September 5, 2018

On Sunday, August 26, Pope Francis concluded a weekend apostolic trip to Dublin, Ireland, where he attended the triennial World Meet of Families. Apostolic is another word for papal or having to do with the pope. Throughout the weekend, enthusiastic crowds turned out to welcome the pope, who is popular in traditionally Roman Catholic Ireland.

Pope Francis greets worshippers before delivering a Mass at Phoenix Park in Dublin, Ireland, on Aug. 26, 2018. Credit: © Stephen McCarthy, Getty Images

The World Meeting of Families brings together Catholics to celebrate the roles of marriage and the family “as the cornerstone of our lives, of society, and of the Church.” The first such meeting was hosted by Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1994. The meetings have since taken place every three years, and each has included the sitting pope. Pope Francis attended his first World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in 2015. This year’s event in Dublin was themed “The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World.”

On Saturday, August 25, Francis flew to Dublin, the Irish capital, and met with President Michael Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin, the official presidential residence. The pope then met with dignitaries at Dublin Castle, visited St. Mary’s Church, spoke with the poor at the Day Centre of the Capuchin Fathers, and delivered a speech for the Festival of Families at Croke Park Stadium.

On Sunday morning, Francis flew to the small town of Knock in northwest Ireland. He visited the Knock Shrine where, in 1879, some children claimed to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary. Knock has been a place of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics ever since. The pope returned to Dublin, then, where he delivered a Mass before some 200,000 people—far fewer than expected—at Phoenix Park. He then met with bishops at the Convent of the Dominican Sisters before boarding a plane and returning to the Vatican in Rome. 

Francis is from Argentina and has been leader of the church since 2013. He is the first pope from Latin America and the first Jesuit pope. Jesuits are members of a religious order called the Society of Jesus. Francis is known for his commitment to social justice, especially for the poor; his humble lifestyle; and his conservative religious beliefs. Francis visited Chile and Peru in January 2018, and he stopped briefly in Switzerland in June. He will visit the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia later in September. The only other papal visit to Ireland was made by John Paul II in 1979.

August 15, 2018

From August 13 through today, August 15, people celebrate the annual Obon festival in Japan and in Japanese communities around the world. Also called the Bon, Bon Odori, or Urabon festival, Obon is a Buddhist event that marks the spiritual return of dead ancestors to the living world on Earth. Because lanterns are hung to guide the souls of the dead, Obon is sometimes called the Festival of Lanterns. In some parts of Japan, the festival takes place in July.

Lanterns illuminate the night and guide the spirits of the dead during the Obon festival in Japan. Credit: Yoichiro Akiyama (licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

According to the Buddhist sutra (scripture) Urabon-kyō, Buddha’s disciple Maudgalyāyana found his deceased mother in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, where spirits suffer from eternal hunger and thirst. Maudgalyāyana tried to give her a bowl of rice, but it burst into flames. He went to the Buddha for help, and was instructed to offer food and drink to monks on the 15th day of the seventh moon, the traditional end of Japan’s rainy season. The act of gratitude and respect freed Maudgalyāyana’s mother from her torment, and he danced with joy. By repeating the disciple’s offerings—and his dance—each year, Buddhists honor the dead and celebrate the relief of their suffering.

The three-day Obon begins with mukaebi, the lighting of fires and lanterns to guide spirits home. Many families build two altars of fruit, incense, and flowers called shōryō-dana. One altar is for ancestors, and the other is for any spirits who have not attained peace. Other common rituals include ohakamairi, the cleaning and decoration of ancestral tombs; prayer services at temples; and the preparation of special foods. Bon Odori, a Buddhist folk dance, is performed during the festival. Dancers in elaborate costumes form a circle around musicians and taiko drummers. (Taikos are large ceremonial drums.) Obon ends with okuribi, when fires and lanterns are again lit to bid spirits farewell. Some communities celebrate Obon with carnivals and other outdoor events.

August 6, 2018

About 8 million people in Andean South America speak one of the many dialects of the Native American language Quechua. Quechua, or Runa Simi as it is called by its speakers, is commonly heard in Peru and in parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador. Spanish is the official language of these nations, but Quechua has equal status in Peru. Quechua descends from the dominant tribal groups of the Inca empire. More than a quarter of Peru’s population speaks Quechua. In Bolivia, there are more people who speak Quechua than speak Spanish.

Quechua is an ancient dialect of the Inca empire. Many people speak the language in Peru, where Inca religious ceremonies—here, the Festival of the Sun—still take place. Credit: © M. Timothy O’Keefe, Alamy Images

Quechua originated as the language spoken by the Inca. The Inca were a native South American people who ruled one of the largest and richest empires in the Americas. The Inca empire emerged in the early A.D. 1400’s and occupied a vast region centered around the capital of Cusco, in modern-day southern Peru. The empire extended over 2,500 miles (4,020 kilometers) along the Andes Mountains. Different peoples within the empire spoke Quechua and a variety of other native languages. A second important language in the empire was Aymara, which is still heard in Bolivia and other nations.

The Peruvian flag flies over millions of Quechua speakers. Credit: © Gil C, Shutterstock

The Inca did not have an alphabet. They did have quipu, however, a cord with knotted strings of various lengths, colors, weaves, and designs that served as a system of record keeping. Special officials throughout the empire read the quipu and maintained the knotted strings. Archaeologists have discovered how the Inca recorded numbers and dates using quipu, but they are still trying to understand what other information might be encoded in the knotted strings.

Click to view larger image
The map at left shows the location of the Inca empire along the Andes Mountains of South America. The empire’s capital, Cusco, is in modern day Peru. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

Without an alphabet or written language, information was passed along the Inca empire’s system of royal roads by messengers called chaski. Messages were passed by word of mouth or by quipu. Chaski were stationed every few miles, and messages would be passed from one messenger to the next so information would flow quickly throughout the empire.

The sons of rulers throughout the empire were sent to Cusco, where they were instructed in Inca language, history, and religion. They were also taught about the quipu and Inca fighting techniques by teachers called amauta. These teachers also recorded stories and legends in poems and songs that they retold at gatherings.

In the 1500’s, during the Spanish conquest, missionaries used Quechua to teach the Inca about Christianity. The missionaries were the first to record Quechua in written form. An official orthography—method of representing the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols—was drafted in 1939 and adopted in 1946 for the main Peruvian dialect of Quechua.

May 16, 2018

On Monday, May 14, representatives from 32 nations attended the opening of the new United States Embassy in Jerusalem, the capital and largest city of Israel. The other 54 foreign delegations in Israel, however, avoided the ceremony, choosing to distance themselves from an event seen as controversial by much of the world. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu applauded with family members of U.S. President Donald Trump in Jerusalem, the embassy opening spurred a much different response in the nearby Gaza Strip, a small Palestinian-administered area between Israel and Egypt. There, Israeli security forces fired into massive crowds of protesting Palestinians, killing 60 people and injuring more than 2,700 others.

Palestinian protestors run from exploding tear gas canisters and gunfire by Israeli security forces near the Gaza Strip border with Israel on May 14, 2018. Credit: © Mohammed Abed, AFP/Getty Images

Jerusalem is a city bitterly divided by history, politics, and religion, and it lies at the center of a larger Arab-Israeli conflict. The conflict has included several wars between Israel and certain Arab countries that have opposed Israel’s existence since it was formed in 1948. The conflict has also involved a struggle by Palestinian Arabs to establish their own country in some or all of the land occupied by Israel.

Click to view larger image
Protests over the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem took place about 50 miles (80 kilometers) away along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

In 1948, Jerusalem was declared an international city under the control of the United Nations. Fighting there soon divided the city between Israeli and Jordanian-Palestinian control. Israel claimed West Jerusalem as its capital, while Palestinians saw East Jerusalem as the capital of their future independent state. The city remained divided until 1967, when Israel captured the whole city in the Six-Day War. After another war in 1973, an awkward peace has held in an Israeli-controlled Jerusalem.

During all that time, foreign governments diplomatically kept away from Jerusalem and declined to officially recognize it as Israel’s capital. Foreign delegations were instead located in Tel Aviv, a city to the northwest. In December 2017, however, President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He also announced that the U.S. Embassy would move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump’s decisions were widely condemned by the international community, and they were perceived by outraged Palestinians as mortal blows to their claims on East Jerusalem.

In late March 2018, Palestinian protestors in Gaza began gathering at the border fence, where they demanded entry to lands they once inhabited in Israel. (Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lived as refugees since Israel’s formation, and the “right of return” to their one-time homes is a dearly held principle.) The protests—sponsored by Hamas, a political group with hopes of restoring historic Palestine—were meant to draw attention to the Palestinian situation in the weeks leading up to the new U.S. Embassy’s opening. Israeli border troops reacted harshly to those earlier demonstrations, killing more than 40 Palestinians before Monday’s much larger protests and the coinciding spike in violence. Israel has been condemned for its seemingly excessive use of force against the largely unarmed protestors. Israel and the United States claim, however, that the bloody response is validated by the violent actions or intentions of some of the protestors.

May 11, 2018

At the end of April, Archaeologists in Peru published shocking details about an ancient site where more than 140 children were ritually killed in a human sacrifice ceremony about 550 years ago. Archaeologists consider the site, built by the Chimú culture on Peru’s northern coast, as evidence of the largest single mass child sacrifice in pre-Columbian history (the period before the arrival of Columbus in America). The site, which also includes the remains of more than 200 sacrificed llamas, is in Huanchaquito, a town near the city of Trujillo.

The remains of sacrificed children and animals were found near the ruins of the ancient city of Chan Chan, seen here before the modern buildings of Trujillo in the background. Credit: © Jess Kraft, Shutterstock

The Chimú were one of several civilizations that developed in what is now Peru beginning around 2800 B.C. The Chimú built a large capital city called Chan Chan. It was begun about A.D. 1000. Chan Chan’s ruins cover about 8 square miles (20 square kilometers) outside the present-day city of Trujillo. Experts in pre-Columbian history know that sacrifices and offerings were important in the religious ceremonies of many peoples, including the Chimú. People often sacrificed crops and animals to ensure adequate rainfall and fertile soil. Human sacrifices were made under certain circumstances, and numerous individual graves of sacrificed children have been found. The remains of the Chimú children of Huanchaquito, however, represent the first evidence of sacrifice on such a large scale. Archaeologist believe the mass child sacrifice must have been performed during a time of terrible crisis, perhaps caused by a natural disaster.

Richly decorated walls line the ruins of the Chimú capital of Chan Chan. The Chimú people were among Peru’s early inhabitants. Credit: © Christopher Howey, Dreamstime

The ceremonial site at Huanchaquito was discovered by archaeologists in 2011 as they were investigating the remains of an early Chimú temple. Archaeologists called the site Huanchaquito las Llamas because they found the skeletal remains of several llamas that had been killed as a religious sacrifice. Radiocarbon dating of remains indicated that the sacrifice occurred around A.D. 1400 to 1450. However, many ancient human remains were then also found at the site. As excavations continued, the number of human skeletal remains totaled 140 individuals. The researchers were shocked to discover that the skeletal remains were all from children aged 5 to 14. Most were between 8 and 12 years old. The llamas were young too, all less than 18 months old.

Other evidence showed that the children all died together as part of a mass human sacrifice. Forensic anthropologists observed cut marks on many of the bones. Such marks show the children were intentionally killed by other people and that they were not victims of a flood, earthquake, or other calamity. Especially telling were cut marks found on the sternum (breastbone) of many victims, along with damage to their ribs. This is evidence that the victims had their chests cut open and their hearts were violently removed. Traces of powdered cinnabar, a red mineral pigment often used in religious ceremonies, were also discovered among the bones of the child victims. The Chimú children were buried facing west toward the nearby Pacific Ocean. The llamas killed at the site were buried facing east toward the Andes Mountains. Archaeologists believe the children and animals were killed as part of the same ritual.

Archaeologists observed that the sacrifice victims were buried beneath a layer of fine mud. This evidence suggests a severe flood at the time in the otherwise arid (dry) region, perhaps caused by an unusually powerful weather event known as El Niño. In the late 1400’s, within a few decades of this mass child sacrifice, the Chimú were conquered by the expanding Inca civilization.

Before Huanchaquito, the largest known mass child sacrifice event was at the Templo Mayor in the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (modern-day Mexico City), where the remains of 42 children were found.

April 17, 2018

Today, World Book extends Arab American Heritage Month to Canada, where the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto is featuring an exhibition called The World of the Fatimids. The Fatimids, often written as  Fātimids, were a dominant Arab culture that ruled much of northern Africa and parts of the Middle East from A.D. 909 to 1171. The World of the Fatimids exhibition, which began in March 2018 and runs through early July, features rare items of art and luxury, as well as a program of films and lectures that concentrates on the culture’s influence on Cairo, the erstwhile Fātimid capital and current capital of Egypt.

This carved ivory oliphant (hunter’s horn) is part of The World of the Fatimids exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario. Credit: © The Aga Khan Museum

The Fātimid dynasty was a line of Muslim rulers who claimed descent from Fātimah, a daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and her husband, Alī ibn Abī Tālib, a cousin of the Prophet. The dynasty and its followers belonged to the Shī`ah branch of Islam and to a sect called the Seveners. In 909, they gained control over land that had been held by the larger group of rival Sunni Muslims and rose to power in north Africa. At various times, the Fātimid empire included Sicily, Syria, and parts of Arabia and Palestine.

Click to view larger image
From the 900′s to 1171, the Fātimids ruled an empire that covered North Africa and much of the Middle East.  Credit: WORLD BOOK map

For many years, the Fātimids made their capitals in what are now the cities of Al Qayrawan and Al Mahdiyah, Tunisia. But after winning control of Egypt in 969, they founded a new capital, Al-Qahirah (Cairo). There, they built many beautiful buildings and established al-Azhar University. Today, this university is one of the oldest in the world and the most influential religious school in Islam. The Fātimids also established great libraries in Cairo and in Tripoli, Lebanon.

The Fātimid rulers were good leaders, but internal conflict eventually broke the dynasty apart. Members of the court struggled for power in the 1160′s, and Nūr al-Dīn, a Syrian leader, became involved. The last Cairo ruler asked Nūr al-Dīn for protection against an invasion in 1168. Nūr al-Dīn sent a strong force that included Saladin, a great warrior who overthrew the Fātimid dynasty in 1171. Today, Shī`ites (followers of Shī`ah Islam) who remain loyal to the Fātimid dynasty are known as Ismā`īlīs (Ismailis).

Aga Khan is the title of the Ismā`īlī imām (spiritual leader). Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum, a creation of the Aga Khan Development Network run by Aga Khan IV (1936-…), opened in 2014. The museum houses collections of Islamic art and heritage and shares formal gardens and a park with the Ismaili Centre Toronto.

April 16, 2018

Hindi <<HIHN dee,>>, also called Modern Standard Hindi, is spoken by more than 500 million people. It is the principal official language of India. More than two-fifths of India’s people speak one or more of the dialects (language variations) of Hindi. There are many regional and local dialects in India, and each state has its own official language. Hindi is the official language of the capital, Delhi, and seven states. Hindi speakers live mostly in northern India, but Hindi is commonly heard in other parts of the country. Hindi speakers are also found in Nepal, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries.

The flag of India flies over hundreds of millions of Hindi speakers in India. Credit: © T. Lesia, Shutterstock

Urdu is a sister language of Hindi. The languages are similar in grammar and pronunciation. When written, however, they use different alphabets and scripts. Cultural differences further separate the languages. Indian Hindus, people who practice Hinduism, often speak Hindi. Indian Muslims, people who practice Islam, often speak Urdu. Urdu is also spoken in Pakistan and Kashmir. Scholars sometimes speak of the two languages collectively as Hindi-Urdu. The spoken form is sometimes called Hindustani. Hindi-Urdu is the main language used in Indian films (Bollywood) and in much Indian popular music.

The Indian film industry produces hundreds of motion pictures every year. Most films are in Hindi (or Hindustani), but some are made in regional languages. Credit: WORLD BOOK photo by David R. Frazier

Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-European family. It is part of the New Indo-Aryan (NIA) group. Hindi uses the Devanagari alphabet, which has roots in Sanskrit, the oldest formal written language of India. Devanagari is a phonetic alphabet, so each letter represents a sound. It has 44 letters, with 33 consonants and 11 vowels. Smaller marks called matras represent vowels preceded by a consonant. Matras are written on the symbol of the preceding consonant. The letters are formed by markings that hang down from a horizontal line (see the red script in the movie poster above).

Click to view larger image
Hindi is spoken in Delhi and the northern states of India. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

Hindi nouns have gender, number, and case. They can be masculine or feminine, singular or plural, and direct or oblique. Most adjectives agree with the gender, number, and case of the nouns they modify. Hindi has four simple tenses and three aspects. Word order for the Hindi language is subject-object-verb. Hindi is written from left to right, and Urdu is written from right to left. Urdu uses the Persian-Arabic alphabet. English words with Hindi origins include bungalow, shampoo, bandana, and jungle.

Hindi and Urdu are based of the spoken dialect of Delhi, Khari Boli, which means standard speech. The modern literary language is based on Khari Boli, which was written in the Devanagari alphabet. Written Hindi can be traced back to poetry of the 1300′s. Hindi prose became prominent in the early 1900’s.

April 9, 2018

Hebrew is one of the world’s oldest living languages. Hebrew has been the main language of the Jewish people since the beginning of Jewish history. It is also one of the two official languages of the state of Israel, along with Arabic.

Click to view larger image
Hebrew vowels are indicated by vowel points placed with a consonant. Some vowel points are shown here with the letter Daleth. Credit: WORLD BOOK illustration

Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asian family. It comes from the same source as the Arabic and Aramaic languages. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. Most are consonants, but a few can represent either a consonant or a vowel. Vowels are not usually written, but they can be indicated by a system of dots and lines. Like Arabic and Aramaic, Hebrew is written from right to left.

Throughout history, Jewish communities developed their own ways of pronouncing Hebrew words. In the United States, the two most common pronunciation styles are the Ashkenazic and the Sephardic. The Ashkenazic originated in central and eastern Europe; the Sephardic originated in Spain.

Click to view larger image
The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, shown here in alphabetical order from right to left, as Hebrew is written. The illustration shows 26 letters, because 4 letters have two forms—with or without a dot—that stand for different pronunciations. Credit: WORLD BOOK illustration

For centuries, the Hebrew language was often considered sacred, called lashon ha-kodesh (holy language). Most of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, is written in Hebrew. The compilation of Jewish law called the Mishnah, which dates from A.D. 70 to 200, is also written in Hebrew.

In A.D. 135, Roman armies killed or scattered the Jews of Judea and renamed the area Palestine. By about A.D. 200, a Hebrew-speaking community no longer existed. As a result, Hebrew died out as a spoken language and was used only in religious writing and in scholarly discussions for almost 1,700 years.

In the later 1700’s, a religious cultural movement called the Haskalah emerged among German and Polish Jews. The goal of the movement was to modernize traditional Jewish beliefs and practices. Haskalah is Hebrew for enlightenment. The Haskalah stimulated an interest in the revival of Hebrew for nonreligious uses, leading to the establishment of newspapers and magazines in the language. Jewish writers began to turn to Hebrew as a literary language.

Hebrew became popular among Jewish poets and novelists during the 1900’s and early 2000’s. Leading Hebrew writers include the eastern European poet Chaim Nachman Balik and the Israeli novelists and short story writers Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua. Agnon shared the 1966 Nobel Prize for literature.

Hebrew underwent a revival as a spoken language beginning in the late 1800’s. At that time, Jews from many lands began to settle in Palestine. Many started speaking Hebrew as their everyday language, passing it on to their children.

March 26, 2018

Heute ist Montag—that is to say, Today is Monday.

On this Montag, World Book takes a look at a language closely related to English—German. In fact, English is a Germanic language, so it is not surprising that the German and English words for Monday resemble each other.

The flag of Germany. Credit: © T. Lesia, Shutterstock

In German, the language is known as Deutsch, and Germany is called Deutschland. German is the official language of Germany, of course, as well as Austria and Liechtenstein. It is also one of the official languages of Luxembourg and Switzerland. There are an estimated 100 million to 120 million German speakers worldwide. German is one of the most widely used European languages.

German and English both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. The earliest source of the English language was a prehistoric language that modern scholars call Proto-Indo-European (PIE). PIE was probably spoken about 5,000 years ago by people who lived in the region north of the Black Sea, in southeastern Europe. These people migrated through the centuries and gradually developed new languages.

Click to view larger image
German is the official language of Germany as well as nearby Austria and Liechtenstein. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

The group of people who spoke PIE and migrated west divided into groups who spoke languages that were the ancestors of the Germanic, Greek, and Latin tongues. The Germanic languages developed into English, Danish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. The ancient Greek language became modern Greek, and early Latin grew into French, Italian, and Spanish.

Today, the Germanic languages are often divided into the North Germanic languages and the West Germanic languages. The North Germanic languages are the Scandinavian languages of Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. Dutch, English, and German are West Germanic languages.

The German language itself has two principal spoken dialects: High German and Low German. They are not named for their status or class but for where they are spoken. High German (Hochdeutsch) is spoken in the “high” mountainous region of Germany, and Low German (Plattdeutsch) is spoken mainly in the lowlands of northern Germany. High German serves as the base for Standard German. Standard German is spoken in schools and on radio and television. It is also the written language of Germany.

One person is credited with having helped form the modern German language more than any other: the religious reformer Martin Luther. Luther, a leader of the Reformation in Germany, translated the Bible into German, using the dialect of east-central Germany, particularly the region called Saxony. In shaping the development of the German language, his translation, completed in 1534, influenced German writers much as the King James Version of the Bible influenced English writers.

Although German and English resemble each other, they differ in a number of significant ways. In German, for example, all nouns are capitalized no matter where they appear in a sentence. And in German, unlike English, nouns also have a grammatical gender—masculine, feminine, and neuter. The grammatical gender of a noun does not indicate the sexual nature of the thing named. For example, pencil (der Bleistift) is masculine, pen (die Feder) is feminine, and paper (das Papier) is neuter. Similarly, chair (der Stuhl), desk (der Schreibtisch), and table (der Tisch) are all masculine, but bed (das Bett) and sofa (das Sofa) are neuter.

In German, articles, adjectives, and verbs also have a variety of forms. A noun’s grammatical gender and function determine which form of the adjective or article is used. The subject of the sentence determines, in part, which form of the verb is used.

Word placement follows fairly definite rules in German. The verb normally comes in the second position in the sentence. If the subject does not begin the sentence, it immediately follows the verb. But in a dependent clause, the verb comes at the very end.

Despite their differences, German and English have many similar words in their vocabularies. Examples of similar German and English words include light and Licht, house and Haus, and cat and Katze. Some German words are the same as English words, including fair, Internet, Manager, and Text. A number of English words have come directly from German, such as flak, hinterland, and kindergarten.

Finally, of the German words that have made their way into the English language mainly unchanged are several that describe states of mind or feelings. Among them are angst (a feeling of anxiety, fear, or insecurity), Schadenfreude (malicious joy or pleasure; joy at the misfortune of others), and Weltanschauung (broad and comprehensive view of the world). Uber, the German word for above, across, or over, has come to mean the best of its kind or extremely in English. It is often used a prefix and combined with other words. So, if you are uberbored, then you are extremely bored.

February 13, 2018

Today, February 13, people in Ivrea, Italy, wrapped up the Battaglia delle Arance (Battle of the Oranges), the traditional end of the city’s Carnival celebrations and the nation’s largest fruit fight. Ivrea is a town near Turin in the Piemonte (Piedmont) region of northwestern Italy. The messy three-day battle uses up more than 550,000 pounds (250,000 kilograms) of oranges, and stems from a revolt against an unpopular lord of Ivrea some 800 years ago.

People of Ivrea, Itlay, defend the town against “an invasion” of the lord’s aranceri (orange throwers) during the annual Battle of the Oranges. Credit: © Pecold/Shutterstock

According to legend, sometime around the year 1200, the lord of Ivrea tried to force his romantic attentions on a local miller’s daughter (known as Violetta) on the eve of her wedding to someone else. The bride-to-be did not take kindly to the lord’s actions. Instead of submitting to his advances, Violetta killed him. The townspeople, fed up with years of oppression, rallied around the miller’s daughter, defeated the lord’s soldiers, and then stormed and burned the lord’s palace.

The people of Ivrea began celebrating their liberation with an annual event that was eventually tied to the end of carnival. Different missiles have been used to “re-create” the battle over the years, including beans and apples (representing arrows). Oranges—still a bit hard, prompting many people to wear protective helmets and masks—have been the battle’s ammunition since the late 1800′s.

Today, a horse-drawn cart loaded with the lord’s aranceri (orange throwers) runs the gauntlet of Ivrea’s streets three days in a row. The lord’s aranceri, protected in plastic “suits of armor,” are pummeled with oranges as they navigate the town streets—but they too throw oranges, and the entire scene is soon one of citrus carnage. Teams of orange throwers on foot defend different parts of the town, and each is identified by medieval uniforms and even coats of arms. Nets protect local store fronts and non-participants from wayward citrus fruit missiles. The oranges, imported from the southern Italian island of Sicily, are the remnants and rejects of the winter harvest. La Mugnaia (the miller’s daughter) Violetta, played by a local woman dressed in red and white, oversees the activities, hands out sweets to children, and throws flowers to admirers. A symbolic funeral ends the battle on Shrove Tuesday, followed by a more traditional parade of bands and floats.

The week-long Carnevale di Ivrea celebration draws some 100,000 people each year. Carnival is a lively time of dancing, feasting, music, pageants, and parades prior to the beginning of Lent, a strict religious season observed in the spring by most Christians. People celebrate Carnival around the world. The largest and most famous Carnaval draws millions of people each year to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the United States, the best-known Carnival is held in New Orleans, Louisiana—an event capped by the city’s famous celebration of Mardi Gras (French for Fat Tuesday).