Today on Saint Florian, if there is a big wind, there are many fires that year. The holiday is Květoslav.
Today is International Firefighters Day (via Florian) and World Nudist Gardening Day.
Today, 653 years ago, after the Gothic reconstruction, the church of St. Jiljí consecrated by Archbishop Jan Oček of Vlašimi in the presence of King Charles, his wife Elizabeth of Pomerania and son Václav IV.
609 years ago today, the Council of Constance definitively declares the teachings of John Wycliffe and John Hus to be heretical.
398 years ago today, P. Minuit, governor of a Dutch province in America lands on an island in the mouth of the Hudson River. Later he buys it from the natives for 60 guilders and establishes New Amsterdam, today New York, on it.
309 years ago today, the first folding umbrella was made in Paris.
222 years ago today, lifelong military service was abolished in the Habsburg Monarchy.
210 years ago today, King Ferdinand VII of Spain. annuls the Constitution adopted the year before, thus returning an absolutist monarchy to Spain.
And on Elba, Napoleon begins his stay in exile. He won’t last long…
105 years ago today, MR Štefánik died in a plane crash.
100 years ago today, the VIII. summer Olympic Games.
And in Beijing, students gather in Tiananmen Square to demonstrate against the Treaty of Versailles, by which the former German colony of Kiaochow was assigned to Japan instead of China.
Today, 86 years ago, Carl von Ossietzky, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935, who was mainly awarded for exposing Germany’s violation of the Versailles Peace Treaty by training illegal German armed forces in the Soviet Union, dies as a result of his imprisonment in a concentration camp. One of the few brave actions of the Nobel Peace Committee…
71 years ago today, Ernest Hemingway wins the Pulitzer Prize for his novella The Old Man and the Sea.
45 years ago today, Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain.
34 years ago today, Latvia declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
31 years ago today, the Constitution of the Principality of Andorra came into force, replacing the arrangement valid for the previous 715 years.
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