Yesterday at dawn, July 24 2020, Muslim prayers resounded in Istanbul’s famous Hagia Sophia for the first time since the great domed building’s secularisation on the orders of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, “founding father” of modern Turkey, in 1935. Its eighty-five years as a museum will be over. Outside Turkey, the...

To most of the world, “Siberia” is an undifferentiated mass, a featureless land of prisons and snowdrifts entirely befitting its place in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. But the Russians themselves divide it up into three administrative units, each of which possesses its own distinctive landscapes, history and relationship to Moscow: Western...

This piece was first published on the Lowy Interpreter on 15 March 2017 at 15:45 AEDT. By Academy Travel tour leader Dr Matthew Dal Santo   A century ago today, Emperor Nicholas II, 'Tsar and Autocrat of all the Russias', pencilled his name to a document renouncing a throne three...