If the Camera Obscura is a darkened room that renders complex reality into something 2-dimensional and discrete through a pin-hole, we might conceive of an Atlas Obscura as a collection of maps that pinpoint the obscure and turn it into the opaque. Skirting around the tourist traps by illuminating the weird and wonderful, the Atlas Obscura delves beyond the surface of things, championing an active community of creators who’s passionate interest and first-hand knowledge of sites off the beaten track, can transform the way we navigate both familiar and foreign locales.
The Museum Of Death: Amsterdam’s Largest Cemetery
The most appropriate place to start an AO guide to Amsterdam – is at the beginning of the end. The Museum Zot Tover gives life to death by exploring the various funerary rites practiced by different cultures around the Netherlands.
In ‘dying’ to answer the question of how we deal with death, it creates a mostly humorous, honest, and open space for something usually a little more serious and taboo. However Zot Tover is inquisitive without feeling irreverent.
Its focus on culture and conversation, over the anatomical and reductionist, opens up the wonder of our irrationally rational. Spanning collections of post-mortem portraits and photography, handmade urns for pets, and the simplistic and extravagant, via the physical, virtual and ethereal.
The finale is a coffin you can climb into, with a helpful TV screen issuing prompts that encourage the contemplation of existence in its wider context. There are also some striking coffin designs based on the ideas of Dutch mystic and author Jozef Rulof, packed with metaphysical symbolism that facilitate a journey through the cosmos.
Every month, the museum hosts its Dutch-language Mourning Cafes for locals, with guest speakers giving lectures and guiding discussions.
The Hortus Botanicus: A Pharmacy of Plants
Established in 1638 to battle the Black Death, this medicinal herb garden is the embodiment of our entanglement with the regenerative and destructive capacities of mother nature. As a plague of residents had chased off the herb-tending monasteries and gobbled up land, frantic doctors desperately needed a solution for propagating more medicine. The answer lay in the horticulture of the Hortus Botanicus.
Originally known as Hortus Medicus, it was the Dutch East India Company that stocked it full of rare and exotic plants never before seen in this part of the world. The captivating Cycad Collection in the Palm House is home to one of the most fascinating plants in ‘captivity’ – offspring from the Wood’s Cycad. Other famous residents include a 2,000-year old agave cactus that dates back to the Roman era, and Victoria Amazonica – a water lily celebrating her 150th birthday.
A pilgrimage for plant-lovers everywhere, the Hortus Gardens and Cafe are a welcome refuge providing regeneration of the soul, amidst the raucous of the red light district and cannabis-infused streets of the Dam(ned).
KattenKabinet: The Cat Cabinet
The death of a pet can inspire a number of reactions, but rarely has anyone taken their grief and started a museum, as was the case with The Netherlands’ KattenKabinet. This ‘cat cabinet’ was founded by Bob Meijer in 1990 as a homage to his beloved feline friend, John Pierpont Morgan.
Throughout J.P. Morgan’s nine lives, the feline received birthday gifts from Meijer’s friends such as paintings, a bronze cat statue, and even a recreated American dollar bill with Morgan in place of Washington, and the coda: ‘We Trust No Dog.’
While Meijer and his family still live in the upper floors of the old patrician merchant’s house, the public museum rooms give a glimpse into a world enriched by the presence of our mute moggie mischief makers.
The classy cat collection has even partnered with such austere establishments as the Museum Van Gogh, Amsterdam to present works of both artistic and feline importance. And like any true collection of art, the KattenKabinet have released a catalogue of their own works: the ‘Cat-a-Logue.’
No less than five cats roam the museum giving tours to visitors. All they ask for in return is a little affection and a string of catnip.
The Embassy Of The Free Mind
The Ritman Library or Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica is a goldmine of rare books and ancient manuscripts on mysticism, religion and philosophy, housed amongst an embassy of artworks and artefacts that lead the plumbum to the gilded.
Driven by an interest in spiritualism, the library was founded in 1984 by Joost R. Ritman. The collection’s primary focus is the Hermetic tradition, and more specifically, Christian-Hermeticism. But you will also find volumes on Rosicrucianism, alchemy, gnosis, esotericism and comparative religion, Sufism, Kabbalah, anthroposophy, Freemasonry, and others lurking amid its stacks.
A source of inspiration for the complexities of The Da Vinci Code, it could be within the walls of this peculiar and provoking athenaeum that you liberate your inner Dan Brown.
The Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum
An ambassador for the culture of this creative city, with its canals of contradictions, cannabis finds its history and future given centre stage at this hemp hideaway in the heart of the capital.
Featuring its own indoor cannabis garden, complete with oils, tinctures and edibles, the museum is a walk through this incredible plants versatility, spirituality, utility, and controversy through the lens of literature, photography, tools and illustrations.
Popeye the sailor was dreamed up in 1929 by American cartoonist Elzie Segar, at a time when ‘Spinach’ was sometimes used as a slang term for cannabis. Anti-cannabis lobbyists in the 1930s claimed that cannabis made users immune to bullets, giving them superhuman strength and other outlandish powers. Popeye had a similar view of his ever-present, ever-green snack.
As a popular pirate, Popeye was doubtless familiar with exotic herbs and plants, and American sailors were among the first groups known to openly smoke cannabis within the USA.
The NXT Museum
Featuring large-scale, immersive installations fusing technology and creativity with psychedelic light and sound, the NXT museum is a 6 minute ferry-ride away from the centre of the city.
Creating a watery home unto its own inhabited by ‘Unidentified Fluid Others’ and (r)evolutionary events, the exceptionally futuristic artwork encourages a surreal look through our present.
Leave gravity behind as you immerse yourself in new worlds reminiscent of the inner and outer cosmos, enter a virtual reality of ‘Xenopunk’ that defines ‘alien consciousness’ as a dance of rebellion, and allow perspectives to transfigure and transform through this expressive space of infinite possibility.
If you use Foursquare or any kind of location-based service, you are contributing to a new sort of atlas. Now, the idea of an atlas is more like a loose set of associated databases that all offer different ways of revealing space and information about that space. We’re in this constant, collapsing momentum where real world space and virtual space become one layer together. I don’t know what that’s going to look like – Google is going to have to make some fancy glasses or something – but that idea of revealing the hidden persists. – Dylan Thuras, co-founder Atlas Obscura
