Photo: view from Monte Creino to Nago-Torbole and the northern part of Lake Garda. Nago-Torbole is a municipal town in the Province of Trento in the Italian region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, located about 30 km southwest of Trento on the north shore of Lake Garda.
Photo: the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in this cave in Qumran in the West Bank near Dead Sea in Israel.
According to Wikipedia ‘the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of about 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in Israel.’
These include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and other documents of great religious and historical significance, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek on parchment and papyrus. These manuscripts date between 150 BC and 70 AD. The scrolls are identified with the ancient Jewish sect Essenes, though some recent interpretations have challenged this association and some scholars argue that the scrolls were written by priests, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups. Click on the photo to enlarge it. You can use it as a wallpaper (size: 1600x1200 pixels) on your computer or post it in your blog! Read more on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Photo: St. James Church in Medjugorje, in the Herzegovina region
Međugorje, a town located in western Bosnia and Herzegovina, about 25 km southwest of Mostar and close to the border of Croatia, is now best known due to claims of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to six Croats since 24 June 1981, and is now visited by thousands of pilgrims from around the world as a Marian shrine.
Photo: The famous Pearl Market in Beijing, dated March 24, 2006. Dimension: 1600 x 1200 pixels, size: 373 KB. Click on photo for an enlarged view and save the photo.
A pearl is a hard, generally spherical substance formed within the soft tissue, specifically the mantle, of a living shelled mollusk, and made up of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. The finest natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones for many centuries.
Precious pearls occur in the wild but they are very rare. Cultured or farmed pearls from pearl oysters make up the major chunk of pearls sold in the market. Seawater Pearls are more valuable than freshwater pearls.
Imitation or fake pearls are also widely sold in inexpensive jewelry. Pearls have also been crushed and used in cosmetics, medicines, or in paint formulations.
In 1914 pearl farmers began growing cultured freshwater pearls using the pearl mussels native to Lake Biwa, the largest and most ancient lake in Japan, near the city of Kyoto. Japanese pearl farmers recently developed a hybrid pearl mussel, a cross between Biwa Pearl Mussels and a closely related species from China, Hyriopsis cumingi, in Lake Kasumigaura.
Japanese pearl producers also invested in producing cultured pearls with freshwater mussels in Shanghai, China, which is currently the world's largest producer of freshwater pearls, producing more than 1,500 metric tons per year.
The Dolmabahçe Palace, or Dolmabahçe Sarayı in Turkish, in Istanbul, Turkey, located at the European side of the Bosporus, used to be the main administrative center of the Ottoman Empire from 1856 to 1922, except a twenty-year interval from 1889 to 1909 in which the Yıldız Palace was used. The Dolmabahce Palace was built between 1843 and 1856 under the orders of the Turkish Empire's 31st Sultan, Abdülmecid I. The 45,000 square meter mono-block palace stands on an area of 110,000 squire meters. Hacı Said Ağa was responsible for the construction work of the palace, while the project was conceptualized by architects Garabet Balyan, his son Nigoğayos Balyan and Evanis Kalfa.
