In the Temple Bar area of London, just outside the Royal court of Justice, stands a pedestal crowned by a sculpture of a dragon that appears ready to swoop down on passersby.
This impressive Victorian-era sculpture was traditionally known to locals as "The Griffin," perhaps due to its feline-like posture and body shape, and its snarl that is reminiscent of a big cat. However, this creature is in fact meant to represent a dragon.
The dragon was created in 1880 by the sculptor Charles Bell Birch, who had been commissioned by the Royal family and government to produce an ornate sculpture to surmount the pedestal marking what were the historic gates of the City of London.
The Victorians were romanticists and consciously revived trends from earlier periods of history. As such, Birch chose the dragon the subject of the sculpture because the beast had always been a culturally important symbol for the City of London and the English nation.
Dragons are creatures of heraldic significance and are prominent characters within English folklore, from the ancient Anglo-Saxon mythological stories such as Beowulf to the tale of Saint George the dragon slayer and patron saint of England.
This particular dragon also plays another important symbolic role. In keeping with the folkloric beliefs about the treasure-guarding instincts of these mythical beasts, the Temple Bar dragon serves a totemic purpose as a protective guardian of the treasures of London.
If visiting Sweden in December, you will see curled saffron buns everywhere you go. These are lussekatter and they’re not just for eating; they were once believed to ward off the devil.
These traditional treats are associated with Luciadagen ("Lucia Day"). Celebrated on December 13, Luciadagen features choirs of children that accompany a leader dressed as Saint Lucia in singing the darkness away and calling for spring. Most aspects of the festivities celebrate light, particularly the candle-lined wreath crown that St. Lucia wears. Like many winter celebrations, Lucia Day blends Christian and pagan practices. Prior to the conversion to the Gregorian calendar, December 13 was the longest night of the year, a time when singing and lighting bonfires were necessary to drive away darkness and nefarious spirits. After Sweden's conversion to Christianity around the 12th century, legends surrounding St. Lucia (a figure also associated with light) were incorporated into the tradition.
The buns that go with this traditional celebration are S-shaped and have a single raisin in the center of the two spirals. It is thought that they were originally modeled after a sleeping cat, an animal that was once associated with the devil; however, because they were made with saffron, a spice that was believed to have magical properties (not to mention a bright, sunny color), the treats were thought to actually be an effective way to ward off Satan. Originally, the buns were called djävulskatter ("devil cats"), but later the name changed to the more polite lussekatter (“Lucia cats”).
The dough is sweet and soft, but spiced with a generous amount of saffron to make it bright yellow. This gives the buns their unique smokey taste that goes well with the sweetness of the dough. The buns cost between 50 cents and $2 depending on where you buy them.
For ancient Scandinavians, chewing gum was not about passing the time or freshening breath. It was an essential tool. Archaeologists believe that chewed-up pieces of birch bark, the ancient equivalent of gum, were used by people as an adhesive, to hold together tools and weapons. Now, a team of researchers want to know more about the people who chewed on this bark millennia ago.
The researchers focused on three specimens, which were found at an archaeological site in Sweden. The trio look like masticated lumps with imprints of teeth or fingers. Preserved in these lumps are microscopic strands of human DNA, most likely from saliva. These strands tell a story about how Mesolithic people interacted with their environment.
“I think the most interesting part is that we’re actually capturing a moment,” says Natalija Kashuba, a Ph.D. student at Uppsala University in Sweden. Kashuba is the lead author on a study, pre-printed on bioRxiv, that presents an analysis of these bits of bark. “This isn’t DNA from deceased ancient individuals—we’re actually catching DNA from a person while they’re alive and doing something. I think that’s kind of fun and remarkable.”
Using state-of-the-art genetic technology, Kashuba and her collaborators were able to analyze pieces of human DNA encased in the gum’s resin. “These were processed by humans somehow,” says Kashuba. “Either they were chewed or held by hand for long enough for DNA to get capsuled within this material. Then we got to extract it.”
By comparing the DNA sequences to genetic libraries of ancient human populations, the team found that the people who had munched on these bits of bark were from the earliest known group of Scandinavian hunter-gatherers. These individuals lived before Sweden was covered in glaciers in the latest ice age, over 9,500 years ago.
The findings also provide some insight into the social dynamics of these ancient people. For example, each piece of gum was only chewed by a single person, and both women and men partook, giving some insight into the community’s social structure—creating these sticky lumps wasn’t the domain of a single gender.
The gum comes from an archaeological site known as Huseby Klev near the southwestern coast of Sweden. The site now sits inland, but thousands of years ago, when sea level was 80 feet higher than today’s levels, it was a beach on an island at the end of a narrow fjord.
Huseby Klev was originally excavated in the 1980s and has provided a wealth of archaeological materials from thousands of years of civilization, which remained well-preserved under layers of marine clay and sand. Archaeologists have found scores of animal bones at the site, mostly fish, but also including whale and dolphin remains. Many of the bones had been sharpened to form tools, like arrowheads and fishhooks.
The chewed-up wads of birch bark have been of interest to archaeologists since they were originally found in 1980s, but this research is the first look into the genetic imprint left behind by the chewers. This study adds a new layer to archaeologists’ understanding of one of the oldest human societies in Scandinavia.
“This research can increase the size of the window,” says Kashuba. “We already have the possibility of extracting DNA from ancient human remains, like bones and hair. This is another way, something completely new.”
As the 19th century melted into the 20th, a young man named Frank Crowe worked his way across America and Europe, playing music for the circus.
The roving musician chronicled his travels, often by pasting his transportation tickets into a huge, handsome folio. That’s how we know, for instance, that Barnum and Bailey secured him passage from Dunkirk to New York on the SS Minneapolis. That same volume also holds some 2,500 postcards that suggest, wherever the caravan stopped, Crowe stole away from the Big Top to see the sights.
We don’t know much about Crowe’s life in the tent, but his sprawling collection reveals what he got up to in his off-hours in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Texas, Arizona, and many more locales. Some captions read like entries in a journal about a whimsically itinerant life. How did he spend the morning of March 19, 1902? Look to the postcard of Lake Geneva, where, he wrote, “I made the trip shown by the dotted line.”
Other postcards are speckled with historical tidbits he picked up along the way. On a page devoted to Northern Catalonia, he scribbled notes about local attractions. Sandwiched between images of people drinking from a porron, tipping a stream of red wine into their mouths from the spout’s great heights, is a note about the ancient thermal baths of Amélie-les-Bains-Palada. There, he wrote, the waters neared 145 degrees Fahrenheit (and still do).
Some of the postcards depicting locals in "traditional" costume topple into the sort of queasy, pseudo-anthropology that doesn't sit well today. Still, there are historical nuggets to be gleaned from Crowe’s scrapbook. A page devoted to his rambles through Hungary juxtaposes two views of the same city, hundreds of years apart. In 1601, the city of Székesfehérvár appears as a cluster of spindly spires (that year, the army of the Holy Roman Emperor wrested short-lived control of the city from the Ottoman Empire, which would ultimately retain it for decades more). The more recent postcard shows a handsome, tree-lined boulevard.
Three big balls of snow, some lumps of coal, a couple of sticks, and a carrot. Today’s typical snowman is minimalist, almost abstract. It is an artistic devolution from what they once were—markedly more advanced and artistically challenging. Even Michelangelo dabbled in the medium. Centuries ago, snowman-makers, many of whom were themselves artists and craftsmen, put considerable time and effort into their snowmanship.
One particular fluorescence in the canon of snow art was during the Middle Ages, when things were made with snow to make a statement. In some places there was a tradition among artists to populate cities with snowmen after a heavy snowfall. In a time when famine, plague, sickness, and conflict were not uncommon, snow often brought winter festivals and other officially endorsed morale boosters, which provided some moments of relief and levity to people who might otherwise be surviving on grass or dropping dead. The thinking was that the public could blow off steam for a week or two—with erotic dancing, excessive drinking, political jokes, and public art displays—but in a somewhat supervised way. That is exactly what took place in Brussels, then an important city in the Duchy of Brabant, during the particularly brutal winter of 1511. It was called the “Winter of Death,” and the city was covered with snowmen.
For six straight weeks, beginning January 1, temperatures stayed below freezing. A winter festival was declared, a much-needed distraction from the cold, the class strife, and the Guelders, another duchy to the north that made a practice of attacking Brussels.
From the colorful surviving accounts, including from the town poet and various diaries, we know that these were not your simple, three-ball snowmen. Every corner of Brussels was occupied with white figures pantomiming the local news or classical folklore. There were snow biblical figures, snow sea knights, snow unicorns, snow wildmen, snow mermaids, and snow village idiots. Some of them were juxtaposed together to create clever interplay and contrast. Some snowmen were based on the icons of the calendar, such as Janus (January) and Pluto (February), or the signs of the zodiac. A snow scene of Christ with the Woman of Samaria. A preaching friar with a dripping nose. A tooth-puller. The man in the moon. Roland blowing his horn. Cupid atop a pillar with a drawn bow. St. George rescuing the princess from a dragon. Adam and Eve. Among the snow-sculpture garden the city had become were 50 elaborately executed scenes with a total population of 110 snowmen. The vigor and ubiquity of the displays earned the festival the title of the “Miracle of 1511.”
Outside the home of Philip of Burgundy, son of Philip the Good and commander-in-chief of the Netherlands, stood a Hercules figure. The miraculously beautiful, perfect proportions of the snowman suggest that Philip was helped in the construction by court painter Jan Gossaert, a leader in Italian architecture and Renaissance art who had just rendered several nude paintings of the Greek hero for Philip.
There were works by artists and craftspeople, but this festival was about the regular Brusselaars. Many of the snow sculptures represented the public’s fears, frustrations, and desires. There were politically charged and sexually obscene tableaux in the streets for all to see—a form of visual satire and social commentary. Current events, complaints, local problems—if it was a nuisance, it was sculpted. Snow gentlemen gambled near the houtmarkt (wood market). Nearby was a urinating “fountain-boy,” today a symbol of the city of Brussels. A snow cow fertilized the ground. All told, according to historical sources, more than half the scenes were sexual or scatological in nature. Numerous snow figures were sculpted in erotic embrace. A snow couple made love in front of the town fountain. In the red light district, prostitutes stood on corners. In another scene, a snow nun seduced a man. It was an open forum to indulge hidden desires and stir the nether regions.
A display of frozen politicians became the town’s de facto op-ed page. The most feared characters, from the devil to the enemy ruler from Poederijen, were crafted in uncompromising poses. A sculpture of Redbad, last king of Frisia (“Freeze Land”) represented Satan, and was symbolically responsible for the deep winter frosts that threatened lives and livelihoods each year.
History has long since forgotten the Miracle of 1511, as well as the ballad that describes the event by official town poet Jan Smekens, “Dwonder van claren ijse en snee: een verloren en teruggevonden gedicht” (“The Miracle of Real or Imaginary Ice and Snow: A Lost and Then Refound Poem”). Maybe a shorter title could’ve helped, but really it was the ballad’s and the snow sculptures’ status as “low art” that left them neglected all these centuries. Despite a reprint of the poem in 1946, literary historians still considered it amateur in style and written in a vulgar, rhetorician tongue instead of Latin or French.
The Miracle of 1511 was not the first snow festival, and its denizens were not the first snowmen. There was a smaller scale one in 1481, and nearby cities hosted similar events: Mechelen (1571), Rijssel (1600 and 1603), and Antwerp (throughout the 17th and 18th centuries). But the Miracle of 1511 was the one to rule them all. It actually changed the society of Brussels by giving the public a voice, and helping affect a shift in the balance of power. This was the snowman’s defining moment, the moment it rose beyond winter distraction to political force. Those snowmen provoked thought, anger, and joy, and even forced people to reassess their places in the world. These snowmen were rock stars, and the Miracle of 1511 was Woodstock.
On the night before Christmas, some people are preparing and decorating Christmas cookies, while others are readying a “roast beast” for the oven. But for Italian-Americans, cooking up the right supper can be a bit fishy. While the precise origins of the tradition are not clear, the Feast of the Seven Fishes, also referred to as La Vigilia, honors Italian-Catholic traditions of eating lean, or magro, in preparation for Christmas holiday feasting. Still, it’s difficult to say that this hours-long meal is anything but indulgent.
Though connected with various Christmas Eve celebrations across Italy, the Feast of the Seven Fishes is decidedly an Italian-American invention that stems from the early 20th century. During these peak years of Italian immigration into the United States, most people came from Southern Italy, where seafood is an important part of the diet. Many Italian-Americans wouldn’t recognize the feast without dishes such as baccalà (fried salted codfish) with a spicy caper-flecked sauce and grilled or fried eel (capitone). Other typical preparations include calamari, linguine with anchovies, seafood salad, and shrimp. To make the meal into a real sumptuous affair, oysters and lobster might join a baked whole fish.
The number seven holds a variety of possible, mostly religious, associations, including the number of days it took god to create the Earth in the Bible, the seven cardinal sins, and the number of holy sacraments. While most families will have at least seven types of seafood on the table, many cooks play by their own rules, featuring additional dishes that include everything from meat to pasta. According to food scholars, despite being a relatively new (and somewhat lawless) tradition, the feast is a way for Italian-Americans to remember, revitalize, or introduce their culture to others (especially in cases of in-laws). And while dinners tend to be hosted at home, Italian restaurants across the country have been known to offer the celebration throughout December. Seven or 17, land or marine, turning down an invite to this fine feast would be seriously sinful.
A dairy wagon in Virginia City, Nevada, made the news when it tipped over in 1878. TheTerritorial Enterprisepublished a story called “Whey Goin?” in which a pun-crazed reporter described the scene: “The air was filled with milk and the wagon was left a complete wreck. It was a regular smear-case. From the length of time he has been in the milk business Pedroli’s horse ought to know butter than to act in such a whey— ’tain’t the cheese.”
All but one of the dairy products listed in the article are still common today. Derived from the German schmierkäse ("to smear" and "cheese"), smearcase simply meant cottage cheese to a 19th-century American. Milkmen sold it. Families mixed it with cream to create the product that paved the way for modern cream cheese. In the Pennsylvania Amish community, smearcase is still a term for cottage cheese. But in Baltimore, smearcase is the name of a rare, custardy cheesecake.
Once home to a large population of Germanimmigrants, Baltimore still features a handful of long-standing grocery stores and bakeries that sell this distinct, local sweet. To make a traditional smearcase, bakers prepare yeasted crust, then add a custardy, cheesy filling. After baking, they finish it off with a sprinkle of cinnamon. Compared to standard American cheesecake, smearcase tastes lighter and less sugary, with a more cake-like crust. Bakeries around the city sell the rustic dessert in large, rectangular slabs. It's a straightforward indulgence that's at once wholesome and comforting.
Pristine, old-growth cedar forests surround the stunning Priest Lake in the most remote parts of northern Idaho. In the farthest corner of the lake, you'll find a flat rock flowing with a layer of icy cold mountain water.
It's here that you'll poke your legs through holes in a plastic garbage bag and throw yourself careening down the rock face, slipping and sliding until you'll splash into the small pool of icy water at the bottom. Assuredly, you'll want to do it again.
Come on a nice summer weekend and you'll have to share these natural water slides with a few others; come on a weekday or cooler day and you'll probably have this hidden gem of the Gem State all to yourself.
The remote location of the rocky ride keeps it perfectly secluded. Reaching the slides first entails driving hours on pavement and then gravel until you finally come to the farthest corner of beautiful Priest Lake to a campground called Lionhead. Here, you'll take one of the most rutted dirt roads into the mountain for a few miles and then park the car.
Next, you'll hike for a couple hours through stunning old growth forests along creeks and waterfalls. Cross a freezing cold mountain stream, then weave through a massive cedar bottom until you come out above the rock slides. Exploring even farther upstream reveals stunning cold swim holes and waterfalls that will beckon you in.
Out in the Sonoran Desert in Imperial County, California, is an experimental, sustainable and educational art installation called East Jesus. Here, artists from all walks of life have built upon the original vision of Charlie Russell, who changed a trash-strewn patch of desert into a space for contemporary art.
In 2007, Charlie Russell quit his tech job and headed to the off-grid snowbird community of Slab City in the Sonoran Desert. His initial goal was to work on Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain, a famous painted mound near the entrance to Slab City.
But Russell became involved in his own project less than a mile from Salvation Mountain, where he had begun to turn a trash-strewn area into a colorful and quirky art installation. He called it East Jesus, after a colloquialism meaning “the middle of nowhere” (there’s no direct religious connotation).
With his shipping container of belongings and two art carts, Russell settled in Slab City and began to turn East Jesus into a reflection of his world vision: a world without waste, where trash could be repurposed into art. He invited artists to contribute, and East Jesus soon grew into a habitable art installation that attracted free-roaming characters from all walks of life, including artists, musicians, scientists and builders.
Russell died of a heart attack in 2011, but East Jesus had already taken on a life of its own. And today it’s a habitable cooperative compound with an open-air kitchen, living room, library, music room and vegetable gardens.
But the real draw for curious visitors is the sculpture garden, a constantly evolving art space that thousands of artists have contributed to over the years. The sculptures are all made from discarded material, and include some pieces salvaged from Burning Man.
To give you just a small idea of what you can see at East Jesus, sculptures include a mammoth made from blown-out tires, a mutant albino whale made out of 4,000 plastic bags, a house that looks like it’s sinking into the sand, and a wall of cynical TVs.
Trains helped build the United States into an economic powerhouse back in the 19th and 20th-century. Today, the legacy of trains is still felt, while not always appreciated. In Ohio, the glorious past of America's trains in is on full display at the Mad River and Nickel Plate Railroad Museum.
Located in Bellevue, Ohio—one of the largest train-yard towns in northern Ohio—the Mad River and NKP Railroad Museum contains a large collection of engines, freight cars, passenger cars, various rail equipment, a giant crane for rail repairs and even a massive snowplow once used to clear tracks in the middle blizzards.
A vast amount of old rail paraphernalia is on display at the museum, including clothing, furniture, tools, signs, dishes, lanterns and a dizzying array of other wonderfully preserved historical rail items.
Visitors can wander the large yard, walk through different cars (including an old troop carrier from World War II) and even sit inside a diesel engine.
How many of your most treasured possessions are built to last? Would they make it through a fire? How about a flood?
There are a few rare items in history that have proved capable of making it through the incredible trials the world has thrown at them. The fact that the circumstances of their survival are often tragic only makes their seeming indestructibility more poignant. Whether they’ve withstood the trials of time, trouble, or both, the artifacts below are striking reminders of the lives their owners lived, as well as of the incredible craftsmanship and engineering that built them.
The Titanic Violin
If you’ve seen Titanic, you know the story of Wallace Hartley, the violinist who famously urged the band to keep playing even as the ship began to sink. While many might imagine this story to involve a bit of artistic license on the part of the screenwriters, it’s actually fairly accurate to the historical record. And we still have the violin to prove it. Amazingly, Hartley’s actual instrument is one of the most notable items to survive the disaster with little damage, both because of the uncanny strength of the glue holding its pieces together as well as the leather valise that was able to protect it from many of the ravages of the undersea. The violin was sold at auction for a whopping $1.7 million in 2013.
Mary Latrobe’s Tea Box
These days, if you ask an elementary school kid to tell you about the War of 1812, the most you’ll probably get out of them is that it…happened in 1812. But although it’s a war that has receded in many ways into the dusty annals of history, it’s also one that saw some serious damage–for instance, the total destruction of the White House after British soldiers marched into Washington in 1814 and burned the place to the ground. The destruction wrought by the fire was severe enough that we now have very little evidence as to what the interior of the original first abode may have looked like, but one rare clue lies in a Chinese lacquer tea box. The box, which was a gift from First Lady Dolley Madison to her friend Mary Latrobe, was lined with a swatch of the same French wallpaper that hung inside the residence, making it one of the few surviving artifacts from the historic building.
Ilan Ramon’s Diary
The crash of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003 stunned the world. While all seven crew members aboard the shuttle were tragically killed when it disintegrated upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, one unlikely item managed to make it through both the explosion and a 37-mile free fall to Palestine, Texas. This item was the diary of Ilan Ramon, an Israeli-born fighter pilot and NASA astronaut who was a payload specialist aboard the spacecraft. While the curator at the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem, where a portion of the diary is on display, describes the item’s survival as “almost a miracle,” others have chalked its unlikely survival up to a combination of aerodynamics, the book’s location in the cabin, and the slow process by which the shuttle disintegrated. Either way, its serves as a moving reminder of an extraordinary life.
The Lewis Chessmen
That dusty old Scrabble set in your closet may be 20 years old at this point, but what are the odds of it hanging on for another 900-plus years? We’re guessing pretty low. The Vikings, on the other hand, crafted their games with an eye toward longevity—at least in the case of the Lewis Chessmen, a collection of chess pieces carved from walrus ivory that are believed to have originated in Trondheim, Norway, in the 12th century. The iconic, and slightly silly-looking figures were discovered on the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and are now on display in the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland. How did they manage to survive for over 900 years?
The Ocean of Lost Toys
In 1997, a ship containing more than 5 million Legos was struck by a freak wave, causing it to accidentally drop its precious plastic cargo off the coast of Land’s End at the westernmost edge of England. Now, more than twenty years later, the nearby beaches of Devon and Cornwall are still bejeweled with thousands of the distinctive, yellow-headed figures and their related doodads, all of which are avidly collected by visitors (not to mention cursed by local conservationists). If you plan to go beach-combing, make sure to wear shoes. Indestructibility comes with a price: those things hurt.
Most items manufactured today won't still be ticking when the archaeologists of the future dig them up. That's why Citizen Promaster is the wristwatch of choice for people who brave the elements every day in their careers. View the video below to see how a forger harnesses earth, wind, fire, and water to create a blade–all while wearing a Citizen Promaster Tough watch.
Scouse, the unique Liverpool accent, and, Scouser, the term for a Liverpudlian, are both derived from a traditional sailor’s stew.
Scouse was originally a poor man's meal, made of beef, potatoes, onions, salt, and pepper. For sailors at sea, salt beef and crumbled hard tack (dried biscuits) were swapped in for the regular meat and potatoes. The origins of scouse, initially lobscouse, are hard to pin down, as versions have been consumed across northern Europe and Scandinavia for centuries, traveling from port to port with the sailors who consumed it. It's remained a particularly popular dish in port towns, which is how it's found a home in Liverpool.
Scouser as a reference to someone from Liverpool came into common use in the 1940s. It was originally a derogatory term that implied that the person was so poor that they could afford to eat decent food only once a week and, for the rest of it, ate leftovers boiled up with potatoes. But Liverpudlians took the insult in stride and turned it around into their own salutatory description.
The Royal Textile Academy of Bhutan is one of the nation’s first institutions dedicated to the conservation and exhibition of textiles, and the various international techniques used to create them.
Weaving is a fundamental component of Bhutanese culture, thus the Royal Textile Academy of Bhutan was established at the behest of Her Majesty Gyalyum (Queen Mother) Sangay Choden Wangchuck as a nonprofit institution in 2005.
The academy serves as an educational space by which trainees learn weaving traditions and techniques, how to dye their yarn, and basic business practices such as bookkeeping. It's also a conservation center used to restore precious artifacts from monasteries all over Bhutan, and a museum that hosts a rotating program of exhibitions relating to the textile arts.
Since its inception, the Royal Textile Academy has since expanded to include offices and partnered with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to further the organization’s mission to preserve this vital element of Bhutanese art and history.
As you walk through the galleries of the Teotihuacan exhibit in Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology, your eyes may be instantly drawn in the direction of a manifestly morbid sculpture.
In front of you stands a slate disk depicting a huge grinning skull, its sightless eyes glaring malevolently while a long protruding red tongue lolls from its maw. But perhaps most strangely of all, it is surrounded by what appears at first glance to be an elaborate halo, oddly reminiscent of a Catholic saint.
Although we can never know for sure what this enigmatic sculpture meant to the lost civilization of Teotihuacan, the location of its discovery was made might offer some clues as to its symbolic meaning.
In 1964, during an extensive archeological excavation of Teotihuacan, the disk was dug from the area directly in front of the famous Pyramid of the Sun, (the third-largest pyramid in the world) by a team of astonished archeologists. The discovery soon made international news and the sculpture was moved to the newly inaugurated National Museum of Anthropology, which had opened that year, to be displayed to the public.
Archeologists believe the sculpture's "halo" may allude to the setting and rising of the Sun, as the change from day into night was perceived by many Mesoamerican civilizations to be a cycle of the death and rebirth of the Sun. The symbolic meaning of the skull imagery itself is more difficult to identify, but it is thought that it may allude to the ritual practice of human sacrifice or be a representation of the Teotihuacan god of death, Mictlantecuhtli.
It also may be that this "disk of death" was somehow connected to human sacrifices made around the construction of the Pyramid of the Sun. Based on the presence and location of burial sites, it seems that the sacrifice of humans and animals was practiced during the construction of buildings, perhaps as offerings to the gods to secure prosperity.
Nuns at the Santa Clara convent in Puebla, Mexico, started making rompope in the 17th century. Though often called Mexican eggnog, this beverage is differentiated by its yellow hue, a result of cooked yolks and no egg whites. The Santa Clara sisters derived their recipe from ponche de huevo, or "egg punch," which came to Mexico by way of Spain.
As officials from the Catholic Church ate and drank their way through Mexico's religious houses, they encountered the velvety drink. Visitors lauded the rich mixture of milk, egg yolk, spices, sugar, and rum, and its popularity grew. According to local yolk lore, a Sister Eduviges made two key contributions to rompope enjoyment. First, she added a secret ingredient to her standout recipe, a special something that she never revealed. But perhaps more importantly, she successfully lobbied for the nuns to be allowed to enjoy their finished product.
Today, families prepare rompope during the holidays and liquor companies sell premixed bottles across the country. It's a staple at Christmas, but it appears on other special occasions, as well. Across Latin America, drinkers often sip the festive beverage chilled or on ice, but Nicaraguans also enjoy a warm version. Creameries, bakeries, and restaurants use rompope to flavor ice cream, pastries, fruit, and cake batter. Some versions are thickened with almonds, chocolate, pistachios, walnuts, or pine nuts—the lattermost of which is often denoted by being dyed pink. It's hardly a surprise that modern Mexicans of all classes and creeds have found a way to enjoy rompope in so many formats. Something so heavenly could only stay cloistered for so long.
This nearly abandoned settlement is a perched on top of a hill. It has steep slopes on three sides that acted as a natural defense, leaving only the south side easily accessible, and this is where the only gate to the village is located. None of this is unique, though; you’ll find many similar hilltop villages throughout Yemen.
What makes the village stand out is that it is a largely deserted Jewish settlement in the heart of Yemen. The village was founded by the Bawsites during the Sabaean Kingdom.
When exactly the Jewish community first arrived in Yemen is a matter of contention. One theory holds that King Solomon sent some merchants to Yemen, and some of them settled down. Another theory says Yemeni tribes converted to Judaism after the Queen of Sheba paid a visit to King Solomon. And yet another theory pinpoints the arrival of the Jews in Yemen to 1451 BC. The only certainty is that the oldest archaeological record of a Jewish community residing in Yemen goes back to 110 BC.
But though they’d been living in Yemen for centuries, most of the Yemeni Jewish community relocated to Israel in 1949 and 1950, during Operation Magic Carpet, and some more in 1959, while a minority moved to the United States. More people left the settlement of Bayt Baws in the 1990s, after urbanization caused the city of Sana’a to swallow the land around it.
Today, Bayt Baws consists of neglected mud houses slowly disintegrating and narrow alleys meandering through compound walls. Most gates ushering into the courtyards are open. However, caution should be taken, as parts of the abandoned may be unsafe.
When walking across a little alley called Schering Rosenhanes gränd, you’ll find a large rock protruding from the wall with a small metal door inside of it. It may not look special, but don’t write it off just yet—it’s actually the Normalhöjdpunkten, Sweden’s official ordnance datum.
This datum was used as the main reference point for all other datums in Sweden and allowed surveyors to create accurate maps and sea level calculations. Inside the safe, there’s a small silver rod placed into a cut in the wall. This rod is located 11,800 meters above the average sea level, with a one-millimeter degree of accuracy.
Based on this datum, the Swedish government made the Ordnance Survey Map, an initially secret map used exclusively by military and government agencies. The first editions from 1820 to 1857 were colloquially called the “Secret Plates” because of their clandestine conditions.
After the maps were declassified, they were made public and future revisions could be made. The maps were published in two series, one for southern Sweden and one for northern Sweden. The southern part contains 110 maps on a 1:100,000 scale and the northern part consists of 84 maps on a 1:200,000 scale.
The datum was created by Professor PG Rosén, who chose its location largely because it was a convenient spot. The General Staff responsible for the datum was located at Riddarholmen, and therefore it was desirable to have the main instrument also at Riddarholmen.
These days the datum is no longer used because most of Western Europe now relies on the Amsterdam Ordnance Datum.
Researchers who work in tropical rain forests often speak of the hassles of it all: Whacking through dense vegetation is tricky, especially when you’re lugging gear and need a free hand to swat, with utmost futility, at the swarm of insects buzzing around your head. And then there’s the rain, which soaks through clothes and patience alike.
But they also talk about how it’s all worth it. These places are precious and shrinking and so little understood. Even researchers who regularly embark on collecting trips to rain forests find, time and again, species that are new to science, from plants to carnivorous insects and more.
Scientific discovery is important, but wonder fuels these adventures, too. At least, that’s the case for Francis Hallé, a French botanist who has spent decades exploring the world’s rain forests. A professor emeritus from the University of Montpellier, Hallé knows that a forest is not just data. He reflects on his time below the branches with great affection, even awe. In a short film from the “Worlds in Transformation” series by the storytelling collective La Foresta, he grows wistful when he recalls drifting off to sleep in the forest, to the symphony of insects and birds around him. He likens the canopy, one of his areas of professional interest, to a sea—only green, and airborne.
Much like the sea, rain forests hold natural wonders that aren’t visible until you’re right up close. Equatorial forests are “a universe of magical allure,” full of “little marvels,” Hallé writes in The Atlas of Poetic Botany, a volume of his Seussian botanical sketches and informed musings, produced in collaboration with Éliane Patriarca and newly translated into English by Erik Butler. In damp, sticky forests from Sumatra to Robinson Crusoe Island, he writes, “there is an abundance of aesthetic satisfaction, wonder, and poetry to be found.”
Each entry in the Atlas drops readers into a scene of Hallé’s fieldwork. On Robinson Crusoe Island, part of an archipelago off the coast of Chile, he found Gunnera peltata, which looks like a rhubarb plant so enormous that it dwarfs whoever stands below its wide, veined leaves. Analyzing it was a thrilling challenge. “Normally, a scalpel is used for dissecting plants,” Hallé writes. “This time, I had to wield a meat cleaver!” A photo would convey the size and the “nest of ruby-red fibers,” but the author eschews snapshots. “I cannot think of a better way to present it than with a drawing,” he says.
There’s a long history of sensitive, precise, and scientific botanical illustration, and more recently scientists turned to stunningly detailed photographs of their subjects, in which, say, an insect’s bristles or compound eyes are presented for close-up study. Hallé prefers to take it slower and simpler. Drawing invites lingering, he writes, which in turn invites people to look closely, carefully, hungrily. To understand a plant, “it is best not to rush.” The time it takes to complete a sketch “amounts to a dialogue with the plant,” and each pencil stroke helps imprint the scene in your mind.
In the sketch accompanying the G. peltata, green and blue-gray stalks stretch above a dusty-rose flower. The coiled trunk is surrounded by others, whose canopies vanish into the margins. In the corner, someone reclines against a trunk that seems to follow the curve of his spine. He’s looking at the plant, admiring it, maybe drawing it, a grin sweeping across his face. The image seems to freeze a moment—perhaps Hallé’s own encounter with the plant, which his drawing helped sear into his memory. “I will never forget my strolls through the Gunnera forest,” he writes, “beneath a roof of gigantic leaves.”
Almost every illustration in the book is infused with this sense of delight in the pleasant strangeness of the natural world. Yes, that includes the sketch of Rafflesia arnoldii, the corpse lily, the largest and possibly foulest-smelling flower on the planet. Its petals are pink (“the color of rotten meat,” Hallé writes), and its scent is rank—a “pestilential odor” that evokes “clogged toilets, or a garbage collector strike in the middle of August.” The two kids in the drawing don’t seem fazed. They’re grinning. One even wraps his hand around the branch, like he’s patting a buddy on the shoulder. In another image, a woman cuddles the gargantuan seed pod of Entada gigas, a Central African vine that might be the world's longest plant. The pods grow to about 6.5 feet, but no one has been able to measure the vines, Hallé writes, because they're hard to reach. Nature is stinky, mysterious, and elusive, and the figures in his drawings are totally into it.
These figures do offer a sense of scale, probably, but also seem to remind readers that sights such as the great African tree fern (Cyathea manniana) are worth reveling in. Anyone who encounters one would be well-served to do as Hallé’s little character does: Stare up, up, up at the palm-like plants that have sprouted in thick clusters for hundreds of millions of years, and saw the dinosaurs come and go.
The book is not an exhaustive checklist of any region’s flora or fauna, nor does it gather everything scientists know about a particular plant. Instead, it’s a tenderly illustrated love letter to specimens that most people will never see outside a conservatory’s glass walls—and to the sights, smells, and sounds that flank the trunks, stems, and petals. If there’s a thesis, it’s that nature is wondrous and bizarre, and we’re extremely lucky to live alongside it.
Built in 2004 by the Queen of Bhutan, Khamsum Yulley Namgyal is a chorten, or stupa, overlooking the Punakha Valley. It was built with a specific function in mind: to ward off evil spirits in Bhutan and across the world, and to bring peace and harmony to all living things.
Despite its relatively recent construction, Khamsum Yulley Namgyal was built in strict accordance with traditional teachings. It took Bhutanese carpenters, painters and sculptors nine years to build the four-story, pagoda-style stupa, as well as the various smaller pagodas surrounding it, some of which contain prayer wheels.
Khamsum Yulley Namgyal was built with a very specific intention in mind. Rather than being a place of communal worship, a monastic retreat or a place of education, it was built to provide spiritual protection, peace and harmony.
As such, the chorten is largely focused on wrathful deities, a concept that may seem counterintuitive. As you walk in to the main room on the first floor of Khamsum Yulley Namgyal, for example, you’ll come face to face with a 15-feet-tall statue of Vajrakilaya, one of the eight deities of Kagyé. And while considered a powerful and wrathful deity, Vajrakilaya’s fury is directed at destroying forces hostile to compassion, purifying their power to do damage.
Statues and shrines to these wrathful deities are also found on the second and third floors, each offering protection against the forces of evil in the world. And to balance the wrathful force of these deities are a series of yab-yum figures on the walls. Each of these figures depicts a male deity in union with his female consort, representing the union of wisdom and compassion.
Finally, as you reach the final rooftop floor, you’ll see a golden statue of Sakyamuni Buddha in his classic pose. The serene statue looks to the south, surveying the spectacular view out across the Punakha Valley.
Long before baking powder became a common household item, making light, crispy, sweet pastries was neither easy nor for the faint of “hart.” To get a good rise without yeast, bakers used a powder made from “hart’s horn,” or red deer antlers. Hart, a British term for a stag (male deer), was readily available in the forests of Germany, where the leavener was referred to as hirschhornsalz (staghorn salt). It appears in recipes dating back as early as the Middle Ages, when it would have been first used by chefs of the nobility.
Making use of hartshorn was no easy feat. After the hunt, cooks would have to heat and pulverize the horns (and often animal bones as well) in order to make use of their rising properties. Once ground, the hartshorn could be added to baked goods much like baking powder is used today, except for the smell. When heated again, the pulverized hartshorn produced ammonia and carbon dioxide gases. As the gases escaped through the batter’s surface, they lifted the dough while it was setting, making it fluffy and light. Although the ammonia dissipated through cooking, its pungent aroma would be difficult to miss (which has led to its use in smelling salts).
One early German-Russian cookie, hirschhornsalz plätzchen, is named after the prized ingredient. Now called “ammonia cookies,” contemporary versions use baker’s ammonia (ammonium bicarbonate), a synthetic version of hartshorn that's produced by heating ammonium chloride with chalk. And although hartshorn has been largely replaced by baking powder, many bakers still seek out baker's ammonia to achieve the light, springy, and shape-preserving properties its predecessor was known to produce, features especially important for making the ornately printed German cookies known as springerle. Luckily, you can spare the harts and eat your springerle, too. Just remember your nose plugs.
