Topsy (elephant)

General Tomoyuki Yamashita

The Great Bath. The Roman bath itself is substantially intact but everything above the level of the pillar bases is of a later date.

Sworn virgin in Rapsha, Hoti , Ottoman Albania , 1908

Heracles , wearing his characteristic lion-skin, club in right hand, leash in left, presenting a three-headed Cerberus, snakes coiling from his snouts, necks and front paws, to a frightened Eurystheus hiding in a giant pot. Caeretan hydria…

The phrase banana republic was coined in 1904 by American writer O. Henry .

Ecclesiastes 3 in the Leningrad Codex

Fengdu Ghost City

Topsy (elephant)

Coney Island's Topsy, a circus elephant who had killed three men, was electrocuted before 1,500 paying spectators on January 4, 1903. Thomas Edison's company filmed it. The footage survives.

Bessus

Bessus killed Darius III with a javelin, stitched on the royal title 'Artaxerxes V,' and lasted two years before Alexander's men pinned him to a tree and sliced off his nose and ears.

Yamashita's gold

Rogelio Roxas claimed to have found General Yamashita's buried hoard and showed a golden Buddha to prove it; he was then arrested, tortured, and died in custody. The gold has never appeared.

Aquae Sulis

At the sacred spring of Sulis Minerva in Bath, worshippers scratched curses onto lead sheets, rolled them tight, and threw them into the 46°C water. One reads: 'May he who stole my gloves rot before he names them.'

Balkan sworn virgins

Albanian women who swore lifelong virginity before twelve village elders were legally reclassified as men — permitted to carry rifles, own land, and head households, sometimes for sixty years.

Cerberus

Greeks slipped honey cakes called meli into the mouths of their dead to bribe Cerberus at the underworld gate. Virgil's Aeneas carries one. The three-headed dog's middle head was considered the most dangerous.

Banana republic

United Fruit Company owned 42% of Guatemala's land by 1950, paid zero taxes, and orchestrated a CIA-backed coup when a president dared to tax unused fields. The term was coined in 1901.

Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes uses the word 'hebel'—breath, vapor, nothing—38 times in 12 chapters. Its conclusion that all human effort is meaningless is so extreme the rabbis debated pulling it from the canon entirely.

Gates of hell

In 1971, a Soviet drilling rig collapsed into a natural gas pocket in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert. Engineers lit it to burn off the gas. It has not gone out in over 50 years.