Curious Expeditions is Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras. Artists, writers and historians, the pair have been working together for 7 years to find overlooked and obscure history. They recently spent a year living in Budapest and traveling throughout Eastern Europe in search of the esoteric, obscure, and wondrous, much of which is documented at their website www.curiousexpeditions.org. They are currently working on a short documentary about wax anatomical models and the history of dissection.

Dylan is also a contributor to the popular (currently being re-designed) www.Kirchersociety.org, and was the co-planner of the "First Annual Kircher Society Meeting" featured in the New Yorker magazine. He is currently working on a graphic novel about the London beer flood of 1816.

Michelle's photography has been used in numerous publications and as the cover for the mystery novel "Dance to your Daddy." She is currently working on a book of her museum photography. When she can find some free time she enjoys putting together and mounting animal skeletons.

One of the most exciting discoveries for a first time visitor to Istanbul is the easy grace with which the city is at once ancient and modern. It is a place full of an infectious vibrant energy, encircled by an ancient and crumbling city wall. In the same moment, you feel the excitement of a 15 million strong cosmopolitan city, while standing a few feet away from ancient Byzantine buildings and relics. Or in some places, above them.

� Read more of The Mystery of the Sinking Palace

Show girls, singing and dancing. A band with blasting bugles. A dental chair poised at the ready in the bed of a horse-drawn wagon. And there at the center of it all is Painless Parker, dressed to the nines in his spotless white frock coat and trademark gray brushed-beaver top hat.

� Read more of Painless Parker’s Dental Circus

The Dark Church, built in the 6th or 7th century and part of the Göreme Open Air Museum in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, is carved straight out of the soft volcanic rock peaks that the area is famous for. It is one of five ancient churches in the area, all noted for their architecture and astounding art. The Dark Church was named for the low amount of light that penetrates the interior, and thanks to this moody low lighting, it has some of the best preserved frescoes in the world.

The Dark Church’s magnificent 11th-century Byzantine frescoes have recently been restored, and dimly lit but brightly painted, this cave-like church is at once eerie and inspiring.

� Read more of The Dark Church of Cappadocia, Turkey

The Boston Science Museum is full of wonders; it’s like a children’s museum for adults (although kids seem to like it, too.)

We especially love the gigantic models of insects …

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In coastal New England towns like Bath, Maine, fortunes in the vast Atlantic were just waiting to be made. A large whale could contain as much as 3 tons of spermaceti, which fetched huge sums of money.

A strange art form came out of this age of whaling, thanks to scores of sailors with many idle hours at sea. The artists are known as scrimshanders, and the work, scrimshaw.

Scrimshaw is the art of engraving images onto a piece of ivory; in the whaler’s case, the enormous tooth of the Physeter macrocephalus. A large collection of these ivory scenes can be seen at the fine Maine Maritime Museum in Bath.

� Read more of Scrimshaw: Maine’s Maritime Museum in Bath

The Semmelweis Museum in Budapest, Hungary, is one of the city’s most rewarding little hidden treasures.

Located on a small side street on the Buda side of the Danube (the bustling city side, Pest, lies on the other), the museum can be difficult to find, but is well worth the effort.

The small medical museum abounds in fascinating things, some of which are shown here, and is housed in the former home of the doctor Ignác Semmelweiss, who discovered the importance of washing one’s hands after surgery.

� Read more of Chastity Belts, Mummies, and More: The Semmelweis (Medical) Museum of Budapest

We were the only people in the dark, musty, maze-like museum in a quiet part of Vienna, a long trolley ride from the city center. We weren’t prepared for what we were about to see.

Yellowed skulls, medieval torture devices, bloody gloves, newspaper depictions of murder, death masks, rusty axes - the Kriminalmuseum (Criminal Museum) in Vienna, Austria, is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.

D and I have been to a number of medical museums and have seen many different forms of deceased bodies, but were ill-prepared for this seemingly endless museum of murder.

� Read more of Vienna’s Criminal Museum (Kriminalmuseum)

Whether Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or assorted other faiths, religious relics—the human remnants of those worshiped by the faithful—have been venerated objects for millennia. Be they Buddhist mummies, Moses’ staff, hair from Mohammed’s beard, or the bones and mummified remains of Christian saints, these revered objects are an inexorable part of religious worship.

Here is the reliquary holding the mummified right hand of St. Stephen …

� Read more of Holy Reliquaries, Homemade and Otherwise

In 1922, a mechanical engineer, Elis Stenman, began building a small summer home.

It started out like any other home, with a timber frame, roof and floors, but Stenman had other plans for the walls: newspaper. 215 sheets of newspaper (about an inch thick) varnished together into walls, to be exact.

In fact, everything inside the paper house is also made of paper, from the curtains to the chairs to the clock, save for two objects—a fireplace and a piano.

� Read more of The Paper House (Literally!) of Rockport, Massachusetts

The police officer just intended to get a drink. Perhaps he was going to ask a few questions about the mysterious disappearances that had been reported for the last few years. He certainly didn’t intend to leave Savannah, much less, the continent.

Too bad for him.

When he woke up he couldn’t remember leaving the bar, yet nonetheless found himself on a ship traveling to China. The officer had been “shanghaied.”

� Read more of Shanghaied in Savannah: The “Pirates’ House”