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Athens is the only capital city in Europe where the air is more polluted outside than inside.

In AD 380, the Catholic Church issued a law specifically forbidding anyone to read the Bible whilst naked.

There is a plant called Hooker’s Lips (Psychotria Elata).

In 2006, later Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

Since 1963, the reverse of the United States ten-dollar-bill has stated “In God we trust”. Between 2000 and 2017, the reverse of the Bank of England ten-pound-note has portrayed Charles Darwin.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Leap Day Trivia

Throughout the ages, the leap day, or the 29th of February, has driven people from all over the world to rather odd behaviour – for one reason or another. Here is a selection of curious or special leap day related facts:

• Julius Caesar introduced the first leap year around 46 BCE.
• In Ireland, February 29 is called Bachelor’s Day, when women are allowed to propose to men. It is held that Queen Margaret of Scotland began the tradition in 1288. If a man refused the proposal, he would be fined a kiss, a silk dress or 12 pairs of gloves.
• One in five engaged couples in Greece will plan to avoid getting married in a leap year. They believe it is bad luck.
• In Taiwan, married daughters traditionally return home during the leap month as it is believed the lunar month can bring bad health to parents. Daughters bring pig trotter noodles to wish them good health and good fortune.
• In Finland, the tradition is that if a man refuses a woman’s proposal on leap day, he should buy her the fabrics for a skirt.
• According to the BBC, the chances of having a birthday on a leap day are about one in 1,461.
• According to the New York Daily News, in modern times, at least two women have given birth to three leap day babies.
• The Honor Society of Leap Year Babies is a club for people born on the 29th of February. More than 10,000 people worldwide are members.
• On February 29, 1946, in Tokyo, the February 26 Incident ends.
• In France, since 1980, a satirical newspaper entitled La Bougie du Sapeur is published only in a leap year, on February 29, making it a quadrennial publication and the least frequently published newspaper in the world.
• On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first black woman to win an Oscar. She was awarded for her role in Gone With the Wind.
• According to the World Heritage Encyclopaedia, the eighth premier of Tasmania, James Milne Wilson, was born in 1812 and died in 1880, both on February 29.

Frasier: Yeah dad, you should go.
Martin: Ah, Montana’s too far away.
Frasier: Well dad, his birthday only comes around once every four years. As a matter of fact, this day only comes around every four years. You know, it’s like a free day, a gift. We should do something special, be bold!  It’s leap year, take a leap!
Martin: You know, I was just about to say the same thing to you.
[…]
Frasier: Dad, Jimmy’s already sixteen. How many more birthdays is he going to have?
Martin: [smiles] You know, I would kind of hate not being there when Jimmy brings out the big ham.
– Frasier Season 3, Episode 16; “Look Before You Leap” [No. 66]

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Sometime around 1500 BC, after being hit by a terrible earthquake, the residents of Crete tried to calm the earth by lowering a large basket of olives into a well.

About one in four animals on earth is a beetle.

In Tanzania there are 125,000 people for every doctor, compared to one doctor for every 156 people in Cuba.

Asteroid 1227 is called geranium.

Novelist Joseph Conrad’s real name was Teodor Józef Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski. He became fluent in English only in his 20s. He never lost his Polish accent.

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Exonym

Exonyms are names used in a particular language to refer to a foreign nation or country; they can be completely different from the name that country uses (in its particular language) to qualify itself. Quite often, they can be of interest from a historical point of view because they can be surprisingly conservative. The exonym is sometimes preserved for hundreds of years after the political or ethnic entity it originally referred to ceased to be.

One of the best-known cases is Germany. Many nations share their linguistic origin with the German term Deutschland, even though they have sometimes assumed a quite different form i.e. Duitsland, Tedesco or Tyskland – from the Proto-Germanic Þeudiskaz. The Slavic peoples call the Germans Niemcy or similar which means ‘a mute’, someone who does not speak Slavic. The French and Spanish, among others, employ the name of the Alamanni tribe. The English, Italians and Russians, to name a few, use a derivative of the Latin Germania or Greek Γερμανία. And the Finns and Baltic states either refer to the name of the Saxon tribe or employ a word of unknown origin, like the Latvian Vacija or the Lithuanian Vokietija.

Consider these other cases:

• The Latvians call Russia Krievija, referring to an ancient Slavic tribal union, the Krivichi;
• The Turks call Greece Yunanistan and the Greeks Yunan, another very old exonym which probably has for origin the word ‘Ionia’, that is the Greek region on the coast of Asia Minor;
• In a kind of an opposite logic, Russia was called Muscovy by the Poles, and then by other Europeans as a way to deny the claim of the Moscow-based government on the totality of Russian lands;
• The Japanese used to call China Tang even hundreds of years after the end of that dynasty. In the late 19th- and early 20th century they resorted to an even older and more obscure word Shina, which had the advantage of being similar to the equivalent Western terms.

Also, there is something particularly curious about Roman exonyms; it seems the Romans gave completely random names to any people they encountered. A people that called itself Rasenna received the name Tuscans or Etruscans. The inhabitants of Carthage became Punics, and the Hellenes or Achaeans were Greeks. Celts became Galli or the Gauls.

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”
– George Bernard Shaw

Greek New Year

Contrary to modern time beliefs, celebrating the advent of the New Year on January 1st in the cold and the dead nature of winter time is among the most universal celebratory traditions.

The custom of marking the beginning of the New Year is 4,000 years old and has its roots in ancient Babylon in Mesopotamia. From the very ancient city of Babylon these customs were passed on to ancient Greece.

Ancient Greeks were not that much into celebrating the New Year rather than the “sickle of the new moon” upon recognizing the visible new moon as the beginning of each month, a custom held in honour of Selene, Apollon Noumenios, Hestia and the other household Gods, also known as noumenia.

In Athens, however, there was an epigraph found reading of a religious ceremony that used to take place on the beginning of the New Year, or better said on the last day of the outgoing year, which involved only a small number of people. The celebration was a sacrifice of the outgoing officials to Zeus the Saviour and Athena the Saviour, which aimed at ensuring the blessings and favour of the two gods for the coming new year.

“The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it” – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

In modern-day Greece, one will traditionally find a Greek family around the dinner table with an extra pacesetting for St. Basil; people eating vassilopita, a is sweet and savoury bread that is baked especially for the occasion with a gold or silver coin put in it; people hanging onions or pomegranates on to their front door to symbolise fertility; people collecting mossy stones as a good omen or talisman; and people practising kalo podariko, that is, the tradition of First Footing – it is believed that the first person who sets foot inside a home in the New Year determines the kind of luck that the household will experience the rest of the year; therefore, it is believed that a First Footer should be a person with a kind and loving heart, and as such, a child is often made a First Footer as they are often associated with having pure, innocent and honest hearts.

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The official US State sport of South Dakota, Wyoming and Texas is Rodeo.

“Waltzing Matilda” is not about dancing, nor about a girl called Matilda. It is Aussie slang for drifting around the outback on foot with a bedroll – your ‘matilda’ – slung around your shoulder.

The Greeks introduced the olive to Italy around 600 BCE.

The 1982 American comedy series Police Squad!, which starred Leslie Nielsen and was produced by ABC, was cancelled after just six episodes. Then-ABC entertainment president Tony Thomopoulos said “Police Squad! was cancelled because the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it.” What Thomopoulos meant was that the viewer had to actually pay close attention to the show in order to get much of the humour, while most other TV shows did not demand as much effort from the viewer. In its annual Cheers and Jeers issue, TV Guide magazine quite rightly called the explanation for the cancellation “the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series.”

Catherine the Great was famous for making five mistakes in a word containing only three letters. Not being a native Russian speaker, she once misspelled the word ‘eщё’ as ‘истчо’.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

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According to the Greek Historian Herodotes, king Xerxes I of Persia had the Dardanelles (also known as the Hellespont) whipped three hundred times and branded with red-hot iron rods for the crime of ‘breaking two bridges’. He also had the architects beheaded.

37% of all the people in the world are either Indian or Chinese.

The longest English name on record is Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. He was a captain in the British Army who died during the First World War in 1917, aged 32.

Bambi, Dizzy, Squiffy, Puddin, Lord Cupid, The Blubberer, Jack Boot, Hubble-Bubble, The Coroner, Stalin, and The Great She-Elephant are all nicknames for British Prime Ministers.

When a Mormon church elder told writer and comedian Stephen Fry he would be reunited with his entire family after death if he become a Mormon, he replied “What happens if you’re good?” He was asked to leave Salt Lake City immediately.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

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The first armoured cars (commissioned by Winston Churchill in WWI) were Rolls Royces fitted with three and a half tons of armour plate and a machine gun.

Flag of Greece also known as the ‘Sky Blue-White’

A bullet fired straight up in the air loses about 90% of its speed on the way back down, giving it the energy of a brick dropped from a height of about four feet.

The nine blue and white stripes of the Greek flag stand for the nine syllables of the slogan of the war of independence from Turkey, Eleutheria i Thanatos ‘Freedom or Death’.

On the night that Alexander the Great was born, a man from Ephesus called Eratostratus, or Herostratus, or Erostratus, burned down of the Temple of Diana – one of the Seven Wonders of the World – so that no one would ever forget his name.

The 3rd Infantry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion is stationed in the town of Kourou, French Guiana. Ironically, its base is in the Forget neighbourhood.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts