There Be Dragons

A view of Mariupol as war in Ukraine rages, on April 9, 2022 [Leon Klein/ Anadolu Agency]

That's odd, an apparently untouched sculpture of a Chinese dragon in a scruffy looking street in Mariupol, Ukraine. I was going to say a bombed out street, but looking a little closer at the image the only damage seems to be the trash lying on the ground and the fallen tree branch.

But it's a Chinese dragon. The East and the West seem to have very different versions of what a dragon should look like. The Chinese seem to prefer a snake-like body with a couple of tiny arms, while the West seems to prefer one that is structured more like a horse or bear, but with scales and wings. Some people think stories of dragons come from far away encounters with crocodiles.

A statue of Zmey-Gorinich in Lipetsk region, Russia

There's a more Western model a couple of hundred miles northeast in a family theme park. MY MODERN MET has a page devoted to this concrete monster.

Kudykina Gora theme park is about 350 miles north of Mariupol

A-10 Warthog

I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.