crossingbarriers

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The Story of Baa and Coo and How They Crossed the Atlantic

Taking inspiration from one of my personal childhood favorites Kenneth Grahame, yet another native of Edinburgh, and still under the spell of Scotland, here is a little story for you:

It was not a very long journey.

Baa and Coo lived amidst dozens of their identical siblings in the window of a wee gift shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. They were born somewhere in Scotland, made out of the finest pinches of wool one could ever find, with their tiny legs shaped out of bark of the birch trees grown by the banks of a Scottish loch. They were a bit unsteady on their feet - perhaps it was all that clean and cool air, proximity to the sea and the mountains, or perhaps a whiff of a whisky dram on the breath of a chance tourist, but their story was that if they lost balance and fell face first... well, that must have been an air draft from the door, or a seagull flapping its wings too vigorously outside, and anyways, you get a wee bit of luck each time they fell face first.

And then someone bought them. Picked and plucked them out of the entire herd of their wobbly-legged companions in the window. They were both wrapped carefully in a tissue paper, and put in a bag with St Andrew's Cross on it, sealed, and ended up in a tourist's backpack. Dark and warm was in there, and noises were rather muffled. And when they saw the light of day again, they were on the other side of the Atlantic. The journey was not too long.

Next, they knew they were away from their siblings but still together, woolly and fuzzy, comfortably standing under someone's lamp on the writing desk, looking at their reflection in its polished base just the way they were once looking into the loch when they were still birch trees... And their legs were not too wobbly anymore. Must have been all that whisky breathing after all...

[crossingbarriers]

Broken Hearts in Silver Urns

Here lies the heart of Maria Theresa, a formidable, extraordinary and perhaps the most powerful woman of the 18th century... who, too, was wed in this church, and in later years dwelled on every hour of her life shared with her much beloved - even if having a roving eye – husband Francis I... whose heart rests in an urn by her side here as well... In life, in love, in death... they were and are still joined together.

Then, again, at least two broken hearts are not here… Here does not lie the heart of Joseph II besotted in love with his first wife, Isabella of Parma, only to lose her affections when she allegedly looked for love elsewhere, and then was claimed by smallpox, taken by Death - the lover from whom there is no escape... They both, bodies intact, rest eternally in the Imperial Crypt.

But here, in the Herzgruft, lies the heart of the object of affections of beautiful Isabella - Maria Christina, Duchess of Teschen, the favorite of Maria Theresa’s sixteen children, and the only one allowed to marry for love rather than to promote geopolitical ambitions of the state, and too, claimed untimely by Death... as the angels weep at the entrance to her (empty) tomb so longingly created by Antonio Canova...

Even in our ever so pragmatic and often cynical times, there is a small breed of us, still surviving. The last of die-hard romantics, we still tend to view love and love’s labor lost as serious, life-changing, and even world-shattering events… Wouldn’t life be easier if we were to take a more ironic view of it all, in tune with another famous resident of Vienna, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who observed that “within the civil society, lovers are what fanatics are in religious matters: lunatics”?

For some of us, though, the path of true love is never an easy one, full of perils, aches, and longing, and sometimes – albeit for a brief moment - perhaps even of bliss…

[crossingbarriers]

Broken Hearts in Silver Urns

“The heart was made to be broken.” — Oscar Wilde

All our lives we are relentlessly pursuing happiness, and often the search for love underlies it as we firmly though perhaps quite erroneously believe that love is all that ultimately matters.

All our lives we are relentlessly pursuing happiness, and often the search for love underlies it as we firmly though perhaps quite erroneously believe that love is all that ultimately matters.

Vienna is possibly one of the most romantic of European capitals, and yet notorious for having an odd fascination and long and - for want of a better word – a rather special relationship with death. Memento mori… its reminders are quite numerous. One of such sad and romantic reminders of the fleeting nature of life and even more fleeting nature of love could be found in ancient Augustinian church – Augustinerkirche in central Vienna.

When we read history books or biographies, we are often overwhelmed by dates and details of battles, political triumphs or disastrous defeats. Sometimes we view great historical figures almost as semi-gods wielding their power and making decisions that turn the course of history for millions of people. But they are nothing more but mere mortals though put in unusual circumstances by birth, chance or luck…

Love is a many-splendored thing. Yet it is filled with irretrievable regrets, failed expectations, and unfulfilled wishes… To me it often seems that no other place in Vienna is as poignant a reminder of this as Augustinerkirche, the court church that witnessed weddings of many Habsburgs including Emperor Franz Joseph I marrying Sisi in 1854 and even Napoleon marrying Marie Louise of Habsburg in 1810. It is also a place with a small crypt holding 54 hearts of the Habsburgs in eternal rest. Somehow I am certain that each one of these hearts kept in silver urns could tell us its own story of how they too occasionally got to be broken and not always got to be mended… and now lie here shattered with human foibles and personal suffering buried forever…