nor too slack. Each member was allowed but one set of garments, of yellowish colour and of cheap quality. These, together with his sleeping mat, razor, needle, water-strainer, and alms bowl, constituted the sum of his earthly possessions. His single meal, which had to be taken before noon, consisted chiefly of bread, rice, and curry, which he gathered daily in his alms-bowl by begging. Water or rice-milk was his customary drink, wine and other intoxicants being rigorously forbidden, even as medicine. Meat, fish, and delicacies were rarely eaten except in sickness or when the monk dined by invitation with some patron. The use of perfumes, flowers, ointments, and participation in worldly amusements fell also into the class of things prohibited. In theory, the moral code of Buddhism was little more than a copy of that of Brahminism. Like the latter, it extended to thoughts and desires, no less than to words and deeds. Unchastity in all its forms, drunkenness, lying, stealing, envy, pride, harshness are fittingly condemned. But what, perhaps, brings Buddhism most strikingly in contact with Christianity is its spirit of gentleness and forgiveness of injuries. To cultivate benevolence towards men of all classes, to avoid anger and physical violence, to be patient under insult, to return good for evil—all this was inculated in Buddhism and helped to make it one of the gentlest of religions. To such an extent was this carried that the Buddhist monk, like the Brahmin ascetic, had to avoid with the greatest care the destruction of any form of animal life.
See note Novak 456 about Ceylon and Novak 487 about Buddhism. 

NOVAK 493.  NOCTURNE IN MORLAIX,  BRITTANY:  Info from 1909: Morlaix is a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Finistère, E.N.E. of Brest on the railway to Rennes. Pop. (1906), 13,875. Morlaix lies between 4 and 5 m. from the English Channel in a narrow valley where two small streams unite to form the Dossen, the channel of which forms its port, consisting of an outer tidal harbour and an inner basin, admitting vessels drawing 17 ft. at spring tides and 12 ft. at neap tides. Below the town the river widens into an estuary, the mouth of which is commanded by an old fortress, the Chateau du Taureau, built in 1542 to protect the town against the English. The railway from Paris to Brest crosses the valley on a striking two-storeyed viaduct some 200 ft. above the quays. Morlaix contains a considerable number of wooden houses of the 15th, 16th and I7th centuries. These have large covered courts, with huge open fireplaces and carved wooden staircases, supported on pillars, leading from the court to the upper storeys.

NOVAK 494. ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSELLER AT NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS:  In original Czech edition of Novak it is called  "Vetesnik [=Used Clothes Dealer]  at Notre Dame", but correct in Rudolf Lesch (NY) own catalogue; 115 have his stamp. See note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185 about Notre Dame.  About book-sellers see Novak 56.

NOVAK 496.  JAPANESE TYPES:  Japan is an extremely homogeneous society with non-Japanese, mostly Koreans, making up less than 1% of the population. The Japanese people are primarily the descendants of various peoples who migrated from Asia in prehistoric times.
Physical Characteristics-The best authorities are agreed that the Japanese people do not differ physically from their Korean and Chinese neighbours as much as the inhabitants of northern Europe differ from those of southern Europe. It is true that the Japanese are shorter in stature than either the Chinese or the Koreans. Yet in other physical characteristics the Japanese, the Koreans and the Chinese resemble each other so closely that, under similar conditions as to costume and coiffure, no appreciable difference is apparent. The most exhaustive anthropological study of the Japanese has been made by Dr E. Baelz (emeritus professor of medicine in the Imperial University of Tokyo in the beginning of the 20th century), who enumerates the following sub-divisions of the race inhabiting the Japanese islands.
The first and most important is the Manchu-Korean type; that is to say, the type which prevails in north China and in Korea. This is seen specially among the upper classes in Japan. Its characteristics are exceptional tallness combined with slenderness and elegance of figure; a face somewhat long, without any special prominence of the cheekbones but having more or less oblique eyes; an aquiline nose; a slightly receding chin; largish upper teeth; a long neck; a narrow chest; a long trunk, and delicately shaped, small hands with long, slender fingers. The most plausible hypothesis is that men of this type are descendants of Korean colonists who, in prehistoric times, settled in the province of Izumo, on the west coast of Japan, having made their way thither from the Korean peninsula by the island of Oki, being carried by the cold current which flows along the eastern coast of Korea.
The second type is the Mongol. It is not very frequently found in Japan, perhaps because, under favourable social conditions, it tends to pass into the Manchu-Korean type. Its representative has a broad face, with prominent cheek-bones, oblique eyes, a nose more or less flat and a wide mouth. The figure is strongly and squarely built, but this last characteristic can scarcely be called typical. There is no satisfactory theory as to the route by which the Mongols reached Japan, but it is scarcely possible to doubt that they found their way thither at one time.
More important than either of these types as an element of the Japanese nation is the Malay. Small in stature, with a well-knit frame, the cheekbones prominent, the face generally round, the nose and neck short, a marked tendency to prognathism, the chest broad and well developed, the trunk long, the hands small and delicate- this Malay type is found in nearly all the islands along the east coast of the Asiatic continent as well as in southern China and in the extreme south-west of Korean peninsula. Carried northward by the warm current known as the Kuro Shiwo, the Malays seem to have landed in Kiushiu-the southernmost of the main Japanese islands-whence they ultimately pushed northward and conquered their Manchu-Korean predecessors, the Izumo colonists.
None of the above three, however, can be regarded as the earliest settlers in Japan. Before them all was a tribe of immigrants who appear to have crossed from north- eastern Asia at an epoch when the sea had not yet dug broad channels between the continent and the adjacent islands. These people-the Ainu-are usually spoken of as the aborigines of Japan. They once occupied the whole country, but were gradually driven northward by the Manchu-Koreans and the Malays until only a mere handful of them survived in the northern island of Hokkaido. Like the Malay and the Mongol types they are short and thickly built, but unlike either they have prominent brows, bushy locks, round deep-set eyes, long divergent lashes, straight noses and much hair on the face and the body. In short, the Ainu suggest much closer affinity with Europeans than does any other of the types that go to make ug the population of Japan. It is not to be supposed, however, that these traces of different elements indicate any lack of homogeneity in the Japanese race. Amalgamation has been completely effected in the course of long centuries, and even the Ainu, though the small surviving remnant of them now live apart, have left a trace upon their conquerors.
The typical Japanese of the present day has certain marked physical peculiarities. In the first place, the ratio of the height of his head to the length of his body is greater than it is in Europeans. The Englishman's head is often one-eighth of the length of his body or even less, and in continental Europeans, as a rule the ratio does not amount to one-seventh; but in the Japanese it exceeds the latter figure. In all nations men of short stature have relatively large heads, but in the case of the Japanese there appears to be some racial reason for the phenomenon. Another striking feature is shortness of legs relatively to length of trunk. In northern Europeans the leg is usually much more than onehalf of the body's length, but in Japanese the ratio is one-half or even less; so that whereas the Japanese, when seated, looks almost as tall as a European, there may be a great difference between their statures when both are standing. This special feature has been attributed to the Japanese habit of kneeling instead of sitting, but investigation shows that it is equally marked in the working classes who pass most of their time standing. In Europe the same physical traits-relative length of head and shortness of legs-distinguish the central race (Alpine) from the Teutonic, and seem to indicate an affinity between the former and the Mongols.
It is in the face, however, that we find specially distinctive traits, namely, in the eyes, the eyelashes, the cheekbones and the beard. Not that the eyeball itself differs from that of an Occidental. The difference consists in the fact that the socket of the eye is comparatively small and shallow, and the osseous ridges at the brows being little marked, the eye is less deeply set than in the European. In fact, seen in profile, forehead and upper lip often form an unbroken line. Then, again, the shape of the eye, as modelled by the lids, shows a striking peculiarity, for whereas the open eye is almost invariably horizontal in the European, it is often oblique in the Japanese on account of the higher level of the upper corner. But even apart from obliqueness, the shape of the corners is peculiar in the Mongolian eye. The inner corner is partly or entirely covered by a fold of the upper lid continuing more or less into the lower lid. This fold often covers also the whole free rim of the upper lid, so that the insertion of the eyelashes is hidden and the opening between the lids is so narrowed as to disappear altogether at the moment of laughter. As for the eye-lashes, not only are they comparatively short and sparse, but also they converge instead of diverging, so that whereas in a European the free ends of the lashes are further distant from each other than their roots, in a Japanese they are nearer together. Prominence of cheekbones is another special feature, but it is much commoner in the lower than in the upper classes, where elongated faces may almost be said to be the rule.
Finally, there is marked paucity of hair on the face of the average Japanese-apart from the Ainu-and what hair there is is nearly always straight. It is not to be supposed, however, that because the Japanese is short of stature and often finely moulded, he lacks either strength or endurance. On the contrary, he possesses both in a marked degree, and his deftness of finger is not less remarkable than the suppleness and activity of his body. 
[Novak 466 depicts a Japanese girl and Novak 518 a Japanese mother with a child.]

NOVAK 497.  INDIAN WOMEN IN KANDY, CEYLON:  Kandy, also written Candi, or Candy; a town 115 km north-east of Colombo in the inland of Ceylon [Sri-Lanka]on a lake surrounded by mountains. Used to be the capital of the Singhalese empire Candy. She has a large former royal palace and 4 Hindu and 12 Buddhist temples. The big, sacred  temple keepsin a rich decorated cabinet [Karanda] a tooth of Buddha. In the neighbourhood is the famous botanic garden of Peradeniga. 
See note Novak 446 for more about Kandy and Ceylon. About Buddhism see Novak 487.

NOVAK 498.  AT THE BUDDHIST TEMPLE:  See about Sri Lanka note Novak 456 and about Buddhism Novak 487.

NOVAK 499.  NEW YORK HARBOUR:  

NOVAK 504.  NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS IN THE RAIN:  See note Novak 96, Novak 134 and Novak 185.

NOVAK 505.  FIESOLE NEAR FLORENCE IN THE EVENING:  See note Novak 537.

NOVAK 507.  BATHING THE ELEPHANTS, CEYLON:  About Ceylon see note Novak 456. 
The Sri Lankan elephant ( Elephas maximus maximus) subspecies is confined to the island of Sri Lanka (65,605 square kilometers, 25,332 square miles) off the southern coast of India. Although there is no accurate census available, it is estimated that about 2500-3000 elephants are still found in the wild, and a further 500 odd in captivity. It occupies a variety of habitats from open grasslands to forested regions, including open savannas, wet areas of marshes and lake shores. At the turn of the century more than 10,000 elephants were found distributed all over the island. These numbers were rapidly depeleted, firstly due to big game hunting, and subsequently because of rapid development and deforestation, which in turn increased the conflict between man and elephant. The remaining few thousands are confined to the national parks, while pockets of small herds are strewn around in the north-eastern and eastern areas.

The Sri Lankan elephant is somewhat different to the African elephant where firstly it has much smaller ears. The profile of it's back, is convex (males) or straight and level (females), as the case may be,unlike that of the African elephant, which is concave. Thus Sri Lankan male elephants have well rounded backs which taper downwards steeply, while the females have straight flat box-shaped profiles. Another less obvious difference between the African and the Asian (Sri Lankan) elephant is the tip of the trunk. The Asian species has two finger-like protrutions while the African has one. The long and flexible trunk can weigh up to 125 - 200 kilograms (275 - 440 pounds). Generally, the Asian elephant has more hair on its body than the African elephant, and it is especially conspicuous in the newborn and juveniles. The body colour could be anything from dark gray of different shades, to dark brown, depending on the colour of the soil and mud where the elephants have bathed and dusted. Mature Sri Lankan elephants in particular display heavy pinkish pigmentation of the skin around the ears, face and trunk. The head of the male has large and pronounced bulges; those of the female are smaller.Only males sprout tusks rarely. (in some cases even longer and heavier than those of the African species). An average male adult Sri Lankan elephant may reach 3.5 meters (11 feet 6 inches) in shoulder height and weigh 5,500 kilograms (12,125 pounds). Females are much smaller.

All elephant species have one of the longest gestation periods in the animal kingdom, of 18-20 months. One calf is usually born, weighing about 75 - 115 kilograms (165 - 225 pounds) and measure approximately 100 centimeters (3 feet 3 inches) at the shoulder. Elephants reach sexual maturity between the ages of 8 and 14 years, but this varies with the prevailing conditions of the habitat. For instance during severe periods of draught, puberty may be delayed even up to age of 14-15 years. A female elephant can give birth every 4 - 6 years, and has the potential of giving birth to about 6-7 offspring in her lifetime, which is about 55- 60 years.
The elephant has a very inefficient digestive system, where almost 45% of it's food intake is passed through as undigested matter. As a result the elephant spends most of it's life eating, and therefore has to seek out a continous and abundant supply of food and water. Their diet is strictly herbivorous. Most elephants consume 100 - 150 kilograms(220 - 330 pounds) of food and 80 - 160 liters (20 - 40 gallons) of water per day. The Asian elephant is adapted to be being a grazer rather than a browser. It's diet will include different types of grasses, as well as juicy leaves and fruits.

NOVAK 509.  RUDE KAMELIE ( TEREZA DUBROVSKA):  See note Novak 528. Original Czech title is 'Rudé Kamelie'.

NOVAK 510.  ON THE STEPS OF A  BUDDHIST TEMPLE:  See note Novak 456 and Novak 487.

NOVAK 513.  PORTRAIT OF HUGO BOETTINGER: 

Hugo Boettinger (1880-1934).

Boettinger, Hugo (1880 - 1934). A Czech painter, graphic artist, and caricaturist who painted under the alias Dr. Desiderius. He created mainly lithography, portraits, but mostly he painted young women. He studied under professor E. K. Liska and F. Jenewein at the Academy of Decorative Arts in Prague and under M. Pirner at the Prague Academy of Arts. Throughout his life he was concerned with Symbolist figural themes, for him the classical treatment of the nude figure was closely related to the myth of the lost paradise. In 1905 he went with T. F. Šimon, one of his closest friends, to London to see the retrospective exhibition of J. Whistler whose sensitive synthesis of Symbolism and Impressionism he admired. Whistler's paintings had a great impact on his work, mainly on his portraits and especially with respect to the compostition and colour.

NOVAK 515.  MOUNT FUJI WITH ENOSHIMI:  Plate 1 of  'Sketches of the Orient'. See note Novak 476.

NOVAK 516.  JAPANES BUDDHIST PRIEST.  Plate 2 of 'Sketches of the Orient'.

NOVAK 517.  A STREET IN KIOTO DURING THE RAIN:  Plate 3 of 'Sketches of the Orient'. See note Novak 478.

NOVAK 518.  JAPANESE MOTHER WITH CHILD:  Plate 4 of  'Sketches of the Orient'.  See note Novak 496.

NOVAK 519. CHINESE  RICKSHAW:  Plate 5 of  'Sketches of the Orient'.  A rickshaw is a passenger carriage pulled by a human being. The word, also written as "jinricksha" or "ricksha", is derived from the Japanese name of the vehicle, meaning literally "manual carriage".
A hand-pulled rickshaw - or jin riki sha, in Japanese -- is basically a seating compartment mounted between two large wheels. 

The vehicle is pulled by a runner holding two long poles extending back to the rickshaw body. While the concept of a passenger being pulled by a runner might seem somewhat primitive, the rickshaw was a vast improvement over sedan chairs, which had to be lifted and carried by two men. Because of the simplicity of its design and mechanics, one might assume that the rickshaw has been a mode of transportation for centuries. Surprisingly, though, the rickshaw is a relatively recent arrival on the transportation scene, having made its first appearance in the streets of Japan around 1870. There is some question as to who gets credit for actually inventing the rickshaw, but a number of authorities give credit to an American Baptist minister living in Yokohama, Japan, who supposedly built the first model to transport his invalid wife through the streets of Japan. Other accounts credit the rickshaw's invention to Japanese individuals, including an out-of-work samurai. In any case, the rickshaw proved an immediate hit with the public and with rickshaw operators, with as many as 150,000 on the streets of Japan alone only a decade after their introduction.

NOVAK 520.  CHINESE FISHING-JUNKS:  Plate 6 of  'Sketches of the Orient'.  Junk (through Portuguese junco, adapted from Javanese djong, or Malayan adjong, ship), the name of the native sailing vessel, common to the far eastern seas, and especially used by the Chinese and Javanese. It is a flat-bottomed, high-sterned vessel with square bows and masts carrying lug-sails, often made of matting.  

NOVAK 521.   Plate 7 of  'Sketches of the Orient'.

NOVAK 522.   Plate 8 of  'Sketches of the Orient'.

NOVAK 523.   Plate 9 of  'Sketches of the Orient'.

NOVAK 524.  IN THE BUDDHIST TEMPEL OF KANDY:  Plate 10 of  'Sketches of the Orient'. See note Novak 456 and Novak 487.

NOVAK 525.  INDIAN TYPE IN A TURBAN:  Plate 11 of   'Sketches of the Orient'. See note Novak 221.

NOVAK 526.  CEYLONESE  GIRL:  Plate 12 of  'Sketches of the Orient' . See note Novak 456. 

NOVAK 527. BOOKSELLERS ON A PARISIAN EMBANKMENT:  See note Novak 56.

NOVAK 528.  SVATKY ME DUSE ( T.DUBROVSKA):  Dubrovská, Tereza, pen-name of  Koseová, Tereza [1878-1951], authoress and translatress; pupil of  Jaroslav Vrchlicky. 'Svatky me duse ' [=a treat for my soul] : Praha, Otto, 1930. 60 pages. 
Novak 509 and 603 have also etchings from books of this writer.

NOVAK 531.  INDIAN GIRLS, CEYLON:  See note Novak 456 and Novak 487.

NOVAK 532.  ARC DE TRIOMPHE,  PARIS:  See note Novak 93.

NOVAK 534.  PORTRAIT OF  FRANTISEK KOBLIHA: 

Kobliha, František (1877 - 1962). Symbolist painter and graphic artist, pupil of  Frantisek Zenisek.

NOVAK 535.  PENELOPE ( TEREZA DUBROVSKA): About Tereza Dubrovska: see note Novak 528. Penelope= the daughter of Icarius from Sparta, wife of Odysseus; paragon of conjugal fidelity; she remained loyal to her husband during his 20-year absence, despite the many men that tried to seduce her. 

NOVAK 536.  STROMY NAD ZAKOPY ( RUDOLF MEDEK):  'Trees  above the Trenches' by Medek, Rudolf 1890 - 1940, Czech writer, son of the painter Antonín  Slavícek; in the first worldwar he fought in the Czechoslovakian army in Russia. 

NOVAK 537.  VIEW OF FIESOLE:  Fiesole (anc. Faesulae) 300 m. above sea level in the main square, Piazza Mino is situated some 9 km. from the center of Florence in Tuscany, Italy. It is the center of a town district of 15,000 residents of whom approximately a third live in the ancient town, another third in the "Valle del Mugnone" zone and the remainder in the suburbs, housing clusters and isolated homes of the "Valle dell'Arno" area. The territory spans about 42 square km., almost entirely hillscape with heights from 58 m. on the banks of the Arno to the 702 m. of Poggio Pratone, a true roof over Florence whose terrain must be described as pre-Appenine The urban centre is connected with the Mugello, a zone of broad, by means of a hillback road that passes through the Olmo. A thick web of ancient roads ensures crosswise communication in other directions. The landscape, primarily farm and forest, is punctuated by olives, the most widely cultivated tree, by patches of conifer woods and copses, and by houses integrated with nature with a wisdom born of long experience.  
 The hills of Fiesole, which from afar present the shape of a crescent moon (the hill of S. Francesco to the west, the hill of S. Apollinare to the east), an image included in the city’s crest, have been inhabited at least since the Bronze age (circa 2000 B.C.). There are traces down through the successive Iron Age during which Etruscan civilisation reached its height (circa VIIIth - IVth centuries B.C.). The Etruscans, who employed a language diverse from the Italic and Latin populations in the peninsula, were strongly integrated with Greek culture, organised their territory into city-states, and developed a rich and complex economy. The urban centre of Fiesole developed around the areas of the earliest dwellings, on the heights. The city proper, marked by an imposing defensive wall running more than 2,500 m. around the two hills, dates to the Hellenistic period (late IVth - early IIIrd centuries B.C.). Understandably, given Fiesole’s position in central Italy, the town became a strategic point for the control of traffic over the major arteries between the south-central areas of Etruria (covering large parts of present-day Tuscany, Umbria and Latium) and the Etruscans of the Po valley zone, and a bulwark against invasions by northern peoples, above all the Gauls. As is often the case, the Latin authors offer far less historical information than archeological researches do. Fiesole was allied with Rome against Hannibal in 217 B.C. In 90 B.C. Portius Cato destroyed the town, which had taken an anti-Roman stance during a civil war in the capital. Ten years later the veterans of Silla colonized Fiesole, displacing local farmers. In 63 B.C. the town served as the headquarters of Catiline, the Roman statesman and conspirator against the Roman republic and suffered the consequences of his defeat. In the second half of the 1st century B.C. Fiesole was transformed into a typical Roman city. The new buildings include a theatre seating 3,000, a new temple replacing the Etruscan one, and a bath complex (most of the large-scale archeological ruins date to this epoch). During the last phase of the Roman empire two battles were fought in Fiesolan territory, that between Stilico and Radagaisius (405 A.D., during the invasion of the Goths) and that between Belisarius and the Ostrogoth Vitige (539). After the fall of the empire Fiesole was occupied by the Lombards (VI-VII sec. d. C.) as attested by the recovery of many tombs and objects. With time Florence took over Fiesole’s role as a stronghold. As was commonly the case, the Roman administrative district formed the basis for the organisation of the Church and its very extensive diocese, which still today embraces the important historical regions of the Casentino and the Chianti. The early bishops were an important factor in regional politics, and indeed their rule extended to civil matters. The Cathedral was founded in the XIth century by Jacopo the Bavarian. In the XIIth century Florence organised itself as a free town or commune, and conquered and destroyed Fiesole, whose bishop was required to reside in Florence. Thenceforth the ruined town entered a phase of relative decline, reduced to supplying Florence with materials and skills. 
Fiesole also entered the patrimony of remembrances and legends about the origins of Florence, to which Dante Alighieri alludes in the Divine Comedy, and which he and other Florentines naturally shaped to their own purposes. Giovanni Boccaccio’s works leave no doubt that he felt the slopes of Fiesole to be a delightful place and the ideal setting for his narratives and his imaginative mythology. Since Renaissance times this countryside, celebrated by Politian and visited assiduously by Lorenzo the Magnificent and the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, has been chosen as the haunt or country seat of well-to-do Florentine (and later foreign) families, and their splendid homes and villas remain as evidence. In the XIVth century, however, many of the inhabitants of Fiesole earned their livelihood as quarrymen or stonecutters processing pietra serena, the renowned grey stone used already by the Etruscans and Romans for architecture and ornament, and still abundantly present to the eye in Fiesole and Florence. Much later, from the second half of the XIXth century, concurrent with Florence’s brief role as capital of Italy (1865-70), Fiesole became the scene of much new building and urban expansion, marked by new exclusive homes and also housing for the poor and middle-class. Essentially the present-day aspect of Fiesole was consolidated at this time. In 1873 the remains of the Roman theatre were excavated under the direction of marquess Carlo Strozzi, and in 1878 the archeological zone and civic museum were established. The museum’s present residence was built in 1914 and restored, enlarged and rearranged in 1981-1990. Thanks to the enlargement of the city of Florence, decided in 1865 by the new-born Italian state, in 1910 the town council of Fiesole lost jurisdiction over some important areas. Nonetheless, the early history and later identity of Rovezzano, Settignano, Pellegrino, Coverciano and Mensola are distinctive and inseparabale from that of Fiesole, whether one considers the finer dwellings of different periods, the functional and tastefully designed gardens and cultivated areas, or the road- and water-works. 
The Romanesque cathedral of S. Romolo is an early and simple example of the Tuscan Romanesque style; it is a small basilica, begun in 1028 and restored in 1256. The picturesque battlemented campanile belongs to 1213. The tomb of the bishop Leonardo Salutati (d. 1466) with a beautiful portrait bust by the sculptor, Mino da Fiesole (I430/1—1484), is fine. The Franciscan monastery, on the site of the Roman acropolis, commands a fine view. The church of S. Maria Primerana has some works of art, and S. Alessandro, which is attributed to the 6th century, contains fifteen ancient columns of cipollino. Below Fiesole, between it and Florence, lies San Domenico di Fiesole (485 ft.); in the Dominican monastery [San Domenico di Fiesole] the painter, Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole [Fra Angelico] (1387—1455), lived until he went to S. Marco at Florence. Here, too, is the Badia di Fiesole, founded in 1028 and re-erected about 1456—1466 by a follower of Brunelleschi. It is an irregular pile of buildings, in fine and simple early Renaissance style; a small part of the original façade of 1028 in black and white marble is preserved. The interior of the Church is decorated with sculptures by pupils of Desiderio da Settignano. The slopes of the hill on which Fiesole stands are covered with fine villas. To the S.E. of Fiesole lies Monte Ceceri (1453 ft.), with quarries of grey pietra serena, largely used in Florence for building. To the E. of this lies the 14th-century castle of Vincigliata restored and fitted up in the medieval style. Of note in Fiesole are a well-preserved Roman theater (c.80 B.C.) and the ruins of Roman baths.  
 The English at Fiesole. The presence of foreigners and especially the English inserts itself within the matrix of nineteenth-century cultural renewals and rediscoveries. Here the most prominent case is John Temple Leader’s reconstruction of the Castle of Vincigliata, which is accompanied by a revival of the Middle Ages (as the period was understood at the time) in general and in particular in architecture and the ‘minor arts’, and even extends to restoration and landscape design (the columns of the Maiano estate, the cypress and ilex woods), implanting a taste that waned only early in the present century. Beyond its undeniable richness in archeological and art historical artefacts, Fiesole fascinates us today in large part because of its splendid panoramas, with the landscape accessible close to the fortified walls of the town. From the Middle Ages until the period of the unification of Italy in the second half of the last century, the old network of roads and the system of churches formed the basis of civic, government and ecclesiastic life in the area. The agrarian landscape was reorganised and reshaped by the Florentine merchant class, with farm units run on the sharecropping system (with the farmhouse as the centre), and altering many of the earlier castles and villages (so that few traces remain of earlier modes of farming). The cypress, traditionally thought to have been brought in by the Etruscans, really became diffused in this zone in the late nineteenth century as a decorative element of lordly dwellings. In the Renaissance period a wealthy and refined class of patrons enriched and cultivated the dwellings and the churches of the area, propagating villas and gardens, not to mention works of painting sculpture and skilled crafts, many of which remain in their original locations. The rule of the Medici was fundamental in the redefinition of the territory in terms that served the interests of Florence but that was marked by beauty as a principle governing all the arts. The care that was taken is perceptible in any direction one turns, in small places as well as the most imposing, main roads or little ones. In 1870, 177 historic villas and 564 fine dwelling and farmhouses were catalogued in the territory. Much of the road network is centuries old: the links between farms and isolated houses, the springs, terrace walls, channels for irrigation or for mills. Some place-names go back to the Etruscans, others to the Romans, and still others refer to the medieval period or to activities that have disappeared. The crossroads are still marked by tabernacles, signs of devotion and at the same time of a social, cultural and spatial order consolidated over the centuries. An excursion to the quarries helps to gain an idea of the scale of the stoneworking activity based here. Without this activity, Renaissance architecture, so intimately bound up with decorative elements, could not have developed, and Florence and other areas in Italy would have been much poorer in art objects and in more practical building elements (paving, stairs, portals, brackets, fountains, chimney-pieces, benches, basins,  tablets). A visit to the civic museum and the adjacent archeological zone is essential for a clear sense of the early history of Fiesole.

NOVAK 538.  VIEW OF FIESOLE:  See note Novak 537.

NOVAK 1931 AP1. PORTRAIT OF BOZKA VOLDANOVA-MASAKOVA (*1896-1929).



NOVAK 590. PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER:

Rozalie Šimon, second wife of Antonin Šimon.

NOVAK 589.  STRECNO NA VAHU:  Strecno on the river Vah (German: 'Waag');south-east of Zilina, Slovakia. Two castles guarded the entrance of the narrow valley, one on the left  and the other on the right bank. Stary hrad, old castle, on the right bank dates from the 11-12th century. It was still inhabated in the 18th century, but today only the bare walls remain. Strecno castle is on the left bank, above Strecno itself. It was built in the 13th century. The road passes directly beneath the sheer cliff on which the ruin of this important castle stand. The possession of it was more than once contested down the centuries by the imperial troops and the rebels in the Austrio-Hungarian monarchy. The castle fell in ruins at the end of the 17th century and was abandonated.

NOVAK 591.  KROMERIZ CASTLE:  See note Novak 415.

NOVAK 594.  GATE AT MONTE PINCIO, ROME 

Piazza del Popolo  (popolo=people, but in this case Popolo derives from pioppo=poplar) is one of the most beautiful squares in the world. The monumental gate Porta del Popolo at the N. End of the square bears the coat of arms of Pius IV and was begon by Vignola in 1561. The inner gate was designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1655 to celebrate the arrival of Queen Christina of Sweden, but the decoration is actually a celebration of Alexander VII, whose coat of arms had six mountains and a star. Porta del Popolo has been the main entrance to Rome for centuries. It is also called Porta Flaminia because it is the starting point (in the walls built by Aurelianus) of Via Flaminia leading to Ponte Milvio after which it splits into Via Flaminia (going to Rimini) and into Via Cassia (going to Florence). Porta del Popolo was the starting point in the tourist guides of the XIXth century. The towers protecting the gate were pulled down after 1870 to expand the gate by adding two minor arches. The granaries and warehouses do not exist any longer.   The Piazza del Popolo and the Pincio (the garden mountain of the ancients overlooking Piazza del Popolo) were redesigned in 1816 by Giuseppe Valadier at the beginning of the 19th century for Pius VII. In the centre of the huge and beautifully proportioned square the Obelisk of Rameses II (Obelisco Egizio), originally erected in Heliopolis, brought from Egypt during the reign of Augustus and placed in the Circus Maximus. It was erected by Domenico Fontana in 1589 as part of the urban plan of Sixtus V. It is topped by the mountains and the star of Sixtus V. Valadier designed two hemicycles (semi-circles) around the obelisk to which he added fountains and Egyptian lions. The statues of the four seasons are located at the beginning of the streets going up to the Tiber or the Pincio. Two large marble groups are at the center of each hemicycle. One is Neptune between two tritons, a typical Baroque theme developed in neoclassical style.

The two, almost twin, Baroque churches of S. Maria di Montesanto (left) and S. Maria dei Miracoli (right) were designed by Carlo Rainaldi, but Gian Lorenzo Bernini gave advice on how to emphasize the similarity between the two churches. S. Maria di Montesanto was erected first (1678) and S. Maria dei Miracoli a few years later (1681). The columns come from the bell tower erected by Bernini for St Peter's, a project abandoned in 1646.
Near the gate stands S. Maria del Popolo. Restored in the 13^th century and rebuilt in the 15^th to the plans of A. Bregno and B. Pontelli, it is like a museum, so numerous are its work of art. In the first chapel on the right: “Holy Crib”, painted by Pinturicchio; the cupola has frescoes by the same artist; the apse is by Brante; behind the high altar, paintings by Caravagio, “St. Paul on th road to Damascus”and “The Martyrdom of St. Peter”. The Chigi Chapel was designed by Raphael and has a painting by Sebastiano del Piombo and sculpture by Lorenzetto and Bernini.
Facing the obelisk is the Via del Corso (formerly Via Lata, the Corso Umberto I); its sober beaty is due to the patrician palaces and the architecture of the baroque churches. Uphill from the Piazzo del Popolo to the Pincio, the rerrace of which, known as the Piazza Napoleone Bonaparte, commands one of the loveliest views over the city. 

Turning S.E., we come to Villa Medici, once the residence of the dukes of Tuscany, today the home of the Académie de France, founded by Colbert under Louis XIV to provide accomodation for artists who had won the “Prix de Rome”for three years.Ingres and David were directors; Berlioz received some of his training there. The front of the villa, where Galileo lived more as a guest then a prisoner, overlooks the Piazzale di Villa Medici; the inner façade (by A. Lippi) is a typical ezample of late 16th century architecture. The gardens in which Poussin, Corot and Chateaubbriand meditated, are among the most beautiful in Rome. From the belvedere there is a magnificent view; one can still see the fortifications built on the foundations of Horti Domitiorum and restored by Benedict XIV and later extended for some distance by Pius IX. Below, the “Muro Torto” (twisted wall) runs along one side of the park. Prince Camillo Borghese, husband of Paolina Buonaparte, rearranged in 1830 the park around Villa Borghese and had the architect and archaelogist Luigi Canina build for him a new entrance to the Villa from Porta del Popolo. The Ionian propyla are surmounted by the Borghese eagles and dragons. In the XVIIIth century this area belonged to the Giustiniani family.

	Another gate in the old wall around Rome is the neighbouring Porta Pinciana, one of the minor gates and from time to time closed. Immediately outside the gate is Villa Borghese. Closed for most of the XIXth century Porta Pinciana was reopened with the completion of Via Vittorio Veneto which goes from Piazza Barberini to Villa Borghese.

NOVAK 596. SELF PORTRAIT:

T.F Šimon (1877-1942).

NOVAK 597. PORTRAIT OF DR. MILAN RASTISLAV ŠTEFANIK:

Milan Rastislav Štefanik.

NOVAK 598.  HONOLULU ( Rudolf  Medek):  Rudolf Medek: see note Novak 536. Honolulu is capital of the state of Hawaii, part of  the USA in the Pacific. Hawaii began 60 million years ago as what geologists call a hot spot: a bulge of hot, molten rock about 250 miles wide running down 1900 miles to our planets iron core. It is the biggest hot spot in the world. The hot bulge, measured at about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit, rose to the Pacific Ocean plate, where it melted the rock and turned to magma, breaking out of the Earths crust as lava, eventually turning to land. This process happens more frequently and with more power in Hawaii than any place else on Earth. The island chain is anchored by Hawaii, crowned by the highest volcano in the world, Mauna Kea. Its sister, Mauna Loa, is still pouring out 2,000-degree lava along its flank and is the worlds most massive volcano. The two peaks rise from the swell of the Hawaiian Ridge, which itself is a colossal platform, 500 miles wide and a half-mile above the surrounding ocean floor. On that huge swell, the islands are staging their life cycle. Today on Honolulu's home island, O'ahu, there are the remnants of two huge volcanoes, Waianae and Ko'olau. 
The early Hawaiians were closely linked with the volcanoes that formed their home and helped shaped their lives. God and Goddess, heroes and heroines associated with the peaks are to be found throughout Hawaiian mythology. Pele, the fire goddess, is one of many deities that Hawaiians speak of through their chants and stories. Others are Lono, Kane and Kanaloa, but Pele is the deity most associated with the volcanoes and thought of as both destructive and creative. The beautiful legends of Pele describe her search for a home, moving down the island chain from Kauai, digging her fire pits but always striking water until she came at last to the crater of Kilauea on the big island of Hawai'i where she remains today. The story of Peles route through the islands, from the oldest to the newest, shows that the original Hawaiians understood volcano science with a great deal of sophistication. Another popular ancient Hawaiian myth concerns Maui, the hero of Haleakala, known throughout Polynesia as a rascal and a trickster. He is famous for creating the islands by bringing them up from the sea with a magic fishhook. Maui was very popular because of his superhuman strength and his ability to invent ways to make life easier. 
 The earliest inhabitants of these islands were likely royal navigators from the Marquesas Islands, the strongest, most knowledgeable people in their villages. They found their way to Hawaii before 900 A.D. Later came seafarers ranging from New Zealand, Tahiti and other Pacific islands. When the star navigators reached these islands, the Big Islands southern points were the first areas settled. British Capt. James Cook started the "modern era" of Hawaii on Jan. 18, 1778 on his third Pacific voyage. He renamed them The Sandwich Islands. At first, he and his HMS Discovery and HMS Resolution crews got along well with the islands inhabitants, but that turned sour within a year and he and most of his men were killed on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1779. Ships from America, Britain and other European countries continued to find their way to the islands with few other altercations.  In 1789 the first Chinese arrive after jumping off a trading ship. In 1810 Kamehameha the First was king of the Big Island, and other kingdoms on Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Lanai and Kauai swore allegiance to him after he slaughtered all of the opposition on each island. During the next 20 years, the Hawaiian Islands became a beacon for voyagers in an era of international imperialism. In 1813 the first pineapple plants are introduced from Spain, 1817 coffee is first planted, 1892 Macadamia nut trees are first planted.  The first Hawaiian flag is sewn in 1816. In 1819 King Kamehameha the Great dies. Prince Liholiho ascends the throne as Kamehameha II (1819-1824). He also abandons the ancient taboo of eating with women. The first American Protestant missonaries arrive aboard the brig Thaddeus from New England in 1820. 1825 – 1854: The reign of King Kamehameha III. 1840: The first Hawaii constitution of the kingdom was established. 1848: The Great Mahele is signed by King Kamehameha III which allows commoners and haoles to own land outright or in "fee simple," a concept that continues today.  
For the most part, Hawaiians welcomed the foreign crews, not knowing they brought diseases deadly to the native population. During the next 100 years, 80 per cent of the native Hawaiian population succumbed to these illnesses. Kamehameha the First died in May of 1819 just as the first of the American Christian missionaries proclaimed their goal of "raising up the people of Hawaii to an elevated state of Christian civilization." The influx of missionaries over the next 40 years was to change the island chain forever.  In 1885, an isolated area on Molokai was chosen by King Kalakaua, as a place of quarantine for those who had contracted leprosy (Hansons Disease). Kalupapa had been a small village of native Hawaiians. Most often leprosy victims were literally dropped off the ships into the sea, along with their possessions and had to swim ashore. Those who made it to shore lived in terrible conditions. There was little food and no housing or nursing care. As the leper population grew, the locals slowly moved away. In 1873 a Belgian priest, Father Damian, arrived at the settlement to minister to the sick and brought law and order to the community. He worked among the patients until he himself contracted the disease and died in 1889. With the advent of sulfa drugs in the 1940s, the disease was controlled and remaining patients were given the option to leave or to stay as long as they wished. 

Foreigners created the village of Honolulu beside the tiny harbor of Kou in the first half of the 19th century. By 1850 [On August 31, King Kamehameha III declares Honolulu a city] Honolulu Harbor was full of masts as more than a hundred fifty whaling ships and merchants crowded the harbor at any given time. This meant that more than 3,000 seamen were ashore, looking for liquor and other entertainment. There were numerous drunken brawls leading to arrests. Honolulu's jails were always filled to capacity. The town, for better or worse, had become the hub of commerce for the entire northern and central Pacific. With the whaling industry came the demand for many things: wood, rope, water, salted beef, pigs and chickens, tools and cloth. Whalers shipped supplies and whale bone and rendered whale oil through Honolulu. This caused a boom economy to which Honolulu became accustomed. Sugar production took hold in the 1840s and by 1884, production soared to 10 million pounds a year, transforming Hawaii from a traditional, insular, agrarian, and debt-ridden society into a city that was multicultural, cosmopolitan and prosperous. In the center of this world was Honolulu. England, France, and the United States, the Pacific's contending maritime powers in the 19th century, were keenly aware of the Islands' and Honolulu's strategic importance. By the early 1840s, intrigues by British residents led Rear Admiral Richard Thomas, commander of the British Squadron in the Pacific, to send Lord George Paulet to Honolulu to protect British interests. He arrived in the winter of 1843 and issued a series of threatening ultimatums. King Kamehameha III had sent emissaries to Europe to resolve all disputes but to no avail. The king was forced to yield to British guns. On February 15, 1843 Paulet ordered the Hawaiian flag lowered and the British flag raised to start an occupation lasting five months. Protests mounted in the Islands and since Great Britain had already recognized Hawaii's independe