Last evening, I met up with my friend D for a surprise activity. First he met me at Spranger’s Yard (my apartment building), then we got some takeout from a very good kebab place in Temple Bar called Zaytoons, which I had been to on a previous visit to Dublin but hadn’t revisited since my arrival in October. Kebabs and middle eastern food are actually a popular cuisine here; there’s even a fast food chain called Abrakebabra (as in Abra-“kebab”-ra), and the SuperValu grocery chain sells a branded version of their “taco sauce” (similar to a spicy mayo).
I digress… the surprise activity turns out to be a walking ghost tour around the Temple Bar area led by a tour guide friend of D’s. I really haven’t done that many touristy things in Dublin, even during past visits, so it sounds like lots of fun to me. We meet the tour guide in front of Dublin City Hall, not far from Dublin Castle. The weather has turned chilly, in the 30s F, but D told me to bundle up. It’s just the three of us, although apparently the tour was advertsised on Meetup just no one else showed.
View of Dublin City Hall from Parliament Street (yes, the lighting has a very similar vibe to previous holiday-by-Melania decorations at the White House):
The Bedford Tower at Dublin Castle cast in an appropriately creepy blood red hue for our tour:
Highlights from the tour:
• Olympia Theatre (across the street from Dublin City Hall): known to be haunted by the ghost of a baby born out of wedlock; the baby’s mother, who had been abandoned and disavowed by the baby’s father (a married man of the aristocracy), haunts a stairway nearby at Dublin Castle.
• Dublin Castle: The Upper Yard of Dublin Castle earned the nickname “The Devil’s Halfacre” for its long history as a place of torture. During the middle ages, the English viceroys of Dublin were infamous for employing various forms of torture in an attempt to subdue the Irish natives, including beheadings, burning people at the stake, and hangings. The Treasury was famed for paying out “head money” to bounty hunters delivering the severed heads of enemies to the English Crown.
• Old Dublin City Wall Section: Legend has it that the father of Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, had been killed by Dublin’s Irish chieftans, then buried outside this section of the city’s wall alongside a dead dog (which was the “gravest” of insults, pardon the pun); in order to exact his revenge, Dermot MacMurrough enlisted the help of Strongbow and the Normans to invade Ireland in the 12th century, and thus he is blamed as the person who first invited the English into Ireland.
• Lord Edward Pub: Allegedly haunted by the ghost of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Irish aristocrat and revolutionary, who was wounded during his arrest in the upper floors of the building. His ghost is said to manifest as a shadow of a man dressed in 18th century garb against the wall.
• Old Dublin City Gates: Location of pikes where severed heads of enemies would be displayed as a warning to others.
• Christ Church Cathedral: In 2012, a relic containing the heart of Laurence O’Toole, the first Irish archbishop of Dublin during the 12th century, was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral. Rumor has it that a member of a local Dublin crime family was the perpetrator of the theft after making a drunken bet. Several members of the family in question subsequently died of rapid onset heart diseases in the following years. Believing a curse had befallen them, the crime family returned the heart anonymously in 2018 through an intermediary who tipped off the police after it had been dropped off in Phoenix Park. True story!
• Fishamble Street: This is the site where Molly Malone, a legendary character from Dublin’s history and folksongs, is said to have worked as a fishmonger during the 17th century. According to our tour guide, in the last ten years or so a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin had supposedly found evidence in the university’s historical birth ledgers that Molly Malone may have indeed been a real person named Mary Malone, who was a daughter of a dairy farmer in Howth (a seaside village to the east of Dublin located on a peninsula jutting out to the ocean). One explanation for Molly Malone’s remarkable beauty at the time is that she may have been spared the ravages of small pox due to working on a dairy farm, where exposure to cow pox could have given her immunity. However, Molly Malone still met an untimely death due to another plague of that era — typhoid fever. Our tour guide also claimed that the origin of the word “shambles” comes from Fishamble Street, which must have been quite a squalid and odiferous scene in its day thanks to an abundance of fish guts and open sewers.
Map of the various stops along the tour:
At some point along the tour, D’s tour guide friend mentions that he studied Russian at Trinity College Dublin and previously worked as an interpreter. We exchange a few obligatory phrases in Russian, just to show that we both can legitimately claim to knowing the language. We discuss how the former Soviets and Irish seemed to share an affinity for each other, perhaps due to their revolutionary histories (not to mention their criminal underworlds). It brought back my recollection of the many Irish pubs I noticed in Moscow and other parts of Russia during my travels in the 1990s.
Our tour wraps up around 10:00pm, and by this point we are feeling quite the chill. We wander back into Temple Bar to find a pub offering take-away libations so that we can partake of some warming spirits (hot whiskey for D and me, a mulled wine for our tour guide friend). There are several groups of young people in their 20s out and about in varying degrees of festive states. The city has definitely livened up since the lifting of restrictions earlier this week.
Until next time…
