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The Taffrail

A taffrail is a railing at the stern of the ship or the handrail around the open deck area at the stern of a ship or boat. The term is a shortening of taffarel, the original name for this ornament.

The stern of the Prins Willem with a wooden carved taffrail and a Captain on the Poop deck taffrail, by William Heysmann Overend (1851-1898) (x) (x)

Sometimes the railing refers only to the curved wooden top of the stern of a sailing ship or an East Indian ship.  It could also be a complete handrail along the poop deck. The rail of these wooden sailing ships usually had hand-carved wooden mouldings, which were often highly ornamented.

schembart carnival costumes

illustrations from a schembartbuch, depicting costumes from the nuremberg 'schembartlauf' festival from the years 1449 to 1539. nuremberg, c. 1551-1600

source: Nuremberg, GNM, Hs 5664

The knot artist....

Dog waiting for his friend

(via)

On October 29, 1955, near the Hospital Wall of Sevastopol Bay, after severe damage from an explosion equivalent to 1000-1200 kg of TNT, the cause of which has not yet been officially established (the official version is an explosion on a mine left over from the times of the Patriotic War), the Black Sea Fleet battleship Novorossiysk (Italian Giulio Cesare) sank. 617 people were killed — 557 people of the battleship's crew and 60 people from the personnel of the emergency parties of other ships of the squadron. Later, the ship was disassembled for metal and transferred to the Zaporizhstal plant.