The very first pharmacist in Székesfehérvár took up residence at this very spot at the Fekete Sas (Black Eagle Pharmacy) in 1688, following Hungary's liberation from the Turkish Empire. In the following centuries the pharmacy changed hands numerous times. After each new owner, equipment and a collection of medicines were left behind, and became more valuable over time.
Black Eagle is the oldest pharmacy in Székesfehérvár, and remained a functioning pharmacy for 300 years. In December of 1745, when the widow of the last pharmacist died, the new owners, the Jesuits, purchased the pharmacy for 1,200 Forints. The Hungarian, Slovenian and German speaking pharmacist, Jakab Meschner named the pharmacy the Black Eagle in 1746. A wealthy patron commissioned a well-known woodworker to decorate it in a baroque style.
The Feteke Sas was owned by the Jesuits until it was sold at auction in 1774, and from then until it closed in 1971, the pharmacy was handed off between friends and family. The shop inherited bits and pieces of history from each of its many owners, as well as numerous items which are now on display in the museum.
After it closed, it was renovated, the equipment refurbished, the wood polished, the medicine bottles set out on display. Two years later, it opened to the public.
Born of a financial fiasco in the 1990s, the resort of Pirou-Plage in Normandy remained a half-built ghost town until its colorful houses were discovered by squatters and ravers. Since then the French village has taken on a new identity, becoming a hub for artists and filmmakers and blossoming into an art project open to all. Recently, though, local authorities made plans to bring in bulldozers and demolish the resort's graffiti-covered structures.
“I am in such a hurry to see this eyesore disappear for good,” says Gabriel Lallemand, Deputy Mayor of Pirou, a Normandy seaside resort. Lallemand has been following the village’s fantastic twists and turns since 1990. Back then, an unscrupulous property developer bought a 17-acre piece of land from the local authorities in Pirou-Plage. The plot was a couple of hundred yards from the beach, behind a lovely natural dune.
The site was called “Aquatour,” and the plans to turn it into a holiday village were ambitious: 75 houses, a hotel-club, 2 tennis courts—in a seaside town which counts only 1,500 year-round inhabitants. The promoter was a convincing salesman: he quickly sold all the houses—on paper, anyway. But no plans were made for water, electricity or draining.
By April 1992, 25 houses were already up when the building work suddenly stopped. The contractors were not paid anymore: the promoter had vanished with its investors’ money. Pirou-Plage would never turn into a holiday village.
The new houses were systematically plundered: everything that could easily be taken away disappeared. Stripped of their doors, windows, and roof tiles, the desolate houses then became homes for squatters and ravers who came and went as they pleased. A sort of seasonal ghost village was born, open to whoever wanted to come, without barriers.
Pirou-Plage’s story took another interesting twist when it started to attract artists in the 2000s. Street artists, painters, photographers, and filmmakers adopted the abandoned resort, and for the first time its houses were lively. In 2014, some Pirou inhabitants were featured in projects led by the famous French photographer and street artist JR, and filmmaker Agnès Varda. Word of mouth and media coverage spread the news: Pirou-Plage had become a cool place to go.
But not for long. After years of legal battles, the local authorities have finally won the land back and are ready to put it to other use. “First of all, we’ll board up the village as it’s dangerous—there is asbestos and tripping hazards. Then we’ll demolish it. We don’t want to waste time anymore,” says Noëlle Leforestier, the Mayor of Pirou.
What will happen next? “We are thinking about a mix of houses, shops and businesses—but with a reliable promoter!”
This faint mark on this shard of clay pottery is one of the oldest human fingerprints ever discovered.
Found at an archaeological site in northern Kuwait, it’s approximately 7,300 years old, dating back to the Stone Age. At this same site, archaeologists have also discovered a town, a temple, a cemetery, and other evidence of the community that lived here thousands of years ago, says the director of Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters.
This fingerprint is the oldest found in this area of the world, but not the oldest ever discovered. Two years ago, a piece of pottery showing a fingerprint was found at a site in Turkey that’s dated back 10,000 years, and in 2004, a scan of a statue that’s at least 25,000 years old uncovered the fingerprint of a child on the clay.
The oldest fingerprints ever found, though, weren't made by humans at all, but by Neanderthals.
On Friday, the sun set for the final time in Barrow, Alaska, as the city plunges into polar darkness for the next two months and, in December, formally changes its name to Utqiaġvik, according to Alaska Dispatch News.
The next dawn in Utqiaġvik will be January 22, 2017, the first sunlight under its new name, an Inupiaq word that the wider area of Barrow has long gone by.
The city of around 4,300 was incorporated in 1958 and originally took its name from nearby Point Barrow, named by a Royal Navy officer in 1825.
The city is the northernmost in the U.S. and each year spends a couple of months in darkness, owing to its position hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, and about 2,000 miles northwest of Seattle.
Residents recently voted to permanently change the town's name to honor indigenous peoples and the area's roots.
Locals seem relaxed about Barrow's final sunset. As ADN reports, the sun "was nowhere to be seen" on Friday, and Qaiyaan Harcharek, a Barrow City Council member who led the drive to change the name, said the event didn't have much of an effect on him.
"I didn't put much thought to it," Harcharek told ADN.
People had some unusual dreams in the 1920s. Dr. Otis G. Button, a veterinarian from Tacoma, Washington, dreamed of something other than a waiting room full of furry patients. He came up with a giant coffee pot diner, 25 feet tall, 30 feet wide.
It’s been 89 years, and his coffee pot is still right where he put it down.
It was 1927, and Dr. Button’s unique piece of mimetic architecture started out as the Coffee Pot Restaurant. Over the years it ran the gamut, from diner to drive-in, speakeasy to juke joint to go-go bar. In 1955 it became someone else’s dream, when Bob Radonich, along with his wife Lylabell, turned it into Bob’s Java Jive.
With a Polynesian flair popular at the time, Bob and Lylabell opened their pot up to live music, and it’s been cranking out live tunes (and some karaoke) ever since.
Now on the National Register of Historic Places, Bob’s Java Jive is working hard to held onto its spot as an important landmark and cultural music hub for Tacoma. Going back to its early years when surf guitar luminaries The Ventures were the house band, they have provided a space (and it’s a tight space) for local musicians to maybe follow in their footsteps.
Beer. Burgers. Bands. In a coffee pot. It’s not clear whether or not they serve coffee.
All adventures start—and end—with a story. A good story can inspire us to veer off the beaten path and reach for the unknown. A good story is also the explorer's reward, an opportunity to share and celebrate risks taken and new ground trodden.
With that in mind, we bring you Horizon Line, a podcast series about the truly intrepid. In each episode, Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras and associate editor Ella Morton will take turns spotlighting a person who pushed the limits of what was believed to be possible.
Our first episode recounts the surreal tale of S. A. Andrée, a Swedish janitor-turned-patent-clerk-turned-aeronaut, who dreamt of ascending to the North Pole in a hot air balloon. His famed 1897 mission invoked both skepticism and wonder: Alfred Nobel personally funded the journey, while polar explorer Adolphus Greely could only say "let him go, and God be with him.”
Listen to Horizon Line here and be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts from. We would also love your feedback, so be sure to leave a comment and a rating!
On a spectacular promontory overlooking one of the world’s largest natural harbours, there is an ancient temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. It is at the head of Konesar Malai (Swami Rock) on the dramatic Gokarna Bay, a seasonal home to blue whales.
Surrounded by jaw-dropping scenery on all sides, the colourful Koneswaram temple sits high above the bay, a classical-medieval complex in the Eastern Province city of Trincomalee. The site is a religious pilgrim centre, and is one of the five “Pancha Ishwarams” (abodes of Shiva) that were built in coastal regions of Sri Lanka to honor the supreme god of Hinduism.
The dates of the temple have been debated, with some scholars citing the original to around 400 BC, and later construction from as early as the 5th century to as late as the 18th.
At one time the complex was as large and grand as any in India or Sri Lanka. The grandeur was mostly lost in the 17th century at the hands of the colonial Portuguese, who razed structures, dumped some into the sea, destroyed objects, and smashed ornamentation. To salvage what they could, priests and devotees of the temple scrambled to bury their sacred objects, event taking advantage of the sea themselves rather than seeing them crushed in the raid.
The original temple is claimed by some to have been the greatest building of its age, for both its architecture and its ornamentation. It combined key features to form a typically southern Indian plan, such as a thousand-pillared hall (similar to the famous “Aayiram Kaal Mandapam” in Madurai, India) and raised platform (or “jagati”) configuration, features that had been destroyed.
The evidence for this magnificence comes from unearthing the very remnants that were buried, as well as the continued discovery of pieces at the bottom of the bay. There are also some original drawings done by Constantino de Sá de Noronha, the Portuguese governor responsible for the destruction. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that full restoration began, with the main temple rebuilt and many pieces of the old complex reclaimed.
Today the site is reborn, and there is some quite modern construction as well. And as new old pieces are recovered, they too are being returned to their original home.
The symbol of Swedish practicality, the Volvo, has its own museum in Gothenburg.
The founders of the Volvo Museum assert that you need not be a "petrolhead" to enjoy the exhibits. The Volvo and its history lend a unique lens to 20th century Swedish history at large.
The brand debuted in 1927 in Gothenburg and was the first Swedish car. As personal automobiles grew popular worldwide in the '30s, Volvo made other vehicles including buses, trucks, construction equipment, marine engines, and airplanes. Artifacts of note in the collection include the world's fastest hybrid truck, a life-sized Volvo SUV made from LEGO bricks, as well as various vintage models hard to find elsewhere.
For years, motorists navigated the intersections of North Capitol Street, Florida Avenue, Lincoln Road, and Q Street in Washington, D.C. by driving around Truxton Circle, one of many traffic circles in the city. In 1947, in an attempt to ease traffic congestion in the area, the circle was demolished and replaced with traffic lights. Somehow in this process the large, ornate fountain that sat in the center of the circle was misplaced after being dismantled piece by piece.
Named for early American naval officer Commodore Thomas Truxtun, the traffic circle was constructed in 1901. The fountain was moved to the circle from a park in Georgetown, across the city. Truxton Circle, at the intersection of multiple busy downtown thoroughfares, was the site of regular traffic jams and accidents. As the city grew, it was decided that North Capitol Street would need to be widened to accommodate the many daily commuters and that the traffic circle would have to be removed.
Oddly, records of where the pieces of the historic fountain were moved to were lost in the process. For decades it remained a little-known mystery—until remains of the fountain were finally identified in the dump site of Fort Washington Park, a historic military fortification outside the city in nearby Fort Washington, Maryland. Although some have voiced support for bringing the pieces back to Washington, D.C. and reassembling it somewhere, for now the demolished fountain remains abandoned in Maryland, deconstructed and slowly being reclaimed by nature.
Imagine life a thousand years from now. What comes to mind? Colonies on Mars, artificial intelligence that lives alongside humans (or has enslaved us), virtual reality that helps you live whatever life you want (or disconnects you from the world)? The visions might change depending on how optimistic you are about the future of humanity.
But if you’re feeling too lazy to imagine anything right now, worry not! This 2008 map by Rick Meyerowitz provides an illustration of what life could be like in New York in the year 2108. And according to the map, the future is very, very watery.
Meyerowitz's darkly funny map is featured in the book You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City, written by Katharine Harmon and published by Princeton Architectural Press. One of Lampoon Magazine’s most renowned illustrators, Meyerowitz has brought sarcasm and comedy to the lives of Americans for decades with work like the iconic poster for the 1978 film, Animal House.
The Metropolis 2108 shows most of New York City underwater. New Jersey is almost completely gone, except for a tiny stretch of land called West Lido. Some beloved NYC neighborhoods also meet a watery grave: Tribeca becomes Tribewa (Triangle Below Water), SoHo is now Beloho, the Lower East Side is the Lower East Pothole, and Hell’s Kitchen has been replaced by Hell’s Bathtub.
Likewise, the only part of Brooklyn that survives is its downtown, crossed by the Atlantic Ocean Parkway, and renamed Forest City Ratner City after the real-estate company that rents office spaces in the area. The Statue of Liberty, perhaps the most widely recognized symbol of the United States, is gone entirely but for the forearm that continues to hold the torch above the water.
Of course, not everything is bad in this new world. Those who formerly thought the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be too antiquated and boring will in the future be able to enjoy the Met Aquarium, where a happy whale resides. Likewise, the Guggenheim will no longer hold abstract artworks. In fact, it will hold no expositions at all, since it will be a water park.
While concerns arise pertaining to certain perks of modern life we are accustomed to, Meyerowitz has taken the trouble to reassure us of our ability to adapt. Without streets, our beloved La Guardia airport will become Lagoona Airport and employ planes that can land on water. Even more importantly, coffee shops will be replaced by coffee boats that will transit all around the city, and recharge at the coffee tower to keep New Yorkers awake and happy.
Almost the entire landmass left after the great flood is invaded by megastores and retail giants like Whole Mart and Targbucks. Staten Island will be completely dedicated to these commerces, even being renamed “Mega Store Island. And if you want to spend your time in the post-apocalyptic world in luxury, Condo District looks like it has some great views over Lexington Avenue River. Otherwise, head over to The Trickle Downs neighborhood or Snipesland Tax Free Zone, in the present Upper West Side.
Seasons may change, polar caps may melt, but exclusive neighborhoods will apparently persist until the end of time.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
In an era where paper is becoming less important than ever, it feels a bit bizarre at this point to go back in time just 35 years ago, when paper was perhaps having its greatest moment of all time.
We were just a few years from the desktop publishing revolution, which expanded the sheer amount of stuff one could put on a page. The ‘zine movement was perhaps at its peak during this time, proving an important way to democratize content for the average person.
And around this time, the copier company Xerox was perhaps at the height of its powers both culturally and within the business world as a whole. And it did it all with a heck of a lot of paper.
It makes sense that its namesake technology was so popular, because the invention, when it first came about, was truly groundbreaking.
“Xerography had practically no foundation in previous scientific work. Chet put together a rather odd lot of phenomena, each of which was relatively obscure in itself and none of which had previously been related in anyone’s thinking,” Clark explained. “The result was the biggest thing in imaging since the coming of photography itself. Furthermore, he did it entirely without the help of a favorable scientific climate.”
The technique, which combined electrically-charged ink (or toner), a slight amount of heat, and a photographic process, helped to change the office environment forever. Attempting to explain this process isn’t easy—just try following along with Carlson’s patent—but the end result made everyone’s lives easier.
(One area that Xerox does not lay claim to on the invention front is the color photocopier. In 1968, 3M beat them to the punch, launching its Color-in-Color device that year. The product required specially-coated paper to allow for the printing of photos. Xerox came out with its own rendition, the Xerox 6500, in 1973, and unlike its workhorse copiers of the era, it could only print four pages a minute. The market for color copiers struggled until the ‘90s.)
Just to give you an idea of how groundbreaking that was, here are just a few examples of the ways that people copied stuff before photocopiers came about:
Carbon paper: Invented at the turn of the 19th century, the ink-and-pigment material made it easy to write on more than one sheet of paper at once, which was at one point useful. It’s still around, but in very limited uses—these days, people who attempt to buy carbon paper are mocked by confused millennials.
Hectographs: Gelatin, which is secretly made of meat, isn’t just a good dessert food; it’s actually a pretty effective medium for making copies. This process involves creating a solid blob of gelatin, writing on a sheet of paper using ink, transferring the ink directly onto the gelatin, and then transferring that same ink onto new sheets of paper by placing them on the gelatin. (Here’s a video in case you’re curious.) Because it’s low-tech and relatively easy to make, it’s still a pretty common crafting technique.
Mimeographs: This system, which had the honor of having been partially invented by Thomas Edison, was one of the most popular ways to make copies before the Xerox came along. Basically, a page of text would be set up as a stencil inside of a metal drum, and users would fill the machine up with ink, then basically turn the drum to put words on the page. The result looked really good, but the process was somewhat complicated, as you had to basically create stencils out of any document you wanted to copy.
Ditto machines: If you went to school in the '70s or '80s, you probably ran into paper copied using one of these devices, which often came in a purplish hue. The devices, also known as spirit duplicators, worked somewhat similarly to the spinning motion of the mimeograph, but with an added touch—alcohol. The end result didn’t use ink, but it did have quite the smell. This scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High doesn’t make sense unless you’re aware of what a ditto machine is.
Photostat machines: Perhaps the closest thing to a modern Xerox machine, these machines relied on literally taking photographs of sheets of paper, creating negatives out of those sheets, then reprinting them. It basically combined the camera and darkroom into a single machine. The machines were large and the process relatively slow, but unlike some of the other processes listed, it wasn’t destructive: Once a single negative was created, an infinite number of copies could be made. Like Xerox, Photostat became so popular that the term was genericized. Rectigraph, one of the Photostat’s largest competitors, eventually formed the bones of the modern Xerox company.
It wasn’t just offices who loved photocopiers, either. Just ask Andy Warhol.
Warhol likely was the first person to think that putting his face onto a photocopier was a good idea. In 1969, the pop artist walked into the art-supply store at the School of Visual Arts in New York and saw an early Xerox-style photostat machine that printed to photographic paper.
He was friendly with the owner of the store, Donald Havenick, so he tried to convince Havenick to let him mess around with the machine. Havenick warned that the bulbs were hot, but that didn’t deter either Warhol or superstar Brigid Berlin, who also got in on the photocopying fun. That led to the self-portrait of Warhol above, which has been widelyimitated by people screwing around with photocopiers ever since.
“Back in 1969, after showing the piece to my wife, she said it looked like death!” Havenick told Artnet of the work in 2012. “She thought it was just too morbid to hang in our apartment—until now.“
It was just one tool for Warhol, who had spent a lot of time perfecting his skills with related techniques like silkscreens, printmaking, and photography. But the fact that his first instinct upon seeing a photocopier was to shove his face into it highlights just how innovative the photocopier had the potential to become for the art world.
Within a few years of Warhol’s face finding a new self-portrait strategy, the zine movement helped crystalize the importance of photocopying as a form of creativity. Punk 'zines like Sniffin’ Glue gained reach and influence thanks to copying machines, which made good stand-ins for Gutenberg presses.
Some zines made for particularly interesting art. Destroy All Monsters, a proto-punk band out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, built its early zines out of a wide variety of different copying techniques—from mimeographs to color Xerox copies. The band, which at one point included Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, has remained fairly influential, but in recent years, it’s the band’s art that’s stood out, as both a subject of gallery showings and through a reprinted version of the band’s zine.
Part of the reason the band’s zine was so vibrant was because of the group’s proximity to the University of Michigan. That helped the band keep the costs down.
"Access to Xerox and mimeograph machines came through the school; some guy we knew worked in the art department and University of Michigan store. We could work all night and we didn’t have to pay,” Niagara, the band’s singer, explained in a 2011 interview.
Soon, Xeroxes would find their way to the hands of New York’s art scene. Before Jean-Michel Basquiat fully embraced painting, he was selling color Xeroxes of his artwork to Andy Warhol in the early ‘80s. Before Keith Haring embraced the world of his iconography, he was cutting up newspapers and creating his own shocking headlines, which he would then Xerox.
Perhaps the peak of what a Xerox machine could do came about in the early '90s, when director and visual artist Chel White created an elaborate three-minute animated short out of heaps of photocopies, a few tinted pieces of plastic, and a lot of faces.
Like retro computers nowadays, the process of photocopying in the '60s, '70s, and '80s carried an air of novelty in the art world, one that added possibilities rather than limits to what art could be.
Chester Carlson’s revolutionary approach to photocopying obviously had a lot more practical uses than simply printing zines—which is why you see them, or their competitors at least, in offices everywhere around the globe.
Though the start of the Middle Ages in Europe is generally considered to coincide with the fall of Rome around 500 AD, in many ways the medieval era in London truly began some time later: on Christmas Day in 1066, to be precise.
On that famous day the Duke of Normandy, aka William the Conquerer, defeated the Anglo-Saxon king in the Norman invasion and was crowned king of a newly unified England. William I’s coronation at Westminster Abbey—at the time, shiny and new—marked the beginning of a new period in the City of London. In the years that followed some of the city’s most iconic medieval landmarks were built, among them the Tower of London, the most famous incarnation of London Bridge, and Westminster Palace, which became the center of the feudal system of government.
Though much of Roman and Anglo-Saxon London has been lost, these medieval structures still attract tourists millennia later. And if you look closely, there are other, lesser-known remnants of this darker period in history that can be found throughout the city. Here are eight hidden places are must-see stops on a history lover’s tour of medieval London.
The River Fleet was a part of London life before London was even London. The largest of the city’s mysterious subterranean rivers, this tributary of the Thames predates even the Anglo-Saxons, and was a major river used by the Romans.
As London grew in industry and population during the Middle Ages, the river became increasingly choked and polluted. Despite attempts to fix this, the canal-cum-open-sewer became an embarrassment and was finally bricked over in the 18th and 19th centuries. It lay buried and forgotten for 250 years until it was recently rediscovered, but the river has never stopped running, rushing unseen, just beneath the sidewalks of London.
Post-medieval London was a place of decency, civility, and strong religious beliefs. But the post-medieval suburbs of London were another story, rife with prostitution, disease and mass burials in Cross Bones Graveyard. This south London graveyard became known as the “single-woman’s” cemetery because of its high concentration of sex worker graves. Since women of ill-repute could not be given a Christian burial, Cross Bones became an unofficial dumping ground for them and other poor people living in squalor outside of London.
Today, the horrors of the cemetery are recognized and remembered. The red fence outside the graveyard is densely decorated with tributes in the form of flowers and ribbons and the names of those buried without ceremony.
A few facts can be confirmed about the Knights of Templar. We know that a group of pilgrims traveled to Jerusalem in 1119, and some of them were armed and followed a strict, religiously inspired code. Over time the Knights grew in number and prestige. In 1185 the Temple Church in central London was consecrated, characterized by its distinct round nave. But by the late 1200s, the Crusades weren't going so well and King Philip IV of France had turned against the order, causing their clout to wane. The group was forcibly disbanded by the Pope in 1312, their land seized by the Crown. King Edward II used the land and buildings for law colleges that developed into the present-day Inns of Court.
Housed behind an iron grill in Cannon Street, this legendary stone of unknown origin stirs up all kinds of mystique and intrigue.
The earliest written reference to the London Stone is in a book belonging to King Athelstan in the early 10th century, and it was used as a common transportation landmark in the 12th century. Historic texts suggest it was actually a central marker from which all distances were measured back in Roman times. It is also sometimes called the Stone of Brutus, referring to the mythical Trojan founder of London.
Although there are no references that suggest that the stone had any symbolic authority, in 1450 Jake Cade, leader of a rebellion against Henry VI, struck his sword against it and declared himself “Lord of the City.” In the 15th century, the stone was a common place for political meetings. The Lord Mayor of London would strike the stone with a staff each year as a proclamation of authority.
Operating from 1144 to 1780, The Clink may be the oldest prison in England. The former penitentiary now houses a museum dedicated to its criminal past, built on the actual site of the ancient lock-up whose name became worldwide shorthand for “jail.”
The Clink Museum offers a number of arresting (pun intended) educational and interactive activities. In many ways, it’s more of a dark historical funhouse than a stoic museum, but the long history of the clink it was built upon adds a gravitas that is undeniable.
Founded in 675, All Hallows-by-the-Tower is an ancient church steeped in history. Samuel Pepys watched the great fire of London from its spire, noting “the saddest sight of desolation.” John Quincy Adams was married here. Due to its close proximity to the Tower of London, most of the beheaded victims of the Tower’s executions were buried here. The pub next to the church is suitably called the “Hung, Drawn, and Quartered.”
But hidden away in the crypt below the church is a peculiar artifact: the original crow’s nest from the ship Quest, which was the vessel that was fielded on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s final voyage. Hardly known about or visited, it is all that remains of the legend's sunken ship.
Located within the oldest hospital in London, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum, a collection dedicated to the treatment of disease, holds specimens from the institution’s long history. The collection was organized by Victorian-era St. Bart's surgeon and pathologist James Paget, best known for his identification of the bone disease now known as Paget’s Disease. However the hospital it's housed in was founded back in 1123, and was given to the city of London in 1543.
The St. Olave Hart Street church is London in miniature—history as a kind of layer cake, boom piled on bust, war piled on plague. With its rich medieval history, it is one of London’s hidden treasures, and the resting place of many luminaries.
While the records of this small city church only stretch back to the 13th century, legend has it that it was built on the site of the Battle of London Bridge as far back as 1014. If you descend into the crypt, you'll find a well where, it is thought, King Olaf II of Norway rallied his troops to help drive the Vikings out of London.
As the city became a center of trade in the 15th and 16th centuries, the church flourished. As the church was next to the home of 16th-century royal spymaster, Francis Walsingham, many of Queen Elizabeth I’s spies are said to have worshipped here, and at least two are buried in the church.
The Hi-Lo Diner has lived in more U.S. cities than most of its patrons. Made in 1957 in a New Jersey warehouse owned by an Italian immigrant, this classic diner—then called the Venus Diner—lived for half a century outside Pittsburgh before going dark in 2009. Vacant but full of potential, the diner lay fallow for years.
Now, the old Venus Diner has reopened in Minneapolis, more than 800 miles away. Along with its new home, it’s gotten a facelift, a new name (the Hi-Lo Diner, shorthand for two nearby neighborhoods), and a bit of TLC from a history buff who’s devoted his life to rehabilitating old greasy spoons.
Over the past three decades, Steve Harwin, who owns Diversified Diners in Akron, Ohio, has refurbished and tricked out old diners and turned them over to new owners who want to give them new lives. Harwin, who hates corporations and chain restaurants, has devoted himself to the retro local restaurant instead; he’s completely restored around 20 diners, devoting between seven months to two years per project.
Harwin first started flipping diners after discovering that the late-night fry-cooking establishments of America transfixed consumers abroad. Harwin grew up in Cleveland but spent much of his childhood in Europe; his mother was French, and he speaks English and French fluently, German proficiently, and some Spanish and Italian (“I’d make Spanish mistakes in Italy, and Italian mistakes in Spain”).
During a semester abroad on a ship (“under the pretext of learning”) while studying at Menlo College in Palo Alto, he discovered a couple of things: motorcycles were very cheap in London, and the diner is to the U.S. what the pub is to England or the bistro is to France. While most students bought T-shirts in London, Harwin hauled a bike—and a business idea to pursue years later—onto the ship deck.
Back in the U.S., Harwin continued refurbishing motorcycles and then cars, starting with a beat-up Austin-Healey.
“I brought it home, and my family was very concerned,” he says. “It looked like such a piece of trash. When I got done with it, it won a car show. Then, I was a genius.”
But he also kept thinking about applying those rehabilitation skills to diners. He started window-shopping, and in Pennsylvania, he found one for sale. “I bought it, which was probably the biggest mistake, because I really didn't know what the hell I was doing,” he says.
When Harwin first became seriously interested in flipping diners, he road tripped across the U.S., canvassing the diner scene. Most of the diners were concentrated in the Northeast, as a handful of companies, including Fodero, Silk City, and Jerry O’Mahony, had mass-produced classic diners, some of them incentivized by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal economic programs after World War II. While the 1950s became the heyday for diners, they weren’t a universal experience. In some regions, the idea of sitting elbow-to-elbow with strangers was considered outlandish. Rumor had it that one owner tried operating a diner in North or South Dakota, and the concept flopped. The diner “was treated like a UFO,” Harwin says.
During his hunt for the first 10 small diners, he’d drop into post offices or police stations to tap into community lore. “It was like looking for a lost kid.” As his lot grew, he cut a deal with the city that he wouldn’t keep more than eight; lately, he has only a few for sale.
“I told them, if I ever have more than eight, they should lock me up,” Harwin said.
Since 1987, Harwin has consulted for or sold parts to countless private owners or developers—everyone from man cave enthusiasts (“I can’t tell you how much diner stuff I’ve sold to people for their basements and garages”) to Hollywood production companies. One of his diners went to Oslo, Norway, where its new menu pays homage to its old home; food on offer includes the Brooklyn burger, Southern fried chicken, and an omelet called “The Eastwood” (“as in Clint,” the menu notes). At an Ohio aviation museum, the Tin Goose Diner from Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, is a recent spectacle, and Harwin has recently teamed up with a high-rolling developer in Buffalo, New York, to transplant a diner, made in Massachusetts, from Rochester into a blossoming section of the city.
“He’s probably one of the premiere diner restorers in the country right now,” says Larry Cultrera, an author in Boston who has chronicled diners on his “Diner Hotline” blog for a decade. “He’ll take it right down to the skeleton and completely rebuild it. A lot of diners have survived because of him.”
Vintage diner restoration is no ice cream sundae. Before a crane dropped Hi-Lo diner, piece by piece, in the Twin Cities, it was a massive headache. “It’s not rocket science, but there are no books,” Harwin says. He usually starts by gutting, finding parts to match the retro aesthetic—there’s only one go-to vendor for classic, porcelain enamel panels, so imagine the price—and then reassembling the diner and shipping it to a new home. There it must be permitted, zoned, and accessible to meet modern standards. And for dessert, new owners receive a binder of carefully curated records, photos, and anecdotes of the business they’ve just resurrected—built-in talking points for hungry patrons.
The menu for the new Hi-Lo Diner includes trendy cocktails (#AmIRite-O Sour and Alexander Hamilton) and pulled pork sandwiched between fried dough (Notorious P.I.G.), and the restaurant draws visitors including Adele. But restoring the diner was no picnic, says Harwin. “I lost a ton of money on that,” Harwin says of the Venus Diner project. “It was deceptively nice looking when I bought it, but underneath, it ended up being so much more than that… Everyone would run the other way. It looks like a disaster.”
In the end, the Hi-Lo wasn’t a disaster—but that’s a testament to Harwin’s expertise and thoroughness. “I underestimated what I had to do, but as I got into it, I started learning a lot of things,” he says. “You can't cut corners. It’s just not the way to do it.” His meticulous style helps ensure that people know he’s the one to call, even if he doesn’t publicly list his phone number.
Former owners and new owners alike appreciate Harwin’s work. “Steve was really picky about what we chose,” says Jeff Castree, who with his wife Vonnie owns the Broadway Diner, formerly Rosie’s Diner, in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
The diner opened in 2012 in a historic part of town, and serves nearly 2,000 people a week. The owners received financial support from the city, and the Broadway Diner—though new in town —sits on the historic registry. Part of Jeff Castree’s dream was to cook in front of customers, which became a matter of handiwork for Harwin—along with an expanded vestibule to keep waiting guests warm during the icy winters.
Once, a gaggle of older women passing through Wisconsin stopped for a meal, and one said she was from Groton, Connecticut, where the diner once lived—first as “Twin Bridge Diner,” and then under new ownership, as “Rosie’s.”
“Have you been to Rosie’s Diner?” Castree asked. “Well, you’re eating here again.”
Denise Worthy, a military veteran who worked in the Ohio prison system for 12 years before quitting to run her family’s restaurant, has also met some of her new diner’s old patrons. Harwin found Worthy a stainless steel diner car, with sunburst accents and its original booths, which she attached to Nancy's, the Cleveland restaurant founded by her parents.
Before it moved to Ohio, the diner lived in Boston, as “The Big Dig Diner,” named after a transportation project that dug tunnels across the city. In Boston, the diner opened in 1998 to help troubled teens rebuild their lives. After the Big Dig became part of Nancy’s, the previous owner and some regular patrons tracked it down to Cleveland and visited. The past was commemorated with a double-decker handheld called “The Big Dig Burger.”
Vintage diners have weathered long journeys and decades of history, but Harwin is not trying to mask their scars. For him, the job is a fair amount of reconciling the old with the new. “I'm a preservationist, and I'm trying to do historic preservation,” he says. “I would find ways to make a diner look totally authentic and original, but get the benefits of better, formal efficiencies.”
Their survival and story, he recognizes, begins when his work is done. “A diner has to have an owner’s personality,” he says. “It can't be anything else.”
You've likely heard of the theremin, an early electronic synth instrument once intended to replace the violin that has now been relegated to the sphere of novelty. You've also likely heard of the matryoshka, the Russian nesting doll. But have you heard of the Matryomin?
It's the invention of Masami Takeuchi, who mastered the theremin in Russia, where the instrument was invented by Léon Theremin in 1920. He spread the word of the theremin by teaching and performing in Japan, eventually establishing a touring ensemble. To bring a little innovation and ingenuity to his theremin group, Takeuchi placed the frequency antenna inside a Russian nesting doll. Thus the Matryomin was born.
In this video, 167 matryominists play Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. As if that weren't peculiar enough, after the first movement the ensemble breaks it down into a bluesy boogie-woogie rendition of the famous melody, topped off with a final, warbling "wooo!"
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 accepted date for the end of World War II is August 14, 1945, even if Japan did not formally surrender until September 2. What some people don't know, however, is that for many Japanese soldiers the war ended much later.
An official count of 127 so-called "holdouts” or “stragglers” surrendered in various places in the Pacific Area between 1947 and 1974. This number does not include the many who died in their hiding places, only discovered decades later.
For these holdout soldiers, strong militaristic principles made surrender impossible. They believed in what their military leaders told them, that it was better to die or be captured than surrender. In some cases, they did not even know about the end of the war. Some of the holdouts continued fighting the American Troops or later the police, others just went into hiding. The “stragglers” believed it impossible to return to Japan, as they feared to be treated as deserters and punished with the death penalty.
One of those stragglers was Yokoi Shōichi, a tailor by trade, conscripted to the Japanese Army in 1941. Making it to the rank of a Sergeant, he was part of the Japanese Forces on Guam when the American Troops under General Douglas MacArthur conquered the island in summer 1944. U.S. forces advanced fast and while many Japanese soldiers were captured or killed, Yokoi Shōichi, in a group of ten, retreated deep into the jungle.
The ten men quickly realized that such a big group would be easily discovered. Seven of them left to other areas; what happened to them is unknown. The three remaining men, Shōichi included, split up to different hiding places in the area, but kept visiting each other. The three men heard that the war was over around 1952. They were not sure if the information was true and feared for their lives if they were captured or surrendered, so they decided to stay in hiding. Around 1964, when Shōichi wanted to visit the other two men, he found them dead and buried them. He believes that they died of starvation. Other sources say they died in a flood.
It took Yokoi Shōichi three months to dig his “cave,” not far from the Talofofo Falls, about seven feet underground. Supported by large bamboo canes, the small underground room was about three feet high and nine feet long, with a hideable small entrance and a second opening as air supply. Inside he hid all day and stored his few belongings. Shōichi only left his cave at night and lived from caught fish, frogs, snakes or rats and learned to use the unknown fruits and vegetables he found. Two of his biggest treasures were a self-made eel trap, and a self-made loom, with which he made clothes from local fibers of the hibiscus bark.
Finally in 1972 two local fishermen discovered Shōichi on the banks of the river Talofofo and when, afraid for his life, he charged them, they captured him. He begged the two men to kill him. Instead they took him home, fed him his first real meal in 28 years and brought him to the authorities. Two weeks later Shōichi returned to Japan and was welcomed as a hero. He himself thought differently about that. His famous words were: "It is with much embarrassment, but I have returned."
After Shōichi's death at age 82, the original cave was protected as a historical monument, but collapsed. In it's place a replica of the cave was erected along with a shrine and memorials for the last three Japanese stragglers. Some of Shōichi's belongings from the time in the cave can be seen in a museum at the entrance of the Talofofo Falls Resort Park.
The tiny village of Čičmany (population 204) looks just like it did hundreds of years ago, untouched by time. But this is no ordinary preservation area. The village is full of black timber houses, each one decorated with intricate traditional patterns in white lime paint. Literally street after street is lined with folk art.
Although the records of the village at Čičmany date back to the 13th century, covering the houses in lacy, geometric and stylized patterns is a much later tradition. It began around 200 years ago, when white lime would be used to help preserve damaged wood. The image of the bright lime pigment on the dark wood was striking, and people began elaborating on themes, eventually covering most of the timber-frame structures with remarkably uniform designs.
The buildings that line the little streets today are actually even more modern, although in the traditional folk architecture. In 1921 a fire raced through the village, and many structures had to be restored. With the help of the Slovakian government, funds were made available to keep Čičmany as it had been for centuries. It was established in 1977 as the world’s first folk architecture reserve, ensuring the protection of its buildings, and unique cultural heritage.
A team of archaeologists excavating the tomb of a powerful Italian family has found centuries-old dentures—five human teeth held together with a clever gold plate.
"We couldn't find the corresponding jaw, so we do not know who the appliance belonged to," the lead archaeologist, Simona Minozzi, told Seeker.
Minozzi’s team has been working at the monastery of San Francesco, in Lucca, Italy, a Tuscan city that dates back to the Etruscans. The excavations included the tombs of the Guinigi family, one of the city’s most famous and powerful. The tomb contains the remains about 100 people, buried there over the course of time, so it’s not possible to precisely date the dentures from the context in which they were found.
The dentures include five teeth—three incisors and two canines—connected by golden pins to a golden band. The ends of the device are curled to fit around neighboring teeth; the whole thing would likely have been held in place by string, Seeker reports.
Devices like this one are described in writing, but this is the first archaeological find demonstrating the use of the technology. Whoever it belonged to, they got good use out of it: the archaeologists’ analysis of deposits on the dentures show that the person wore it for many years.
In the world of fine dining, Auguste Escoffier has had a greater influence than perhaps any other chef in history. When his canonical cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire, was published in 1903, it set the standard for fancy food, moving systematically through stocks, sauces, aspic jellies, omelets, consommés, sweetbreads, rabbits, truffles, canapés, and every other fussy French preparation imaginable. More than a century later, his recipes still guide ambitious cooks: anyone who’s felt it necessary to learn to make the five “mother sauces” can blame Escoffier.
But while even today fancy chefs refer to Le Guide Culinaire as a foundational text, a cookbook Escoffier wrote in 1911 has fallen into complete obscurity. That year, the famous French chef took on the most American of food challenges—Thanksgiving. He got it almost entirely wrong.
Escoffier’s Thanksgiving Cookbook was published as a supplement to the Sunday edition of a Hearst paper named, most patriotically, The American. The cookbook was 32 pages of commentary and recipes from Escoffier, “the Greatest of French Chefs,” who had supposedly selected dishes suited for American tastes.
The book was intended to double as a guide for home cooks preparing a Thanksgiving meal and an intro to French cooking. Escoffier did include a suggested menu for a multi-course Thanksgiving meal. Strangely, though, it did not have any of the dishes we’d now associate with Thanksgiving—no turkey, no mashed or sweet potatoes, no stuffing, no gravy, no green beans or brussels sprouts, no squash of any kind, no cranberry sauce, and no pumpkin pie.
Instead, in the cookbook, Escoffier offered 12 separate recipes for rabbit, a chapter on ragouts that featured only mutton, recipes for tomato sauce and macaroni; “some new ways for preparing tomatoes” including “Tomatoes à la Americaine” (basically tomatoes sliced and sprinkled with salt, pepper, vinegar and oil); crawfish recipes and tips on making cream soups.
His suggested Thanksgiving menu was based on a meal he’d had in Perigueux, a town in southwestern France known for its truffles. It included an omelette of potatoes and bacon, veal sweetbreads with spinach, a roast saddle of lamb, celery salad, sautéed mushrooms, and partridge terrine. There was only one dish mentioned in the whole cookbook that an American might recognize as Thanksgiving fare: a pie of “carameled apples,” for which no recipe was given.
Thanksgiving is an invented holiday, first officially established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and moved to its current position on the calendar by Franklin D. Roosevelt. By 1911, Thanksgiving menus usually contained the foods we think of as standard Thanksgiving dishes—turkey, cranberry sauce, and all the rest—but weren’t quite as codified as they are today.
One menu published in 1911, for instance, included roasted stuffed turkey, brown gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry conserve, and pumpkin pie, but also featured oysters with sherry, chicken pie, and something called “puritan pudding.” That same year, a Boston Globe columnist engineered a “frugal” Thanksgiving menu featuring potato soup, dried herring, oatmeal mush, bread pudding, and corned beef hash. It wasn’t until World War II, when Norman Rockwell put a giant turkey at the center of his painting "Freedom from Want," that the Thanksgiving menu in its current form was truly mythologized.
Even with some flexibility in the Thanksgiving menu, though, French food wasn’t an obvious fit for the most self-consciously American of all American holidays. Americans had inherited a suspicion of French cuisine from their British forebearers (who took some lessons from the French but did not adopt their willingness to make the most of offal or of animals like snails and frogs). Among elite Americans, from Thomas Jefferson onward, French cooking had cachet, but that taste never became popular.
“By the turn of the 20th century, French food would still have been really elite,” says Jennifer Jensen Wallach, associate professor at University of North Texas and the author of How America Eats.“There still wasn’t an extensive dining culture, but to the extent that it existed, it was French. The menus were French and designed to be exclusionary and elite. It’s not the kind of food Americans would have identified with.”
To his credit, Escoffier seemed to understand that Americans didn’t think of French cooking as food for average people. In his Thanksgiving cookbook, he took pains to explain that the recipes he had picked were economical and representative of French household cooking, not fancy restaurant food. He focused on rabbit because of its low price, “especially suited to families where economy is important.” He emphasized that ragout, in France, was a “respectable dish in domestic cookery,” and that pot-au-feu was a cost-effective meal. He lamented that Americans didn’t make better use of all their very good vegetables but chose to include the tomato because “its moderate price makes it accessible to all purses.”
Escoffier’s best efforts to speak to the American masses, though, did not land. “The emphasis on game and on organ meat would have been typical of French lower middle class food,” and the idea of making the most of all foods, says Andrew Haley, a historian at the University of Southern Mississippi. Around this same time, American reformers were advocating for a similar reform of cooking among poor Americans. But lower class Americans were not interested in carefully preparing cheaper cuts of meat to get the most value out from them.
“I don’t think Escoffier’s attempt to reach out would have been well received, because those efforts by Americans to do the same thing were not well received. They were seen as patronizing,” says Haley. “Americans wanted to buy better cuts of meat when they could afford them.”
In 1911, too, American food culture was slowly changing. Middle class Americans were starting to dine out more but, as Haley explains in his book, Turning the Tables, the way they asserted their identity was by rejecting French food in favor of American food. Escoffier had come to America in 1910 to oversee the expansion of the Ritz-Carlton restaurant in New York, but by then the Waldorf-Astoria was already serving its more Americanized version of fancy food, including the famous Waldorf salad.
Escoffier’s attitude towards Americans and their food didn't do him any favors. He praises American ingredients but doesn’t seem to think much of American diners or cooks. “Americans have an abundance of good, cheap vegetables at their command, and they do not make a sufficient use of them or prepare them in as many attractive ways as would be possible,” he writes. He doesn’t understand why Americans aren’t more interested in crawfish, either. “Probably if the virtues of bisque of crawfish were thoroughly understood, it would become as popular in America as in France,” he writes.
His instincts in this case are misplaced, though. He’s so proud of the Thanksgiving menu he put together and so confident of it! He writes, of the meal he had in Perigueux, “The midday repast to which I was entertained was remarkable as an example of the best French household cooking, and I feel sure that it will interest my American readers as a possible menu for Thanksgiving Day.”
He was probably right about that first part—anyone looking for a French menu for a fancy feast might consider this one. But, as much as his influence was felt in the rest of food world, Escoffier’s attempt at creating an American meal had zero influence on Thanksgiving.
Over the years, Christmas-themed amusement parks have popped up all across the globe (and crumbled right back down), but to this day there is is only one theme park that celebrates the American Thanksgiving holiday nearly all year. Just not on Thanksgiving.
Holiday World, in the town of Santa Claus, Indiana (yes, that's its real name), is the world’s only holiday-themed amusement park. It features a section devoted exclusively to Thanksgiving, in which visitors can feast on turkey dinner, then try to keep that dinner down while zooming around a pilgrim-themed roller coaster track.
But it wasn't always that way. The park was founded by wealthy businessman Louis Koch in 1946 as Santa Claus Land, a Christmas-themed amusement park featuring a year-round Santa Claus, children's rides, and a toy shop. Over the decades the number of attractions grew, but it wasn't until the 1980s that the owners started looking past Christmas. In 1984, the park was rechristened Holiday World and two new themed sections were added to the park, celebrating Halloween and the Fourth of July.
As the only theme park in the world to focus exclusively on the theme of holidays, Holiday World continued to thrive. Then in 2006, on the park’s 60th anniversary, they added the latest section of the park: Thanksgiving.
“It was quite the controversy back in 2005,” says Paula Werne, Director of Communications for Holiday World. “We knew we were going to be adding a new holiday to Holiday World in 2006. And there were all too many holidays put out there. I personally wanted Valentine’s Day, if I may tell you that. But my powers of persuasion failed me this one time.”
In the end, the park owners decided to theme the new section after Thanksgiving because it represented a time when families come together, and as a family owned and operated park, it made sense—even if the theming possibilities were a bit limited.
The most recognizably Thanksgiving-y parts of the park are probably the rustic colonial architectural flourishes that litter the entire section, and the Plymouth Rock Cafe, where full turkey dinners are offered throughout the year. “People really enjoy that they can eat Thanksgiving dinner in July,” says Werne.
Fitting thrilling rides into the Thanksgiving theme is a bit tricker. At its unveiling, the Thanksgiving section of the park was anchored by a massive new wooden roller coaster known as The Voyage. Over a mile long, the coaster continues to win awards and accolades nearly every year, although these have to do with the coaster’s huge drops and freefalls, and not its pilgrims-on-The-Mayflower theme.
In 2015, another steel roller coaster was added to the Thanksgiving section. Called the Thunderbird, it needed a little finessing to fit the theme. “We had to kind of create our own legend to more or less pull together the pilgrims’ ride over in The Mayflower to the thunderbird helping them find their way,” says Werne. The mix of feasting and lurching around also makes for strange bedfellows. “It’s funny that the most thrilling of our rides are located [in the same section] as our heaviest meals,” she says.
Other rides in the Thanksgiving land include a tilt-a-whirl in which the passenger buckets are shaped like turkeys, and a dark ride where guests round up neon turkeys with infrared “turkey callers.” There is also a swinging boat ride, called The Mayflower, that the Holiday World website admits is, “not exactly the Atlantic Ocean, but that pop of airtime will give a hint of what the Pilgrims experienced on their heroic voyage long ago.”
Surprisingly, Holiday World is closed from November through March, meaning it is shut on half of the holidays that it celebrates. This dissonance hasn’t gone unnoticed. “We catch a lot of heat," says Werne. "‘Why aren’t you open at Christmas time?’”
Yet people seem to love the turkey-filled section of the park as much as the Halloween or Christmas sections, according to Werne. So, why don’t more amusement parks embrace a love of Thanksgiving?
According to Jim Futrell, historian at the National Amusement Park Historical Association, it’s all about business. “If you look at parks that are open year round, or through the end of the year, logistically, it’s just very difficult to do,” he says. “There really isn’t a whole lot of time to do anything specifically Thanksgiving-themed.”
Halloween and Christmas may be much more marketable holidays, but, as Holiday World proves, there is a demand out there for turkey-shaped tilt-a-whirls.
Every year, thousands of pilgrims descend upon this small cross-covered hill in Eastern Europe to be healed and to pray. The hill is the Holy Mountain of Grabarka, and its significance as the most holy Orthodox location in Poland is not taken lightly by the 1% of Poles who claim the Orthodox faith.
On August 18th and 19th, the days of the Orthodox Church's Feast of Transfiguration, over 10,000 pilgrims make their way to the hill where they climb the steps to pray and sit up for night-long vigils. Those who seek to be healed or cured carry crosses which are blessed by priests and then put into the ground surrounding the small chapel on the top.
The crosses litter the mountain, coming in all shapes and sizes: metal, wooden, ornamental and plain. Some tower over a dozen feet in the air while others are small, some hang on a string dangling from the arms of others. Rosary beads, photos, amulets, and letters are stapled, tied, or left to sit on the crosses, all in various states of atrophy. Most crosses read in Cyrillic text "Lord, have mercy (Spasi Hospodi)” or list the names and ailments of those in need of healing or salvation.
Tales of the miracles surrounding the mount date back to 1710, when during a cholera outbreak, an old local man received a vision to lead the local people to the mountain, build a cross, and pray for salvation. They then washed themselves in the water of the nearby stream. Instantly the epidemic ended, and a chapel was built in commemoration.
Today, pieces of religious iconography that have slowly succumbed to time and weather litter the soil. Since nothing is ever removed, new crosses are easy to make out as they are mixed in with the slowly decaying ancient crosses left to rot in the ground. In a way it is a lonely, gloomy, funereal sight. But the devout who visit the mountain see it as a place of hope and rehabilitation.
The stream that circles the bottom of the hill is believed to heal physical ailments such as soreness, scars, burns, and other disfigurements. Pilgrims bathe in the stream and wash themselves with rags and paper, rubbing and cleansing their aching limbs. After bathing, a pile of the cleaning rags is made and they are set on fire to symbolically erase the pain, suffering and forgiveness of sins. A small chapel is built over a pump and pilgrims come year round to fill up cups, jugs and buckets of the miracle water to take with them.
