The beautiful Russian chapel in the Cimetière du Vieux Château of Menton has just had its onion-shaped dome painted gold. It's my favourite building in the cemetery and so today - Menton Daily Photo's 3rd birthday - seems a good day to show it to you as it gleams in the sunshine. The photo below shows it before the paint job.
The chapel was built in 1886 by Count Protassov-Bechmetieff and is the final resting place of several Russian Princes. The building is crumbling in places and becoming dangerous for visitors but happily, the Russian architect Andrei Smirnov will undertake, at his own expense the remains of the restoration.
And so on this 3rd birthday - one post a day for three years and never a day missed and the same on Monte Carlo Daily Photo - I wish I could invite you all for a glass of champers but we'll have to do it 'virtually' - please open that bottle!
Joining the City Daily Photo community has truly changed my life bringing a new field of creativity, so many new and valued friends and even a new job as journalist/photographer for CITYOUT Côte d'Azur. None of this would have happened without our dear Eric Tenin who started it all with Paris Daily Photo - thank you, Eric, and thank you to Demosthenes and Igor who keep us up and running every day.
Thanks to my fellow bloggers, some of whom I've been lucky enough to meet, others are valued friends from afar. So many of you, over these three years, have helped and encouraged me and even more of you inspire me. And thank you to everyone, blogger or not, who takes a look at my photographs each day.
I know I'm lucky to live in such a beautiful place and the pleasure for me in blogging is to share the place I love so much. Photography has changed the way I see the beauty around me. Once I used to just 'look' but now, thanks to seeing my world through the lens of a camera, I really 'see' it. How lucky I am.