In 1948 an accidental fire destroyed the facilities of Station D, the scientific base that Great Britain had built in Hope Bay, the eastern end of the Trinidad Peninsula. The thing seems to be nothing special except for one detail: this place is located in Antarctica and the devastating effect of the fire not only […]
Posted inAncient Greece
The Nymphaeum of Mieza, the place where Aristotle instructed Alexander the Great.
When Alexander the Great was already at war in Asia, strange news reached him from his homeland: his tutor Aristotle had made public his teachings, those same doctrines with which he had imbued the mind and soul of the young Macedonian, allowing the whole world to know them. Alexander’s displeasure is reflected in the alleged […]
Posted inAntiquity, Culture
How the Karatepe bilingual inscription from the 8th century B.C. led to the decipherment of Anatolian hieroglyphs
Just as the Rosetta Stone was fundamental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, other writing systems followed a similar process, sometimes more rugged and convoluted. Some contributed in part to the decipherment of the Anatolian hieroglyphs, in a sort of curious domino effect. In 1694, the Cippi of Melqart, two pedestals bearing bilingual inscriptions, in […]
Posted inModern Era
Saigō Takamori: the true story of the last samurai
In 1877 the Satsuma Rebellion or Sainan War against the Japanese imperial throne ended with the victory of the latter and the definitive confirmation that the Meiji Revolution was continuing with the modernization of the country, putting an end to the traditionalist faction that had resisted it. The leader of the Meiji Revolution died in […]
Posted inGeography
The mysterious seismic pulse that repeats every 26 seconds, coming from the Gulf of Guinea
Seismic detectors around the world have been capturing a curious and strange phenomenon for decades. Every 26 seconds the earth emits a pulse, a small microseism barely perceptible, that nobody knows why it happens or what causes it. Until recently, no one knew where it came from either. The first to document the phenomenon was […]
Posted inArt, Middle Ages
The Chartres Cathedral’s great labyrinth
About 80 kilometers southwest of Paris stands the city of Chartres, one of whose main cultural attractions is its Gothic cathedral built between 1194 and 1220. It was built in the same place where other churches and cathedrals had been before, the first one around 360 A.D., all of them destroyed by fires: the first […]
Posted inGeography
The world’s largest globes
A globe is a three-dimensional scale model of planet Earth represented on a sphere where, sometimes, the topography of the surface is shown (obviously exaggerated because, depending on the scale, it would be difficult to see). The circumference of the planet is approximately 40 million meters. The oldest of those that remain is the Erdapfel […]
Posted inMiddle Ages, Modern Era
The High Court of Chivalry, a medieval institution still active in the United Kingdom
Heraldry is the science of the coat of arms, the “art of explaining and describing the coats of arms of each lineage, city or person” (apart from making ostentation and self-praise). It is a science that dates back to the Middle Ages, since it was then that this type of identity representations were born, and […]
Posted inAncient Rome
Hippika gymnasia, the Roman cavalry tournaments
We are used, thanks to literature and cinema, to the image of medieval horsemen engaged in chivalry tournaments. Although this type of competition and its rules are exclusively of medieval invention, in reality similar exercises existed long before, such as the one practiced by the Roman cavalry, probably due to Greek influence. It was called […]
Posted inCulture
Abram Gannibal, the African slave who became a military engineer, general of the Russian army and great-grandfather of the writer Alexander Pushkin
There is an episode from the eighteenth century that in a way seems to come from a work of fiction: that of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an African prince kidnapped by the Otmans but bought by a Russian ambassador who took him to his country, where, after a careful education, he reached high military and political […]