Is this ancient stone cross, tucked in the apse of a small Scottish village church, the source of the oldest work of literature in the English language?
The Ruthwell Cross is an 18-foot-tall Anglo-Saxon cross dating to the 7th or 8th century, beautifully carved on two sides with worn images of Jesus Christ and religious symbols, along with descriptions, in Latin, of the scenes they are intended to depict.
The cross is considered one of the most wonderful and impressive early Anglo-Saxon monuments, from the golden days of the Kingdom of Northumbria (modern-day Scotland), with carvings so sophisticated they have been the subject of scholarly study for centuries.
But it's the runic inscriptions carved on alternating sides that shroud the cross in mystery. The runes depict vine and animal motifs common to other Anglo-Saxon monuments, although it's unusual to find the runic alphabet on a Christian monument. These runic inscriptions contain a portion of "The Dream of the Rood," (“rood” meaning cross), which is in the running as the oldest English poem.
The full text of the poem is recorded in the 10th century manuscript the Vercelli Book, but fractions of it are also carved in the Ruthwell Cross in runic characters. The question has always been: Did the poet find the text on the cross, or was the cross carved with the runes at a later date? No one really knows. But if the runic inscription is original to the cross, then this carving might indeed be the oldest known work in the canon of Old English literature.
The cross was smashed to pieces during the Protestant Reformation, then reconstructed with some of its original pieces in the early 19th century. This only added further mystery to the Ruthwell Cross, as no one is sure that it is properly put together.
Underneath a passage of one of the oldest and most frequented buildings on Penn State's main campus, a mysterious work of art awaits those with enough knowledge and free time to find it.
Under the front lawn of the Willard Building there is a maintenance tunnel that leads to a janitor's storage space. As one might expect, there is an electrical transformer box and a large heating system vent down there, with a couple of window sills and wells from old and mostly disused classrooms. A metal grate covers overs the top of the passage. However, there is more to see here.
Running the entire length and height of the alcove's outward wall (approximately 20 feet by 8 feet), a long mural has been painted. It is unknown when or by whom this painting was made, but this strangely beautiful mural exists nevertheless. The mural's orange, viridian, and, blue hues are strongly reminiscent of those of southwestern Native American art (the Pueblo and Navajo, mainly), while its vegetative banners and simplistic stars call to mind another mysterious artifact: the Voynich Manuscript.
There isn't any artist's signature or dedication date on this painting; the only part which bears any writing is one panel approximately in the centre of the wall. Underneath an eight-fold leaf pattern with a differently coloured circle at the cardinal points, this key is written:
To The West — INTROSPECTION
To The North — WISDOM
To The East — ILLUMINATION
To The South — INNOCENCE And TRUTH
Once again, the meaning of this inscription, beyond interpreting or expounding upon the design, is unknown. Some speculate this is either guerrilla art or the remnant of a mural project by a painting class. Whatever the case, this artwork is worth seeing if you have a few minutes and aren't afraid of a bit of litter.
To visit St. Vincent Court is to feel oneself whisked from the hustle and bustle of downtown Los Angeles to the center of an old European city.
The small square is named for its original owner, St. Vincent's College (now Loyola University), which enjoyed the unique privilege of being the first institution of higher learning in southern California back in 1868.
The little alley became useful when the massive Bullock's department store opened beside it—it was where deliveries were received and sent out. Over the decades the alleyway became such a popular congregating spot that Bullock's let it out to small businesses. Italian restaurants and espresso bars populated St. Vincent's Court. In 1957 the plain alleyway was decorated like an ancient European lane, with plaster facades and a brick-paved street.
Now home to mostly Middle Eastern restaurants, this quaint little alleyway still looks like it belongs in Rome or Florence rather than downtown Los Angeles. During the day, with ample umbrella-covered al fresco dining, the scene is a lively and welcoming respite from the world around it. You may feel yourself transported to a place and time altogether unlike the Los Angeles we know today.
In the 19th century, the sleepy Ligurian town of Bordighera was among the most indulgent attractions for the elite traveling the Italian Riviera, and perhaps nothing better exemplifies its former glory—and subsequent decay—better than the appropriately named Hotel Angst.
Allured in part by the 1855 publication of Doctor Antonio by Giovanni Ruffini—an exiled Italian author seeking British support for Italian unification—Britons flocked en masse to a town redolent with exotic palms, olive trees, and that sweet, healthy coastal breeze, leaving in their wake churches, tennis courts, and numerous other distinctly British buildings that remain anachronistic to this small Italian town.
None remain as imposing as the Hotel Angst.
Seeking to capitalize on this glut of wealth and the recent construction of a new railway running directly to London, star-crossed Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Angst started construction on the Hotel Bordighera not far from the train station. After an earthquake in 1887 compromised such plans, however, he shifted his focus to the nearby Via Romana, where he would give the world its first "Six Star" hotel.
Construction was relatively quick for the time, lasting from 1887 to 1914, and resulted in a product worthy of Mr. Angst's ambition. The very top of society luxuriated in its world-class billiard halls and ballrooms, in its state-of-the-art suites. Queen Victoria herself was so enticed as to have reportedly booked the hotel in entirety. Her visit, however, was not to be.
The outbreak of World War I left the Angst as a military hospital, and, after Adolf Angst's death in 1924, the place began to suffer under its great ambition. Fast-forwarding to the Second World War, when the hotel and its city came under Nazi rule, anything of value was stripped from the premises and the once-illustrious Hotel Angst fell into ruin.
Though several attempts at rehabilitation have been undertaken over the years, the collapse of tourism in the region has seemingly left its owners with little reason, and little money, to restore it to its original glory. Today, the site remains closed off to visitors under the longstanding promise of its reconstruction. Its infrastructure, from the regal edifice to its several floors waiting underground, remains unstable and quite dangerous.
Even in ruin, however, the Hotel Angst continues to impress, and hopefully, with the return of another boom, it can one day return to its former glory.
In Offa of Mercia's reign in the 8th century CE, a great earthwork boundary was built that delineated the border between what would become England and Wales. At 176 miles long and up to 12 feet high, the great earthwork is Britain’s longest ancient monument.
Offa’s Dyke likely served as a sign of Mercia’s power—the sheer amount of resources to create the Dyke showed contemporaries that the Mercians could destroy any opponent. Also, and more obviously, it signaled that the Welsh would be excluded from former territories. The Dyke offered a very visible divide between Anglo-Mercia and Welsh Powys, and the Mercians had the upper ground.
Offa is mentioned by the monk Asser in his biography on Alfred the great. Asser writes, "a certain vigorous king called Offa [...] had a great dyke built between Wales and Mercia from sea to sea.” This mention has traditionally been accepted as proof the Dyke was built solely during Offa’s reign. However, ongoing historical research has put former conventional knowledge into question. Radiocarbon dating has suggested the Dyke was built earlier than Offa’s reign and could have been the project of several kings, if not an ongoing project lasting for hundreds of years.
The Dyke is a fascinating insight into how boundaries are formed and how this affects conception of nations. It is also in a stunning location with chances to encounter amazing wildlife.
Double-decker buses have been a staple of London streets ever since the first engine-powered one appeared there in 1923.
But double-deckers, like all things, some day must die. Above, you can see what happened in 1959 to one such soon-to-be-deceased bus in London.
"On this occasion," the narrator intones, "the proud giant is being propelled—almost against its will it seems—by a bulldozer, and the reason is, is because this is the end of the line."
Workers then proceed to smash windows and, with torches, rip the bus apart. Each weighs around 10 tons, with some eight tons of that being salvageable metals. The rest had a worse fate.
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.
In 1830, Stephen Preston Ruggles—an engineer and craftsman, and soon to take charge of the print shop at Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Massachusetts—took on an unusual project. He got a map of Boston, pasted it to a thin wooden board, and began to cut. He traced around the city streets, slicing out Boston Common, the Charles River, buildings, and houses, but leaving in the city's roads, bridges, and squares.
Eventually, he had a kind of skeleton of the city, the streets separated from their surrounding environment. He glued this to a second board, which he had painted green. After what must have been hours of labor, he had what he wanted—a map of the nearest city that students at Perkins could actually read.
For centuries, people who were blind had no dedicated way to learn geography. But starting in the 1830s, at places like Perkins, educators repurposed existing technology—and invented new types of maps—in order to bring the world to their students' fingertips.
The Perkins Archives are filled with tactile maps from various eras. Many are like the Boston one—existing tools rejiggered for new needs. One has the Great Lakes cut out, pasted on a board, and heavily shellacked; another, a pastel map of Australia with borders and braille labels pressed into it. "You couldn't buy them in a store, so a lot of them are very experimental, says Jennifer Hale, the school's archivist. "They're very homemade, and very hard to date."
Others are more deliberate. In 1837, tired of what he considered to be partial solutions, Samuel Gridley Howe, the school's Founding Director, decided to take matters into his own hands. Enlisting Ruggles—who was doubtlessly eager for a way to map-make that didn't include painstakingly cutting out many square feet of bare space—he invented a new method of embossing maps, and released a book, the Atlas of the United States Printed for Use of the Blind.
Like the writing systems of the time, these maps were raised above the paper, so that borders and contours could be easily felt. Textures denoted different geographical features, like lakes and seas. The maps contained labels and plenty of supplementary information, printed in Boston Line Type, Howe's preferred writing system. "It has been found a source of great pleasure and useful knowledge to the blind, who can study it unassisted by a seeing person," wrote Howe in the introduction to a later edition. This method was later used for mapmaking projects across the world, and the Perkins Archive is full of embossed maps.
That same year, Ruggles, who was in charge of printing at the school, undertook another big project—the Perkins Globe, a spherical tactile map made of 700 flawlessly glued pieces of wood. Likely the first globe in America made for people who are blind, the Perkins Globe is 13 feet in circumference and includes a set of moveable meridian lines. "The land is raised by a composition of emery firmly embedded in the wood; [and] the boundaries of countries, rivers, towns &c. have a very natural appearance," the Trustees of the Perkins School—then the New England Institution for the Blind—wrote in their 1837 Annual Report. "We believe this is the most perfect article of the kind in the world."
The Perkins Globe has undergone several restorations, the latest of which took place in 2004, when it was resurfaced and given a better support carriage. It is now on display in the Perkins Museum.
Puzzle maps, or "dissected maps," worked by a similar principle: students could take apart countries, continents, and hemispheres and piece them together again, learning how different states and regions fit together. While many of them were originally made for sighted students—the genre dates back to the late 18th century, and they were popular throughout Europe and the United States—they proved useful to blind students as well. "The best of all contrivances for imparting a knowledge of natural and political boundaries to the blind is the dissected map," the American Social Science Association reported in 1875, because "we cannot learn the shape of objects by touch alone unless we can embrace them or completely encircle them with our hands."
In the picture above, from 1893, two students in the geography room at Perkins are putting America together, state by state. The Mid-Atlantic, in pieces, waits patiently on the chair.
As anyone who has tried to freehand a map of their state knows, reading an existing map can only teach you so much. There's nothing like drawing your own to familiarize you with the placement of a capital city, or the ins and outs of a coastline. According to a contemporaneous account by educator Amelia Sanford in The Mentor, "map drawing" was invented in the 1890s, by the students and teachers of the Philadelphia School for the Blind. Noticing that her pupils loved making patterns on their leftover schoolbook pages, one teacher provided her class with blue denim cushions, different-sized furniture tacks, and wire. Taking her dictation, the students would mark out the outlines of states, countries and continents, and connect them with wire.
Familiar geographical shapes quickly emerged. "As the details were filled in, tacks of different shapes and sizes were used to locate cities, rivers, railroads, and mountains, and strings to mark limits of vegetation and productions," Sanford writes. "The class then journeyed in imagination through the different continents, filling in the details as they went along." The above map—made by Arthur Beckman, then a seventh-grader at Perkins—features Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont on maroon cloth, with green-pin mountain ranges, and the Penobscot and Merrimack Rivers in string.
Students also sculpted maps, which allowed for explorations in geology, topography, and even engineering. Nineteenth-century photos of the geography classroom show a sandbox, perfect for recreating an Andes-ridged South America, or sculpting a volcano. Some enhanced existing maps with 3-D borders and symbolic additions—like this "Production Globe," from 1927, which features imports, exports, flora and fauna. Others modeled new infrastructure proposals, like this bridge over Lake Champlain.
While there are many pictures of these sculptures and map additions, the actual items were probably wadded up and reused. "I haven't run into anything that has survived that is clay," says Hale.
These days, much map innovation for the blind is focused on inventing and enhancing navigational aids—making smartphone-savvy tactile subway maps, or personalized, 3-D printed building and neighborhood layouts. But these contemporary inventors are relying on technologies, such as embossing and sculpting, which were first brought to bear decades or even centuries ago by dedicated students and teachers. Looking through the map archives, Hale says "just impressed by the innovation of it all." "They're excellent examples of universal design"—just what you want when showing people their place in the universe.
At 635 feet above sea level, Great Blue Hill is the highest hill on the Atlantic Ocean south of Maine. It is the origin of the Massachusett Indian tribe's name, roughly meaning "of the great hill" in various Algonquian translations. It came to be called Great Blue Hill after the granite on its eastern slopes appeared blue from ships on the ocean.
The hill is part of the Blue Hills Reservation, a park 10 miles southwest of downtown Boston. The 3.4-mile Great Blue Trail winds up the hill past the Eliot Memorial Bridge and Observation Tower—which offers a wide view of the Boston skyline—to the summit, the highest point in Norfolk County. At the summit you'll find Blue Hill Observatory, which has been studying climate weather since 1885.
The hill also caused a little bit of panic in 1980, thanks to an ill-advised April Fools joke at a Boston television station. On April 1, 1980, WNAC-TV ran a report that this hill had erupted, belching forth lava and ash. The station ran footage of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, along with some ominous-sounding words from President Carter. While a sign at the end of the report said April Fool, the local police were swamped with calls from panicked citizens asking about how to evacuate. The producer was then fired.
A rattlesnake in a toilet is high up on anyone's list of living nightmares, but for one family in Abilene, Texas, there was a bit more to worry about it.
That's because there were 23 more snakes hiding beneath their home—a family of their own, perhaps, that, until they were discovered last week, might have just been trying to get along.
The first snake was found by four-year-old Isaac McFadden, who spotted it while he "was starting his day as usual, by going to the restroom," according to KXVA.
He told his mother, Cassie McFadden, who promptly texted her husband Jason.
"Oh my gosh!" Jason replied. "Kill it. Get yard tools from the shed."
Which is exactly what Cassie did, with the help of a garden hoe, shovel, and branch cutters, according to the Post.
What happened next was a bit more horrifying, after a snake removal service came to the McFaddens' home for further inspections. Big Country Snake Removal found 23 more rattlesnakes, posting their findings on Facebook, in part as trophies, part cautionary tale.
In the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk, Virginia, a triangular lot too small to be a real park sits at the intersection of Hampton Boulevard and Princess Anne Road. You would never guess it by walking through this quiet, suburban neighborhood, but this is a mass grave.
These days Hampton Boulevard is a busy road leading to the Midtown Tunnel and the Port of Virginia, but long before trucks hauling containers from all over the world began rumbling past, this was rural area a couple miles outside of the City of Norfolk.
In summer 1855, a ship from West Indies accidentally brought along mosquitoes. Those insects brought yellow fever to Norfolk, and the disease spread quickly to the surrounding area. It's estimated that a third of the population of Norfolk died before the epidemic ended, including the city's optimistic young mayor. Thousands more fled the city.
With hundreds dying each day from a little-understood disease and gravediggers unable to keep up, mass graves became the preferred burial method. It's unknown how many were interred in the pit beneath this lot, but the number is likely in the dozens.
This part of Norfolk's history was nearly forgotten, but thanks to the efforts of a local Girl Scout troop a plaque commemorating the yellow fever epidemic and the grave was placed in the tiny park. The little lot and its marker bear silent witness to one devastating summer.
One look at a centuries-old mechanical silver swan, and Nico Cox was set on her path toward a career in tinkering with antique cogs and fixing chirping metal birds.
Cox grew up collecting clocks and watches as a kid; had she known she could grow up not only to help mend the Silver Swan, but to become a full-time antiquarian horologist, she would have started pursuing the career a lot earlier.
A pristine automaton now nearly 250 years old, the life-size Silver Swan now resides at a museum in northern England. Believed to have been built by inventor and mechanical polymath John Joseph Merlin, it has over 113 articulated silver rings in its neck, all detailed to look like feathers, above an array of silver that simulates the movement of water with tiny swimming fish. “In a way, it’s very vulnerable like a real swan—as a mechanical object, there’s nothing else like it,” says Cox.
Cox gained her skill set in the south of England at West Dean College, a horological conservation school, where she learned the ins and outs of 18th-century clockmaking seven days a week, from morning until late evening. (There is nowhere in the United States that offers any type of conservation horological training, she says.)
Making a clock from scratch is very, very difficult, requiring extensive training and mastery of many different elements, says Cox. Conservators are constantly borrowing from all different fields in science and technology to identify new forms of technology as well as use and reuse of materials, from Pyrex to fish bladders.
Cox, originally trained as a jeweler, studied the philosophy of metaphysics in college. It was then that she learned about art and technology of the Renaissance period, such as beautifully detailed automatons—“kind of the first artificial intelligence,” she says. It was a hands-on approach to metaphysical problems.
Part of the magic of automatons is the mechanical optical illusion—a ship moving in waves, a deer drinking water—all created through a network of tiny inner gears and disks. Recently, Cox has noticed a renewed interest in this historical, analog form of magic—and in particular, its tangibility. “People are needing a more grounded association with what they can see and feel,” she says. “They are craving that experience of holding something, looking at something.”
People come to share a feeling of stewardship, she says—a need to be part of the preservation of cultural heritage. “I definitely think that when people come to my studio, they're encountering a space they don’t think exists anymore—it’s a reminder that this is still here, and this is still relevant.”
Cox often introduces guilloché, also known as ornamental turning or engine turning, which is the mechanical engraving of metal that uses different gearing systems to generate complex drawings. (She even created a coloring book of designs created by guilloché.)
We asked Cox to describe some of her favorite pieces she’s worked on. Here’s what she showed us.
Pagoda clock
“Say I’m working on a chronometer pocket watch—that’s much more straight-forward than a pagoda clock.” In the case of the pagoda clock, recently documented to be from 1770, Cox was dealing with over 600 pieces—and that was just the outer case. Each of these pieces was photographed, measured, and documented, then entered into a spreadsheet, meticulously cleaned, wrapped, and stored away until everything could be put back together and the object’s movement restored.
The pagoda clock, a project for the National Trust, had been taken from China and returned to England at some point in history. Cox explains that there was a lot of evidence that the clock had been altered from its original state to play music the Chinese emperor would have liked; larger springs had been put into the mechanism so that music would run much faster to give it a jauntier rhythm and tempo.
When the clock came back to England, a clockmaker weighted down the fly (another name for a governor, which is used to govern the speed of a mechanism), which created two opposing forces and caused the wearing down of everything in between. Such research and clues allow experts like Cox to figure out the timeline of events for historic objects—and decide how to maintain the objects’ identity and integrity.
Tiny mechanical ship
One piece that Cox particularly enjoyed working on was a tiny mechanical ship. When she first received the ship as a project, the music box inside was so quiet you could barely hear it. Once she was able to resolve the issues causing the lack of sound, she discovered that the ship played a version of "God Save the King," the former national anthem of the United Kingdom. Since this melody was ever so slightly changed when each new monarch came into power, Cox was able to trace the age of the ship back to 1810 through its music (and a trip to the British library). She learned, too, that it was a commemorative piece made for the Battle of Trafalgar.
The tiny ship pitches and rolls in the waves, sitting in the center of a ripply plane of isinglassin front of a cliff. (Isinglass, which is made from the swim bladder of a fish, is often used in confectionary, brewing, as an adhesive.) Cox made a case for the delicate piece out of sterling silver. “It’s the only one we’ve seen like it,” she says.
Singing bird boxes
When you see a singing bird box, it simply looks like a tiny decoration—you’d never suspect that inside is a mechanism that allows the bird to pop out and actually sing a song to you.
Some of the earliest bird boxes go back to the late 1700s, though some very complex automata—mechanical ship galleons—go back to the late 1500s. Each tiny, individual feather (taken from hummingbirds) on the bird is trimmed, lacquered, and applied one by one to the body—for Cox, this constitutes an eight-hour job. Because there is still no convincing artificial substitute for bird feathers—and sometimes, the original materials are inaccessible (for example, ivory for a beak)—creativity and improvisation are constantly required.
The bellows are the lungs to the bird, supplying air to a slide whistle, articulated by levers that run along something called a “song cam”—which requires disks with very specific cutouts and profiles that dictate the pitch of the whistle and trill of the bird. The motion of the bird is mechanized to match its song to an exact degree—its body and head rotating left and right, its beak opening and closing, tail bobbing, wings flapping. Cox is currently writing a treatise on the bird’s bellows, the most complicated and intricate component of these boxes. While there exist two books dedicated to singing bird boxes, in general, the bellows themselves have not received much attention.
These bird boxes are Cox’s favorite small objects to work on. “They seem to delight people in a way that pretty much nothing else does,” she says. “Everyone loves the birds.”
Speaking of birds—that brings us back to the Silver Swan, the holy grail of automatons, and a bird that Cox has, since entering the world of antiquarian horology, touched with her very own fingers.
“It was just the most unbelievable thing—I actually got to go underneath it, laying on my back, seeing these little fish and glass rods,” says Cox, describing when she and her college tutor uncased the Silver Swan to check on the fish within the pool of glass water. “I know that doesn’t sounds like a huge job, but for me, having the privilege of being able to touch that, knowing that my hands were on that particular piece—that is something I will never forget,” she says. “It was the most meaningful moment in my whole horological career.”
Brittany Nicole Cox currently works as a horological conservator in Seattle, Washington. In addition to her private conservation studio, she has a workshop in South Seattle where she teaches classes and does new-making. This January, Cox offered several Atlas Obscura workshops to demonstrate the technology and technique (see more: Mechanical Magic: Intro to Engine Turning), and this June, she's hosting an event demonstrating how to create cardboard automata (see more: Cardboard Automata: Toy-Making Workshop).
In the preface of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the narrator describes meeting a mysterious man on a castle tour. As they walk through the hallways, his new friend begins talking about the Knights of the Round Table, speaking of ancient events as if they were yesterday.
Suddenly, the narrator feels he is walking back in time, too. "I seemed to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity," the narrator says. "How old, old, unspeakably old and faded and dry and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on!"
Unfortunately for Twain, no matter how fresh and lively his words remain, the trappings of his life are getting old, faded, shadowy and dusty. And now, according to the conservators at Hartford's Mark Twain House & Museum, a whole bunch of them are moldy as well.
The mold problem centers on the Mark Twain Museum, which was built next to the historic house in 2003. Thanks to subpar HVAC systems and a leaky roof, mold snuck into the museum's storage room sometime in 2015, the Hartford Courant reports. By now, it has crept into thousands of artifacts, including furniture, “metal, glass, and leather items,” and some Twain first editions. The house itself—where Twain and his family lived from 1874 to 1891—is relatively unaffected.
Thanks to insurance, state bonds, and grants from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the museum is embarking on a million-dollar mold removal project. They've already fixed the HVAC and the roof, and the next step—the big wipeoff—begins next week. Six people will take on the task, which will probably last three to four months. No word on whether they'll come after the shadows and specters next.
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.
Before Alaska became the 49th of the United States, it was colonized by Russia. The Russians didn't use Alaska for much, and their only outpost in the province was Sitka, used as a trading post. As it grew, it would need a religious center, so the missionary Bishop Innocent constructed a cathedral in the traditional Russian Orthodox style, the first of its kind in North America.
The church, designed by Bishop Innocent himself, was built between 1844 and 1848 out of spruce timber and sailcloth for insulation. As it was the first on the continent, St. Michael's was the seat of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of North America. It was the largest building in Alaska at that time, and would into the 20th century brought more development to the peninsula.
Though the congregation would mostly have been Russian expats and Scandinavian laborers upon the cathedral's opening, today it is largely an indigenous population. Liturgies are predominantly in English, but hymns are sung in Tlingit, Aleut, Yupik and Slavonic, the language of Russian Orthodox services, as well.
Sadly, the original building caught fire in 1966 and burnt to the ground. St. Michael's was the literal center of Sitka, and townspeople collected what artifacts they could of the demolished church, including precious icons. These were put on display in the new St. Michael's, an exact replica of the original with some modern architectural updates. Though better insulation has since been introduced, the walls of St. Michael's are still lined with sailcloth in memory of both the original church and those who have lost their lives at sea.
On the south shores of lake Issyk-Kul in Barskoon, in the the northeastern corner of Kyrgyzstan, is a giant face carved directly into a massive rock. Specifically, it is the giant head of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
While the giant face of the first man to journey into outer space, complete with Cosmonaut helmet, is carved directly from solid rock, the story behind its creation is less certain. It seems that Yuri visited the area just shortly after his historic spaceflight. He may have even stood on this very rock. At which point, everyone was so psyched about the whole first man in space thing, the boulder was promptly carved into his likeness. Later, in a meta tribute to the first monument, a second more standard bust was erected.
A local rumor has an more whimsical version of the rock's origin. The rumor says that this was in fact where Yuri touched down, a fact which was covered up by the USSR because it was nowhere near the intended landing spot. While almost certainly untrue (Yuri did eject from his capsule landing near the village of Smelovka, in the Ternovsky District) it makes for a wonderful origin story.
Last night, if you lived near Lake Michigan, and were awake at 1:30 a.m., and you looked up at the sky, you might've seen a bright flash and, also, at some point, heard a distinct boom.
Dashcam footage from a police car (seen above) captured the scene pretty clearly: A meteor, descending from the night sky, burning up in the Earth's atmosphere at a very high rate of speed.
According to the Associated Press, it's unclear what happened to the rock—whether it crashed into the lake or simply disintegrated in the sky.
But meteorologists tracked it for a time on radar, including one who told the AP that it also gave off a sonic boom, a fiery ball that turned out to be a fleeting wonder instead of the apocalypse.
Artist Roxanne Fonder Reeve never imagined that she would find herself dumpster-diving in the industrial areas of Seattle, Washington.
On drives around the city, she’ll pull over when she sees interesting objects people have cast away, collect them, and use them as building materials for a futuristic, architectural experiment.
She’s building a miniature Earthship in her driveway in Columbia City.
Earthships are a self-sufficient alternative to the conventional home. Instead of relying heavily on outside organizations to receive utilities, they allow people to live off-the-grid, independent of the economy and government.
“I’m not a hardy, outdoor construction type of person,” says Fonder Reeve, who calls herself 'the Queen of Trash Fairies,' “so all this collecting of old tires and pounding dirt with sledgehammers was unexpected.”
Since 2012, Fonder Reeve and volunteers in the community have been building Trash Studio, a sustainable, zero-waste structure made out of recycled and natural materials. It’s the first Earthship structure of its kind in Seattle. Inspired by the work of American architect Michael Reynolds in New Mexico, Fonder Reeve’s 120-square-foot driveway serves as a laboratory to showcase elements of Earthship architecture and bring awareness to the self-sustaining lifestyle.
“I think now, with climate change and economic insecurity, people—especially young people—are realizing we need to live differently, tread more lightly on the planet, and be much more capable and self-sufficient,” says Fonder Reeve. “Earthships embody that in every way.”
The concept of the Earthship was first described by Michael Reynolds in 1971. In Taos, New Mexico he began to build homes out of empty aluminum soda and beer cans, bottles, and tires. He completed his first Earthship home in 1988, and has continued his quest in spreading his sustainable living ideals globally.
While some may perceive Earthships as an outdated practice born out of 1970s environmentalism, Fonder Reeve believes the idea has never faded.
“I would say that the Earthship community is actually much stronger than it was in the 1970s,” she says. “I think it’s consistently grown because the design has changed from the ‘70s. It’s gotten better and better.”
Today there are Earthships in every state in America and in more than 20 countries, appearing as homesteads in Guatemala and an emergency shelter in post-earthquake Haiti. And people live in these Earthships. There’s an entire Earthship community in Taos that supports 70 residences and allows overnight visitors.
Earthship enthusiasts can attend the four-week Earthship Biotecture Academy in Taos. Over 1,300 students have been educated on the design principles, construction methods, and philosophy of Earthships. Founder of Earthship Seattle, Florian Becquereau, attended the academy in 2013 and spent six weeks living in an Earthship.
“You’re more in touch with the natural world,” he says. “You rely on what you get from nature so you have to be more conscious of what you use. You can’t leave everything on, like all your electric appliances, all the time. It’s wasteful anyways.”
In addition to being built entirely out of natural and recycled materials, these structures are powered by thermal, solar, and wind energy. Earthship architects have created systems to harvest water, produce food, and maintain sewage. Some Earthships now have vents to allow for air-conditioner use and greenhouse space that creates better temperature regulation, says Becquereau.
The creativity and ingenuity involved in creating these self-sustaining structures have given way to diverse architecture that is both functional and artistic. Windows perpendicular to the winter sun and roofs that can catch water are all design features that help make an Earthship work, while glass bottles and sculptures give a futuristic, alien aesthetic.
“The design has evolved over time, but the concept and philosophy is still the same,” says Becquereau. Now, Becquereau is leading the design of Trash Studio.
Becquereau and Fonder Reeve are building the Trash Studio without any money, using only materials left behind or donated to them. The added challenge forced them to find creative ways to construct the shed-sized Earthship, from packing 150 old tires with dirt to collecting clay unearthed from a housing project. The Trash Studio has a thick, curving two-foot-wide wall made out of 150 old tires packed with dirt. Each weighs between 200 and 300 pounds.
For insulation, Becquereau came up with a plan to use 400 old phonebooks in the two-foot-wide curving wall constructed out of the tires. But when they could only find five, Becquereau had to improvise. Instead, they used Styrofoam boxes that were being discarded by a medical facility.
“It’s a little bit of planning and making requests, and a little bit of just creatively using whatever happens to be around,” says Fonder Reeve.
The Trash Studio is an on-going construction project. Currently, Fonder Reeve is designing an intricate mosaic for the exterior of the structure, coming up with different ways to attach objects to the cob walls. They are also hoping to install an oven to accompany their biochar stove to cook for the volunteers. However, the size of Fonder Reeve’s driveway limits how much they can build.
“It would be nice eventually to have a full-on Earthship, maybe a 2,000-square-feet center well-placed in Seattle,” Becquereau says, but for now projects like Trash Studio is a first step in the right direction.
“Our current housing system is not sustainable, so I don’t have a lot of faith that it will be in tact in 50 years,” Becquereau says. ““I know that Earthships are gaining more and more popularity. More and more people are looking for alternatives and Earthships play a big part in that.”
Once a thriving coal mining town of over 3,000, What Cheer, Iowa stands today at a dwindling population of 646. Largely abandoned, What Cheer’s rusting infrastructure today seems incongruous with its peculiar name. But a deeper look into its etymology reveals an absurd and widely disputed naming history.
What Cheer was founded in 1865 under the name of Petersburg, named after its creator, Peter Britton, who staked his claim for 14 acres of Iowan land in the mid-19th century. But the Post Office rejected this toponym, forcing a name change December 1, 1879. "What Cheer" was chosen by store owner Joseph Andrews, and his exact reasoning is unknown to this day.
There are a wide variety of theories as to how What Cheer was the name of choice. Some believe that it stems from the 15th century British saying “what cheer with you,” often simplified to "wotcher." Or perhaps, some believe, it originated when a Scottish coal miner exclaimed “what cheer!” upon striking it rich.
A more elaborate theory proposes that Andrews got the toponym from the saying of "what cheer, Netop" (translating to 'what cheer, friend') that was popularized in his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. The phrase was first uttered by the Narragansett Native Americans, who combined English with their native language to greet the British colonists.
This strange naming history is a source of life and uniqueness in a decaying town. The city clerk commonly receives letters from across the nation asking for the meaning behind the name. In addition to its unique etymology, What Cheer is also home to a two-story museum, the Masonic Opera House, built in 1893, and the What Cheer Flea Market, which operates on Saturdays and Sundays from May 1 to October 4. Sounds like quite a cheerful time!
The first of many myths involving a divine grail was written more than eight centuries ago. People have been fascinated with the potential whereabouts of the holy treasure every since, making it one of history’s most enduring legends. As the stories evolved and fractured over time, the lure of the Holy Grail persisted and expanded, muddying historical events with religious beliefs, Arthurian literature, wild conspiracy theories, and pop culture epics.
While the Holy Grail is generally thought of as mythology, some believe the vessel is a real object that still exists today. The question is, where?
There’s no way to know the answer to that age-old curiosity, especially since there’s no consensus on what the Holy Grail even is. The sacred object has variously been described as a vessel, dish, chalice, golden bowl, platter, and silver basin, imbued in Celtic myths with miraculous powers. Some camps define it as the cup that was used to collect the blood and sweat of Christ during the Crucifixion. More often it’s conflated with the Holy Chalice used to serve the wine at the Last Supper.
Over the centuries there have been copious religious treasures claimed to be some form of the coveted grail, from the time of the Crusades, when such holy relics were a highly lucrative trade, up to present day, when even a rumored trace of the famous cup can attract grail-seeking tourists to a locale. One of the most popular stops on the grail hunt today is Spain’s Valencia Cathedral, which displays an ancient relic that historians and treasure hunters alike believe to be the most likely contender for the Holy Grail, if it does indeed exist.
Kept in the golden Chapel of the Holy Grail and guarded behind glass, the Valencia Chalice doesn’t look like something from the first century. The holy part is specifically the cup at the top, carved from a chocolatey-red agate. (The base, handles, and jewels were added centuries later to add a medieval flare).
In this theory, the holy cup used at Christ’s Last Supper was taken by Saint Peter to Rome, and some time later by a Vatican soldier to Spain, where it landed in Valencia’s Gothic cathedral. This possible history is based less on literary tales and more on archaeological authenticity: The chalice was carbon-dated to the period between the third century BC and second century AD, and manufactured in the Middle East, making it possible it could have been in the possession of Jesus and his disciples.
Before the cup made it to Valencia, however, it had a stop-off at the ancient monastery of San Juan de la Peña, “Saint John of the Cliff”.
Built between 920 and 1190 CE, the highly fortified monastery has remained one of the safest, most secure places to store booty of any sort for well over a millennium, due in no small part to the extremely inconvenient cliffside the structures were built directly into. The story holds that the Roman soldier that acquired the Holy Chalice took it to Spain where it was hidden at this monastery to protect it from an upcoming Moorish invasion.
Yet another school of thought as to the Holy Grail’s whereabouts stems from medieval literature, most famously the tales of King Arthur and his valiant Knights of the Round Table.
The first literary mention of a wondrous grail was by the poet Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th century. But it became connected to Christianity, and thus holy, in a slightly later legend by Robert de Boron, which centers around Joseph of Arimathea, the disciple said to have collected the blood and sweat of Christ on the cross before burying him in Joseph’s own tomb.
This is the story that first equated the grail and the Last Supper chalice, which Joseph is said to have taken to Glastonbury, where he established the first Christian church in Britain. De Boron’s legend was incorporated into the Arthurian romances (the Knights’ Round Table was modeled after the Grail Table that Joseph built in remembrance of the Last Supper) and elaborated on.
According to the tales, Joseph hid the grail in a secret place at Chalice Well, an ancient spring at the foot of Glastonbury Tor. Some believe the red color of the water that flows from the well, also known as the Red Spring, represents either the blood of Christ or the rusty iron nails used at the Crucifixion.
Throughout the Middle Ages, myth and reality started to blur as the grail romances were repeated as historical fact. Today, Glastonbury’s history is steeped in legend. The Tor itself is sometimes claimed to be the mythical Avalon, and the burial site of King Arthur and his Queen Guinevere, though some archaeologists say this latter claim was created by the abbey monks in the 12th century after a financial crisis.
The fascination with questing for the elusive grail took hold in the Arthurian legends, with heroes like Lancelot and Galahad traveling around Britain in search of the holy cup at the mysterious “Grail Castle.” The Grail Castle in these literary tales is entirely mythical, but that hasn’t stopped speculation over what real-world medieval structures it may be referencing. One such candidate is the castle at Montségur, which today is a gorgeous mountaintop ruin perched 3,900 feet high in the mountains of France.
The fortress ruins at Montségur today are located on the site of a former 13th-century castle that was once the center of the Cathar church, a Christian sect with dualist beliefs—meaning they considered there to be one good god and one evil god. It is said to have temporarily housed sacred treasures including the Holy Grail. Montségur is believed to be the Holy Grail castle mentioned in Wolfram Eschenbach’s grail epic Parzival (“Percival”), in which the grail was taken from the castle when it was conquered by the royal French army.
The medieval legends of Joseph and Arthur also became entwined with the mysterious Knights Templar, the ancient religious order that has long been rumored to be the guardians of the Holy Grail.
The order formed in 1120 as a small group of monks in Jerusalem, headquartered at Solomon’s Temple, not far from where Jesus was entombed. It’s believed the knights dug around the temple looking for religious artifacts, and one theory is that they discovered the holy cup in the process. It’s thought the Templars then squirreled it away to Britain when they were persecuted after the first Crusade, and have been hiding it ever since in various secret locations throughout Europe and North America.
The centuries-long mystery surrounding the Templars has been perfect fodder for grail-seekers over the years, leaving room for speculation, stories, and conspiracies. Some believe the Knights themselves may have encouraged the lore by promoting or even writing many of the Arthurian legends about the quest for the Holy Grail.
After the Renaissance the grail stories fell out of vogue—temporarily. The legend was brought back into popularity by Richard Wagner’s dramatic opera Parsifal in 1882, paving the way for a new flood of grail fascination in the modern era, which materialized in everything from Nazi rituals to Monty Python to Indiana Jones to Dan Brown’s bestselling book and subsequent film The Da Vinci Code (which draws heavily from the 1982 book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”)
The Da Vinci Coderesuscitated the myth that the Knights Templar secretly hid the Holy Grail under Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. (Although in this alternative history the grail is interpreted as the remains of Mary Magdalene, who, in Dan Brown's universe, was Jesus’ wife.)
This tiny 15th-century chapel is a hotbed for conspiracy theorists and occultists. It had been linked with the Templars, Freemasons, and Illuminati, in part because its interior is full of mysterious sculptural carvings that range from Nordic pagan figures to Christian images to the apparent seal of the Knights Templar, making up an iconography that’s one of the more puzzling of the European Heritage.
The myth goes that a small group of Templars flocked into Scotland with the coveted treasure, then hid their gold and holy relics, the Holy Grail among them, in several locations including the vault of Rosslyn Chapel. Though this has been debunked by skeptics, it’s one of the most popular grail theories today.
It’s worth wondering, though: What if the Knights Templar never did find the grail in Jerusalem? While less enticing, this reasonably logical course of events could mean the holy cup is still buried somewhere in the extensive network of tunnels and sewers stretching underneath the holy city.
One of these ancient tunnels, built more than 2,000 years ago to support the height of the Western Wall surrounding the Temple on the Mount, was only unearthed as recently as the 19th century. Archaeologists are still excavating the tunnels under the wall, discovering some ancient artifacts in the process. Some even believe the Ark of the Covenant is still hidden beneath the Temple Mount and—who knows—maybe the Holy Grail as well.
Of course, even if the cup is out there somewhere, there would likely be no way to prove it is the Holy Grail. And that’s part of the beauty of it: As long as the fascination holds, the myth, and the quest itself, may continue indefinitely.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Back in 2010, Graham Barker, an Australian librarian, announced that after spending 26 years collecting belly-button lint —basically because he was bored and curious—he had set a Guinness World Record.
Barker's collection (you can see it in pictures here) is pretty gross, but his long-running experiment does speak to a basic human interest in our navels, which are one of the few things that separate us, from, say, androids. Or, as Barker put it: “The raw material is worthless but as a unique world record collection and a piece of cultural heritage, of debatable merit, it has some curiosity value,” he explained then in an interview with the Daily Mail.
But belly buttons are more than just a physical quirk, they are also one of the few body parts to have inspired a phrase, and perhaps even a philosophy: navel-gazing, or the act of contemplating yourself too much.
Navels are all about lint and self-interest, in other words, something Barker, for one, managed to combine into the same pursuit.
Barker’s experiment might have been amateur, but actual scientists have devoted a fair amount of energy to uncovering the mysteries of belly buttons, like why, exactly, all that lint gets stuck there in the first place.
It turns out, for example, that men are more likely than woman to get belly button lint, according to research done by Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, a popular Australian scientist who won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2002 for a far reaching study of nearly 5,000 belly buttons. The reason? Men are more likely to have hair on their stomachs. Kruszelnicki also adds that there’s a certain reason why specific colors usually pop up. “The reason it is usually blue is that we mostly wear blue or grey trousers, often jeans, and when these rub against the body, the fibers often end up finding their way to the navel,” Kruszelnicki told the Telegraph in 2009.
Which also means, if you buy a new undershirt, plan for a little extra belly lint. A University of Vienna researcher figured this out by analyzing his own belly button. Seems like a reasonable use of his time.
On the more useful research front, a 2013 study in the British Journal of Surgery finds that if you’re going to get an appendectomy, the best spot to get one could be through the navel, because the end result limits the amount of noticeable scarring.
And, finally, one Duke University study said that the placement of a navel can be a key to whether you’ll be successful or even any good at sports, since the placement of the navel acts as your center of gravity.
Still, a body's belly button—essentially an umbilical scar—might just be a physical oddity without a widely known cultural concept tied to it, which, in this case, is omphaloskepsis, or navel-gazing. The word itself has roots in Greek, and while originally it was seen as something like meditation, it's now something much more banal, even disparaging—shorthand for overthinking, thinking of nothing in particular besides oneself (like, perhaps, this article.)
But how did belly buttons get involved at all? A large part of the reason can be blamed on Robert Alfred Vaughan, who made the first printed reference to gazing at one's navel in the 1856 book Hours With the Mystics. In a section of the book highlighting monks around Greece’s Mount Athos, he wrote:
“It seems that some of the monks (called, if I mistake not, Hesychasts) held that if a man shut himself up in a corner of his cell, with his chin upon his breast, turning his thoughts inward, gazing towards his navel, and centering all the strength of his mind on the region of the heart; and, not discouraged by at first perceiving only dark- ness, held out at this strange inlooking for several days and nights, he would at length behold a divine glory, and see him- self luminous with the very light which was manifested on Mount Tabor. They call these devotees Navel-contemplators. A sorry business! All the monks, for lack of aught else to do, were by the ears about it, either trying the same or reviling it.”
So basically, because some guy mocked a bunch of monks for focusing on their navels in a religious sense, we’ve got a phrase about staring at one’s belly button.
Elsewhere, though, belly buttons get more respect, like in yoga, where one's navel chakra—a spot on the spine directly behind your navel—is considered an important energy center. Which is certainly a better fate than the target of all your self-absorbed thoughts.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
There are many model ships on display at the U.S. Naval Academy, but perhaps none as special as the U.S.S. Agerholm overlooking the main lobby.
This 16-foot long model is a cutaway that shows the exterior on one side, and reveals the complicated interior layout on the other. David Wooley and William Clarke write in Warships and Warship Modeling that “The Agerholm is probably the most detailed model ever built.”
The World War II-era miniature destroyer was pieced together by the Gibbs and Cox Company model shop in the 1940s. The model Agerholm cost $1.4 million at a time when a single family suburban home went for about $7,000.
Gibbs and Cox was and still is a leading naval architecture firm behind an estimated 60 percent of the present-day surface combatant fleet. In the words of Rear Admiral Harold Bowen, “Nowhere . . . did the art of model building exceed in excellence its development at Gibbs and Cox.”
Models like the Agerholm had a dual purpose. First, they actually were a part of the design process—modeling was an important step that took place alongside blueprinting to work out just how everything fit together.
In Bowen’s assessment, Gibbs models like the Agerholm “were so accurate that it was safe for a draftsman to obtain dimensions from them, and it was much easier for the pipe shop to lay out its piping from the model than to construct it by laying templates in the actual vessel.”
The Navy recognized modeling as an innovative best practice and at one point actually required that shipbuilders supply a model. The Algerholm’s second purpose had nothing to with actual ship building, though: It was about public relations. Admirals were spending heaps of money on these warships and loved the idea of being able to show off their sexy hardware with museum quality models.
