1887 L.S. Lowry born
All Saints Day
Day of the Innocents (Mexico/Haiti remember the firstborn males killed by Herod, mainly with pranks and flour fights (Alicante))
Independence Day (Antigua and Barbuda, from UK in 1981)
Day of the Bulgarian Revival Leaders – see 22nd September
D Hamilton Jackson Day/Liberty Day/Bull and Bread Day (US Virgin Islands remember man who helped them gain workers’ rights and free press under Denmark’s rule)
Hallowe’en
Huesos de Santos
In Cornwall it’s called Allantide and children have apples under their pillows to dream of the future or for good luck.
The Scots used to peel an apple in one long strip and throw it over their shoulder to see the first letter of their future love’s name.
Also today:
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1941 – Mount Rushmore completed
2000 – Expedition 1 launched to the International Space Station. Before the International Space Station, we had the Mir space station ran by Russia. We’ve had humans continuously orbiting the earth since 1986! You can find out when to see it in orbit here, and you can see its view here. See a quite long video tour of its insides here. This kindergarten has a wonderful space play area.
Germany Day of Reformation – see 3rd October
Nevada (founded 1864): Las Vegas, Hoover Dam
Anniversary of the Declaration of the Slovak Nation – see 17th July.
Mischief Night (USA; also celebrated 4 November in Yorkshire)
Diwali: (2016) The BBC has the Diwali story for kids here. Make a rangoli or a paper lantern. Maybe make chai tea or pumpkin halwa. I love this rangoli made of grains and pulses and I love this Diwali nature table, Five days long:
Day 1 the cow and calf are worshiped.
2. birthday of Dhanvantari, the Physician of Gods;
3. the day the demon Narakasura was killed by Krishna – an incarnation of Vishnu. It signifies the victory of good over evil and light over darkness. Wikipedia: “Hindus wake up before dawn, have a fragrant oil bath and dress in new clothes. They light small lamps all around the house and draw elaborate kolams /rangolis outside their homes. They perform a special puja with offerings to Krishna or Vishnu, as he liberated the world from the demon Narakasura on this day. It is believed that taking a bath before sunrise, when the stars are still visible in the sky is equivalent to taking a bath in the holy Ganges. After the puja, children burst firecrackers heralding the defeat of the demon. As this is a day of rejoicing, many will have very elaborate breakfasts and lunches and meet family and friends.”;
4. Lakshmi Puja: Hindus worship Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Ganesh, the God of auspicious beginnings, and then light little clay pots in the streets and homes to welcome prosperity and well-being.
5. Govardhan Puja: Krishna – an incarnation of god Vishnu – defeated Indra and lifted Govardhana hill to save his kinsmen and cattle from rain and floods. Large quantities of food are decorated symbolising the Govardhan hill. Also the victory of Vishnu in his dwarf form Vamana over the demon-king Bali, who was pushed into the patala. Men present gifts to their wives on this day.
6.Yama Dwitiya: Yama, lord of Death, visited his sister Yami (the river Yamuna). Yami welcomed Yama with an Aarti and they had a feast together. Yama gave a gift to Yami while leaving as a token of his appreciation. Brothers visit their sisters’ place on this day and usually have a meal there, and also give gifts to their sisters
Turkey Republic Day
Most of modern Turkey lies on the Anatolian Peninsula, one of the oldest permanent settlements in the world. It is thought that all Indo-European languages came from here. The European bit, the Eastern Thrace, is also pretty old, and had Neolithic farming in 6,000 B.C.
The Hattians and the Hurrians lived here until the Hittites came along (I know, it’s great) and founded the Hittite Empire (18th-13th century B.C.!) A load of others invaded, Assyrians, Phrygians, Cimmerians, etc., but when the Greeks came and founded Byzantium in 657 B.C. it started to get interesting.
In the 6th-5th centuries B.C. Turkey was part of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which fell to Alexander the Great in 334 B.C. The Battle of Troy was fought here, and the architectural site is a big tourist attraction.
Then it became part of the Roman empire, by which time the Anatolian language had been replaced by Greek. In 324, Constantine I chose Byzantium as the Roman capital (which is why it became called Constantinople) and when the Empire was divided, Byzantium became the capital of its eastern half.
In the 11th century, Seljuks (Muslim Turks) invaded and introduced Turkish and Islam. They were then defeated by the Mongols, and one Turkish king who remained, Osman I, founded the dynasty of Ottoman Turks who would rule the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire took over the Byzantine Empire in 1453 when it took Constantinople. Portugal turned out to be the empire’s main rivals for dominance over the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean.
The Empire peaked under Suleiman the Magnificent (look at that turban….)
Its rival now was the Holy Roman Empire, as the Ottomans marched on through the Balkans to Poland-Lithuania. In the 19th century it began to decline; Russia took the Caucasus, and Muslim Turks settled in the Balkans mainly fled back to Constantinople.
The Ottoman Empire entered WWI and was defeated. During the war the Ottomans decided to get rid of the Armenians, and while the Armenian men were mainly fighting for their country abroad, the women, children and elderly were sent on death marches into the Syrian desert without food or water. 1.5 million Armenians were killed and the word ‘genocide’ was coined in 1943 to describe this mass murder. Turkey does not recognise it as genocide yet.
After WWI you’d think everyone would have a break, but actually the Allies occupied Constantinople and insisted (in the Treaty of Sèvres) that the Ottoman Empire hand over all non-Turkish land and divide it between (British-owned) Palestine and (French-owned) Syria.
So then the Turkish War of Independence booted them out in 1922, and we all signed the Treaty of Lausanne, which defined nearly all of Turkey’s borders except with Iraq, but didn’t give the Kurds their own homeland, which is why they’re always kind of in the wrong country.There was also some weird population exchange, wherein Greece sent over 380,000 Muslims in return for 1.1 million Greeks.
Mustafa Kemal, who had led the war of independence, became the first president of the Republic. They managed to stay out of most of WWII, and they got a lot of economic support from America’s Truman Doctrine so they didn’t fall into Russia’s hands afterwards.
Cyprus had a bit of a wobble in 1974, when a military coup installed the dictator Nikos Sampson who wanted union with Greece. Turkey invaded, took the north of Cyprus, and by 1983 this had declared itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which only Turkey recognises. Turkey itself still has problems with some separatist Kurds who keep terrorising people.
Their national sport is oiled wrestling….Try making Turkish delight, or buy some and have a Turkish tea party, with coffee (use Nesquik or dandelion and burdock for the kids?) in a pan or tea in tulip-shaped glasses.
Cambodia Coronation Day – see 9th November
1893 Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique premieres
1915 Strauss conducts first performance of Eine Alpensinfonie
International Animation Day – can you make one?
Greek National Day (Ochi Day)
Greece’s official name is the Hellenic Republic but no one calls it that.
It was home to the first advanced civilisations in Europe, the Cycladic, Minoan and Mycenian civilisations, from 3200 B.C.
The first Olympic Games occurred in 776 BC, and Homer’s Iliad (an epic about the Trojan war) and the Odyssey (an epic about Odysseus’s adventures around magical Greek islands) around then too.
Their architecture, philosophy, maths, drama, science and literature were all ground-breaking and still influence the West today. They invented democracy, for cripes’ sakes.
The Persian Empire invaded in 500 BC, but Philip II and his son Alexander III, or Alexander the Great, pushed them out again. Alexander the Great’s empire dissolved after his death into lots of little empires.
Greece then became a protectorate of the Roman Empire, which greatly admired its culture, and Greece helped with the spread of Christianity as it was well into it.
The Roman Empire then fell in the West and became the Byzantine Empire in the East – predominantly Greek-speaking, with its capital in Constantinople. The Goths, Huns and Slavs invaded (known as the Barbaric Invasions).
After the Fourth Crusade (when Western Europe honestly intended to go and conquer the Muslims in Jerusalem but was distracted by invading Christian Constantinople and causing quite a big divide between Roman Catholic and Green Orthodox Christianities), Greece came under Frankish rule in 1204 (the Franks were some Germans who settled in France. That’s right, France is named after Germans.)
In the 14th century the Slavs then the Ottomans (Turks) invaded, and Byzantine scholars fled to Western Europe and brought Greek knowledge to the Renaissance. The Ottomans hated the Greeks, especially the Christian ones, and whenever the Ottomans had to fight against other invaders the Greeks usually took the side of the invaders.
The Reformation and the Enlightenment were kept out of Greece, but in the 18th century Greek merchants did a bit of travelling, raised a bit of money, and started to think about kicking the Ottomans out.
The resulting civil war was going quite badly until England, Russia and France came in and won it for the Greeks.
From World War I the country was very much divided on a few important subjects, like what the national language should be (Ancient Greek or Demotic), whether to be royalist and pro-German or republican and pro-Britain. In the end they fought against Germany.
After WWI they tried to conquer Asia Minor (nope).
In World War II Italy decided they wanted Greece and had a fight with them, and it is their resistance to this ultimatum that the National Day celebrates today, and the Germans got involved and occupied Greece (and treated them very badly, of course).
After being liberated, Greek communists and anti-communists had a civil war and generally distrusted each other for the next 30 years.
From 1967 they were under a horrid military rule until 1974, when Turkey invaded Cyprus, about which NATO didn’t do much. Greece pulled out of NATO in protest and replaced its government with a democratically elected one.
They rejoined NATO in 1980, joined the EU in 1981, forgave Turkey its misdeeds when both Turkey and Greece were hit by earthquakes in 1999, and had an economic crisis in 2010.
Greek activities: Mums can read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which fictionalises an account of the refusal to allow Mussolini to just pop in and take Greece.
Kids can do all sorts of stuff, like make paper dolls of the Greek gods and goddesses to learn about their attributes, or do any Olympic games, or play online games here, here or here. There are a lot of Greek foods you could try here.
Czech Independence Day – see 28th September
1782 Niccolo Paganini born
1923 Roy Lichtenstein born – try colouring in with dots here and here.
St Vincent Independence Day
Turkmenistan Independence Day – see 19th February
1685 Domenico Scarlatti born
1863 the Football Association formed in London
1936 Hoover Dam’s first electric generator starts
Austrian National Day
Oesterreich, as Germans call Austria, means Eastern Realm. It was a Celtic country until it was conquered by the Romans, then invaded by Bavarians, Slavs and Avars (Turks).
Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the Holy Roman Empire, conquered the area in 788 A.D. and introduced Christianity. It became a duchy and then was taken over by the Hapsburgs, rulers of Germany, from 1278 to WWI.
Austria occasionally had scuffles with the Ottoman Empire as they both encroached on Hungary. In 1699 Austria actually took over all of Hungary.
In 1815 Austria helped defeat Napoleonic France and emerged as one of the great European powers.
Germany was trying to become a unified country rather than a load of principalities. Austria could be part of it, but it didn’t really want to be – it wanted to be its own empire. Austria helped Prussia fight against Denmark to take Schleswig and Holstein from it, but then as Prussia and Austria couldn’t agree on who should then rule Schleswig and Holstein, Prussia and Austria had a war against each other. Austria lost and then definitely couldn’t be part of Germany.
Franz Joseph I
In 1867 Hungary and Austria agreed to go their separate ways, although they shared the king, Franz Joseph I.
Austria-Hungary included Croats, Czechs, Poles, Rusyns, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Ukrainians, Italians and Romanians, and they were all allowed to be educated in their own language and use their own languages in official settings, which was nice.
In 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Ottoman Empire, causing the Bosnian Crisis. In 1914 a Bosnian Serb shot the Archduke of Austria-Hungary and heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, whereupon all the other countries said “Oh no you don’t!” and “Oh yes I will” and WWI started.
(…to be continued)
Famous Austrian composers include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss.
Musikverein in Austria.
Since 1939, the famous Vienna New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic is broadcast from its Golden Hall to an audience of one billion in 44 countries.
Every year the Opera Ball sees everyone do a Viennese waltz.
Their folk music is called Schrammelmusik and their folk dances include the Schuhplattler.
It has big castles and palaces like the Schoenbrunn:
or the Belvedere:
Make a Sachertorte or an apple strudel or a Salzburger nockerl.
Nauru Angam Day (Nauruans celebrate having a population of more than 1,500) – see 17th May.
1881 Pablo Picasso born – we love this book.
Grenada Thanksgiving gives thanks for when their Communist government was overthrown and their Prime Minister murdered, and the US (and Jamaica) came and bombed them. Then they got a democratic government and it’s that they’re being grateful for on this day. Grenada is known as the spice isle, and is especially famous for nutmeg, so maybe try making nutmeg ice-cream or nutmeg pancakes. Here is an alcohol-free Grenada punch for kids! Older kids might like to do a blindfold test and see how many of the spices in the spice cupboard they can recognise.
Also today:
United Nations Day, Maldives Hajj Day
Zambia Independence Day: Originally inhabited by Khoisan people, then by Bantus, Zambia became the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (named after Cecil Rhodes who had acquired the mineral rights to the land) in the 18th century. On 24 October 1964 it declared independence and renamed itself Zambia after its Zambezi river. It was then a one-party state until 1991, when the price of its main export, copper, fell drastically and it found itself with one of the highest foreign debts in the world. The average life expectancy is still only 43 years.
It has the largest waterfall in the world, Victoria Falls – can you make a waterfall, in the shower or in the garden? Pretend to go on an African safari. We got in a washing basket, took along a plastic camera and made some cardboard binoculars, and hid stuffed and imaginary animals all round the living room. Then we ‘drove’ round the safari and saw elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, crocodiless, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest, warthogs, antelopes, etc.
Wild About Gardens week starts: http://www.wildaboutgardensweek.org.uk/
Around the World with the Kids 
