Thessaloniki 4, and another train

[fivemack]

At last, I managed to get to the Museum of Byzantine Culture. Heads are knocked off statues by iconoclasts; my guess is that the genitals on Herms are knocked off by more prudish iconoclasts, but, unless it's the intrinsic fragility of marble, I'm not quite sure why so many statues are noseless.

This is reputed the best museum of its kind in Europe, and indeed its text is very good, but it still doesn't manage to explain what I should be looking at in a room full of icons. I suppose the story came across as purely of decline, retreating from grid-planned Roman cities to cramped walled fortresses on the top of hills placed with a paranoid care for water supply. I hadn't realised that Salonica was pretty much the second city of the Byzantine empire for a while, seat of a powerful tetrarch.

Also the Palace of Emperor Galerius, the richly-mosaiced third-century Church of Ag. Georgiou (formerly Temple of Zeus) and the church of Pantagliou (presumably 'all saints') where every available surface was gilded in a way to make a German rococoist jealous (though, he would counter, not quite as twiddly; twiddles were reserved for the altars and iconostases).

At about six I got onto a train which spent six hours taking me to Bulgaria, north then east then north to avoid the mountains; there is certainly a game mechanic possible in building railway lines to get from A to B to time and to budget, though it needs a Google Maps-like interface because there's a lot of unexpected small-scale detail, and it might turn out too hard to be fun. The contour maps of the world required for it exist, thanks to NASA, and there may be people who like the idea of planning out the all-Africa rail network that the British Empire would have built by now were it not for certain European altercations in the period 1860-1960.

Or maybe it'd just be Railroad Tycoon and has already been invented; more careful attention to the terrain might make it less fun.

James will be surprised that I managed to use my fifteen-year-old B-grade-GCSE Russian to get myself a taxi to the hostel, and even to notice that the first taxi driver I encountered wanted to charge a larcenous sum and avoid him.

Comments

[drplokta]

It's Railway Rivals (Dampfross in Germany), where terrain is very important, and for which many maps are (or were) available, including Bulgaria.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That's what I was going to say.

That's a good game.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

There are an *awful* lot of train games, though most that I know of only have at most three or four types of terrain. As you say, I suspect it'd be hard to make a fun, balanced game that was more complicated than that.

Ah hang on, you're talking about computer games not board games...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Apparently at one time the runner up in the struggle to be Basileus would tend to have his nose cut off, the theory being that the emperor had to be perfect, at least until Justinian II bloodily disproved it. Perhaps the same logic was applied to statues.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

You'd love railway planning in Colorado, where terrain is all. The Moffat Road decided they wanted a 3% grade, so built 70 odd tunnels climbing through the foothills, and then looped and looped and looped to get 4% over Hell Hill

The Brooklyn museum has a FAQ about Egyptian noses (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/kiosk/egyptian/ancient-egypt/k4/faqs/faqs.php#noses). They argue that the statue was viewed as a immortal home for the soul, and breaking the nose 'killed' the soul of the deceased. They also mention the prosaic point that when a statue is toppled, it tends to land on its nose!