Devotees perform religious rituals by splashing holy water during the Madhav Narayan Festival, a month-long event dedicated to Lord Madhav Narayan, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu in Thacho, Lalitpur, Nepal on February 10, 2025. Devotees also carry butter lamps and blow conch shells (shankha) as part of the sacred observance. (Photo by Safal Prakash Shrestha/ZUMA Press Wire)

Dancers wearing masks and kimonos perform in the streets at the “Super Yosakoi 2015” dance festival in Tokyo on August 30, 2015. One hundred dance teams with some 5,500 people participated in the two-day summer festival event. (Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP Photo)

Only the most intrepid urban explorers cross the tattered ruins of the old Iron Curtain to endure the excessive bureaucracy, military paranoia and freezing winds of the East to hunt for the ghosts of an empire. Rebecca Litchfield is one who couldn’t resist the haunting allure of the ruins of the Soviet Union.

People run in panic after a coalition airstrike hit Islamic State fighters positions in Tahrir neighbourhood of Mosul, Iraq, November 17, 2016. (Photo by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

Films that are being screened are advertised in a makeshift cinema located under a bridge in the old quarters of Delhi, India May 25, 2016. A makeshift cinema hall under a 140-year-old bridge in the Indian capital is allowing poor rickshaw pullers and migrant labourers to escape daily hardship and sweltering heat into a world of Bollywood song, dance and romance. With the rusty iron floor of the bridge as its ceiling and some old rags acquired on the cheap from a nearby crematorium serving as curtains and floor mats, the cinema shows four films a day. (Photo by Cathal McNaughton/Reuters)

Festival goers run toward the main stage to catch the beginning of Kendrick Lamar's set during the first weekend of Coachella 2012, on April 13, 2012. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

A boat sails behind a woman looking through binoculars as she sits on a cliff on a sunny day in Sydney, Australia, May 29, 2016. (Photo by David Gray/Reuters)

Revellers dressed as the Devil take part in a parade to celebrate Saint Nicholas Day (Mikulas) in Prague, Czech Republic on December 5, 2022. Meeting Saint Nicholas, the Aangel, and the Devil, who talk to children and reward those who have behaved well during the year with small presents, is tradition in the Czech Republic before the Christmas holidays. (Photo by Michal Cizek/AFP Photo)