bruecken_schlag_worte

Brückenschläge und Schlagworte

Places of Desire

I have a notion in my life that I call Places of Desire, or in German Sehnsuchtsorte. I refer the term to those places I have come to love on a level that I myself can hardly grasp. It is reserved for the places that have provided me with a sense of coming home to a strange city; the places that have given me beauty beyond belief. Places where I encountered the most amazing people and have learned the most things about the inner workings of this world. They are the places that inexplicably have touched upon a place in my soul that I didn’t know existed, each of them a different one. They are not a rational phenomenon, they are the embodiment of all that love means to me. Places of Desire are what gives me drive and strength, for whenever I think about them I know that if such inner and outer beauty exists, the world can’t be all bad. They are the places that I always miss, in every moment of my life, and in the craving that I have for them lies the seed of my ambitions to make the world a better place. They provide me with my idealism and they remind me of my love for life. They are my most concrete, most tangible, most important ideals. They make me who I am, because they are my home abroad, my Sehnsucht at home.

I have four of these places: Krakow in Poland, Mostar in Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Istanbul in Turkey, and Gdańsk in Poland. Below you find a collection on all the posts I have written about them. Reading them, you may understand better the immense value they have for me. Tell me in the comment section about your places of desire and the reason why you love them so much!

Kraków

Mostar

Istanbul

Gdańsk

4 Kommentare

  1. I totally agree with you on Istanbul… lived there for a while and it will always have a special place in my heart. My other ‚desired places‘ are: Roma, Italy and Den Haag, the Netherlands (yes my home town, which I love the most of all cities in the world) – for the rest I’m still searching more for places that touch my heart the deepest.. the search for is already incredible and brings me to some amazing places like Srebrenica in beautiful Bosnia or Granada in Spain or the lovely Wicklow Mountains in Ireland… So many places, so many stories =)

  2. I agree – the search for Places of Desire is just as enjoyable as being in one 🙂 It is funny that you should mention your hometown. You see, my hometown Hamburg in Germany for some reason is not part of my list, in spite of me loving it. Metaphorically speaking, my Places of Desire are love affairs or maybe even spouses, wheras Hamburg is like a parent or a sibling. It will always be there in its stability and security. I’ll have to check out Den Haag though – shamefully I have never been to the Netherlands…

  3. As hard as try to think of places I can name to try and join in with this idea as you invited all your readers to above, I must say that I struggle. I think of things much more specific than towns or cities such as the source of a river where I used to wander or a mountain hillside near where I used to live that I walked on regularly. The only two whole towns and cities that come even close to me are both close to my heart because of things I shared there with someone else. But that said, I think that I could slip back to those places at any time and feel right at home. The first is Malcesine, on the north-east shore of Lake Garda in Italy, a place that combines the fresh blue water of the lake with the steep hill and olive trees that line it’s sides. It is so easy to be there and be in your own bubble, as if no outside world exists. The second, and this is not contrived, is your own current home town of Berlin. Although I only spent less than a week there I felt immediately at home surrounded by the history, culture, people and atmosphere of the place, somewhere I regard as perhaps the number 1 city in the world for the creative type of person I see myself to be. If I think in the abstract and without regard to circumstances I could easily see myself living in Berlin and never leaving.

    • bridgekeeper

      April 25, 2013 at 8:54 am

      Ha, that is interesting. See I don’t even know if I could ever live in any of my Places of Desire. And they’re not so much about peace and calm for me either. They are drive and strength. I’m not sure if this is something so individual that it could even be comparable though. Someone could desire a place for very different reasons from the ones I have.

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