The remote village of Ribnovo in the Rhodope mountains of southwestern Bulgaria has kept its traditional winter marriage ceremony alive despite decades of Communist persecution and subsequent economic hardship. Ribnovo's inhabitants, who are Muslim,...
Aysha is one of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have undertaken the hazardous and sometimes deadly journey from Syria, through Turkey to Europe over the past two years, fleeing war, persecution and death. It took her over two weeks of ...
The waters of the Prespa Lakes are shared between three countries which border them: Albania, Greece and Macedonia. Over the past century the two lakes, located on a mountain plateau in the southern Balkans have been straddling the faultlines between...
The Greek island of Leros, nestled among the Dodecanese in the southern Aegean, is a place accustomed to outcasts. In Antiquity it was a place of exile for the nearby town of Miletus, now on the Turkish mainland. Later, during Ottoman times the ...
On the Greek island of Leros, in the dilapidated shell of a former mental asylum that served as a jail for political prisoners during the country's dictatorship, a 'hotspot' has been housing stranded refugees who have arrived on boats from Turkey ...
In Japan, where eating is taken very seriously and fish forms a major part of the national diet 'fugu', or pufferfish, is in a league of its own. Not only is it one of the most expensive delicacies on the Japanese menu but it also carries the extra ...
I'm in Nikolai Smetanin's office where he is talking me through a series of photographs of mangled reindeer carcasses. Nikolai is the head of Yakutia's government-run hunting department. With a landmass comparable to India, Yakutia is by far the ...
In the late 1970s, Soviet geologists discovered large uranium deposits near Mardai River in the Dornod province of Eastern Mongolia. The governments of the USSR and Mongolia signed a secret agreement to open a uranium mine in 1981 and Mardai town ...
The Buddha's first sermon, the Dharmachakrapravartana ('Turning of the Wheel of Law') which put forth the Middle Path, The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path after his enlightenment marked the formal beginning of Buddhism in the Indian ...
The Inca were originally a small tribe in the southern highlands of Peru. In less than a century, during the 1400s, they built one of the largest, most organised and tightly controlled empires the world had seen. Their skill in government was ...
Around the Braj region of India which is most closely associated with the festival of Holi, revellers gather at the Shriji Temple (Laadli Sarkar Mahal) in Barsana during Lath mar Holi which usually falls around March. They throw coloured powder at ...
Travelling on an urban subway system is normally a chore, but on Moscow's Metro eight decades of Russian and Soviet history unfold as you hop from station to station. The Moscow Metro opened on 15 May 1935 beginning eight decades of development. As ...
As West Africa's ebola crisis enters its second grim year and with a death toll nearing 7,000 it is easy to lose sight of the fear, sorrow and tragedy of each infection, each silent and painful death in towns and villages across the countries worst ...
On 25 April 2015 a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck central Nepal with Gorkha District at the epicentre, causing widespread destruction of property and infrastructure. A powerful aftershock on 13 May 2015 caused further damage and loss of life. Many ...
The toilet a small but fundamental part of every-day life, wherever you live in the world. Seldom do we pause and think how much we rely on having access to a decent toilet how it enables us to go to school, work, rest and play; how it preserves ...
Each evening the sleek commuter trains pulling into Bucharest's Gara de Nord make way for a relative from an earlier era. The Bucharest to Chisinau night train is an iron behemoth; uniformed attendants stand by each doorway scrutinising tickets and ...