Early on a September morning, Lior cuts through Volkspark Friedrichshain on his way to Ding Dong Ping Pong. The air carries the scent of rain on stone, and faintly, children’s laughter drifts between the trees. Sunlight brushes lightly over leaves and flowers, promising another warm day.
He slows his pace at the fragrance garden, where a statue of a mother and child stands watch. Passing through the gate, Lior pauses to admire Edmund Gomansky’s 1898 sculpture. Around him, the garden hums with life — hungry insects busy themselves among the flowers, making the most of summer’s final days.
Family Ties
Mother and Child, Edmund Gomansky 1898.
The statue makes Lior think of his own mother, and of her mother before her. And then of the darker stories about his great-grandmother and her parents. In 1898 that side of the family lived in Kolonia Yakovleva, in what is now Belarus but was then part of the vast Russian Empire. These rural villages, the kolonii, were created by the Tsarist government to cultivate the borderlands. They were self-sustaining settlements. Built on shared ownership and equality, a pioneering model quite unlike the better-known market towns, or shtetls — places like “Anatevka” from Fiddler on the Roof— which thrived on trade, culture, and religion. From the early 1900s, this idea of communal settlement was echoed in the Jewish Kibbutzim in Ottoman, later British-controlled Palestine, and eventually in Israel.
Twentieth century
Memorial to the German International Brigades, built by Soviet Union in the late ’60’s.
When the October Revolution erupted in 1917, Lior’s family sided with the Bolsheviks, drawn by the promise of equality and an end to antisemitism. They believed deeply in socialist ideals, and several even volunteered in the International Brigades, fighting against Franco’s fascists in Spain between 1936 and 1939.
It had been a rough path — marked by Tsarist violence, by war, by loss. The family’s story was one of resilience, but also of wounds that had never fully healed.
Rocky road
The “fountain of fairy tales” from 1913, designed by Ludwig Hoffmann.
From the fairy-tale fountain, Lior continues his walk uphill. He knows he is quite literally climbing over the remnants of the Second World War. The hill beneath him is made of bunkers so solid that even the Red Army could not destroy them. Instead, they were simply buried under earth. Pausing, he glances down and notices two small rocks at the path’s edge. He bends to pick them up.
For a while, Lior simply sits there. Between past and present, between stone and bloom. Grateful for the way Berlin always carried its memory not as a burden, but as a companion on a beautiful day.
I don’t have that much experience with sports-photography, as theater and festivals are the arenas I’m used to. Through the years I made a lot of photos of my daughter Sofia and her unicycle of course, but never covered a whole event a lot of athletes, all with different techniques and timing. Now sometimes I volunteer as a unicycle event-photographer. I find it exciting but still have a lot to learn.
Disciplines like Trials are pretty new to me. I’m not familiar with the techniques and the lines. Some of them are really flying all over the place. So for the time being I prefer to stay back a bit to not annoy the athletes.
Another problem I have to overcome is my excitement. The athletes sometimes really awe me with really cool jumps and climbs. It made me forget to take a photo of the moment more than once.
These photos are from a set I took during the German Unicycle Championships Trials (2025) in Wildberg-Sulz. It’s a really awesome site, both indoor and outdoor.
The fairytale forest villages usually have no more than a few hundred permanent residents. Some even less than hundred. In the summer, that number grows by several thousand. Between May and November the city-dwellers escape the hustle and bustle and seek out their picturesque country homes. I am talking about the small villages located in the forests on the Karelian Isthmus, between Vyborg and St. Petersburg. Within walking distance of the beaches of the Gulf of Finland and surrounded by countless small lakes. The area was originally part of Finland, but after World War II it was absorbed by the USSR and is now integrated in the Russian Federation.
Classic Finnish Style
In the vast forests you can still find houses like these, but they are getting rare.
Before the first world war, a lot of ground and homes were already purchased by wealthy Russian residents of Saint-Petersburg. The Russian elite were willing to pay a high price for such a rustic wooden country house in classic Finnish style.
Initially, it was rich Russian intellectuals. Poets and writers flocked en masse to the Finnish forest with its thick moss-covered beds. The House of Creativity of the Russian Literary Society is still located there. Due to overdue maintenance, it had to close its doors two years ago, but the woodpeckers still live there.
Conservatory on every floor
This once beautiful dacha ended its operational life as an orphanage. After years of decaying, the plot was finally bought by the Sint-Petersburg Authorities. They replaced the orphanage by a huge retirement center.
In the 1920s and 1930s, it was mostly party-bosses who sought refuge in the region. They built their country estates, known as dachas, on spacious plots of land. And in this case we are not talking about small 2 bedroom sheds. These are huge 3-4 storey houses with a big glass conservatory on every floor. And balconies all around, and finished with woodwork and rustic porches. The Communist elite needed peace and quiet, but in luxury.
After the Second World War, the area was absorbed into the USSR and now it was the turn of the Russian intelligentsia to move to the forests. They often earned building-permission as part of a government award, eg polar-explorers, scientists and the builders of Sputnik.
No Wild West in the fairytale forest
If you got permission to build a house, you had to comply with strict rules. You were not allowed to build on or at the beach. You had to respect the forest and were not allowed to cut down healthy trees. The Finnish style was to be maintained. So you could only build wooden houses in soft pastel shades. They had wood-burning stoves and beautifully decorated windows. Matching sheds and wells were placed on a sandy soil dotted with blueberries. It was okay to fence off your land in order to keep the moose out. But you had to make use of fragile slats. The lines of sight in the forest were not to be disturbed. The forest was so rustic and desolated, that you would almost forget that a cold war was raging.
Hibernation
The endless fairy tale forest of Karelia. It’s easy to get lost here.
In the 1970s, the fairy tale forest slumbered in a deep hibernation. Untouched, it survived Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. It slept through Gorbachev’s Perestroika and subsequently survived Yeltsin with his jokes, pranks, and uprisings.
The permanent- and summer residents enjoyed their peace and quiet, their customs and traditions. Three times a week people cued up on a sandy square for a truck bringing fresh milk and white cheese. For the rest of the groceries they depended on mobile vendors that irregularly brought vegetables, meat and fish. And for the rest each village had one or two tiny shops that basically sold everything. At their leisure, the people painted their dachas, repaired the metal roofs, and built new wells. And they cut down dead trees. Some houses were abandoned and fell into disrepair, others burned down. A few were renovated. Not much really changed.
Enter Putin
A decaying fence around one of the dachas. These days the New Russians replace these by huge walls of three metres. Where traditionals choose for an almost invisible wire-fence of 90cm.
After Yeltsin came Putin. He initially really tried to built a relationship with the EU and the US. Putin’s Russia was the first country to offer the US help after 9/11. Putin also gifted the US the “Tear Drop Memorial”. He basically delivered everything the US asked for. He also opened to market to foreign investments and take-overs. Privatisations on a grand scale and unmatched corruption made a whole lot of people in Russia wealthy. And Putin’s inner-circle became insanely rich. His regime gave birth to “The New Russian”.
The scandalous rich
You definitely know the type, as they are a well-documented nouvelle rich archetype. The modern party Russian. Very welcome in every body correction clinic in the world. Banned from many hotels in the Middle East. And in the Far East. Before the sanctions hit them, they bought a lot of football-teams in Western-Europe. And they own huge houses in cities all over the world. And yeah, they have also discovered their own fairy-tale forest.
As those scandalous rich eyed the rustic beaches for their party palaces, the rules had to give or go. Money talks, so the government complied. Beautiful houses in Finnish style are torn down and replaced by ugly stone-buildings with tiny windows with bars. The plots are surrounded by massive stone fences, at least three meters high. Each fence has more security-cameras than an average bank, as the owner has more enemies than the average American gangster. Not a single tree remains standing, as houses are supplemented by dwellings for staff and security. Deep scars—caused by the construction of gas pipes, fiber optics, and sewers—mark the forest. Rustic sandy roads and paths have been paved. Lovely hand-painted street signs have been removed, and moose are nowhere to be seen. The two-lanes road through the area got a ten-lanes upgrade. And a luxurious high-speed train stops every hour at little train stations from another era.
Prison Romanticism
The Finnish houses are built “on the wind”. They don’t need a lot of paint and work, because the wind keeps ‘m dry. This one is from the early 50’s.
The regular inhabitants love their country and their village. They are at age and lived through a lot, with some even remembering Stalin. Their country survived other maniacal leaders and they know it will survive the current one too. They want nothing to do with these New Russians and their prison romanticism, but deep inside they long for the Soviet policy aimed at maintaining the Finnish tradition.
