Tall Ships Races Aberdeen: Everything you need to know
When is the Tall Ships Races and how many vessels are taking part?
The event - which is billed as Europe's largest free family event - will run from Saturday 19 July until Tuesday 22 July. Almost 50 ships have been confirmed as taking part in the four-day extravaganza.
The vessels are divided into four classes, ranging from large sailing ships to smaller single-masted boats.They are expected to start arriving in Aberdeen on Friday, having competed against each other on the journey from France, before the public event begins properly on Saturday.They will then remain in the Granite City until Tuesday, when they will sail on to Norway.
Where is the best place to see the tall ships in Aberdeen?
The ships will be berthed in Waterloo Quay, Regent Quay, Trinity Quay, Upper Quay, Jamieson's Quay and Blaikies Quay. Full details of where each ship will be can be found here. The main entrance to the harbour area will be via Marischal Street. Many of the ships will be open to visitors during their time in Aberdeen.
Which is the tallest tall ship taking part?
Tall ship Dar Mlodziezy, from Poland, is 62.5m (205ft) high.Her name means "the gift of youth".Dar Mlodziezy was built in 1982, and made her Tall Ships debut in the same year.
Which tall ship is sailing the furthest?
The BAP Union is coming to Aberdeen from Peru.BAP Union's sailing distance from Callao to Aberdeen is about 7,500 nautical miles (13,890km).As well as being the longest traveller, BAP Union is also the newest tall ship taking part, having been built in 2015.At the other end of the scale, Christiania is 130 years old, having been built in 1895 - 120 years earlier than BAP Union.
How many people will be involved in Aberdeen?
Hundreds of volunteers have been recruited to help stage the event, which is expected to attract about "400,000 visits" - an estimate which includes repeat visits.There will be about 2,000 international crew members taking part, from as far afield as Uruguay and Oman.
What other entertainment will there be?
Aberdeen will be turned into a "party city", according to the event's organisers.Gigs by Deacon Blue and Kaiser Chiefs are already sold out, as is a Ministry of Sound Classical event.Additional attractions will include free live music, and street food stalls.Aside from the main names, other acts include Tide Lines, Calum Bowie, Glasvegas, Brooke Combe, Little Kicks, Capollos and Look Busy Collective.
The event organisers say there will also be a "vibrant" line-up of live music, including Scottish trad, jazz, Afrobeat, hip hop, and Latin soul.The line-up also features local choirs as well as youth ensembles.Young children will be catered for with attractions at a family zone at Blaikie's Quay, including a giant sandpit.People can also get their picture taken with Tall Ships Aberdeen mascot, Dorry the Dolphin, during the festival.
What is the best way to travel to Tall Ships Aberdeen and will there be road closures?
Aberdeen city centre is expected to be extremely busy with thousands of spectators each day. The organisers are recommending that spectators use public transport or car share if coming into Aberdeen, and that those staying locally could walk or cycle.Four regular Park and Ride services will be in operation from Bridge of Don, Craibstone, P&J Live, and Kingswells.Road closures and parking restrictions will be place on streets around Aberdeen harbour during the course of the event. Castle Street, King Street, Marischal Street, Regent Quay, Blaikies Quay and Regent Road are among those affected. Pocra Quay and New Pier Road in Footdee are open to business and resident access only.
What have local children been doing to prepare?
P4 children at Hazlehead Primary have been among the Aberdeen school pupils studying Tall Ships.Eight-year-old Remy said: "I am so excited about the Tall Ships."I've been learning about the boats, they all have big sails."
Kayla, nine, added: "We've been learning about the Bermuda Triangle and the Titanic."I think it would be cold to sail in the sea, and smell a bit fishy and salty."
What's the weather forecast for the weekend?
The current forecast for Saturday is 19C and dry. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday are also expected to be warm but there could well be rain too.You can keep up to date with the latest BBC weather forecast here.
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BBC News
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Telegraph
41 minutes ago
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Was Ingmar Bergman really a Nazi?
During his lifetime, and beyond, the film director Ingmar Bergman was widely believed to be a genius. Yet even geniuses have their flaws, and Bergman came festooned with his: allegations (put into the public domain by himself, before he thought better of it) that he raped a former partner of his; an embarrassing arrest for tax evasion and, most notoriously of all, the suggestion that he spent his youth as a fully paid-up Nazi supporter who bitterly mourned the death of Hitler. The last and most damaging story recently re-entered the public domain courtesy of the actor Stellan Skarsgård. While Skarsgård was attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's acclaimed new film Sentimental Value, in which he plays a Bergman-esque director named Gustav Borg, he was asked about his own relationship with Bergman. (He had acted for him in the Eighties in a stage production of Strindberg's A Dream Play.) 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Unlike Dag, however, he was never a member of the Swedish National Socialist Party, which his brother was responsible for founding and operating. Still, as he wrote in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern, 'for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' Yet the eventual awakening that he faced came shortly after the end of the war and the subsequent collapse of Hitler's regime. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes,' he would say. 'When the truth came out it was a hideous shock for me. In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' Those who have attempted to excuse Bergman's youthful folly have argued that, although Bergman did not fully repudiate Hitler and Nazism until 1946, when he came to an understanding of what he had been impressed by, it was a seismic shock to him that changed the course of his life and career. As he told his friend and producer Jörn Donner: 'My feelings were overwhelming and I felt great bitterness towards my father and my brother and the schoolteachers and everyone else who'd led me into it. But it was impossible to get rid of the guilt and the self-contempt.' Thereafter, many of his films and stage productions dealt explicitly with the evil caused by the Nazi regime, whether it's his English-language picture, 1977's The Serpent's Egg, which is set in 1932 Berlin, or his decision to stage Peter Weiss's The Investigation, about the Auschwitz trials, in Stockholm in 1966. Several of his most acclaimed pictures also looked, more obliquely, at themes of guilt and lack of communication brought on by conflict, including 1963's The Silence, which follows the journey of two sisters and was inspired by Bergman spending time in post-war Germany. Or 1968's Shame, in which a marriage, and an unnamed country, are both torn apart by civil war. It would be reading too much into these films to see them as a straightforward apologia for his earlier beliefs – which in any case were not common knowledge until the publication of his memoir – but there can be little doubt that they weighed upon him. It would also be a mistake to take Bergman's comments at face value. As Jane Magnusson, who made the documentary Bergman: A Year in the Life, said in 2019: 'The fact that he had sympathies with Hitler… he wanted to talk about them. And nobody else did. He was pretty much alone in Sweden when he came out in the 1980s and said, 'I went to Germany, I was in Weimar during the parade and I yelled 'Heil Hitler!' And I loved it.' 'It's horrible that he didn't reject Hitler before 1946. It is very late. That's a problem. But I don't think Bergman thought Hitler was a good idea because he hated Jews. Sweden was very afraid of Russia at that time and I think he just thought that it was better than what's going on with them.' It is also likely that Bergman never fully repudiated his youthful Right-wing views. The director Roy Andersson, who studied at the Swedish Film Institute Film School in the late Sixties, remarked that '[Bergman] was a so-called inspector of the film school that I attended, and each term we were called and we had to go to his office and he gave some advice, or even some threats, and he said, 'If you don't stop making Left-wing movies… If you continue with that you will never have the possibility to make features. I will influence the board to stop you'. Bergman often described the most traumatic event of his lifetime as being his 1976 arrest on income tax evasion charges. These were eventually dropped, but caused him to leave Sweden for Munich. From there, he continued his career, albeit to diminishing artistic returns. It would not be until he returned to Sweden in 1982 for Fanny and Alexander – an epic often considered Bergman's crowning achievement – that he would make another truly acclaimed film.
BreakingNews.ie
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