Known to its multi-ethnic populations by different names, Transylvania, now a part of modern Romania, has long enchanted and enthralled foreign visitors and writers including Bram Stoker who captured the imagination of his Western audiences with his ...

During Soviet Times, the small Caucasian Soviet Republic of Abkhazia was part of Soviet Georgia and Joseph Stalin's favourite holiday destination where he would hold court at one of his numerous dachas in the mountains overlooking the Black Sea. As ...

'Janjaweed' is said to translate as 'devils on horseback'. Since 2003, the people of Darfur have faced a reign of terror waged by the Arab militia group, which is backed by the Sudanese government. At least 200,000 people have been killed, and over two ...

On a hilltop near the small Latvian town of Piltinkalns, around a hundred people gather each Midsummer's Eve. The women carry herbs collected from the forest, most prized of which is the mythical blooming fern, said to only flower on this day and to ...

The earthquake in Kashmir on October 8th 2005 killed more than 73,000 people, and up to five million lost their homes. Three months after the massive quake, the survivors were struggling to stay alive in the cold weather. Millions were living in tents ...

Three million people have been displaced by the violent conflict in Colombia. Yet after 40 years of civil war and with the second highest number of IDPs (internally displaced persons) in the world after Sudan, the conflict hardly merits a mention in the ...

Five years into the war in Iraq, almost five million of its citizens remained displaced. The two countries that led the invasion have largely avoided taking responsibility for the human fallout. Around 20,000 Iraqi refugees live in the US, and slightly ...

The Yangtze river supplies water to one in twelve people on the planet and supports 200 cities along its length including Chongqing, the biggest municipality in the world with 31 million residents. Mao famously swam in the river at Wuhan in July 1966, at...

They have been described as the frozen conflicts: those messy, unresolved territorial issues left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Early in August of 2008, two of these conflicts experienced a sudden melting.South Ossetia is home to just ...

The war in DR Congo is the most deadly conflict to have taken place anywhere on earth since World War II. Bewildering in its complexity, the war officially came to an end in 2003. And yet the killing goes on. At the beginning of 2008, as a ceasefire was ...

It's a journey of horrors, the kind you would only make if you were truly desperate. But in the failed state of Somalia there are a lot of desperate people. Up to a quarter of a million Somalis are now living in Yemen after undertaking the harrowing boat...

Strictly Come Dancing is the most watched television programme in the world, according to figures released by industry magazine Television Business International in November 2008. The show, which began in the UK in 1949, has spawned more international ...

Iran is a country divided. Following the disputed election held in June 2009, that division was symbolised by a single street: Vali asr Avenue, the spine of Tehran. At one end, supporters of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have rallied in his ...

Standing in mud that reaches up to their knees, hundreds of men form a human chain that snakes to the horizon. They are trying to rebuild a flood barrier with their bare hands. There are no excavators or trucks, no cement or iron. Everything here is ...

A stricken oil tanker sits in a slick of 200 tons of diesel, 100 miles south of Norway's capital city, Oslo. The usually picturesque landscapes of Sastein and Langesund, site of wildlife sanctuaries and tourist beaches, saw thousands of birds slaughtered...

The smell gets in your clothes and stays. The sun barely shines through the windows. Walls that were once white are now black. The streets are covered in a dirty layer of ash, and the horizon is dominated by factory chimneys and slag heaps that are ...

For close to 8 millennia, the cobbled streets of Aleppo have echoed with the footfall of traders and shoppers. The narrow alleyways of its souks, marked by 2000 years of continuous construction, sell much the same wares now as they did centuries ago, ...

'This work is about people on the run. For almost seven years I have followed in their footsteps - marked by war and unbearable anxieties, but also by hopes and aspirations. This pursuit has taken me to a refugee camp in Congo, to an earthen hut ...

Six months after Japan was rocked by a huge earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, two Panos photographers - William Daniels and Espen Rasmussen - travelled back to the devastated areas to document the continuing reconstruction. William Daniels, ...

After 3 decades of sham elections which saw Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak re-elected on four occasions with ludicrously large majorities, the country is now entering a new era with an eagerly awaited election that is to start on 28 November....

The Nobel Peace Prize this year has been awarded to three women - Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Tawakkul Karman from Yemen. The Nobel laureates will travel to Oslo for the Peace Prize ceremony at Oslo's City Hall. On 11 ...

On a thin mattress by the wall sits Rana Alkassem Alkhaled with her children. She lost her husband in the deadly conflict in Syria, and fled to safer grounds accross the border in Lebanon. She is not alone. According to the UNHCR, of the more than 30,000...

Alphonsine Banyanga was nine when the militia kidnapped her and started using her as a sex slave. Two years later, they left her under a tree, pregnant. The men had tried to cut out the foetus using machetes, scissors and gun barrels. When she was ...

Tough Guy claims to be the world's most demanding one-day survival ordeal and it has been widely described as 'the toughest race in the world', with up to one-third of the starters failing to finish in a typical year. It markets itself as 'the safest...

As part of a long term project looking at masculinity in its various forms, Espen Rasmussen met some of the competitors at two extreme sport events in the minutes after they finished and photographed them and their feet. The first race, Den Store ...

Greenland's vast natural resources, ranging from oil and gas to uranium, rare earth and iron ore, have remained largely inaccessible under thick layers of ice, making them too difficult and expensive to extract. But with a receding ice sheet and new ...

Since November 2013, Ukraine has been gripped by the most serious political crisis since its independence in 1991. What started as public demonstrations protesting against a decision by the government of Viktor Yanukovych, the president, to pull out ...

When does the pain start? Norwegian runner Bernt Arne Tvedt (34) starts to feel it 3 km into gruelling 254 km Amazon Jungle Marathon in Brazil. It starts with a cramp in one leg, then cramps in the other. By the time he is able to stop and stretch, ...

The Norseman xtreme triathlon is an annual endurance race which starts at the Hardangerfjord south of Bergen. Limited to 250 participants for safety reasons, the race is regarded as one of the toughest in the world. The runners are 'unsupported' so ...

Five year old Jonathan Yala died of malaria, not because of a lack of medicine or equipment but because neither of the two health workers at his local clinic had the training necessary to diagnose and treat his illness in time.The sad story of Jonathan's...

For centuries, Europe's Romani people have traversed the continent, sometimes taking root and becoming sedentary, at other times staying on the move, true to their peripatetic tradition. Rarely socially integrated, usually ostracised and viewed with ...

Although Yemen is a very conservative country, women have more rights than in any other country in the region. Unlike their neighbours in Saudi Arabia, Yemeni women are allowed to drive and vote, while many work in the professions as teachers, nurses, ...

There is another side to the Land of Smiles. In Thailand's deep south, only 150 miles from its tourist-filled beaches, 1.8 million people are living under martial law. Bombs, disappearances, torture and murder are everyday events. The Thai government now...

The shocking, hidden lives of refused asylum seekers whose bids for sanctuary have been rejected by the British government are revealed in a new exhibition and multimedia presentation commissioned by Panos Pictures.Abbie Trayler-Smith has photographed ...

Tinginaput is an ordinary village in remote rural India: two rows of neat mud houses, a couple of water pumps, a mango tree where people gather to talk. But there is something very modern perched on the tiles of each roof: a solar panel the size of a ...

Working on assignment for an NGO in Kabul this summer, I found out what it means to work under the auspices of a security-conscious international organisation in times of conflict and unrest. My task was to document the lives of a number of inspiring ...