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France Gets Ready to Say ‘Merci’ to World War II Veterans for D-Day’s 80th Anniversary This Year 

A World War II reenactor plants roses on Omaha Beach in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 6, 2023. (AP)
A World War II reenactor plants roses on Omaha Beach in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 6, 2023. (AP)
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France Gets Ready to Say ‘Merci’ to World War II Veterans for D-Day’s 80th Anniversary This Year 

A World War II reenactor plants roses on Omaha Beach in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 6, 2023. (AP)
A World War II reenactor plants roses on Omaha Beach in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 6, 2023. (AP)

France is getting ready to show its gratitude toward World War II veterans who will return, many for the last time, to Normandy beaches this year for 80th anniversary commemorations of D-Day to mark the defeat of the Nazis.

A ceremony at Omaha Beach, with many heads of state expected to be present, will be honoring the nearly 160,000 troops from Britain, the US, Canada and other nations who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday that D-Day celebrations, alongside the Paris Olympics, will be "France’s rendezvous with the world."

It will be an occasion for the French to say "merci," or "thank you," to veterans, some of whom will make a long trans-Atlantic journey, despite advanced age, fatigue and physical difficulties.

"We will never forget. And we have to tell them," Philippe Étienne, chairman of the Liberation Mission, the specially created body that organizes the 80th anniversary commemorations, told The Associated Press.

As a former ambassador of France to the United States, Étienne recalled his "strong emotion" when handing veterans the Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction.

"They were 18, 20, 22 when they liberated our country, when they gave us back our freedom," he said. "Now 80 years later, they’re 100, 98, 102. It’s really incredible. Those are really courageous, humble people. They must feel our gratitude."

The link between the last witnesses of the war and the youth will also be at the heart of the anniversary.

"What we want above all, when the last witnesses, the last fighters, the last veterans are still with us, is to give their testimonies to our young people," Étienne added.

In the past couple of years, commemorations also have taken a special meaning as war is raging again in Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Gen. Michel Delion, director-general of the Liberation Mission, said "that the message is more for the whole population than only for soldiers. Because the price of liberty is something that any citizen of any democratic nation needs to understand."

"The civilians were part of this (World War II) conflict because they suffered and they supported fighters. And we need to have this cohesion of our nations, of our populations to be able to answer to any question ... or any danger we could face tomorrow or today," he added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had been present for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, wasn't expected to be invited this year. Putin didn't attend the 75th anniversary in 2019.

Countries like France that have signed and ratified the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court are obligated to arrest Putin, who was indicted for war crimes connected to the deportation of children from Ukraine, if he sets foot on their soil.

Étienne said that the commemorations, including some academic events, "will surely not ignore the sacrifices of everybody who ... was involved in the liberation of Europe, including in the East, because the Nazi regime was defeated both from the West and from the East."

He stressed the fact that "populations of the former Soviet Union, Russians in particular, but also Ukrainians and others, participated in this liberation."

Other key events will include celebrations of the Allied landing in Provence, in southern France, and the liberation of Paris, both in August, as well as the liberation of Strasbourg, at the border with Germany, in November, and the commemoration in May 2025 of the surrender of Nazi Germany to Allied forces.

Ceremonies will also allow France to pay tribute to Resistance fighters, to soldiers who came from its then colonial empire in Africa and to the civilians who suffered during the war.

Already across France, "we feel that there's a very strong mobilization to remember this very important period in history," said Fabien Sudry, deputy director-general of the Liberation Mission. "We feel it in the contacts we have, in the trips we make, with many local and regional authorities involved."

French authorities are notably considering launching a nationwide operation to collect family documents, objects and audiovisual material related to World War II that would help keep the memory alive.

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Culture

Italy’s Lecce… Florence of the South

The city has an ancient history that stretches back more than 2,000 years (Getty Images) 
The city has an ancient history that stretches back more than 2,000 years (Getty Images) 
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Italy’s Lecce… Florence of the South

The city has an ancient history that stretches back more than 2,000 years (Getty Images) 
The city has an ancient history that stretches back more than 2,000 years (Getty Images) 

‘The best way to experience Lecce is to walk around looking up.’

That is what a tourist is told shortly after arriving in the second-largest city in Italy’s Puglia region, often described as the “Florence of the South.”

And not because it is a place filled with skyscrapers like New York. Rather, because so much of its beauty is built into its exquisite architecture, according to London’s Metro newspaper.

The cobbled streets are steeped in history, and every Baroque-era building tells a story, much like its northern sister.

Florence attracts millions of tourists each year, many of them drawn by world-famous masterpieces.

There are frescoes by Giotto, canvases by Botticelli, and sculptures by Michelangelo — it is the cradle of the Renaissance, after all.

As for Lecce, the city sits in the Salento peninsula of Puglia, and its honey-drenched limestone is its dominant feature.

Much like Florence, you are never far from a church. Again and again, you see an unassuming facade and find an incredible duomo inside.

Nothing compares to Lecce Cathedral, built in the 12th century in the heart of the historic center, the Piazza del Duomo.

You could spend hours taking in the intricacies of the artwork: pillars romanticized with tiny cherubs, altars carved in gold and huge stone fonts.

Remembering the advice, tourists should look up at the ceiling and find a version of The Last Supper, painted by Giuseppe da Brindisi.

By night, the streets of Lecce are a gorgeous setting for walking off hearty meals, shopping and finding hidden gems like secret gardens in courtyards.

Lecce is smaller than Florence and less crowded, but is just as impressive. This city might be big on siestas, but it’s certainly not one to be slept on.

 

 

Culture

‘The Eye of Goliath’, A Novel That Recalls Jekyll and Hyde

Cover of “The Eye of Goliath” book
Cover of “The Eye of Goliath” book
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‘The Eye of Goliath’, A Novel That Recalls Jekyll and Hyde

Cover of “The Eye of Goliath” book
Cover of “The Eye of Goliath” book

By Dexter Palmer* 

“The Eye of Goliath”, the Argentine writer Diego Muzzio’s dark-humored, macabre puzzle box of a novel, is set just after World War I, in an Edinburgh sanitarium that “harbored a select group of the many mentally ill people who had come back from the war.”

The institution’s psychiatrist, Edward Pierce, conducts controversial research into hypnosis as a means of treating mental illness. His peers think his experiments are “destined to fail before too long,” while Pierce finds their “methods, based on pharmacology and electricity, to be ineffective and obsolete.”

A new patient, an engineer named David Bradley, arrives at the sanitarium after being stranded on an island with an abandoned lighthouse, which he was sent to assess by his employers.

Pierce sees a chance to prove the viability of his innovative psychiatric procedures.

Traumatized and unable to speak, Bradley is possessed by a need to swim at all times. He has documented his time on the island in a diary, which makes up the second part of the book and details his descent into madness and persistent terror. Muzzio then returns to Pierce and the treatment of his perplexing patient.

This complexly plotted novel is deeply intertextual, and Muzzio uses other writers’ themes as a hip-hop producer might use samples, crafting new tunes by borrowing fragments of familiar melodies and arranging them in new ways.

Allusions abound to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Dante’s “Inferno,” the first Book of Samuel, the work of the writer and naturalist William Henry Hudson and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

The most significant influence, however, is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic novella “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”

A few mentions function as blinking neon signposts (Pierce has a copy of the book in his bedroom; the lighthouse engineer David Alan Stevenson, Robert’s real-life cousin, makes an appearance), but subtler engagements with the novella also come into view.

Pierce’s neuralgia, a condition of crippling headaches caused by shrapnel lodged in his head, is kept in check by increasingly frequent doses of morphine.

His habit echoes Dr Jekyll’s dependence on his secret elixir, which he first imbibes to deliver his evil alter ego, Hyde, to the world (and then takes to restrain Hyde from appearing on his own).

An act carried out on a pair of corpses is viewed from two perspectives, one that regards it as a desecration and the other as a performance of remorse; where one person might see a Hyde, another might see a Jekyll. Twins and duplicates appear throughout, including one clever moment when the book itself becomes doubled. In its elegant, sometimes playfully quaint prose (ably translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery) and in its structure, particularly the documents that make up Bradley’s section, the novel gestures toward the Gothic without wholly turning into pastiche.

Behind Pierce’s and Bradley’s plotlines are memories of the recently ended war, which both men would prefer to forget.

Flashbacks to the phantasmagoria of trench warfare, a “fabulous catalyst for insanity,” are the novel’s most unsettling passages.

Pierce views the personification of war as a grotesque distortion of Carroll’s Alice, a girl with “glimmering eyes who went about with a jingling bunch of keys, opening all the chambers of the mind where legions of babbling demons had been shut away.”

The trenches are where every man is forced by circumstance to bring forth a Hyde, not for the pleasure that Stevenson’s Hyde takes in violence, but for mere survival. In this compelling novel, the fates of both Pierce and Bradley suggest that no matter how justified one may be for letting Hyde run riot the first time, it is extremely difficult to contain him again.

 

*The New York Times

Culture

On World Architecture Day, Madinah Reflects Its Identity Through Its Urban Landscape

Madinah stands out for its architectural character, which draws on the city’s cultural identity and architectural heritage. (SPA)
Madinah stands out for its architectural character, which draws on the city’s cultural identity and architectural heritage. (SPA)
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On World Architecture Day, Madinah Reflects Its Identity Through Its Urban Landscape

Madinah stands out for its architectural character, which draws on the city’s cultural identity and architectural heritage. (SPA)
Madinah stands out for its architectural character, which draws on the city’s cultural identity and architectural heritage. (SPA)

The first Monday of October marks World Architecture Day, an occasion that highlights the role of architecture in shaping cities and enhancing the quality of the urban environment. Madinah stands out for its architectural character, which draws on the city’s cultural identity and architectural heritage while preserving the authenticity and distinctiveness of the place, the Saudi Press Agency reported Tuesday.

Madinah’s architectural style embodies an approach that derives its identity from the city’s architectural features and cultural elements, incorporating them into contemporary designs. This strengthens the connection between the urban landscape and the city’s history and local environment, giving its projects a distinctive character.

Local architecture showcases details historically associated with the city, such as rawasheen (traditional projecting wooden windows), courtyards, basalt stone, and other heritage-inspired elements. Reinterpreting these features through contemporary methods helps strike a balance between authenticity and the demands of modern life, creating urban environments that respond to human needs while ensuring comfort and privacy.

Architectural features and design identities rooted in the local environment enhance the distinctiveness of the urban landscape and elevate design quality, aligning with future aspirations while simultaneously preserving the memory and identity of the place. The focus on Madinah’s architectural identity aligns with the objectives of Saudi Architecture, which aim to enhance urban identity, improve the urban landscape, and develop sustainable, human-centric urban environments in harmony with the objectives of Saudi Vision 2030.