#mosaic

The name spelled out in the tiles sent me looking: Babrios was apparently an ancient Greek poet who retold Aesop's fables in verse, and this one is the sour grapes. It's set into a school wall, which figures.

According to what I found, the blank ends of these prefab blocks got handed to artists as giant canvases — there was a whole programme of it in the East. Beyond that I couldn't dig up anything about this one in particular.

It's for three men who were shot in the dunes at Waalsdorpervlakte in March 1945, a couple of months before it was all over. They say it went up two years after that, in the stretch when towns across the country were commissioning memorials about as fast as anyone could carve them.

The title points at Mount Parnassus, where the Muses were supposed to live, and it's also the name of an old set of music exercises — he played violin seriously, so people reckon both were on his mind. It's said to be one of the biggest canvases he ever did.

It's mounted on the wall of a supermarket built on old railway land — which is apparently why the transport history ended up there at all.

Apparently a 'tropeiro' was someone who drove mule trains loaded with goods across southern Brazil, back before there were roads built for anything faster than a hoof.

The whole wall tells an old Irish epic — a war fought over a stolen bull, from what I've read, with a queen on one side and a teenage hero on the other.

Apparently the big East Berlin estates had art built into them from the start — mosaics and murals set right into the everyday buildings, not tucked away in galleries. This one has been sitting over a pharmacy the whole time.

I couldn't find much about this one beyond the building's name - 'andorinha' means swallow in Portuguese, which the mosaic makes pretty literal.