Far more than badly directed (and played) comic twist on Agatha Christie, I enjoyed an exhibition titled "The Year 1000" and presented in Leiden's glorious National Museum of Antiquities - probably the most exciting archeological museum I have ever seen anywhere in the world. I do have some authority here since I sailed around the world for 15 years and have visited many museums in different countries, this one in Leiden is by far the best.
The exhibition was titled "The Year 1000" and it was meant to cover The Netherlands but it soon became obvious that its scope was much bigger - perhaps there were simply not so many saved artefacts from Medieval lowlands - so eventually we got little stories from many different parts of the world and some explanations what kind of world it was around year 1 000. What left the biggest impression on me was a screen with a movie of night sky - full of comets and stars, constantly moving but somehow always the same, almost immortal - combined with the contemporary writings of monks excitedly mentioning strange, mysterious things in the skies and what it could possibly mean (for many of them now we understand they were comets or Northern Lights, not a harbinger of Divine's wrath). It was a world totally different from ours (for one thing, religion was a big part of daily life in many aspects) but we as a humans have hardly changed at all. So it was like a peek into a time machine, where this same night sky is constantly same but our perception of it changed a lot.
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