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SWALLOW’S NEST

This is not a great photo, but it is a great view. I had been giving lectures on the Crystal Serenity, the magnificent cruise ship of the Crystal Cruise Line, when the ship visited the port of Yalta in the Crimea. I had only a few hours to take a tour bus making a shore excursion to the Swallow’s Nest Castle on the Yalta-Sevastopol road. I can imagine the views one might have here with better light, for example in a sunset or in soupy fog with the horizon vanishing into the fog, and I am certain much better photographs of the site have been posted. In 2007, I had posted another shot of Yalta, shot in 1998, showing Yalta in thick fog. The scene was the Livadia Palace where in 1945 a secret summit meeting brought together Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin.

In 1912 the wealthy businessman Baron von Steinheil, a Baltic German nobleman who had made a fortune in drilling for oil in the Baku region of Azerbaijan, hired the Russian architect, Leonid Sherwood, to build a “romantic hideaway.” The architect rendered his design in a mix of neo-Moorish and Scotish Baronial style, inspired by another fairy tale castle, Neuschwantein, in Bavaria (1886). Compared to the latter, this structure is much more modest and compact, but what a view! Swallow’s Nest Castle was built on a 40 m (120 ft) high promontory overlooking the Black Sea, and at a site once occupied by the third century Roman fortress, Castrum Charax. (A far more impressive image appears at the commercial site, NationMaster.The castle appears to be perched on a platform cantilevered precipitously over the sea. But, in surviving a massive earthquake in 1927, it proved it possessed impressive structural integrity.

Nikon D200, auto-Nikkor 28-200 mm, tripod.

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Additional Photos by Bulent Atalay (batalay) Gold Star Critiquer/Gold Star Workshop Editor/Gold Note Writer [C: 4537 W: 295 N: 6786] (20836)
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