In this post I want to show some of the photos I took in Santa Fe in 2009 and 2014. It is a beautiful and historic city to visit, with a downtown small enough to be very walkable. My photographs of three Santa Fe churches are in three other posts: Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, Loretto Chapel, and San Miguel Chapel. As always, click on a photo for a larger view.

San Miguel Chapel is a Spanish colonial mission church in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is said to be the oldest church in the United States, originally built around 1610. It has been rebuilt twice and it is not clear how much of the earlier churches remain. The wooden reredos, which includes a wooden statue of Saint Michael dating back to at least 1709, was added in 1798. The church is part of the Barrio De Analco Historic District, which is a U.S. National Historic Landmark. This district also includes the De Vargas Street House, which is called the “oldest house”.

Loretto Chapel is famous for its spiral staircase. The building, a chapel for a girls’ school, was built by the same French architects who designed the St. Francis Cathedral. Like the cathedral, the stained glass windows came from France. The building was commissioned in 1873. I will quote from Wikipedia on the staircase – it is well worth reading why this staircase is notable, but first note, it has no central pole.
“It is known for its unusual helix-shaped spiral staircase (the “Miraculous Stair”). The Sisters of Loretto credited St. Joseph with its construction. It has been the subject of legend, and the circumstances surrounding its construction and its builder were considered miraculous by the Sisters of Loretto.”

I was working on photos I have taken in Santa Fe and discovered so many of the St. Francis Cathedral, mostly interior, that I am making a separate story for the cathedral. The current building was built on the site of two previous previous churches. It was designed in the Romanesque Revival style and was completed in 1887. The stained glass windows were imported from France. I am no expert on this building, but wanted to share my photographs of it.

What is abstraction in photography? Abstract photography to some people is a photograph of something you cannot recognize, but that is not true of most of mine and not my goal. My goal is usually to simplify the image in order to extract the “essence” of it and downplay the too-busy details. Some of these images were abstract out of the camera, but for most of them I used tools in Photoshop and Photoshop plugins to achieve my goals.

And now for something completely different, to use a famous phrase… Leaving Ukraine for a while, I decided to find my best reflections I had taken over the years and put them in one place.

On our third day in Odesa we took a bus trip of almost two hours to Akkerman Fortress. Akkerman Fortress (also called Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi fortress) was built on the site of the ancient Greek city of Tyres. Construction of the fortress is believed to have begun in the 13th century. Akkerman Fortress was protected by the Black Sea (Dniester Estuary), a moat, and its walls (see birds eye view below). Like most of this region, the area has had many rulers, which you can read about in the Wikipedia article.

Odesa has a long and complicated history, like much of this area. In antiquity there was a Greek settlement at the site. There is known to have been a settlement which was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by 1415. The Grand Duchy included large portions of the former Kievan Rus’ and other neighbouring states, including what is now Belarus, Lithuania, most of Ukraine as well as parts of Latvia, Moldova, Poland and Russia. Odesa became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1529 until the Ottomans’ defeat in the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792). In 1794 Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, established a navy harbor and trading port and soon after it was named Odesa. From 1819 to 1858, it was a free port. During the Soviet period it was a trading port and naval base. Ukraine became independent again when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Odesa is the third largest city in Ukraine and (was) a major seaport and transportation hub.

It was when I started to post this photo of the statue of Catherine the Great that I discovered she is no longer there… That removal was part of the Derussification of Ukraine. The Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Maidan Revolution or the Ukrainian Revolution, took place in Ukraine in February 2014 at the end of the Euromaidan protests. It was In late November 2013, that Ukrainians took to the streets in peaceful protest after then-president Viktor Yanukovych chose not to sign an agreement that would have integrated the country more closely with the European Union. On February 22, 2014, after President Yanukovych had fled the country, parliament voted to oust him and hold new elections and on May 25, Ukrainians elected Petro Poroshenko as president. After the October elections, a new pro-reform coalition government came into power in December 2014. Polls conducted in Odesa from September to December 2014 found no support for joining Russia.

This is not the type of post I intended to make, documenting our 2013 cruise in Ukraine. Yesterday I tried to find out what was happening in Odesa and discovered that in July 2023 Transfiguration Cathedral was heavily damaged.

The following photograph is from the New York Times in their article about the attack.