If we know anything about Turkish prisons, we probably learned it from the 1978 film Midnight Express, loosely based on Billy Hayes' memoir of the same name. Hayes later apologized to Turkey for the unrealistic brutality of Turkish characters in the film.
The real story of Turkish prisons is as long and multi-layered as the country itself—starting with the Byzantines and taking on different forms through the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. The Ottomans’ strong relations with European powers meant that there were even British and Russian prisons in Istanbul. This is also the city of reinvention, so expect to find prisons in the most unexpected places: a restaurant, a hotel, or a mosque. While other cities might hide their prisons away, Istanbul has adapted them to the pace of the megacity. But the eerie traces of the past remain like prisoners’ scratches on the walls.
The Yeraltı Camii (underground mosque) in Karaköy is one of the few subterranean places of worship in the Islamic world. But its earlier history is even more remarkable. The Byzantines built this space as the dungeon of Kastellion Tower, which held one end of the giant chain that stopped enemy fleets from entering the Golden Horn. Its conversion to a mosque is linked to the first Arab siege of Constantinople in 674-687. During the siege, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad called Süfyan bin Uyeyne was captured and died in the dungeon. Around 1,000 years later, a Sufi dervish saw Uyeyne's grave in a dream, and one room of the mosque holds his tomb. Yeraltı Camii is one of the most popular places of worship in Istanbul during the month of Ramadan.
When Emperor Theodosius expanded the city's land walls to the west in the 4th century, he also ordered the construction of a processional entrance called the Golden Gate. At first the castle around the gate was used as a reception room for visiting kings and ambassadors. Later it became an infamous dungeon whose Turkish name is Yedikule, meaning “seven towers.”
In the Ottoman era this was the prison for foreign ambassadors who had offended the sultan. The novelist Leo Tolstoy's ancestor Count Pyotr Tolstoy was imprisoned in the Yedikule dungeons for four years, returning to Russia in 1714.
But the more unsettling prisons are those that you can walk by without even noticing. To the west of the Galata Bridge in Eminönü is an innocuous-looking 19th-century building that holds jewelry shops and a restaurant on the top floor. Its former use is betrayed by the name Zindan Han, meaning “dungeon caravansary.” A section of the city walls used to run along this shore of the Golden Horn, and the tower attached to the 19th-century building was a Byzantine prison.
The Turkish name Baba Cafer Kulesi comes from a Muslim ambassador Baba Cafer who was imprisoned and died in the dungeon. Similar to the story of Süfyan bin Uyeyne and the underground mosque, Baba Cafer's tomb became a pilgrimage site for Muslims. Despite this sacred heritage, the Ottomans continued to use the tower as a prison for women and debtors. These poor souls used to shout from the windows at passersby, begging for enough money to pay off their debts.
On a quiet street close to the iconic Galata Tower is a restaurant called Galata Evi. Today it serves a mixture of Turkish, Georgian, and Russian dishes influenced by the Tatar co-owner Nadire Göktuğ. From the outside, there is little evidence that this building began life in 1904 as a British prison. The men and women confined here were guilty of civil crimes, and graffiti saying “three months” and “seven months” shows that most prisoners did not remain here long. With the occupation of Istanbul after World War I, Galata became a British-controlled zone and the prison was turned into a police station. The building was also a base for British spies working against the Turkish nationalist movement, and the headquarters of the British army force was located in the St. Pierre Apartment just across the street.
The most unlikely spot for a former jail, though, might be the swanky Four Seasons in Sultanahmet, which used to be an Ottoman murderers' prison. The impressive square-plan building with guard towers and a central courtyard was built around 1918. Orientalist touches such as patterned tiles around the windows and muqarnas-style corbels are features of the Neoclassical Turkish architecture that developed in the late Ottoman era. The original prison was closed in 1969 and then reopened in 1980 as a military prison. Famous leftists such as national poet Nazım Hikmet and novelist Orhan Kemal were held here, as Kemal recalls in his memoir “In Jail With Nazım Hikmet.” Socialist revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş was also held in Sultanahmet prison before his execution in 1972.
Close to the iconic Sirkeci train station is a neoclassical building that looks little different from the surrounding hans and offices. But despite its plain appearance, there are many people alive today who shudder at the sight of this building. Sansaryan Han in Eminönü was built by Armenian architect Hosep Aznavour in the late 1800s. The owner Mıgırdiç Sanasaryan left the building to the Armenian Patriarchate, but in the 1930s ownership passed to the Istanbul Governorate.
From that time to the 1990s this was the Istanbul Police Headquarters, which was notorious for its torture of political detainees. The unfortunate Nazım Hikmet also spent some time here, as did humorist Aziz Nesin and folk musician Ruhi Su. Former inmates called Sansaryan Han “the coffin house” because its cells were shaped like upright coffins, not allowing the prisoners to lie down.
Remote Year involves working while traveling through twelve countries in twelve months. (Photo: selinofoto/shutterstock.com)
When Nissa Szabo, a 27-year-old tech industry lobbyist from Denver, Colorado, was notified of her acceptance into the inaugural class of Remote Year, she didn’t tell a single soul for ten days. None of her friends. Neither of her parents.
She had known from the minute she read about the program in Fast Company that Remote Year was the kind of experience she had been searching for, but now she had to tell everyone else in her life that she was about to spend the next year traveling and working remotely across the world with 72 people she had never met, in the hands of a company that had only existed for about nine months at the time.
“I wasn’t going back and forth on the decision,” Szabo says. “But how do I communicate this to my family and friends? Because it really is a crazy idea.”
Szabo had traveled in a similar way before, a two-week trip to Bali, Indonesia, with a travel group for young professionals called Under30Experiences. When someone linked to the story about Remote Year on the Under30Experiences Facebook group, Szabo was instantly hooked.
It was a year-long program, a gigantic commitment compared to her previous experience, but that didn't bother her. “I don't know how to explain it,” she says. “It was almost something that I had to do. That feeling was more overwhelming than the feeling of fear.”
Striking scenery in Plitvice, Croatia. (Photo: Joyce Lin)
Remote Year founder Greg Caplan already had one successful startup under his belt. Obaz, a fashion blogging platform that he co-founded in 2011, wasacquired by Groupon in April 2014 for $250,000. Caplan was planning to travel and work remotely after wrapping things up at Groupon but didn’t want to do it alone, so he decided to build a company to solve that problem. Four hours and one Squarespace page later, Caplan had launched the Remote Year concept.
Within a month, Remote Year had gotten over 25,000 email signups. By the following spring, the application process was in full swing, and by May 2015, before the company had actually gotten off the ground with its first group, Caplan secured Remote Year’s first round of funding. According to thefiling with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the investment clocked in at $175,000, funded by a number of undisclosed investors.
The concept was mindbogglingly ambitious from the very beginning. Remote Year was acting as training wheels for prospective digital nomads — it took out all the hard parts (coordinating travel, setting up accommodations, finding friends) and promised to handle it all in exchange for $2,000 a month plus a non-refundable $3,000 deposit before the trip began.
Caplan and his co-founder, Sam Pessin, had no formal backgrounds in the travel industry – both had graduated from business school at the University of Michigan just a couple years prior to launching the startup.
Remote Year’s first staffers were nearly as green as the founders; most had zero work experience in the travel industry before coming to the company. Jesse Gross, who graduated from the University of Michigan around the same time as Caplan and Pessin, had been working at an investment firm in Chicago before joining Remote Year as its director of partnerships. Trish Kennelly, Remote Year’s VP of program operations, was formerly a project manager at a real estate company. Will Gassenheimer, the group’s VP of global operations, was previously a management consultant at Accenture.
Nevertheless, here they were, about to take on the responsibility of providing accommodations, setting up workspaces, and coordinating travel for what was initially supposed to be 100 people from all around the world. The inaugural class would hit twelve cities in twelve months, in this order: Prague, Czech Republic; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Dubrovnik, Croatia (which was later switched to Cavtat, Croatia); Istanbul, Turkey; Penang, Malaysia; Ko Tao, Thailand (which was later switched to Ko Phangan, Thailand); Hanoi, Vietnam; Kyoto, Japan; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Mendoza, Argentina (which was later switched to Montevideo, Uruguay); Santiago, Chile; and Lima, Peru.
Szabo at Denver International Airport en route to Prague, for the start of her Remote Year. (Photo: Nissa Szabo)
It was a wild proposition, and a ton of people wanted in on the experience. Caplan and Pessin sifted through thousands of applicants to pluck out the prime people for Remote Year’s first trip. For the lucky few who made it all the way through three rounds of interviewing, Remote Year asked for a $3,000 deposit within two weeks of the initial acceptance email.
Greg Underwood, a 41-year-old video game programmer from San Francisco, ran a background check on Caplan and the company before handing over his deposit. Some travelers had lawyer friends look over their individual Remote Year contracts beforehand. Others just took a chance.
“It’s so weird, I look back at this whole year on this program and I think, oh my god— It’s almost crazy to put all your trust in this program that has never existed and hand over that money,” says Katelyn Smith, who also saw the Fast Company article and joined the program from Canada. “The only thing I thought was, ‘OK, if I pay this $3,000 and the program doesn't exist, it's just going to be a really expensive flight to Prague.’ But I barely even thought of that. I had no reservations.”
With the exception of a few small bar meetups in a handful of U.S. cities, no one had met face-to-face before landing in Europe. “This isn’t like meeting in a bar down the street, you know, you’re all going to meet in Prague,” says Dan Kaplan, a software engineer from Chicago. “You needed people who had some real skin in the game, because obviously this type of program is going to attract anybody and everybody. This is the part where it becomes real.”
By the time the deadline arrived, 68 people had put down a deposit and booked a flight to Prague, where they would meet up with Remote Year’s six staff members, who would hopefully be waiting for them at the airport.
Luckily, that trust was matched across the Atlantic. In preparation for their first Remote Year group, Caplan, Pessin, and their small crew had booked hotels across the city and set up workspaces in advance. The internet was fast and reliable. Everything was under control.
A workspace in Prague during Cassandra Utt's Remote Year. (Photo: Cassandra Utt)
Multiple people described the initial couple of weeks in Prague as feeling like freshman year of college. The energy was palpable: there was always something to do, tons of people to meet, and the beer never stopped flowing through all of it. Greg Underwood, the video game programmer, had set up a Slack channel for the community and it was constantly pinging with people putting together dinner plans and weekend trips and everything in between.
“The first month was really, really chaotic for people,” recalls one traveler who’s no longer with the program. “I don’t know if I’ve seen a group any drunker.”
College vibes aside, most people were trying to hold down jobs with companies that they had just convinced to let them stay on as employees while working remotely. It was like navigating a vacation with 67 new friends while also trying to show up at work each day and be reasonably productive.
Still, the work component of Remote Year was key, at least from the way the company talked about it. When Caplan and Pessin had originally set up the program, there was a big emphasis on the fact that this experience was about championing remote work and professional development. TheFAQ section of the original website included information on how each participant needed a remote job once the program started, although the staff promised to work with each person “to ensure that you have a remote job once the trip begins.”
In practice, employment was pretty much up to the individual to figure out. Szabo lined up a job at a startup that focused on marketing campaigns for crowdfunding projects before she left for Prague. Cassie Utt, an IT project manager for a global manufacturing company, had submitted a nine-page business plan to her bosses making the case for working remotely, and they let her go.
Dan Kaplan in front of Lennon Wall in Prague. (Photo: Dan Kaplan)
Even though Remote Year had specified that participants needed to have jobs before the trip started, Katelyn Smith arrived in Prague without one–nothing had come through in time. Upon joining the group, though, she was surprised and relieved to find that she wasn't the only one without a job to do. In fact, Remote Year’s staff never seemed concerned by her work status.
According to an informal record kept among participants, only 29 people came into the program with full-time employment. Seven were employed part-time, six had freelance gigs lined up, and 26 people weren't employed at all when the trip started. (Smith ended up securing a job with an online marketing company in Prague, and started a blog called The Remote Nomad.)
Beyond the workday, or lack of one, life as a Remote Year participant could seem like a nonstop adventure. All the things that one would normally do on vacation–skydiving! scuba diving! caving! renting a plethora of party boats!–were still at the group’s fingertips. It was also, in the words of Szabo, an “incredible social experiment.” Sub-groups solidified, cafeteria-like cliques were born; the dynamics resembled a tiny, mobile American high school.
That's not to say that the group didn't take advantage of their access to the world. Remote Year kept a blog documenting each week of the trip and the posts blurred into a steady stream of gorgeous plates of local food, dispatches from weekend trips in neighboring cities, hikes around stunning natural wonders, and enough Instagrammable sunset moments to last a lifetime.
“FOMO was a very frequent phrase used to describe people’s feelings,” says Britanny Carter, a former group member who left Remote Year to travel and work on her own. She estimates that at least one person was putting together a trip to a nearby country every weekend, and since not everyone had the same work constraints, some people were able manage this constant travel schedule. For those that couldn't, sometimes it felt like getting left behind.
“My FOMO hit so hard in Ljubljana that I was only in Ljubljana for one weekend,” says Carter. “Every single weekend I was somewhere else because of weekend trips that I didn't want to miss out on.”
Joyce Lin in Berlin. (Photo: Joyce Lin)
When people traveled, they often did it in small groups with each other, bringing along a comfortable blanket of American familiarity wherever they went. Essentially, if you never wanted to put yourself in the position of navigating different cultures by yourself, you didn't have to.
It didn’t help that there wasn't a ton of racial and cultural diversity on the staff and within the group, which led to embarrassing cultural missteps. Joyce Lin, a project manager from L.A., witnessed a moment on the beach in Croatia where a couple of group members were trying to swim out to an inflatable obstacle course anchored in the water after hours. A local man tried to communicate to the group that that was not allowed, and a Remote Year staff member wondered aloud in English if they could just give money to the guy to make him go away, since the local population was not wealthy.
“If I travel on my own, I am forced to be in the position of the learner,” Lin says. “People are not going to cater to me. I’m the minority, I’m forced to learn how the local culture is and I’m forced to blend in with that, right? But then when we are in a group we have this presence that changes the way we interact with the places we are going into.”
Lin was anxious about what was going to happen when the group went to Asia; people were already making comments in front of her about how it was going to be “so ghetto.” When they stayed in Kyoto, Japan, Lin had fellow travelers unintentionally ignore her several times because, as they told her, they had gotten used to mentally tuning out all the Asian faces around them.
“I think that is why the lack of diversity on the staff and the team is important,” says Lin, currently the only East Asian left in the group. “If you’re all from mainstream American culture where everything caters to you, I don’t think people have as much perspective in that way.”
A street in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where the accommodation that was arranged for the Remote Year travelers was called out to be the worst on the trip. (Photo: Oleg Podzorov/shutterstock.com)
According to Remote Year’s lengthy list of terms and conditions that each traveler agreed to at the beginning of the trip, the company was responsible for providing places to live and work in each country but the actual specifics on that were vague and, in reality, varied greatly month to month.
The accommodations were a total crapshoot: one month the group was settled into boutique hotels in the Czech Republic, the next month they were slapping off bugs in a Slovenian high school dorm. The third month was spent in seaside apartments in Croatia, the fourth month in the windowless basement of a university dorm in Turkey. Participants were lucky to get reliable internet connection on a daily basis.
Clean beds, access to wifi, a pot to brew coffee — these were all basic amenities that no one had planned on worrying about, and morale went south pretty early on when the reality of the trip didn't line up with many people’s expectations.
Mutiny broke out among the group in the third month. Each person is able to opt out of any month on the Remote Year journey, travel on their own, and rejoin the group later (at a 50 percent discount for the month). One of the participants, Kai Law, knew that the sixth stop on the tour, Ko Phangan, Thailand, was a tiny beach locale known for its party atmosphere. Word got around that Law was planning to go to Chiang Mai, Thailand, instead (a city he had lived in and knew to be accommodating for remote workers) and over half the group ended up opting out for that month, and going with him. Some did not come back.
Arikia Millikan, a writer who currently lives and works in Japan, was one of the first to walk away from Remote Year. She had traveled extensively outside of the U.S. prior to joining Remote Year, and tried to provide constructive feedback to the staff, especially in Slovenia, where many people were clearly disappointed with the company’s accommodations that month. When it became apparent that the staff wasn’t receptive to her feedback, and the situation didn't look like it was going to improve, she decided to leave.
“I wanted it to work out,” Millikan says. “It was not ideal to have signed up for this year-long journey and have planned my time and my money and aspects of my career around it only to find that they were complete amateurs.”
When Millikan left after the month in Slovenia, she was supposed to pay an early exit fee of $2,500, as stated in each participant’s contract. But there was no across-the-board enforcement of that policy. She didn't pay any of the fee but when Rafael Bertolli left a month later, when the group was in Croatia, he paid the full $2,500 and was assured that if he ever wanted to rejoin Remote Year there’d be a discount waiting for him. When Carter left after Turkey, she paid the whole fee but wasn't offered a future discount. When Law left during the group's fifth month in Malaysia, he paid about half and then stopped making payments when he heard it wasn't really that mandatory after all.
A hot air balloon ride, Cappadocia, Turkey. (Photo: Nissa Szabo)
When Caplan had started the company, he wanted to travel the world with a bunch of his best buds. With that kind of tone set at the beginning, personal and professional boundaries were blurred in ways that made it difficult to, say, enforce an exit fee when you knew your friend was having trouble coming up with the cash. At the beginning of the trip, Caplan and his staff traveled with the group, worked with the group, partied with the group. When complaints surfaced, it became a matter of: do I treat this person like my good friend or a client with my company? More often than not, they let things slide under the leeway of friendship.
“I think they have a special relationship with us because we are their first class,” says Lin. “But I think they were a lot more lenient with us in terms of dealing with us on a case-by-case basis.”
By the end of the fourth month in Istanbul, Remote Year had lost about 25 percent of the group. The early exodus was clearly not anything that the staff had planned for, and coupled with the temporary desertion to Chiang Mai, they knew they needed to make a change. An incentive was needed to keep more people from walking out the door. A big incentive.
The staff called everyone together and announced that they were waiving the monthly $2,000 fee for the group’s upcoming month in Hanoi, Vietnam (scheduled as the next destination after Ko Phangan). On top of that, every month thereafter would be discounted by $500 for each person.
Jessie Cooper, a 34-year-old who left her job as a sales director at a startup in New York to participate in Remote Year, had been chronicling the travel experience on a podcast called The Weekly Wandery. She described the staff announcement in an episode, saying it was the first time she could remember where the staff apologized for not providing a better travel experience so far. She called the new discounts “a hell of a Hail Mary move” for the company, but noted that it looked like it was what the group needed to lift morale.
On that same episode, Cooper invited Caplan on the podcast to give the official Remote Year perspective on how the trip was going so far. “Personal growth is hard,” Caplan said when Cooper asked him about the current mood of the group. “Figuring out who you want to be and what you want to do and how to react to all of these new, crazy stimuli is difficult. And being content with confusion is hard.”
Throughout the interview, Caplan wasn't so much concerned with addressing concrete breaches in the Remote Year contract as he was talking about the deep, introspective journey of self discovery that the participants were wading through. And, although Cooper had brought up the shrinking size of the group and leadership missteps when she recorded on her own, the interview environment was more strenuous. Cooper gave Caplan a list of questions beforehand to mitigate some of the tension, and when she was preparing to discuss the new developments on air, Pessin asked her not to disclose the amount of the group's discount. (Remote Year did not return multiple requests for comment for this story.)
“This is a hard process,” Caplan told Cooper. “We’re changing everything every month and you have to find where you're gonna work, a comfortable place to relax, a comfortable place to go grocery shopping, a comfortable place to eat and meet new people and all in this new environment where people speak a different language and you don't understand their customs and you need to learn all these things.”
“It's definitely a lot for a lot of people,” he admitted.
The Remote Year group spent March 2016 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where there were further complaints about accommodation. (Photo: Matyas Rehak/shutterstock.com)
The constant state of flux made big life changes harder to handle, and Remote Year didn't have an official support system in place to help people through rough times. The company had promised that if anyone lost a job during the trip, “we will have a team of career counselors on staff to help the participant quickly get a new job,” according to the FAQ section on the old version of Remote Year’s site. But when people actually did start to lose their jobs, there were no career counselors or staff members to help line up another source of income.
Szabo, the former lobbyist who had taken a job with a tech startup at the beginning of the trip, found out via email in Cavtat, Croatia, that her boss had disbanded the company. It was a complete shock, and suddenly she had to scramble to find other sources of income.
She immediately reached out to staff members to let them know what had happened, expecting a support system to kick in as promised. She listed her skill sets on a form and was told that the staff would send it out to prospective employers, but never heard a word about career help after that. Szabo ended up picking up contract work along the way that’s helped sustain her on the trip.
Remote Year has since backed down on promising professional development within the program. The currentFAQ section on Remote Year’s website no longer says that staff will work with participants to ensure that each traveler can lock down a remote job when the trip starts. The section about having career counselors in place to help people who lose their jobs has been completely removed.
By now, in the group’s last month, Szabo estimates that at least eight people lost jobs while in the program. According to that informal record kept among participants, just 50 percent of the current group is employed full-time. Once 68 people strong, Remote Year’s first cohort is down to 43 people (42 original members plus one new traveler who joined the group in February). At least one more participant is planning to leave before Remote Year finishes up its last month in Lima, Peru.
March was spent in Montevideo, Uruguay, where, as Cooper put it, the group was living in “a straight-up roach motel.” Once again, participants gave disgruntled feedback, and the staff acknowledged their failures. One week before the group was planning to ship out to Santiago, Chile, everyone was given a free weekend vacation.
Multiple travelers expressed that they were willing to overlook Remote Year’s earlier mistakes because hey, it’s a startup, and not everything is going to work perfectly in the very first year. But incidents like in Uruguay, where the rooms were just as intolerable as they had been in Slovenia, were harder to overlook because the same mistakes were being made repeatedly. “I want to see them build and I want to give them feedback and grow, but at the same time where do you decide as a customer, as a client, that maybe the value isn’t [worth] what you’re paying?” asks Szabo.
She plans to finish out the Remote Year program in Peru, and after that, the door’s wide open. “I feel a little overwhelmed but at the same time, I’m excited,” she says. “I almost get to start over–not in a bad way, but like, I don’t have a home. I don’t have a car. I feel like I can go anywhere and set up a life.”
For all that went haywire with the first group, the company is still growing at a tremendous rate. As Remote Year’s first group wraps up its last couple of weeks, Remote Year Two is currently in Peru, its fourth stop, and Remote Year Three is spending its second month in Bolivia. Remote Year’s fourth group ships out in June, and its fifth group in August. Last week, the company sent out a newsletter announcing that over 100,000 people had applied for open spots on the trips.
The less easily quantifiable aspects of spending a year working remotely while touring the world with dozens of people–the personal growth, the deep friendships that come from shared experiences–these are the things that Remote Year has excelled at, according to travelers who are sticking it out for the full year. But the practical things that Remote Year, as a business, promises to deliver on continue to fall through the cracks while thousands of people sign up for the ride.
The expedition, which lasted from February to March, took place on the James Ross Island, hundreds of miles south of Chile.
The James Ross Island is part of the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost section of the continent. Rocks there are exposed every summer, allowing the scientists—a team of 12—to conduct their research.
The expedition on Antarctica was grueling, one of them told ABC, but even harder may have been getting there. Previous research trips were scuttled after the scientists ran into too much sea ice in the Drake Passage.
"It's a very hard place to work, but it's an even harder place to get to," Steve Salisbury, of the University of Queensland, told ABC.
The fossils are currently in Chile but will eventually make their way to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
"A lot of the bigger bones will need quite a bit of preparation before we can do much research on them," Salisbury told ABC.
Everything about this Jackson’s widowbird's flashy display is in the interest of attracting the ladies. During breeding season, the black-feathered males of this small, finch-like species can be seen bobbing up like pogo sticks from tall grassy savannas in southern and eastern Africa.
While this bird's long glossy tail and sleek black feathers stands out in the field, male widowbirds actually spend most of the year with murky brown plumage. Growing that long down-curled tail takes a lot of energy and grooming—the extra plumage makes them 40 percent heavier than females, who have brown plumage year-round.
In addition to primping up their appearance, the rest of the Jackson’s widowbirds’ mating ritual is quite elaborate. A male widowbird will create a little stage for his dancing performance by clipping down the tall grass to form a three-foot-wide circle and defend the territory from other males. He’ll leave a small patch of grass in the center of the circle as a platform where he will proceed to hop up and down. You can see the widowbird in the video jumping up repeatedly to show off the length of his tail while singing a soft call to lure females.
There are several other bird species that are known for having dancing displays. For example, male blue manakins group together in a line for a flying show, while the tap dancing blue-capped cordon-bleu does a series of rapid step-dancing to attract mates.
For extra amusement, check out this flying Jackson's widowbird as it drags around its long fluttering tail.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The blurry video popped up, like so many, on my Facebook feed with no clear source or attribution, just a persistent text at the top reading “HOLY CRAP… THIS IS SO AWESOME” and at the bottom reading “THIS NEEDS TO BE IN THE OLYMPICS.”
The clip, just under two minutes in length, depicts two teams of men completing a relay-type obstacle course that seems impossibly difficult at a pace that makes them look like video game characters. They scale a 30-foot ladder and leap down from the top. They elbow-crawl under a low rope ceiling without slowing down hardly at all from their sprinting pace.
All of a sudden they drop into a rectangular pit placed in the middle of the track like a Wile E. Coyote ploy, and climb out.
It does not appear to be an American event; the shouting from the sidelines is not in English, but the only clue as to where it takes place comes from what may or may not be a Brazilian flag painted on one of the obstacles. The competition is not haphazard, though. These are clearly athletes at the highest echelon of whatever sport this is, and though the video’s production quality is nonexistent, the obstacle course itself is immaculately constructed.
Patient Googling reveals the sport’s true nature: this is one event of a pentathlon. But wait, I thought. The pentathlon? That boring Olympic event nobody watches that involves, like, horse jumping and extremely slow rifle shooting?
It turns out that the world of pentathlons is much larger than the Olympics would suggest. Following this video down the internet rabbit hole led me into a world of elite athletes doing amazing things that nobody has ever heard of—but, as the clip’s text says, it’s awesome.
The first Modern Pentathlon taking place at the 1912 Olympics. (Photo: Public Domain)
The pentathlon in the Olympics is technically called the modern pentathlon. Like many other sports that most people only see in the Olympics, it has military origins. The modern pentathlon made its Olympic debut—really, its world debut, as the event began at the Olympics—in 1912. It was meant to mimic the skills needed by a cavalry soldier, a style of warfare that was, unbeknownst to the pentathlon’s creators, just about dead. (Horses were used in the early parts of World War I, but by the time trench warfare became popular, horses were phased out, and were never a major factor again.)
The modern pentathlon has not changed very much since its inception. It includes fencing, swimming, (slow and precise) shooting, running, and show horse jumping. Aside from the fact that it’s a military-inspired sport with the word “modern” in it that includes thoroughly non-modern elements like show horse jumping and fencing, the modern pentathlon is very boring. (The one wrinkle is that the competitors are given a strange horse to wrangle into competing, and are not allowed to bring their own horse with whom they have any rapport.)
Scintillating it is not. In Beijing, the competition took 12 hours to complete, drew low ratings, and caused the International Olympic Committee consider eliminating it. (It wasn’t; the shooting and running sections were sort of combined, to theoretically make the sport move faster.)
But far more exciting is the event shown in the mysterious viral video: the Military Pentathlon, which began around 1950. It includes five events, namely obstacle racing, obstacle swimming (50-meter race), simulated grenade throwing (competitors have to heave heavy balls into specific spots), running, and both precision and rapid-fire shooting (accurately shoot 10 shots in one minute, rather than one shot every 40 seconds as in the modern pentathlon).
U.S. Army Golden Knights Parachute Team competes at the Military World Games. (Photo: US Army/Public Domain)
The Military Pentathlon is just one of several alterna-pentathlons that are found in competitions like the Military World Games. Others include the Aeronautical Pentathlon, designed for the Air Force, which includes basketball (nobody seems to have a good answer as to why other than “it’s good for eye-hand coordination”). The Naval Pentathlon includes a “seamanship race,” which forces competitors to very quickly tie knots and then row a rowboat.
These significantly better pentathlons are run in tournaments by the Conseil International du Sport Militaire, or CISM. In these tournaments, like the Military World Games, 134 countries send their militaries to compete nonviolently. The Military World Games are an alternate-universe version of the Olympics, held every four years on the year before the summer Olympics (so, the most recent one was in 2015, and was held in South Korea; the next one will be in 2019, in China.) They include some sports that seem not very military-like at all, like handball, basketball, cycling, and volleyball, but also feature some of the more overtly military events that also appear in the Olympics, like archery, a few different types of martial arts, and fencing. The more interesting events are those that don’t appear in the Olympics at all, like the alternate pentathlons, but also including orienteering (basically map-following as sport) and parachuting. Parachuting is especially excellent; it’s most similar to synchronized swimming, but done while free-falling from an airplane.
Often there are countries competing that are actively at war with one another, cheering on their own soldiers as they simulate what’s happening on the front lines thousands of miles away right that minute. North Korea competes in the Military World Games, for instance. (They’re good, too, sitting at 9th on the all-time medal list. The U.S. ranks 12th. Russia and China are by far the best at this stuff, or at least the most willing to devote resources to it.)
That’s no easy feat. The competitors, for one thing, are limited for a simple reason. “In order to take part in the championships organised under the CISM umbrella you have to be in active military duty,” says Alessandro Trono of CISM, who heads up the Military Pentathlon event. It’s unlikely that there are any non-military athletes who would be capable of competing in the Military Pentathlon at any high level.
That said, Trono knows that the Military Pentathlon has potential. He told me that just last week he petitioned the CISM to create an exhibition of the now-viral obstacle relay race in Rio, during the Olympics, “in order to impress the IOC representative about the potentiality of the military unique sport.” The internet would agree.
The deafening screech of Bay Area Rapid Transit cars in San Francisco is probably not the system's worst feature. (That would be, of course, the packed trains. Or maybe the raised fares. Or just a general unpleasantness.)
But the noise is a problem, nonetheless, sending around 90 decibels piercing through trains, according to NBC Bay Area.
BART officials said recently, though, that they think they have a solution: new wheels.
The root cause of the screeching, it turns out, are tiny grooves dug into the tracks that are carved as trains pass over them. Wheels then slip on the curves, sending ear-piercing howls through the air.
The new wheels, shaped by a computer model, are designed to create fewer grooves, meaning that they will also reduce the noise by, transit officials hope, up to 50 percent, according to NBC Bay Area. The wheels will be installed on new train cars next year, and, eventually, older train cars will be retrofitted as well.
All this means that soon, while you're riding in a packed San Francisco train car full of sweaty commuters, you might no longer have to plug your ears.
The once unthinkable on the streets of Berne, Indiana: a closed buggy. The vast majority of buggies in the Berne area are still "open" but that is changing. (Photo: Kevin Williams)
There’s a grid of rural roads in eastern Indiana where, if you’re lucky, and you listen carefully, you might hear yodeling. When I first heard it 25 years ago, I had no idea I had stumbled onto a sliver of Switzerland on the Indiana prairie.
This yodeling is not the shrill sound popularized in Hollywood caricatures. It's a seamless, haunting harmony emanating from another century’s daguerreotype. The sounds are made by people whose heads are covered in crisp, black caps; boys in suspenders, around a coal stove. The youngest, barely old enough to toddle, will chime in with a few notes, while the oldest fills the room with a gravelly harmony.
For the Swiss Amish of Adams County, Indiana, yodeling is a part of their language. It's a dialect that stands apart, both from the non-Amish world, and even from other Amish communities. The question that haunts many here today is, how long can this dialect last?
There is a necklace of Swiss Amish settlements in eastern Indiana extending from Grabill in the north to Milroy in the south. At the center are Berne and nearby Geneva (each named after the Swiss cities, with Bern given an extra “e.”). The Amish here speak a completely different dialect than the vast majority of Amish in major settlements like Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and Holmes County, Ohio, who speak a more traditional mainstream dialect of high German.
The different language serves as a sort of insulation for the Swiss Amish, limiting much interaction between the two groups. For instance, in Wayne County, about 40 miles south of Geneva, is a community of Amish who moved from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. Their dialect, customs, and traditions are very different from the Amish of Geneva and Berne. (Among the Swiss Amish “raisin pie” is a staple of wedding menus. Among the Wayne County Amish, raisin pie is served so commonly at funerals that the pie has earned the moniker “funeral pie.”)
Greg Humpa, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics and is now an administrator for the Kapor Center for Social Impact in San Francisco, spent months surveying the Swiss Amish for his Purdue University dissertation in the early 1990s. In doing so, he was able to trace the exact origin of the Swiss German spoken among the Indiana Amish. It is, he says, a High Alemannic dialect, of the kind spoken in most of German-speaking Switzerland. The Alemannic German is also found in the Alsace region of France where many Amish in Geneva-Berne have their roots.
Humpa goes on to explain that the ancestral homeland of the Adams County Amish is the Emmental region of Canton Bern. Despite the fact that the Amish community has had intense contact with other dialects during periods of persecution-induced migration in Europe, and with Pennsylvania German and English in the U.S., the modern-day Swiss German of Adams County would still be recognized by a visitor from the Emmental as a kindred variety, Humpa says.
Mark Loudon, a professor of German at the University of Wisconsin and co-director of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, has studied the various permutations of Amish dialects extensively and describes the differences this way: “Pennsylvania Dutch is related most closely to dialects from the Palatinate region of central-southwestern Germany, while Amish Swiss German is descended from Swiss German dialects, which are quite distinct from Palatine German dialects."
Guido Seiler, Chair of Germanic linguistics at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, says Swiss Amish speakers are well aware of the linguistic difference between Swiss and Pennsylvania Dutch. He mentions the Swiss Amish joke about the Pennsylvania Amish: "si visse nid vie racht shwatze" (they don't know how to speak right).
In addition to their different dialect, the Swiss Amish are distinguished by other quirky customs not found elsewhere, like the yodeling, and the practice of putting celery in vases on the table at weddings. The Amish in the area sit in open buggies, bundled up in thick horse blankets and expertly wielding umbrellas to, depending on the time of year, shade them from the roasting heat or shield them from the piercing rain (although one Amish church in the area has recently started allowing closed buggies, a sign of change in Berne). Also, the community has an affinity for cases of Pepsi and Mountain Dew; in an odd cultural juxtaposition, I’ve seen buggies loaded down with cases of soda.
Riding in an open buggy in bad weather, Berne, Indiana. (Photo: Kevin Williams)
When I first ventured into the Swiss Amish enclave of Geneva during the summer of ‘91, I was a wide-eyed idealistic college journalism student. Through a chance encounter I teamed up with an Amish grandmother who agreed to write a weekly column that I syndicated in over 100 newspapers from coast to coast. As editor of the column and Amish culture website Amish365.com, I’ve likely been to more Amish settlements than anyone in the world, exploring far-flung, remote communities from Maine to Montana, from Texas to Florida, in order to document the different customs from place to place.
Yet it was in the fields east of Berne and Geneva that I learned the most about the Amish. They first arrived here in 1850. With most Amish families in the area having six or more children—I once ran into a family with 17—their population is estimated to double every generation. Currently there are about 10,000 Amish in Adams County, Indiana, an unsustainable size that has sent some Amish packing to other areas where the Swiss language isn’t the norm.
Berne draws much of its identity from its Swiss namesake. The downtown buildings are festooned with Swiss imagery, and flags of the neutral nation line the main street. There’s Swiss City Real Estate, the Swiss City Medical Center, the Swiss Hair-itage Salon, and even the Swiss Lock Box Storage. The main florist shop in town is named Edelweiss after the elusive white flower that grows high in the Swiss Alps. But the capstone of all things Swiss in Berne is the imposing 160-foot Muensterberg Plaza and Clock Tower, completed in 2010 to pay homage to a similar structure in Bern. The Amish live outside town; Berne is comprised largely of Mennonites espousing varying degrees of conservatism.
Amish houses in Berne. (Photo: Kevin Williams)
I visited the Swiss Heritage Society in Berne, hoping to get a better insight into what brought settlers from a land of such beauty to the marshy headwaters of the Wabash River. “Oh it wasn’t the scenery that brought them here,” explained a docent. “It was the cheap land, $1.25 an acre.”
Eastern Indiana is where the presence of the Swiss Amish is the strongest, but there is a sister settlement in Seymour, Missouri. And elements of Swiss Amish culture are alive in Guthrie, Kentucky and Degraff, Ohio. Seiler suspects the smaller “daughter” settlements of Berne have each developed their own slightly different Pennsylvania Dutch-influenced version of Swiss.
But things are changing, even for the traditionally slow-to-change Amish. The change is most visible along the edges, but it is slowly seeping in everywhere. One of the edges is Grabill, Indiana (another is Milroy, Indiana where it seems most traces of the Swiss dialect have vanished over the past 20 years).
“The problem is when you get Amish people together from other areas with the ones here, they have trouble understanding one another, so they both revert to English,” says Festus Graber, a jovial Amish drywall installer in Grabill. The preference for English is degrading the Swiss language, little by little.
“It’s not a big deal to me, I can converse anywhere with anyone,” says Graber. Many Amish share his nonchalance at the language. The overwhelming sentiment is that what happens is God's will. Graber's wife was raised speaking Amish Swiss, a language which he says is in the minority and on the decline in Grabill.
Amish men's wear hats in the Amish-owned Katie's Kountry Corner store in Grabill. (Photo: Kevin Williams)
The Swiss Amish have hung onto a flash-frozen dialect that has changed little in 200 years. So when technological or societal shifts introduce new words, there’s no Swiss Amish equivalent. You’re left with a Swiss stew that includes gradually larger chunks of English. Still, remove the English and someone visiting the area from a time machine set to 19th-century Switzerland would have no trouble navigating—or less trouble than traditional Amish do with the Swiss Amish.
I was trying to talk the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch language to an Amish family in Berne when I erroneously used an Alemannic Swiss word for pig to refer to one of the young ladies in the family. The word in more traditional Pennsylvania Dutch had a completely different, complimentary meaning. The father, not amused, immediately rose from his chair, probably to show me the door. I quickly caught my mistake, and, red-faced, explained. I was able to stick around for supper.
Another significant element that has accelerated the decline of the unique Swiss dialect in Indiana is the emerging “factory culture.” For most of their history in the United States the Amish have lived in relative agrarian isolation. But as micro-farming began to become less and less viable as a way to make a living (and land became less plentiful) the Amish had to find other ways to make a living. In some areas it has been cabinetry and carpentry. In other places, like northern Indiana and the Berne area, the answer was factory work. This work, though, put Amish in constant contact with English-speaking non-Amish, which eroded the language.
A milk-house with solar-power, a sign of the changing times in Grabill. (Photo: Kevin Williams)
Abraham Schwartz lives on a quiet plot of land north of Geneva with his wife and 13 children. The youngest is six months; the eldest is 22, a just-married daughter. Abraham used to work in a factory before he tired of the impact it had on his way of life. He now works long days as a self-employed carpenter and runs a greenhouse.
“I’d still rather do this than factory work," he says. "At least I get to work with two of my boys every day.” And he doesn’t have to content with cultural issues. “There’s a lot of coarse language and bad habits in the factories. Some of these young men go into the factory and are exposed to habits that maybe just aren’t in line with what our way of life is about.”
I asked him about the yodeling. “The yodeling is good fellowship, a way for the family to have a good time together without spending a lot of money,” Schwartz said. “There’s too much that’s bad for our children to get into today, which is why we try to keep them entertained here at home. I think it would be sad if the yodeling and the language fell by the way side, the younger ones don’t seem as interested, many of them would rather speak English.”
The Amish are an organic, vibrant culture. Beneath their seemingly monolithic, unchanging exterior there are fierce debates within about boundaries with technology, church rules, and language. Change comes slowly. But it comes.
The Swiss culture has survived in east-central Indiana for almost 150 years. The language has survived the onslaught of the automobile, suburban sprawl, the migration from farm to factory, and the arrival of the internet. Can it survive the ultimate language killer: time? That remains to be seen. In the meantime, if you drive the grid of rural roads east of Berne, if you’re lucky, you just might hear the same haunting harmony I’ve heard: a yodel, whispering in the wind, a linguistic link spanning two centuries and two continents.
The Palazzo Teti Maffuccini, outside Naples, Italy, may be run down now, but it has a long, distinguished history.
It is partly where the country was born, for one thing. In 1860, the Battle of Volturnus ended in surrender at the palace, essentially stopping the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in its bid to remain independent; it was absorbed a year later by the Kingdom of Sardinia to form the Kingdom of Italy, within what are now the modern borders of the country.
Police said Tuesday, however, that the palace has not been immune to a Neapolitan tradition: corruption. The local government had been trying to renovate the decaying palace, but, on Tuesday, nine men connected to that renovation were arrested, some of whom police say were tied to the Camorra, a crime syndicate dating to the 16th century, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Their scheme involving the palace, built in 1839, was based on bribery, prosecutors said. In disrepair for years, the Italian government had recently allocated €3 million, or around $3.4 million, to renovate the palace, which had fallen into public hands years ago.
Two companies won the bid; prosecutors said both were tied to organized crime, after several local officials were bribed with money totaling around €70,000 (around $80,000), according to the OCCRP.
It's unclear now how or if the renovation will go forward, but if the palace can survive 177 years of war and weather, it can probably survive a little corruption as well.
Attention Atlas readers! We need your help to create the definitive calendar of holidays that are celebrated by the characters in your favorite books, TV shows, movies, and beyond.
Did you forget to honor the First Contact Day on April 5th, along with the Star Trek universe? How about Harry Potter Day on May 2nd, honoring the date that the Boy Who Lived finally defeated Voldemort? With our upcoming calendar of fictional holidays, you'll never miss another Festivus, but we need your help. Please fill out the form below, and tell us about the fictional holidays you don't want to miss!
We'll be taking submissions until next Friday, May 13th, so let's start celebrating.
The artist John Law on the Tribune Tower's copper roof. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
The Tribune Tower is an anomaly, a collection of clashing styles and rare, bizarre architectural features: a copper sheeting roof, 12-foot-high wraparound neon letters, and, rarest of all, a clock with both neon numerals and neon hands. It’s a mysterious building, in its way, and so it’s fitting that it’s lingered in the background of John Law’s life for years.
“It’s the coolest building in the Bay Area,” he says. “It’s the the iconic building of Oakland.”
The Tribune Tower by night. (Photo: John Law)
Law is an icon too, a Bay Area artist and culture jammer. He’s the co-founder of the Cacophony Society, a group of socially-minded, trespassing art pranksters. He’s also a member of the late, legendary Suicide Club, founded in 1977 to, as Law puts it, “create unique events and explore off-limits places.” And he’s a co-founder of the now-enormously popular Burning Man Festival, which evolved out of the spirit of the Cacophony Society.
A view overlooking Oakland, CA from the very top of the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
The Tribune Tower was first built in 1906, its tower erected in 1923 added 16 stories to bring the total building height to just over 300 feet. When it became the home of the Oakland Tribune in 1924, most Americans hadn’t heard of it until later that year, when magician Harry Houdini demonstrated his death-defying skills dangling from its ninth-floor building wearing his trademark straitjacket. (He escaped in just five seconds.)
John Law and Oakland artist Monica Canilao on the top of the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
The building was declared a city landmark on May 4, 1976. At various times, it’s flown a flag with the word, "THERE" emblazoned upon it, a send-up of Gertrude Stein's comment that in Oakland "there is no there there."
But the Tower was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which forced the Tribune to relocate to new offices. The city planned to demolish it, but never got around to it. It sat empty until 1996, when John Protopappas purchased it for $300,000.
One of the workspaces available to John Law in the top of the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
As the building went through its near-death and rebirth, Law became the in-house steward of the iconic neon sign and clock that have become a symbol of Oakland.
Law began working for the American Neon Sign Company in the ‘80s, a family business during the Depression founded by “old school neon service men,” as he puts it. He was quickly popular with his older co-workers, as he had an affinity for working in extreme heights, often suspended from a boson’s chair. He watched in dismay while the building was damaged in the earthquake, then fell into disarray and was vandalized. One late night in 1996, as he was driving by, he noticed that after seven years, one side of the tower’s sign had been re-lit.
A view overlooking Oakland, CA from the very top of the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
“I was so excited I drove right over,” he says, to what was then a fairly dangerous part of downtown Oakland. He found a “group of men in suits,” he says. “Just very odd.”
Law banged on the tower’s locked doors and demanded to know what was going on. He told the suited men he was the last man to work on the tower’s neon. He was eventually able to learn—through a construction manager working for the new owner—that the building’s facade was being restored for a Clint Eastwood movie, Bloodwork.
The view adjacent to the back of the clock on the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
For Law, it was his chance to return to the tower. He underbid another sign company to get the job of maintaining the sign, and with the help of two artist friends (Deb Lee and Kevin Binkert), painstakingly restored both the sign and the clock.
"I love neon,” he says. “No other light has the same quality. It is not a science. It’s more like alchemy.” A ten-year coating of dust, for example, is going to make the load on a sign different, changing the quality of its light.
"Working with neon is more intuitive,” he says. “Especially with older signs. They are like cranky old humans, the more you know how to finesse them the better they respond."
These days Law can be found in a small office full of curiosities in the very top floor of the tower, where he keeps an eye on the glowing icon of Oakland.
The view from inside the suite at the very top of the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
Looking down while walking the tiny roof gutter ledge of the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
A view of downtown Oakland from the Tribune Tower. (Photo: Tod Seelie)
These devilish heads await travelers who veer off the beaten path in the Czech Republic, and are slightly less distinct, but no less imposing than they were when created in the mid 1800s. (Photo: Petr1868/CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Czech Republic is home to some of the most thought-provoking and strange statues in the world. This should come as no surprise, given that its capital, Prague, is the birthplace of the famed sculptor David Černý, whose provocative works have garnered acclaim all over the world. In addition to containing some of Černý's most breathtaking masterpieces, even beyond the city of Prague, the Czech Republic is filled with bizarre statues that are sure to make you stop and think. We here at Atlas Obscura have compiled some of the country's most eccentric offerings.
What looks like a suicide in progress is actually a statue of Sigmund Freud. (Photo: jim/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Dangling above one of the cobblestone streets in Prague's Old Town is a sight that has caused more than a few people to be concerned that a man is about to plummet to his death, but fear not, it is simply a statue of Sigmund Freud. As with many of David Černý's works, the sculpture is deliberately provocative and startlingly lifelike, especially at a distance. The work has been displayed in places ranging from London to Grand Rapids, Michigan, but is now back in Prague, hanging extended over a tight, historic street, causing passersby to look away from the ancient surroundings and take a look up to ponder the future.
Gigantic metal babies crawl up Prague's imposing Zizkov television tower. In 2000, Černý attached the 10 crawling babies to the iconic tower, which, following a brief removal in 2001, became a permanent feature due to popular demand. From the bottom of the tower, each baby seems tiny, but in reality, they are all over six feet in height. That's not the weirdest part: their faces are not faces–they're machine-like slots. The tower babies stand as one of Černý's most impressive and massive works of art in the city.
You can send text messages to a phone number, and the statues will spell out your messages with the water they spray. (Photo: Achim Hepp/CC BY-SA 2.0)
The Černý work with perhaps the most obvious sense of humor is the Proudy statue, on display at the Franz Kafka museum in Prague. The sculpture consists of two bronze men who robotically waggle their metal junk around to spell out text messages with their pee. That's right–you can actually send messages to a phone number inscribed on a plaque near the statue, and it will interrupt its programmed movement and spell out the words you sent to it.
Hanging from the ceiling of the Art Nouveau Lucerna Palace in Prague, an ancient king rides triumphantly astride... an upside-down, apparently dead horse. Černý's Horse is a parody of the famous sculpture of St. Wenceslas by Josef Václav Myslbek that can be seen on the square. As you walk into the palace to view the absurd sculpture hanging from the ceiling, don't forget to admire its majestic, Art Nouveau setting.
The tale of Wilgefortis, while strange and fascinating, is entirely untrue, and this bearded lady never existed at all. (Photo: Curious Expeditions/Public Domain)
There is a story of a woman, Wilgefortis, whose father is said to have promised her to a pagan king. The pious Wilgefortis would have nothing to do with the heathen king, so she took a vow of virginity and prayed for a miracle, which came in the form of a beard. The king saw the beard and immediately called the marriage off. In a fit of rage spurred by this unfeminine miracle, Wilgefortis' father had her crucified. This tale, while strange and fascinating, is in fact entirely untrue: this is actually a statue of Jesus in a dress, believed to have been the work of Nicodemus. Jesus was often clothed this way in the Middle Ages, until the practice was discontinued in favor of the loincloth we know today. Still, Wilgefortis' story lives on through an 11th-century wooden carving, and has since inspired many oppressed and unhappily married women around the globe.
Though the tradition calls for couples to lay flowers on May 1st, the statue of Mácha is a welcome sight to lovers and lovers of poetry year-round. (Photo: Jan Polák/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Wanderers in Prague’s Petřín Hill park can discover the striking statue of Karel Hynek Mácha, poet of the Czech epic Maj. Mácha’s dreamy, unusual pose catches the eye: this is no warrior with a boldly flourished sword, no classical figure crowned with laurels. So why do couples snap pictures at his feet? The answer lies in the following tradition: on May 1st of every year, couples from Prague gather and lay flowers at Mácha’s statue in Petřín Park, honoring the man who is now regarded by his countrymen as “the poet of love.” The statue is equally exciting to stumble upon throughout the rest of the year, with Mácha’s contemplative stance and fistful of blossoms a welcome sight to both lovers and lovers of poetry.
The Devil's Heads cut an imposing shape against the forests of Želizy. (Photo: Richenza/CC BY-SA 3.0)
A disturbing sight awaits hikers exploring the forest above the village of Želizy—two enormous demonic faces carved from the native stone stare back with empty eyes. Created by Vaclav Levy in the mid 1800s, the nearly 30 foot tall stone heads are known locally as Certovy Hlavy or the "The Devil Heads" and have been a local attraction for generations. Other carvings by the artist including artificial caves and scenes inspired by fairy tales adorn other nearby rock faces. Now suffering slightly from the ravages of time and weather, the faces have grown less distinct over time, but no less disturbing.
Constructed between 1716 and 1754 by local Olomouc craftsman, the Holy Trinity Column was recognized by UNESCO in 2000, when it was added to the World Heritage List after being cited as "one of the most exceptional examples of the apogee of central European Baroque artistic expression." The nearly 115-foot column was erected as a gesture of gratitude for having survived a bout of the plague as devout Catholics often saw fit during the period, and the monument remains a point of pride for the Czech people.
These posts were written in partnership with CzechTourism. For more obscure and unconventional stories, from the Land of Stories, head here.
Dragonball Z, giant cereal, and a trombone. Sure. (Photo: WWE/Youtube)
In what may be one of the crazier pieces of fan memorabilia to ever go on sale, you can now pick up an oversize piece of foam cereal that was used in an insane WWE intro. The foam prop is signed by the members of reigning WWE tag team champions, The New Day, who burst out of an oversize cereal box to announce their arrival at Wrestlemania 32.
The New Day, composed of wrestlers Big E, Kofi Kingston, and Xavier Woods, wrestle as a trio of excitable, pop-culture-savvy characters who have competed both as faces (heroes) and heels (villains) with a goofy (even for professional wrestling) aplomb. With their catchphrase, "Booty," as in "Brooklyn is booty!" (BOOOOOO!!!!), signature unicorn horns, and trombone-playing front man (Woods), they have risen in popularity since their 2014 debut, and now have a devoted fan following, and currently hold the WWE Tag Team Champion Belts.
In a fashion befitting their bizarro, nerdy characters, The New Day showed up at Wrestlemania 32 in April not by coming down the ramp to fireworks and driving music but by popping out of a giant box of "BootyOs," a joke cereal The New Day had introduced a month earlier that they said could keep you from being booty. As they emerged they had to wade through giant pieces of foam cereal. As if that bit wasn't strange enough, they were all dressed like characters from Dragonball Z. They were also wearing their unicorn horns, and Woods was carrying his trumpet. It was a bewildering mash-up of geeky iconography that pretty much boggles the mind. It was also pretty awesome.
Now, over on WWE Auctions, they are selling off pieces of the giant BootyOs (actually just a ring of painted foam), that has been signed by all three members of The New Day. Each of the signed cereal props is going for $300.00, and out of an initial 15 pieces that went on sale, only eight are left as of this writing. If you are a wrestling fan, this might be your only chance to pick up such a bonkers piece of WWE history.
Driving in India is a loud experience, to say the least.
One of the characteristic traits of Indian roads is the sound of honking car horns, which provide a constant cacophony of noise. In 2015, the transportation department of Maharashtra, the state containing the city of Mumbai, attempted to diminish the noise pollution caused by the honking by outlawing a phrase found on the back of almost all Indian trucks: "Horn OK Please."
It is unclear whether the ubiquitous sign actually contributes to drivers honking their horns more, though the government of Maharashtra certainly seems to think there is a connection. The phrase itself, however, is intriguing for two reasons: the first being that it doesn't seem to make grammatical sense, and the second for the question it raises—why would Indian trucks be encouraging drivers to honk their horns?
One possible reason for "Horn OK Please" is pretty instinctive. As Kenneth Rapoza notes in this Forbes article about horn honking in India, Indian drivers rarely use their side mirrors, and instead use horns to indicate when they are about to overtake a car. Trucks, in particular, are often not even equipped with side mirrors in the first place. As a result, the backs of trucks may be painted to urge drivers to use their horn as a signal to the truck driver when they are overtaking.
"Horn OK Please" emblazoned beneath other artwork on the back of a truck. (Photo: ix4svs/CC BY-SA 2.0)
While the reason for "Horn OK Please" may simply be a matter of the peculiarities of Indian driving etiquette, it doesn't quite explain the "OK" in the middle of "Horn Please," which would make much more sense by itself. That the "OK" is incorrect grammatically seems contradictory to the fact that it is almost always present.
One theory suggests that the "OK" is meant to be separate from "Horn Please," and is intended to only appear to the eye when the driver is a safe distance away from the truck. If the driver is too close, the theory goes, only "Horn Please" is visible.
The validity of this idea is questionable, given that there is very little consistency in how the words are painted, although the words themselves are often the same. It seems unlikely that on all Indian trucks with the sign, the "OK" is only visible when the driver is a safe distance away.
Yet another theory behind "Horn OK Please" is derived from a tradition thought to date to World War II, when there were worldwide diesel shortages. Trucks would be filled to the brim with kerosene instead. The kerosene made the vehicles highly flammable, and prone to exploding at the slightest accident, so the backs of the trucks were painted, "Horn Please, On Kerosene," to warn drivers to keep their distance. This reason is among the more plausible, given that many Indian truck drivers continue to mix diesel with kerosene to save money on gas.
A more fanciful interpretation of the "OK" comes from the fact that the multinational Tata company used to have a near-monopoly on first Indian trucks to be manufactured. Tata Motors, the automobile arm of the huge conglomerate, supposedly painted "OK" on the back of its trucks as a subtle—and somewhat insidious—way of advertising the new "OK" detergent and bath soap from its Tata Oil Mills subsidiary.
Whatever the true reason may be for the phrase, it's clear that "Horn OK Please" has embedded itself into the Indian cultural consciousness. Beyond the handful of restaurants and food trucks around the world that use the words in their names, "Horn OK Please" has even found its way into Indian pop culture. In 2009, a Bollywood comedy entitled "Horn OK Pleasss" came out in theaters, and in late 2013, Indian rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh released a tune named after the back-of-a-truck phrase. The government of Maharashtra might believe that the noise caused by "Horn OK Please" is polluting their streets, but evidently the quirky words have given people something to sing about, too.
It might seem counterintuitive given how expensive they are to produce, but it is not entirely uncommon to leave the wreckage of downed airplanes right where the plane landed.
Some flights go down over remote, inaccessible spots that make it difficult to recover the remains. Other planes are left as a memorial to those who died in the crash. No matter the reason for their abandonment, many of these hidden wrecks can be visited by anyone with a will to traverse a little wild terrain. Here are eight remote airplanes that are still sitting where they crashed, waiting to be rediscovered.
Sitting in the middle of an Alaskan field since 1942, this silver plane was purposefully crash landed when the airmen's original landing zone was compromised. The plane hit the ground relatively safely considering the lack of a proper runway. The only injury was a broken collarbone suffered by one of the officers on board.
Hidden away among a field of boulders on the slopes of the highest peak in Arizona are the chrome scraps and engine parts of a U.S. Army B-24 that crashed into the peak in 1944. The spot where the plane crashed is relatively inaccessible, so the wreckage was left where it lay. The remains can still be reached by committed hikers.
The plaque dedicated to the crewmen who died in the crash. (Photo: Andrew Petro/CC BY 2.0)
Barely noticeable beneath the thick green brush of a valley in Southern France are the remains of a Royal Air Force Wellington bomber that tragically crashed there in 1944 (a sad year for aviation). The plane went down during a World War II bombing run, after it was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Now its twisted metal remains still lie in the valley. Those who died in the crash are remembered by a quintet of stones with little plaques bearing their names.
Rusting away in the jungle of the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, the wreck of Air Aruba P4-YSA seems like something Indiana Jones might stumble upon. How this plane arrived in its current tropical home is unclear, but it seems likely that the remains were left in the jungle after the plane came down elsewhere. Regardless of how it got there, the abandoned debris is still in relatively good condition, and can be explored by anyone willing to track it down.
While this military wreck has been receiving a bit more attention lately, the downed DC-3 rotting away on the black sands of Iceland's Sólheimasandur Beach has lost none of its haunting atmosphere. The plane crashed back in 1973 for unknown reasons, although the leading culprit was an empty fuel tank. Luckily, it remained mainly intact, and is now a permanent fixture of the volcanic beach, which is otherworldly enough on its own.
The wreckage from a commercial plane crash that killed 16 people still sits at the impact site as a memorial to the tragic accident. TWA Flight 260 left Albuquerque on a short trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 19, 1955, but quickly came crashing down into the nearby Sandia Hills. Initially, the accident was thought to be caused by pilot error, but the true reasons for the crash are unknown. A large panel from the plane now sits next to a plaque in what is known colloquially as "TWA Canyon."
Not all airplane wrecks are hard to get to because they are in some far-flung wilderness spot. A great number of planes can be found beneath the waves of the ocean, often attracting scuba divers. Many wrecks are purposefully sunk to create diving features, but the remains of this Vought F4U Corsair actually went down during a routine mission in 1948. When the engine failed, the pilot made a water landing, where it sank in the same spot it sits today.
Stuck in the branches of an otherwise unremarkable tree in Mission, British Columbia's Heritage Park are the mangled remains of what appears to be a single-seat airplane. While the exact origins of the twisted metal is unclear, there is graffiti scratched into it that dates itself back to 1971, so it's at least a few decades old.
Almost nothing can ruffle a DC commuter. Year-long delays? Same old same old. Sharing a bench with a harried congressman and woman? Yawn.
On Wednesday afternoon, though, a baby beaver who wandered into the Van Ness-UDC Metro stop delivered a charm offensive fit for an experienced politician, stopping travelers in their tracks and inspiring the kind of publicity most campaigners can only dream of.
"He was a little cutie," Scott Giacoppo, vice president of the Washington Humane Society, told the Washington Post. Video footage from his visit shows him wandering around the station, sniffing the ground and climbing up the neon sneaker of a young constituent.
Giacoppo theorizes the beaver may have been stranded after a recent flood, and entered the station in search of a drink. After his brief tour of the Metro, the DC Humane Society delivered him to the nearest beaver transit station—a nearby stream bed. After a long day of baby kissing, he deserved a quick commute home.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris's rendering of the signing of the Mayflower Compact. Each person to hold this quill would have done so in a way suited to their gender, occupation, and maybe even their hometown. (Image: Library of Congress/LC-USZC4-7155)
Imagine a world in which the font you use is chosen for you, based entirely on your demographic affiliations. All doctors write in Garamond, while designers are mandated Futura Bold. Middle-aged men get Arial; women, Helvetica. Goofy aunts must use Comic Sans.
Seem strange? A few centuries ago, that was just how things worked. In colonial America, "the very style in which one formed letters was determined by one's place in society," writes historian Tamara Thornton in Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Thanks to the rigorous teachings of professionals called "penmen," merchants wrote strong, loopy logbooks, women's words were intricate and shaded, and upper-class men did whatever they felt like. So different were the results, says Thornton, that "a fully literate stranger could evaluate the social significance of a letter… simply by noting what hand it had been written in."
Understanding how colonists put pen to paper means understanding why they wanted to write in the first place. As E. Jennifer Monaghan explains in "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England", Puritans and other early colonists considered reading and writing to be largely separate endeavors. For your average Thaddeus, Miles or Hiram, reading was generally valued not as a skill in itself, but as a direct route to the era's most popular book: the Bible. Starting around age six, children were taught reading by their mothers, aunts, or grandmothers, with the aid of what John Locke called the "ordinary road" of educational materials—religious texts of varying difficulty, starting with a one-page "Horn Book" and ending with a complete Bible.
Even if you could motor through the whole Bible, though, there was no guarantee you could copy any of it. If "reading was taught first, as a universal spiritual need," Thornton writes, "writing was taught second, and then only to some." The practice of writing in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries was considered less of a creative or analytical endeavor than a kind of rote physical one.
"Just as 'good' reading was considered to be accurate oral reading, so 'good' writing seemed to be viewed entirely in terms of fine letter formation," writes Monaghan. Any art involved was concentrated not in what the words said, but in what they looked like.
Because of this, writing was considered a kind of craft—a skill one needed in order to properly carry out his or her other professional and social duties. As these duties differed, so did the type of writing required: loopy or straight, thin or bold, embellished or simple. These different styles were called "hands."
As with reading's trajectory, the existence of different hands can be traced back to the relationship between words and religion. In the Middle Ages, church authorities mandated a particular type of dense, blocky script—now known as "Gothic" script—for religious documents. To differentiate themselves, legal and court scribes developed their own, slightly different hands, and readers became accustomed to the symbolic coexistence of different styles. As literacy increased, and more people began writing, a new, thin, flowing style—called the Italian or italic hand—came into vogue, imported from Florence. This new style was meant to be "both pleasing to the eye and easy to read," writes Laetitia Yeandle in "The Evolution of Handwriting in English-Speaking Colonies in America."
For a brief period in the 17th century, the two hands flourished in America—people sometimes switched between both in a single sentence—but soon, the hierarchy shook out: by the end of the 1600s, the Gothic hand was old-fashioned; the newer Italian hand trendy and on the rise. Though Gothic script was still required for legal documents, everyone else kept away from it—indeed, Thornton writes, its increasing impenetrability may have added to people's distrust of lawyers.
Those who did want to be trusted made sure to learn the hand that was right for them. To do so, they often employed a penman—an expert quill-wielder who had mastered what was then, as Monaghan puts it, "a fairly arcane skill." Many penmen were former scribes or secretaries, who had been routed from their old jobs by the development and proliferation of the printing press. All were trained in multiple scripts—"all the most modish as well as necessary Hands," as one advertisement, dug up by Thornton, read.
"Round hand," as demonstrated by penman George Bickham in his 1740 instruction book, The Universal Penman. (Image: George Bickham/Public Domain)
A client could hire a penman to teach him whichever script he needed. A merchant, banker or tradesman might learn "round text," a skinny hand with a slight lean, or "round hand," a loopier variant—both forms of stripped-down Italian script, good for people who needed to be both quick and legible. Some who wished to differentiate themselves from more prosaic farmers or artisans might learn to add slight embellishments, or ornate capital letters—though penmen cautioned them against compromising their speed or assuredness.
"Among Men of Business, wrote one expert, "all affected Flourishes and quant Devices… are as much avoided as Capering and Cutting in Ordinary Walking."
While merchants and businessmen worked hard to perfect their round hand, those who leaned on their titles rather than their occupations took the opposite tack. The best way for upper-class colonial men to prove their aristocratic status was to make their work appear effortless. Such people often refused to hire penmen on principal, in order to prove they didn't need to learn a trade—the on-paper equivalent of growing your nails long, or wearing fancy clothes.
"It is much to be regretted that it has become of late years in a degree fashionable to write a scrawling and almost unintelligible way," fumed penman John Jenkins in 1813.
A sample of George Washington's devil-may-care handwriting. Even decades after his death, Thomas Jefferson praised Washington's hand, writing to a friend that he "wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy & correct style." (Image: Moverton/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Indeed, sometimes it seemed like the only ones who cared for what one penman called "Owls, Apes, Monsters and Spring'd Letters" were the penmen themselves. Constantly striving to be considered artists rather than mere craftsmen, they used what platforms they had to emphasize handwriting's beauty and importance.
Though their advertisements used practical promises to draw in specific audiences, the copybooks they used to teach their lessons often betrayed their inner romanticism. A seaside penman, fishing for customers in Boston, offered to teach "Gauging, Navigation, and Astronomy" alongside writing, while a Southern one promised two-in-one writing and dance lessons.
Handwriting was not only "useful in Business," wrote George Bickham in his 1740 work The Universal Penman—done well, it could be imbued with "Masterly Beauty." Clients, though, preferred to focus on the useful aspects—as Thomas Tompkins, a penman who spent his whole life angling for an invitation to a particular artist's academy, found out the hard way. After years of talking up his medium, a friend later related, "the luckless calligrapher went down to his grave—without dining at the Academy."
The 17th-century copybook of Sarah Cole, featuring simple arithmetic and complicated doodles. (Image: Folger Shakespeare Library/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Penmen got to cut a little looser while teaching ladies. While working women also learned the round hand, aristocratic women—who, as penman John Davies once wrote, could never "bruise a letter as men could do"—were privy to a whole different set of scripts. One favorite was the "roman," a flowing hand which, with its light touch and varying thicknesses, was easy on the eyes and the wrist (as a bonus, it supposedly could not be managed well by men's fingers, which were"hardened by the sword-hilt.") Certain forms of it even required decorative shading, indicating that the writer had time enough to go back over all her letters—an unmistakeable sign of a leisurely lifestyle.
As Thornton points out, the fact that these hands revealed what their writers did as a profession–or lack of one–kept people in their place. The same thing that enabled people to play letter detective doubled as a subtle form of social control, "guaranteeing that the writing produced by different categories of writers would be accorded culturally appropriate, socially innocuous degrees of authority," she writes, ensuring that just because literacy was spreading didn't mean everyone was on an equal footing.
Over the centuries, as notions of identity shifted, handwriting became less a measure of your various statuses than of your individual personality. These days, with the anonymizing veneers of computer fonts, 21st-century humans count on other aspects of self-presentation to give them away—aspects contained in the words themselves, and not their forms. Unless, that is, you send emails in Comic Sans.
There is a whole underwater world of forgotten ancient cities hidden in the Mediterranean Sea. Archeologists recently dove as deep as 32 feet to swim through temples and statues of two sunken Egyptian cities, Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus. The seafaring towns’ eternal resting place is at the mouth of the Nile, their existence and treasures lost for thousands of years, CNN reports. Now, the artifacts from the underwater excavation will be on display at the British Museum on May 19 in an exhibit called Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds.
Archeologists have been exploring the underwater site for over 20 years. French archeologist Franck Goddio and his team first discovered Thonis-Heracleion in 2001 while neighboring city Canopus was discovered back in 1933 when a British RAF pilot noticed some ruins that led into the sea. British Museum exhibit curator, Aurelia Masson-Berghoff explained to CNN that the cities became submerged from years of natural phenomena, including rising sea level, earthquakes, and subsidence—the gradual sinking of land.
The archeologists collected an assortment of ancient objects from hieroglyphic slates and steles, statues of leaders and gods, and ornate jewelry. The largest exhibit piece the divers brought ashore was a 16-feet-tall and 12,000-pound granite sculpture of Hapy, who (funny enough) is the god of flooding.
These historical treasures reveal more about religion, culture, and political life in ancient Egypt. In 700 BC, both cities were bustling trade hubs. Thonis-Heracleion was one of Egypt’s most important commercial centers for the Mediterranean world and Canopus was a well-known city for worshipping the gods.
Goddio’s team only excavated less than five percent of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus, having to leave behind huge artifacts like a sacred barge of boats for the celebration of Osiris, the god of the underworld.
That means there's still a trove of knowledge and history that has yet to be discovered.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
It's been a long national saga. Or for some a national nightmare. But Boaty McBoatface, the name voted on by some 124,000 people to adorn a new British research vessel, is not happening, according to the BBC.
Instead, the boat will be named for one of the more popular British humans of all time, the broadcaster Sir David Attenborough.
Boaty will still live on, though, after the Natural Environment Research Council—the British agency that put the name to an online vote—said Friday it would be the new moniker of a submarine attached to the research ship.
Over 11,000 people also voted for Attenborough's name to be on the ship, though he stood no chance in the face of internet virality. The RRS David Attenborough is to set sail in 2019.
This being England, members of Parliament said they would review the naming process. One MP said they would investigate whether the episode was a "triumph of public engagement or a PR disaster," according to the BBC.
After years of prioritizing development over nature preservation, India's government now says it wants to seriously increase the country's forest cover, and might be willing to spend billions to do it.
According to Quartz, India's lower house of government passed a bill this week to spend $6 billion to build more forests in the country, with the aim to have 33 percent of land in India covered in trees. That would be up from 21 percent currently. Which is a lot of trees.
India's upper house is now considering the bill, which, even in the early stages, invited plenty of skepticism from observers. They questioned if the money would be spent efficiently, and also where the country would find the room to develop new forests.
“I have my reservations about this project,” Sreedhar Ramamurthi, an earth scientists, told Quartz. “Many a times, forest officials themselves burn down forests when they are pressed for target completion and complain that their work was lost in fires.”
Any bump in forest cover would be welcome, though, since afforestation is also a linchpin in the country's fight against climate change.
If you've never taken a ride on an Indian train, put it on your bucket list immediately: the experience is equal parts chaotic, visually breathtaking, and, if the train is catered, delicious.
The above video gives you a taste of what it would be like. It follows the Dibrugarh-Kanyakumari Vivek Express, a 2,655-mile weekly trip that clocks in as the longest train ride in India at 85 hours. As a bonus, it is soundtracked by an excellent tabla piece.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
