For six and a half centuries, a peculiar ceremony has been held every July 13 at the Ernaz pass and the San Martín stone, a mountain pass in the Pyrenees that serves as a border point between the Foral Community of Navarra (Spain) and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department (France). The event consists of the delivery of […]
Festivals
Posted inModern Era
Juggernaut, the origin of the word that defines a destructive, uncontrollable, and unstoppable force
To define the plague that devastates the world in her novel The Last Man, Mary Shelley (also the author of Frankenstein) writes: Like Juggernaut, it proceeds crushing the being of all who stand in the high road of life. The term Juggernaut is also used by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. […]
Posted inAncient Greece
Thesmophoria, the festival of ancient Greece where men were prohibited from participating
The Thesmophoria were a religious festival in ancient Greece honoring Demeter and her daughter Persephone, goddesses of agriculture and fertility. Held annually, mostly coinciding with the planting of seeds in late autumn, though in some regions it was associated with the harvest, this event celebrated human and agricultural fertility and was one of the most […]
Posted inCulture, Modern Era
Intervision, the Soviet Bloc Festival that Replicated Eurovision with Voting by Turning the Lights On and Off
This is evident with NATO and the Warsaw Pact or the European Common Market and COMECON. But interestingly enough, the Eastern countries also had a response to something much less serious. In 1977, the ISC, the Intervision Song Contest, was born, which, as you can guess, was a copy of the Eurovision Song Contest in […]