Heathrow is no longer Europe’s busiest airport. That crown was taken in July by Istanbul Grand Airport (IGA), the gargantuan hub on the Black Sea that opened in October 2018. Some 8 million passengers passed through its single terminal last month, just ahead of the 7.86 million that passed through Heathrow’s four. Advocates for Heathrow’s expansion point to the figures as proof of the need for a third runway; the two that it currently operates are running at near-full capacity. For passengers, however, bigger airports aren’t necessarily better.

IGA replaced Atatürk Airport, which had served as the base for flag carrier Turkish Airlines since its foundation in 1933. Like New York’s JFK, Atatürk was shabby, mid-sized, unglamorous – but it was much loved thanks to its location, with quick routes in and out of the city centre. These days it only serves commercial or private flights and hosts the odd political rally for president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

IGA, meanwhile, is a gilded behemoth, filled with food outlets and designer shops. It is the world’s biggest airport under one roof and there’s plenty to do within it. Walking from passport control to your gate will ensure that you reach your daily step-count goal. Friends flying through the airport for the first time message me to complain that their plane takes half an hour to taxi from the runway to the terminal. And if your airline doesn’t have a jet bridge, you’ll spend another 30 minutes on the shuttle bus.

Then there are the prices. Airports tend to rip off passengers but in departures at IGA you should expect to pay €9 for a bottle of water. In April last year, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera conducted an analysis on 17 European airports and found that prices at IGA were up to 10 times pricier than in other hubs on the continent, largely a result of high rental costs in the new luxury space. Getting to and from the airport – about 40 kilometres from the city centre – is expensive and convoluted too. 

After Atatürk closed, I tried to stick to the city’s second main airport, Sabiha Gokcen, which is located on the Asian side of the Bosphorus but far closer to the action and served by a direct metro line. It is small and unfussy but you can get through security and to your gate with a carry-on in a fraction of the time that it will take you at IGA.

In London, too, there are reasons to favour smaller airports over lumbering Heathrow. Flying from London City is joyful, both for its ease of access and the views of London as you take off and land, though its route map is limited. Gatwick is unappealing but functional. The journey to Stansted on Anglia’s recently upgraded trains is usually relaxing and quick, though that has to be weighed against the fact that it’s mostly served by budget airlines. Luton, admittedly, is always best avoided unless you’re lucky enough to be taking a private jet.

The Istanbul experience shows that Heathrow and its passengers should be careful what they wish for. When airports are expanded or beautified, it’s the customers that end up paying for it; Heathrow’s management is considering charging airlines more for its services to cover £320m (€374m) of the costs of a third runway. The end result will be higher ticket prices and busier transport links, as well as more terminal shops to make up the shortfall. That’s fine if you enjoy retail therapy in departures – but if your aim is to get to your seat as quickly as possible, bigger isn’t always better.

Hannah Lucinda Smith is Monocle’s Istanbul correspondent.For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Further reading:
– If Greenland wants more visitors, it must fix its airports

– Can building Africa’s largest airport turn Ethiopia’s fortunes around?

– New York City aims to lead a revival of US airports

Pesky mosquitoes could be about to have their own AI-powered reckoning (writes James Chambers). Photon Matrix Lab, a start-up from Jiangsu province northwest of Shanghai, claims to have developed a laser device and algorithm that can zap mozzies straight out of the air. The portable machine, which looks a lot like a projector or speaker, can be used at home, mounted on restaurant walls or brought along to a picnic or barbecue, creating a six-metre-wide safe zone. No fuss, no chemicals and none of the annoying zapping sounds made by those tennis-racket-style plastic paddles. The company’s AI-generated marketing pictures show fly-fishers and campers enjoying the outdoors bite-free. Excited? I’m buzzing. 

This slightly daft-sounding innovation could be lifted straight out of a comic book. It could also be life-changing for those of us who live in the tropics. Mosquito bites are a regular occurrence in cities such as Bangkok but the prevention industry still feels very analogue, relying on coils and plug-ins. Planes landing at Suvarnabhumi International Airport advise passengers to wear long-sleeved clothing; nets and shutters are standard on all windows and doors; and my medicine drawer at home is full of all manner of sprays, stickers, oils and dual-purpose sun creams. As a family we each have a citronella spritz before going to the park and are forced to retire at dusk, mosquito hour, to lock down the apartment, crank up the air conditioning and apply Zam-Buk to any itchy bites – a miracle herbal ointment and my must-have buy for any trip to Southeast Asia. 

There is a serious side to all of this spraying and splatting. Thursday is World Mosquito Day, which marks the discovery by a British doctor that mosquitos transmit malaria between humans. That was in 1897. More than 125 years later, mosquito-borne diseases, including dengue fever, yellow fever, zika and chikungunya, still kill more than one million people annually and infect up to 700 million – almost a tenth of the global population. 

While many have to grin and bear it, richer governments spend considerable resources on public health warnings about the dangers of stagnant water and regular fogging – spraying clouds of insecticide inside parks. Singapore is at the forefront of insect suppression. The National Environment Agency has, for the past decade, been releasing sterile, lab-bred, male mosquitoes to mate with females and limit their ability to reproduce. 

The wealthy, tech-savvy city-state would actually be an ideal test case for Photon Matrix Lab’s anti-mosquito lasers, provided the machine is proven safe to birds and bees as well as humans. Southeast Asians are a lot quicker than Europeans to adopt Chinese technology. Hospitality venues in Singapore also deploy cooling techniques to make outdoor seating areas more comfortable, so why not an anti-mosquito, Israel-style laser dome? 

Wang Chuan, CEO and founder of Photon Matrix Lab, started his company because he was fed up with mosquito bites. China Daily, a state-owned newspaper, quoted him as saying, “By compressing industrial-grade laser systems into a compact, consumer-ready device and pairing them with AI algorithms, Chinese engineers effectively turned a cannon into a sniper rifle.”

Demand for this technology could easily go international as climate change turns mosquitoes into a global problem. The dozy, well-fed ones that can now be found in London gardens are far easier to swat than their smaller, sprightlier Southeast Asian cousins but they are no less annoying. Following a design overhaul and brand makeover, the Photon Matrix could become Europe’s must-have gadget next summer.  

Taking the sting out of mosquitoes would be a sizeable soft-power win for Beijing. While the US’s biggest business minds are gazing up at space, China’s brightest engineers are battling earth-bound challenges that demonstrate the ingenuity of homegrown innovation and deliver tangible benefits to consumers. 

Ukrainian drones are striking deep into Russia. Men worried about potential mobilisation are working out how to leave the country, while a spike in support for the only party that opposes the war led the Kremlin to ban it. So why does Vladimir Putin still seem confident?

This summer, Western media outlets were in a bullish mood, proclaiming that Ukraine was turning the tide. This was largely based on video footage of oil refineries exploding across Russia.

Attacks on energy facilities, ports and logistics hubs are disrupting both the Russian economy and daily life. Meanwhile, the budget deficit is on track to be twice as large as in 2025 – and last year’s was twice as large as the year before. Just 47 per cent of people say that they are satisfied with their lives, down 10 percentage points from last year. Most Russians want the war to end.

None of this has yet forced Putin to change his policy. On the battlefield, his forces continue their slow, painful grind towards the last two fortress cities in Donetsk. Their capture would allow Putin to claim that he has “fully liberated” the contested Donbas region. This was not the president’s primary objective when he launched the invasion in 2022. But it now appears to have become a possible end point, giving him a chance to declare victory and his propagandists to hail the war as a triumph.

Russia continues to retaliate against Ukraine’s long-range strikes. Logistical depots are being hammered, as are petrol stations. On some highways, drivers have to carry their own fuel in cans stowed in the trunk.

As Europe swelters through August heat waves, Moscow is beginning to plan its winter campaign against Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure. The aim, as in previous years, is to break morale by degrading the country’s power grid. Ukraine will head into winter with its generating capacity reduced from almost 55 gigawatts before the war to just 12 gigawatts. A particular concern is that Russia might now start targeting the ultra-high-voltage 750kV substations that hold the grid together, carrying power from generating sites to the cities.

At the worst moments of last winter, temperatures inside Kyiv apartment blocks fell to -10C. Radiators had to be drained and shut off to prevent them from splitting as the water inside froze. If Russia targets the waterworks, many fear that Ukraine’s major cities could become all but uninhabitable.

Ukrainians have shown extraordinary resilience. But while Western coverage tends to portray their glass as half full, Russian media – and, it seems, the carefully curated reports reaching Putin’s desk – present it as half empty, at best.

This seems to explain Putin’s apparent optimism. Partly, it reflects a genuine, if probably misplaced, belief that Ukraine might finally be forced into concessions. Unlike in 2022, he no longer seems to expect to turn Ukraine into a vassal state. Instead, he wants guarantees of neutrality, recognition of territorial gains, sanctions relief and a public declaration of victory. He may feel that anything less would make it impossible to convince Russians that the 1.5 million dead or wounded were in any way worth it.

But the deliberate and desperate optimism also lets him avoid tough decisions. There is a growing consensus among Russia’s elite that the war cannot continue much longer. For the pragmatists and technocrats, the solution is to accept that the “special military operation” has reached a point of diminishing returns, freeze the front line and open negotiations with Ukraine. For the hawks, the answer is escalation: mobilise hundreds of thousands of more troops, step up sabotage attacks on European factories and supply lines supporting Kyiv’s war effort and seek a military victory.

For now, Putin seems to favour the hawks. But both options are risky. He might therefore be clinging to optimism to avoid choosing between them. Instead, he continues to sit on the fence and, like so many Russian leaders before him, hopes that General Winter will win the war for him. And soon.

Mark Galeotti is the principal director of Mayak Intelligence and author of ‘The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War’. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

The French city of Bayonne is 30km from the Spanish border and 8km from the Atlantic-coast resort town of Biarritz. Its streets are known for their red-shuttered, half-timbered houses and striking Gothic spires. But it also has another claim to fame: the Musée Bonnat-Helleu. Nicknamed “the Little Louvre”, the museum has reopened following a 14-year, €35m renovation that doubled its size.

This remarkable repository of almost 7,000 sculptures, sketches and paintings was started by Léon Bonnat, a man with a deep dedication to his French-Basque hometown. In 1853, at the age of 20, he received a scholarship of 1,500 French francs (about the equivalent of a mid-income annual salary) from the city to study at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. He followed with a stint at Rome’s Villa Medici. 

Bonnat’s breakthrough came with an 1876 portrait of Adolphe Thiers, the inaugural president of the Third French Republic. Painted in a style devoid of romantic motifs, the work revealed Bonnat’s flair for accurately capturing physical features. He soon became known as France’s official portrait painter and commissions streamed in from Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and successive French presidents. It was an impressive rise for an artist from a provincial city. 

Having amassed a small fortune, Bonnat began collecting artworks from antiquity, the Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age. Then, in 1901, he commissioned the Musée Bonnat to house 3,000 artworks from his collection, including paintings and drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Lacking an heir, Bonnat decided that the Louvre was the only suitable custodian for the artworks and bequeathed the bulk of them to the institution in 1922 on one condition: they must remain on permanent loan in Bayonne.

The collection of 19th-century painter and engraver Paul César Helleu has since been added to Bonnat’s initial trove, hence the museum’s extended moniker. Today the size of the collection is equal to about 10 per cent of the works on display at the Louvre. 

“It’s an unprecedented quantity of works for a gallery in a regional city,” says Barthélemy Etchegoyen Glama, the museum’s newly appointed director. The role is a homecoming for the affable thirtysomething, who was born in the village of Saint-Palais, 55km from Bayonne; he tells Monocle that his lifelong interest in art was inspired by a visit to the Musée Bonnat-Helleu when he was seven years old. Until late last year, he worked as a senior adviser to the Louvre’s director in Paris but returned here at the request of Bayonne’s mayor.

The renovated museum is as striking as the collection itself. Bonnat insisted on commissioning Italian mosaic artist Giandomenico Facchina, who created the flooring for Paris’s Opéra Garnier and the Petit Palais, to do the same here. This has now been restored, while the main gallery’s original glass roofs have been reinstated to let in natural light. There are striking juxtapositions: Egyptian sculptures sit next to a painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and a nude study by Théodore Géricault. “Though the museum houses centuries-old works of art, we still want its curation to feel contemporary,” says Etchegoyen Glama. 

In the nine months since the museum reopened, it has become a fresh draw for a city that has historically been in the shadow of neighbouring Biarritz. “We don’t have its status as the mid-19th-century seaside resort of kings and queens or as a glitzy place where directors and cinephiles flocked in the 1950s,” says Etchegoyen Glama. The opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997 was a boon for the Basque region and Etchegoyen Glama hopes that the momentum that this has generated will help to keep the area evolving.

“We want to continue to add nuance to the region’s perception as a destination not just for surfing, pintxos and mountainous landscapes but also as a place for museums,” he says. The Musée Bonnat-Helleu’s director might be separated almost two centuries from the Bayonnais artist whose collection he first admired as a child but both are linked by a shared ambition: to put this small, sleepy city on the global art map.
mbh.bayonne.fr

For decades, Greece’s defence strategy has centred on fighter jets streaking across the Aegean and naval patrols threading between its islands – an approach driven by long-standing tensions with neighbouring Turkey. But as drones, autonomous systems and cybersecurity transform modern warfare, Greek companies are developing technologies aimed at operational environments far beyond the country’s borders. The nation’s defence minister, Nikos Dendias, has been blunt about its potential. “The solutions to tomorrow’s problems will not come from the dinosaurs of yesterday,” he told a conference in May. Instead, answers are being sought from a new generation of firms based in coastal facilities and research sites around Athens and in industrial spaces repurposed for advanced engineering. The companies featured here are helping to turn the country’s ambitions into a reality.

Velos Rotors
The V-Twin sits on a workbench like a stripped-back aircraft in miniature – about two metres long, with a carbon-fibre fuselage. In flight, it rises to a steady hover on twin rotors, making subtle corrections through the fuselage instead of the jittery movements of conventional drones. It is one in a helicopter series of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) developed by manufacturer Velos Rotors for surveillance, logistics and defence, with systems deployed in Ukraine. The company was born of founder Aris Kolokythas’s fascination with remote-controlled aircraft. “I was always building them, tuning them, improving them,” he says.

The goal, he says, was to make a reliable scaled-down helicopter. The project underwent a demanding real-world test in 2021, when Velos technology was used by US drone operator MissionGo to transport a human pancreas in Minnesota. Since then, deployments have expanded into defence. In the early months of the war in Ukraine, Velos’s V3 was sourced for battlefield use by a private US fund. 

As demand has grown for more robust and adaptable aircraft, Velos has built an international customer base, stretching from the UK and Canada to India, Thailand and Malaysia. The company still operates in a space dominated by cheap, multi-rotor drones but its founder argues that helicopters are regaining ground in more demanding applications. “Helicopters didn’t have the market share that they deserved,” he says. “But that’s quickly changing.”

Sotiria Technology
“There’s no internet, no GPS, no energy – you can’t see very well,” says Angelos Tsereklas Zafeirakis of the silent underwater domain where Sotiria Technology operates. From its base at a low-rise research campus in a pine forest north of Athens, the Greek deep-tech defence start-up works on underwater sensing systems. The company’s 35-year-old CEO points to a laptop showing live data from a test-bed off a port south of Athens, where multicoloured graphics map the acoustic and magnetic impact of passing vessels. The system helps to locate submarines and other underwater vehicles – crucial when it comes to protecting infrastructure such as ports, offshore platforms and pipelines. “It’s about finding submarines and other threats before they find you,” Tsereklas Zafeirakis tells Monocle. Founded in 2021, Sotiria has already deployed systems in Greece and elsewhere in Europe, though specific locations remain undisclosed because of the sensitivity of the missions. Last summer, the company presented its technology to the US Navy at Naval Station Newport after receiving a €110,000 Nato accelerator grant.

Hack The Box
Haris Pylarinos transformed a hacking hobby into a community of like-minded individuals who enjoy solving problems. That group eventually became Hack The Box, which is now a globally recognised cybersecurity training platform used by governments and corporations to prepare defence teams. When Pylarinos, who is now 42 years old, first started working in IT in Greece more than 15 years ago, cybersecurity was a less prominent issue. “Cyber is a weapon now,” he tells Monocle. “Every army has a cyber division – it’s a necessity.”

Today, Hack The Box has almost five million users, attracting about 3,000 sign-ups a day. It has raised $66.9m (€58.8m) in European and US funding, opened offices in New York and Sydney, and works with a growing roster of corporate and government clients, including the US Department of Defense, the FBI, Siemens and Verizon. 

What sets the company apart is its insistence on practice. Traditional cybersecurity training remains overly academic, says Pylarinos. The company builds simulated environments that force users to think creatively. “It’s like a house – completely locked. And you have to find your way in.” The result is continuous pressure training. “You need to be battle-ready. Whether we’re talking about organisations or countries, there are criminals or state actors who want to harm you.” Participants face virtual battles so that when a real incident occurs, it’s “just another day at work”.

The 2028 US presidential election will be the 60th anniversary, give or take, of the last time that a single state was won by anybody other than a Republican or a Democrat. In 1968, rambunctious Alabama governor George Wallace, though a Democrat himself, ran for president on his own segregationist American Independent Party ticket. His running mate was the equally bellicose former US Air Force general Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay. They won five states. A clue: California and Vermont were not among them.
     
Since then, only one third-party candidate has piled up votes in really significant numbers, though without winning a single electoral college vote. Eccentric Texan businessman Ross Perot won 18.9 per cent of the national vote against Bill Clinton and George HW Bush in 1992 and 8.4 per cent against Clinton and Bob Dole in 1996. Another third-party run in the desperately tight election of 2000 might have diverted the entire course of 21st-century history. The Green Party’s Ralph Nader won nearly three million votes nationwide, 97,488 of them in Florida, where vice-president Al Gore only needed another 538 votes to take the state, and thereby beat Texas governor George W Bush to the White House.

Nevertheless, there are now suggestions that the 2028 presidential election might be graced by a third party. Meetings have reportedly been held among disillusioned and/or discarded former acolytes of president Donald Trump, with a view to standing on a platform which appears to be the Maga equivalent of those zealously puritan communist parties that insist that everything would have been dandy if only the plan had been correctly implemented. The names at the centre of this scheming – and perhaps, who knows, the 2028 presidential ticket of Continuity Maga – are former Fox News blowhard Tucker Carlson and former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. If this notion seems ridiculous, it can only be wearily noted that so does no end of stuff that has actually happened in the US in recent years. 
     
The potentially intriguing aspect of this story is that both Carlson and Greene are former Trump cheerleaders who have recently deserted him. It would probably be naïve to credit either of them with having taken a noble stand on principle. Much more likely is that this is positioning ahead of the coming scramble for power in the post-Trump Republican party. 
     
Trump cannot – at least not legally – run for a third term, though it is not difficult to imagine him having a go anyway and defying anyone to stop him. He cannot live forever. More urgently, he might, on the other side of November’s mid-term elections, be reduced to the ineffectual quacking and waddling that is the unhappy lot of the lame duck president. The cratering of Trump’s personal approval rating notwithstanding – he is down to a wretched 33 per cent – there is still an electorally formidable cult that could shortly be needing new leadership.
     
Greene has denied that either Carlson or herself aspire to the presidency: this is, of course, what everybody says at around this point in the electoral cycle. Both are plausible candidates. Carlson, though a glib cynic, is a capable communicator. Greene, though a genuine dingbat, retains support from the online fever swamps (the difference is essentially that while both traffick and amplify deranged conspiracy theories, Greene actually believes them). Both can credibly position themselves as old-school Trumpists, while neither is tarnished by association with Trump’s unpopular war with Iran or its baneful economic effects at home. The line will be: the old man was stabbed in the back by the deep state or whoever, we will deliver on a promise betrayed.
    
Andrew Mueller is a contributing editor at Monocle and host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

It has been a bit of an odyssey – partly of the Italian variety, partly on-screen. You might recall that last week I was bound for Forte dei Marmi, and I’m pleased to report that all was tasty as ever at Bagno Bruno, though some of the Russian guests had lips so XXXL that it was hard to determine if they’d asked their clinic for “A380 escape slide” or “super-size asylum seeker dinghy” proportions. Quite a sight.

Post-lunch, it was non-stop to Il Pellicano near Porto Ercole, and despite the volume of drivers heading south it was a smooth-ish cruise until the toll autostrada ended and we were suddenly thumping and swerving along an underfunded stretch of road to Grosseto. Here are a few highlights from the week.

Il Pellicano
The Italian resort classic was much as I remembered it, aside from the very big order that Kettal landed for much of the outdoor furniture. We were introduced to a fine wine from Sicily and I took note of the bar staff’s burgundy uniforms. There was some good tailoring on the service team that just might inform a future brief for Monocle’s front-line crew. Keep an eye out.

Alessio’s big ‘gommone’
It’s not quite as it sounds. Then again? … Anyway, on Monday evening we embarked with friends Alessio and Juliet on their large rigid inflatable boat (RIB), which, thankfully, had more balanced proportions than the lips of those ladies further up the Tuscan coast. Along for the ride was journalist Riccardo Orizio, author of Lost White Tribes, which is also not quite as it sounds and a very good read. We gunned it up the coast, dropped anchor and dived into the rolling sea. Gin and tonics were waiting on deck, the sky was clear and the sunset was perfect – dipping behind Elba. 

Ruthie’s Retreat
On Tuesday morning we hit the road early-ish. Juliet arranged a little pit stop in a nearby village for some bakery bites and then we programmed the Land Cruiser to head for Pienza. After about 30 kilometres, the roads became impossibly narrow, the forests dense and I worried that we would be late for lunch. The car promised a journey just shy of two hours but 100 minutes later we were crunching up the gravel track, concerned only that we were those guests with Swiss licence plates arriving unsocially early. Ruthie was on fine form, the house filled with wonderful guests (a head of state here, a talented actor there), the parmigiana di melanzane was in the oven and for the next 48 hours we were treated to the best food and drink; “Singing Scrabble”; a side trip up to the rather amazing village of Castiglioncello del Trinoro and its wonderful Monteverdi hotel; a stormy eclipse and a geopolitical briefing or two. Headline: Europe needs to pull its thumb out – and fast.

Fill her up
Ruthie took us wine shopping in Pienza on Thursday morning. Should you be in the region, a visit to Enoteca di Ghino is highly recommended. Thankfully, the wheels were parked right out front, so adding an extra box or two didn’t involve breaking a sweat. And if you do end up spending too much time at Ghino’s, La Bandita Townhouse is a cosy joint nearby to rest your head.

Another odyssey
What do you do when, after a zippy eight days on the highways of Italy, you’re settled back at your apartment in St Moritz? First, you check in with your colleagues Logan and Iulian at The Monocle Shop and say hello to all the visitors from Kuwait and the UAE. Next, you go for a dip in the lake, dinner, and then, because it’s Friday and you haven’t been to the cinema in ages, you buy tickets for The Odyssey. I have five things to say:

1.
By now you will know that the film is a casting jumble sale that pays little attention to plausible geographies for the period and a lot of attention to the right stars for box office success and potential inclusion flashpoints. Oddly, there’s not a Greek in sight. Wouldn’t Theo James have been a better call for Odysseus? I love Matt Damon but …

2.
On the topic of inclusion, shouldn’t the DEI crowd be paying more attention to accents and not just skin tones? Why did everyone have to sound as though they were from a mid-Atlantic state or southern Ontario? Tom Holland sounds like a tech bro throughout. Annoying. I wanted some chic French people to comment on the rubbish-looking food on the banquet tables. Also, who would venture out to sea without a proper Filipino crew? Impossible. 

3.
Do you remember the wispy, gauzy 1980s fashion brand CP Shades? Watch for its comeback. If the company was still trading, you’d think it was responsible for all of Charlize Theron’s perfectly lit, sandy, bronzy scenes.

4. 
Why was the cyclops so dry and scratchy looking? Given that he lived with a massive flock of sheep, one would have thought that he would’ve been a bit more glistening with all that lanolin around.

5. 
Finally, one of the better bits of casting was Odysseus’s dog. In this role, they went for a wiry podengo. It does raise a question about why Odysseus didn’t take the dog with him. As the breed is Portuguese, and clearly has navigation in its genes, our hero would have no doubt made it home sooner. Speaking of, he would surely have allowed for one last detour – to our Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon.

Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns. 

It’s 05.00 when soldiers at the Austrian Armed Forces’ Alpine base in Hochfilzen rise for a morning routine that might look rather old-fashioned. They muck out the stables, lay down fresh bedding and feed their 50 Haflinger horses and eight serving donkeys. Four of the horses and a donkey are fitted with pack saddles that are capable of carrying up to about 120kg of ammunition, weapons or supplies. The morning trek to the Römersattel, a mountain pass linking the Austrian states of Tyrol and Salzburg, is a traditional military exercise with a modern significance. The drill has drawn attention from international special forces seeking to firm up supply lines and add resilience in the context of the war in Ukraine.

“On the trek, we train our conscripts to lead animals through rugged terrain, cross a riverbed and defend positions under enemy fire,” Staff Sergeant Florian Manzl, who oversees pack-animal training in Hochfilzen, tells Monocle. Four pack-animal units were merged in 2007 and now form a component of the larger base.

Given Austria’s constitutional neutrality and its reliance on a conscript army, Manzl’s main job is to train a fresh batch of about 40 soldiers every four months. “Most arrive with little experience with animals or endurance training,” he says. “But, by the end of their time, they can walk 80km a week with horses and donkeys, have good physical fitness and are well versed in leading pack animals.”

This focus on training novices is one of the key aspects of the pack-animal centre. Another is its use of donkeys, which were introduced in 2016. “Our special forces requested the donkeys because they are easily available in many countries, so knowing how to work with them can be useful on missions abroad,” says Colonel Wilfried Tassenbacher, the centre’s commander. As word of conscripts training with donkeys in the Austrian Alps spread among European armies, many began sending select members of their own special forces here, usually for three-week training sessions.

“When we introduce new soldiers to the animals, we begin with horses,” says Manzl, as he starts the 8km trek. As herd animals, horses instinctively follow a leader, whereas donkeys think more independently. “A donkey only works with a leader that it trusts, which requires more experience,” says Manzl. “Furthermore, donkeys evolved in difficult terrain where they learnt to kick in multiple directions, which can be painful for inexperienced conscripts.”

The main virtues of both horses and donkeys are resilience and stealth. “Unlike lorries or helicopters, they operate in any weather, be it the current heat, deep Alpine snow or heavy rain and fog,” says Manzl. They also require no fuel or specialised spare parts, are immune to electronic warfare and are considerably harder to detect than motorised vehicles that emit heat and sound, as well as radio and electromagnetic signatures. “That stealth allows pack animals to evade detection by drones and other surveillance more easily, which is a vital tactical advantage,” adds Manzl. Polish soldiers use horses to supply and patrol muddy, forested parts of the Belarusian border. “They seem upbeat about it,” says Manzl. “They just invited us to an upcoming international gathering to share our experiences, since they plan to build three army centres for horses.”

As the conscripts return to base, they finish their day by grooming, washing and even stretching some of the horses for a cool down. The animals’ rest is much deserved in the summer heat. But it might be short-lived. The weight of expectation on these animals’ capabilities is continuing to grow.

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1.
On the Iberia hopper flight from Palma to Mahón in Menorca, there is a guy in his thirties, wearing a low-key outfit of T-shirt, shorts and sneakers but carrying perhaps the nicest carry-on bag that I’ve ever seen. A black leather beauty. I spot the mark of the luxury house that made it. I do a nosey Google. It’s yours for €72,000. Meanwhile, on the tarmac, he has a platoon of suitcases lined up, all from the same maker. I have a momentary flash of desire (for the bags, not the bag carrier). Then I remember the time that I left my suitcase on a train, another where it arrived on the carousel looking like it had been punched in the face by Mike Tyson. Suddenly his collection seems like anxiety on wheels. I’d better stick with ribbed and metal.

2.
Oh, yes, after all these years of life in Palma, I finally lost my Menorca virginity this week. And thank you for asking, it all went very nicely. I am definitely going back for more.

3.
We stayed on the west of the island in the town of Ciutadella in the Faustino Gran hotel. It’s French-owned, part of the Relais & Châteaux collection. It feels at ease with itself and you don’t sense that staff are following a script. It also has a brilliant concierge service – tables were booked, quiet beaches marked on paper maps. And, no, they didn’t have a clue that I was from Monocle. Just good service and a GM who went out of her way to say hello to everyone.

4.
I am happy with my nationality but on holiday I prefer not to be surrounded by Brits. Over breakfast, by the pool, I don’t want to tune in to conversations about the banalities of my fellow countrymen’s lives (and I definitely don’t want them to hear mine). I want to feel that I am away. Luckily, in Menorca, it seems as though every visitor is French, Italian or American. It’s a safe space.

5.
Friends from Madrid invite us for drinks at their apartment on the north coast, sitting on a bay not far from the town of Fornells. They book a nearby chiringuito for dinner but just after the starters arrive, the power goes out. And stays out. The kitchen will have to close. It doesn’t seem to faze anyone. Candles are produced, wine drunk, children continue playing. Our hosts nip home and return with a tub of ice-cream and a Santa & Cole table lamp. We just carry on laughing and talking in the dark.

6.
You know that you’re hitched to the right person when it’s 36C and, while you could be going for a swim, your partner agrees that it would be fun to visit Lithica, an abandoned stone quarry that’s now also part artwork, complete with a huge stone maze. We bake in the heat and agree that it’s one of the trip’s highlights, even if we exit feeling cooked to perfection.

7.
Late to the party, perhaps, we also got to visit Isla del Rey, the island in Mahón harbour that was once a naval hospital but is now home to a Hauser & Wirth gallery and its Cantina restaurant. Is it bad that I enjoyed the Piet Oudolf-designed garden more than the art?

8.
Friends’ recommendations. My chiringuito host Pablo gave us a great list of Menorca places to visit and so did my Madrid pals Ale and Moy. In their concise lists there are so many gems. I might have to enlist all of them when we add Menorca to our travel guides. That’s the vibe we are going for at Monocle – telling you about the sort of places that a friend would take you to.

9.
So many nice spots to eat at, shops and galleries to see. I’ll share one. A table for two at Ulisses, which is next to the market in Ciutadella. Sublime sushi, fish caught that morning by the restaurant’s boat. A night slips slowly by.

10.
We got back to Palma in time to see the eclipse and it was worth it. There were so many stories about the island going into lockdown, about how Mallorca would be overcrowded with eclipse watchers. We ended up on a beach, sitting on a rock, surrounded by nice people. And at the moment of totality, people clapped and cheered. The universe amazed us. Or was it just the power going out again?

When the owner of Munich’s Arabellahaus announced in 2018 that the building would have to come down, residents were furious. Completed in 1969, the enormous, skinny, rectangular structure long functioned as a miniature city, earning comparisons with Le Corbusier’s L’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. There were leather-clad lift doors, a 24-hour concierge, a hotel, two clinics and even an in-house catering service. But infrastructure ages. The reinforced-concrete frame began to corrode, the façade started to fail and water damage spread. Real-estate developer Bayerische Hausbau, the owner, declared the building technically exhausted. Demolition, it said, was unavoidable.

Now, in a surprising reversal, the owner has changed course. The Arabellahaus will stay. The trick is to make it fatter. The proposal, drawn up by Munich-based architect Andreas Hild, is deceptively simple: the ageing façades and balconies will be stripped away and a new, roughly 2.4-metre-deep structure will be wrapped around the building’s long sides. This new layer will accommodate lifts, staircases and services, relieve pressure on the existing structure and, crucially, create additional interior space. On the roof, a publicly accessible garden is planned, reached by an enormous outdoor escalator roughly four times the length of the one at Paris’s Centre Pompidou.

If the project succeeds – and with residents, developer and city broadly behind it, the odds are unusually good – Arabellahaus could become a model for one of Germany’s most urgent architectural problems. The country is full of large housing blocks from the 1960s and 1970s whose façades, pipes, roofs and concrete structures are reaching the end of their useful lives. At the same time, Germany is short of roughly two million homes. In that context, demolishing thousands of structures only to spend years rebuilding them is hard to justify.

A better approach would be to treat these buildings as raw material: keep what still works, replace what does not and add whatever is missing. But that only works with a change in regulation. Much of Germany’s building code is still shaped by the logic of the postwar construction boom, when the priority was to build as many homes as possible, as quickly as possible. Today, even a carefully refurbished old building can’t be expected to meet standards devised for an entirely new one, making adaptations especially expensive. Planning rules should do the opposite: make it simpler to retain a sound structure, not penalise those willing to work with what is already there.

The environmental argument alone is compelling: the carbon and materials already invested in a building are retained rather than crushed, hauled away and replaced. But there is a social argument too. Residents keep a place that has become part of their identity. Buildings acquire meaning through use; people grow attached to them, neighbourhoods form in their vicinity. And if a refurbishment can improve a building rather than merely preserve it – as with Arabellahaus’s free public roof garden – even better. A city that learns how to deal with its building stock not only saves more of its architecture, it builds much less of what it doesn’t need. 

Florian Siebeck is Monocle’s Frankfurt correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

More on Munich: There’s a host of outstanding mid-century architectural projects in Munich, not least the city’s Olympiapark. Click here to read the full report on how its 1972 athletes’ village is a rare example of Olympics infrastructure that remains admired today.