Ghost City

Former cathedral on former Kneiphof island in former Königsberg 

Everywhere you go in Central Europe, you’re travelling to a place that no longer exists. And no place more so than Königsberg.

The centre of the city, now Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave wedged between Lithuania and Poland, simply isn’t there. Where once were bustling streets and shops and trams and carts and markets... it’s now a tree-lined park, flanked by a couple of highways. The old city is gone.

Many European city centres were devastated by massive Allied bombing and fierce ground combat in WW2, but unlike almost everywhere else, in Königsberg, no one rebuilt what people remembered – mostly because the people who might have remembered were deported en masse after the war: men, women and children. Centuries of the old city’s Prussian history came to an end. There was no one left who could have any sense of nostalgia for what was lost, and so no one was yearning to recreate what once was.

The Wasp Effect

You, my dear and learned friends, are no doubt already very well aquatinted with the "Butterfly Effect", the notion that the gentle flutter of a lepidopteran wing sets off a causal series of unlikely, yet inevitable, interactions that ultimately bring down a long-ruling empire. I would like to put forward to you, my esteemed associates, a similar concept, the "Wasp Effect", the idea that a hymenopteran suddenly flying between your eyeglass lens and your eyeball can set off an existential panic that, in a radically short span of time, will up-end the bicycle beneath you and somersault your entire overweight organism on to the asphalt.