Fodor's Expert Review The Owl House
This is what Nieu Bethesda is best known for, and why tourists began traveling to this small, once-forgotten hamlet in the first place. Its creator, Helen Martins, was the subject of the Athol Fugard play, The Road to Mecca, which was made into a film starring Kathy Bates. The story of Helen Martins, who was born in 1897 and died in 1976, has been extensively elaborated upon, and the truth may never be known. Whether she was mad with grief, a visionary, or a mystic genius, the reclusive Martins externalized her loneliness by spending the last 30 years of her life (she eventually committed suicide) transforming her home into a jewel-box with bits of mirror and colorful crushed glass all designed to beautifully reflect the candlelight. Her wondrous vision then spread into her backyard, where she and her assistant Koos Malgas spent over a decade creating the country's most famous sculpture garden, a mystical world cluttered with concrete sirens (which everyone mistakenly calls mermaids),... READ MORE
This is what Nieu Bethesda is best known for, and why tourists began traveling to this small, once-forgotten hamlet in the first place. Its creator, Helen Martins, was the subject of the Athol Fugard play, The Road to Mecca, which was made into a film starring Kathy Bates. The story of Helen Martins, who was born in 1897 and died in 1976, has been extensively elaborated upon, and the truth may never be known. Whether she was mad with grief, a visionary, or a mystic genius, the reclusive Martins externalized her loneliness by spending the last 30 years of her life (she eventually committed suicide) transforming her home into a jewel-box with bits of mirror and colorful crushed glass all designed to beautifully reflect the candlelight. Her wondrous vision then spread into her backyard, where she and her assistant Koos Malgas spent over a decade creating the country's most famous sculpture garden, a mystical world cluttered with concrete sirens (which everyone mistakenly calls mermaids), sphinxes, serpents, glittering peacocks, camels, owls, and wise men. The figures and scenes find their inspiration in the Bible, in William Blake, in the poetry of Omar Khayyam, and also in the visions and personal obsessions of Martins herself. Her house and yard are now a gallery and museum at the heart of the village and worthy of an hour or two of your time.
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