Moments
Moments.
Locations in human history rendered as 360° panoramas, with the context behind each scene.
prehistoric
Prehistoric
34th century BC · Drenthe
Hunebed D27, Borger
Around 3400 BC farmers of the Funnelbeaker culture on the Hondsrug ridge in Drenthe finish their largest communal tomb: a 22.6 m chamber of glacial boulders roofed with nine capstones, to be heaped over with sand until only the capstones show. Over five thousand years later D27 at Borger is still the largest hunebed in the Netherlands.
70th century BC · Konya Province, central Anatolia
Çatalhöyük
Around 7000 BC in central Anatolia, the densely packed houses of Çatalhöyük are entered only through hatches in the roof: there are no streets, only rooftops.
1323 BC · Theban West Bank, Upper Egypt
Valley of the Kings
In 1323 BC, the funeral procession of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun arrives at the cliff face of the Valley of the Kings to deposit him in tomb KV62, where he will lie undisturbed until 1922.
95th century BC · Şanlıurfa Province, Anatolia
Göbekli Tepe
Around 9500 BC, hunter-gatherers raise a five-meter T-shaped limestone pillar at the oldest known monumental sanctuary on Earth, eleven millennia before the pyramids.
1600s BC · Thera (Santorini), Cyclades
Akrotiri, Thera
Around 1600 BC, a Plinian eruption of the Thera volcano begins to bury the prosperous Minoan port of Akrotiri under meters of ash and pumice, ending one of the Aegean's great Bronze Age centers.
ancient
Ancient
7th century BC · Salzkammergut, Upper Austria
Salzberg High Valley, Hallstatt
Around 650 BC the salt miners of Hallstatt are among Europe's wealthiest communities: in a high valley above the lake they cut rock salt from galleries up to 200 m deep and bury their dead with bronze vessels, imported luxuries and ivory-hilted swords. Their cemetery gave its name to a whole era, the Hallstatt period of the early Iron Age.
730s BC · Pałuki (Greater Poland)
Biskupin Fortified Settlement
In the winter of 738/737 BC people of the Lusatian culture felled thousands of oaks to build a fortified village on an island in Lake Biskupin. Behind a timber box rampart, eleven log-paved streets of identical houses sheltered up to a thousand people, a planned settlement more than a thousand years older than the first Slavic strongholds.
9th century BC · Tabasco, Gulf coast lowlands
La Venta
Around 900 BC, Olmec sculptors on the humid Gulf coast of Mexico carve a colossal stone portrait head of a ruler from a single multi-ton basalt boulder.
510s BC · Fars Province, southern Iran
Persepolis
Around 515 BC, sculptors from across the Persian Empire carve the Procession of Nations relief on the Apadana staircase at Persepolis, capital of Darius I's empire.
classical
Classical antiquity
52 BC · Burgundy
Alésia, Mont Auxois
In late September 52 BC, the day after his relief army was routed, Vercingetorix surrenders at Alesia: Caesar sits on the Roman siege works in front of his camp while the Gaulish chiefs are brought out and their weapons thrown down. The fall of Alesia ends the great Gallic revolt and seals the Roman conquest of Gaul.
310s · Moselle, Rhineland-Palatinate (Roman Gallia Belgica)
Porta Nigra, Trier
Around 310, while Constantine the Great holds court in Trier and raises a vast palace hall, the city's monumental north gate has already stood for 140 years, never quite finished. Augusta Treverorum is now one of the capitals of the Roman West and seat of the praetorian prefect of the Gauls.
130s · Northumberland
Housesteads Fort, Hadrian's Wall
Around AD 130 the new stone fort of Vercovicium, today's Housesteads, stands on the crags of the Whin Sill with its north rampart built into Hadrian's Wall. A double-strength cohort of some 800 auxiliary infantry guards the frontier the emperor began in 122 to run 73 miles from the Tyne to the Solway.
179 · Váh valley, Roman-era barbaricum north of the Danube
Castle Rock of Trenčín (Laugaricio)
Winter of 179: soldiers of the Second Legion Adiutrix, wintering deep in the land of the Quadi at the end of the Marcomannic Wars, cut a dedication to the emperors' victory into the cliff above the Váh, naming their camp Laugaricio and their strength, 855 men. It is the most important Roman inscription in Central Europe north of the Danube still in its original place.
193 · Lower Austria (Roman Pannonia Superior)
Legionary Fortress of Carnuntum
On 9 April 193, twelve days after the murder of Emperor Pertinax in Rome, the Pannonian legions proclaim their governor Lucius Septimius Severus emperor at Carnuntum, capital of Upper Pannonia on the Danube frontier. He wins the civil war that follows, founds the Severan dynasty and raises Carnuntum to the rank of a colony.
450s BC · Campania (Magna Graecia)
Temples of Hera at Poseidonia (Paestum)
Around 450 BC the Greek colonists of Poseidonia gather at the altar of their newest temple, a massive Doric house for Hera still gleaming with fresh marble-dust stucco, beside an older temple to the same goddess built a century before. It is Magna Graecia at its height, when Greek cities on the Italian coast rivalled those of Greece itself.
200s · Pannonia Inferior
Roman Civil Town of Aquincum
Around AD 200, a few years after Septimius Severus raised it to a colonia, the civil town of Aquincum on the Danube frontier is heading for its heyday of 10,000 to 12,000 people. It has a forum with a podium temple, public baths and a market hall fed by spring water carried on stone arches, and lies just north of the legionary fortress guarding Pannonia Inferior.
1st century BC · Bohemia
Celtic Oppidum of Závist
Around 100 BC the Celts of Závist, traditionally identified with the Boii who gave Bohemia its name, live in the largest Celtic oppidum in today's Czechia. Timber-laced stone ramparts ring a sacred acropolis and workshops that make blanks for coins, high above the Vltava.
3rd century BC · River Nile State
Pyramids of Meroë
Around 250 BC, the kings and queens of Kush are buried beneath dozens of steep, narrow pyramids on the Nile in what is now Sudan: a desert necropolis of an African civilisation that once ruled Egypt itself, with more pyramids than Egypt has.
2nd century AD · Bekaa Valley
Temple of Jupiter, Baalbek
Around 150 AD, the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek is one of the largest temples in the Roman world: columns nearly twenty metres tall on a platform of stone blocks weighing eight hundred tonnes, beside a quarry holding the heaviest cut stones ever moved.
120s · Rome
Roman Forum, Rome
Around 120 AD, the Roman Forum is the crowded heart of an empire of fifty million: temples, basilicas and triumphal arches packed along the Sacred Way beneath the Capitol, with Trajan's new column and forum rising alongside.
430s BC · Elis
Sanctuary of Zeus, Olympia
Around 430 BC, the sanctuary of Olympia holds a new wonder: Phidias's gold-and-ivory Zeus, a seated god twelve metres high filling his temple, while every four years the games in his honour bring the whole Greek world to the stadium beyond the sacred grove.
400s · Tigray, northern Ethiopian highlands
Aksum
Around 400 AD, masons of King Ezana of Aksum raise a 24-meter granite stele carved to resemble a multi-story house: a monumental tradition unique to the Aksumite kingdom of Ethiopia.
79 · Campania, southern Italy
Pompeii
On a late October afternoon in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius unleashes a Plinian eruption that buries Pompeii under meters of pumice and ash within hours.
80 · Rome, Latium
Colosseum, Rome
In 80 AD, Emperor Titus opens the Flavian Amphitheatre (the Colosseum) with 100 days of games, including the rare flooding of the arena for a mock naval battle.
3rd century AD · Valley of Mexico
Teotihuacan
Around 250 AD, Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico is at its peak; its 2.5-kilometer Avenue of the Dead lined with brightly painted stepped temples and dominated by the Pyramid of the Moon.
1st century AD · Petra, Edomite highlands
Petra
Around 100 AD, a caravan from southern Arabia emerges from the narrow Siq canyon of Petra to face the freshly carved 40-meter facade of Al-Khazneh, the Nabataean treasury or royal tomb.
medieval
The Middle Ages
1215 · Surrey
Runnymede, Surrey
On 15 June 1215, on the water-meadow of Runnymede between Windsor and Staines, King John seals the charter his rebel barons have forced on him, promising justice by lawful judgement and limits on royal power. Repudiated within three months, Magna Carta becomes the founding text of liberty under the law.
1253 · Umbria
Basilica of Saint Francis, Assisi
On 25 May 1253 Pope Innocent IV consecrates the new basilica raised over the tomb of Francis of Assisi, just 27 years after the saint's death, before crowds of grey-robed friars and townspeople. Later painted by Cimabue and Giotto, it became the spiritual heart of the country whose patron saint Francis is.
1370s · Tuscany
Leaning Tower of Pisa
Around 1370, the bell tower of Pisa is finally finished after two centuries, and it already leans, its marble tiers curving as builders fought the soft ground, beside the great cathedral and round baptistery on the green cathedral square.
1211 · Kingdom of León (Galicia)
Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela
In April 1211 Archbishop Pedro Muñiz consecrates the Romanesque cathedral of Santiago de Compostela before King Alfonso IX of León, his heir and his court, well over a century after work began above the tomb of St James. Pilgrims with scallop shells on their hats crowd the square where Master Mateo's masons have just finished the west front.
987 · Al-Andalus (Andalusia)
Great Mosque of Córdoba
In 987 Almanzor, the all-powerful chamberlain of Caliph Hisham II, begins the third and largest enlargement of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, eight new aisles to the east that make it the largest mosque anywhere outside Abbasid Iraq. From the courtyard, open arches reveal the forest of red-and-white double arches inside.
620s · East Anglia
Sutton Hoo, Suffolk
Around 625 the East Angles haul a 27-metre oak ship up from the River Deben onto the heath at Sutton Hoo and bury a king, most likely Rædwald, in a timber chamber amidships with his helmet, sword, shield, gold and silver. Found in 1939, the grave is one of the most spectacular discoveries in British archaeology.
863 · Moravia
Mikulčice-Valy, Great Moravia
In 863 the Byzantine brothers Constantine (later Cyril) and Methodius arrive in Prince Rastislav's Great Moravia with a liturgy in Slavonic and the new Glagolitic script. Mikulčice, a princely stronghold among the arms of the Morava and a leading candidate for Rastislav's seat, already has a stone basilica and several churches.
960s · Bohemia
Malá Strana below Prague Castle
Around 965 the traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub finds Prague the richest trading place of the region: Rus and Slav merchants from Kraków and Muslim and Jewish traders from the east meet in the settlement below the Přemyslid castle, where saddles, bridles and shields are made and slaves, tin and furs are sold.
1357 · Bohemia
Charles Bridge, Prague
In 1357 Emperor Charles IV lays the foundation stone of a new stone bridge on the Old Town bank near St Clement's, fifteen years after ice and floodwater wrecked the Judith Bridge. Tradition sets the moment at 5:31 on 9 July, a palindrome of odd numbers; the bridge will take 45 years to finish.
864 · Great Moravia, Devín Gate
Devín (Dowina), Great Moravian Stronghold
August 864: the East Frankish king Louis the German crosses the Danube and besieges Prince Rastislav in a fortress the Annals of Fulda call Dowina, 'the maiden', the first written mention of Devín. Rastislav gives hostages and an oath instead of battle, and Great Moravia, a year into the mission of Constantine and Methodius, holds.
1209 · Languedoc
Cité de Carcassonne
On 15 August 1209, after two weeks of siege in a heatwave with its wells run dry, Carcassonne surrenders to the army of the Albigensian Crusade: Viscount Raymond-Roger Trencavel gives himself up as hostage and every inhabitant must walk out with nothing but the clothes they wear. The fall of the Trencavel city opens the conquest of Languedoc by the lords of the north.
802 · Rhineland, North Rhine-Westphalia
Palatine Chapel of Charlemagne, Aachen
On 20 July 802 the envoy Isaac reaches Aachen with Abul Abbas, an elephant sent by Caliph Harun al-Rashid to Charlemagne, crowned emperor in Rome nineteen months earlier. The emperor's palace chapel, an octagon modelled on Ravenna's San Vitale and grander than any stone building north of the Alps, is all but finished.
1284 · Gwynedd, Wales
Caernarfon Castle
In spring 1284, a year after Edward I completed his conquest of Gwynedd, his masons are raising a castle and a walled town at Caernarfon on the Menai Strait. Tradition holds that here, on 25 April, Queen Eleanor gives birth to the future Edward II, later the first heir of an English king to be made Prince of Wales.
1000 · Northern Transdanubia
Castle Hill of Esztergom
At Christmas 1000, or on New Year's Day 1001, Stephen, son of Grand Prince Géza, is anointed and crowned the first king of Hungary, tradition says in the church on Esztergom's Castle Hill. The crown, won in Rome with the backing of Pope Sylvester II and Emperor Otto III, turns the Hungarian principality into a Christian kingdom of the Latin West.
1150s · Angkor (Siem Reap)
Angkor Wat at dawn
Around 1150, Angkor Wat is newly finished: the largest religious monument ever built, five lotus-bud towers rising beyond a vast moat in the Khmer capital, a temple-mountain to the god Vishnu that still draws crowds to its dawn today.
1320s · Tombouctou Region
Djinguereber Mosque, Timbuktu
Around 1327, on the southern edge of the Sahara, the great mud-brick Djinguereber Mosque rises in Timbuktu, commissioned by Mansa Musa of Mali, whose gold and salt caravans and famous pilgrimage to Mecca made his empire a byword for wealth and learning.
1350s · Andalusia
Alhambra, Granada
Around 1350, the Alhambra crowns its hill above Granada: the palace-citadel of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, its courts of slender columns, carved-stucco lace and reflecting pools set against the snows of the Sierra Nevada.
1250s · Colorado
Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde
Around 1250, the Ancestral Puebloans build Cliff Palace into a sandstone alcove high in a Colorado canyon wall: over a hundred and fifty rooms and two dozen round ceremonial kivas tucked beneath an overhang, the largest cliff dwelling in North America.
11th century AD · Illinois
Monks Mound, Cahokia
Around 1100, Cahokia is the largest city north of Mexico: some fifteen thousand people, around a hundred and twenty earthen mounds, and a flat-topped pyramid of packed earth thirty metres high whose base covers as much ground as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
14th century AD · Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Pacific
Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
Around 1400 AD, Rapa Nui islanders "walk" a 9-meter basalt moai statue upright across the volcanic landscape from the quarry at Rano Raraku toward a coastal ahu platform.
1350s · Masvingo, southern African plateau
Great Zimbabwe
Around 1350 AD, Great Zimbabwe is the capital of a prosperous Shona kingdom controlling gold trade with the Indian Ocean: its elliptical dry-stone walls and conical tower the largest stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa before the modern era.
537 · Constantinople, Eastern Roman Empire
Hagia Sophia, Constantinople
On December 27, 537 AD, Emperor Justinian I dedicates the newly built Hagia Sophia in Constantinople: its 32-meter dome rising on pendentives in a structural feat that defines Byzantine architecture.
12th century AD · Hawaii (then uninhabited)
Kealakekua / Big Island, Hawaii
Around 1200 AD, a Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe from the Marquesas Islands makes landfall on the unpopulated Big Island of Hawaii after navigating 4,000 km of open Pacific.
770s · Central Java, Sailendra kingdom
Borobudur, Central Java
In the late 8th century, the Sailendra dynasty of central Java builds Borobudur: a stepped andesite stupa-mountain of nine levels, the largest Buddhist monument in the world.
12th century AD · North Wollo, Amhara highlands
Lalibela, Ethiopia
Around 1200 AD, masons of the Zagwe king Gebre Mesqel Lalibela carve the church of Bete Giyorgis from the living rock in the form of a Greek cross, a structure cut from the top down with no joints or seams.
renaissance
Renaissance
1584 · Castile (Community of Madrid)
Courtyard of the Kings, El Escorial
On 13 September 1584, twenty-one years after the first stone, Philip II watches the last stone of El Escorial set in the Courtyard of the Kings, marked with a cross. The granite monastery-palace designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, with its domed basilica, is finished in all its essentials.
1590s · Andalusia (Crown of Castile)
The Arenal, Seville
In the 1590s the Arenal, the sandy riverbank outside Seville's walls, is the gateway to an empire: ships of the Indies fleets load and unload beside the Torre del Oro, while the Giralda, crowned since 1568 with its Renaissance belfry, looks down on the city that holds Castile's monopoly of trade with the Americas.
1600 · London
Globe Theatre, London
Around 1600, Shakespeare's company plays the Globe on the south bank of the Thames: a round, open-roofed timber playhouse where some three thousand Londoners, from groundlings in the yard to gallants in the galleries, crowd in to see a new play by afternoon light.
1574 · Holland (South Holland)
The Vliet at the Walls of Leiden
At daybreak on 3 October 1574, after a south-westerly storm drove the floodwaters high over the polders and the Spanish abandoned their forts, Admiral Boisot's Sea Beggar boats sail up the Vliet into starving Leiden with bread, cheese and herring. The relief ends a siege that cost thousands of lives and keeps the Dutch Revolt alive.
1420 · Bohemia
Vítkov Hill, Prague
On the evening of 14 July 1420 a handful of Hussites under Jan Žižka hold two timber blockhouses on Vítkov against Meissen and Austrian knights of King Sigismund's crusade, until Prague gunners and flail-men led by a priest with the Eucharist storm up the slope and drive the attackers off the cliffs.
1539 · Loire Valley (Sologne)
Château de Chambord
On 18 December 1539 Francis I receives his old rival, Emperor Charles V, at Chambord, the vast hunting castle whose keep, bristling with chimneys, lanterns and dormers, has just been finished in the marshes of Sologne. The emperor, crossing France on his way to Ghent, is said to be dazzled; the visit shows off the French Renaissance at its most ambitious.
1484 · Danube Bend
Royal Palace of Visegrád
In 1484 King Matthias Corvinus finishes rebuilding the royal palace at Visegrád: its court of honour gains arcades with a Renaissance balustrade around a red-marble fountain of the infant Hercules fighting the Hydra, among the first works of the Italian Renaissance north of the Alps. On the ridge above, the citadel guards the Holy Crown.
1410 · Masuria (Teutonic Prussia)
Grunwald Battlefield
On the hot morning of 15 July 1410 the armies of King Władysław Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas wait at the edge of the woods facing the Teutonic Order across the fields of Grunwald, until two heralds ride over with two naked swords from Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen, a taunt to come out and fight. By evening the Order's army is broken and its Grand Master dead.
1552 · Northern Hungary (Heves)
Eger Castle
On 18 October 1552, after a 39-day siege, the last Ottoman troops under Ali Pasha of Buda march away from Eger, where about 2,000 defenders under István Dobó, helped by the town's women, have held the battered castle against an army many times larger. The victory became Hungary's great tale of heroism, retold in Géza Gárdonyi's novel Eclipse of the Crescent Moon.
1410 · Bohemia
Old Town Square, Prague
On 9 October 1410 the Old Town councillors reward the clockmaker Mikuláš of Kadaň for the astronomical dial he has built on the town hall tower, the heart of today's Prague orloj. Below it the market square trades as usual in the year Wycliffe's books are burned in Prague and Jan Hus is excommunicated.
1543 · Warmia
Cathedral Hill, Frombork
In late May 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, a 70-year-old canon of the Warmian chapter, dies at Frombork; by tradition the first printed copy of his De revolutionibus, the book that sets the Earth moving around the Sun, reached him on his last day. The walled cathedral hill, beside which he lived and watched the sky for more than thirty years, looks out over the Vistula Lagoon.
1492 · Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (Andalusia)
Banks of the Genil, Granada
In the early morning of 2 January 1492, beside a small domed oratory on the banks of the Genil, Boabdil, the last Nasrid sultan, surrenders the keys of Granada to King Ferdinand, who has them received by the Count of Tendilla and Gutierre de Cárdenas. Almost eight centuries of Muslim rule in the peninsula end as the Christian banner rises over the Alhambra.
1500 · Tyrol
Golden Roof, Innsbruck
In 1500 King Maximilian I, who often holds court in Innsbruck, completes a splendid oriel on the princely residence, roofed with 2,657 fire-gilded copper shingles. From its loggia, the Golden Roof, he and his court watch tournaments and performances in the square below.
1478 · Schleswig-Holstein (Hanseatic Lübeck)
Holsten Gate, Lübeck
In 1478 Lübeck's city architect Hinrich Helmstede completes a massive new gate on the road to Holstein, raised on an artificial mound with walls up to 3.5 m thick against the cannon of a new age. Behind it lies the leading city of the Hanseatic League, whose ships and salt trade dominate the Baltic.
1487 · Spiš (Szepes), Kingdom of Hungary
Spiš Castle
Candlemas, 2 February 1487: at Spiš Castle, seat of the Zápolya counts, the palatine Stephen Zápolya's wife Hedwig gives birth to John, the future king of Hungary, while the vast lower courtyard below the Gothic palace serves as the castle's farmyard. The castle, one of Slovakia's largest, is at its late-Gothic height, three centuries before the fire that ruined it.
1517 · Saxony-Anhalt (Electorate of Saxony)
Castle Church, Wittenberg
On Wednesday 31 October 1517, the eve of All Saints, the Augustinian friar and theology professor Martin Luther sends his 95 theses against the trade in indulgences to the Archbishop of Mainz and, by tradition, nails them to the wooden door of Wittenberg's Castle Church. The dispute they start becomes the Reformation.
1526 · Southern Transdanubia (Baranya)
Plain of Mohács
On 29 August 1526 the royal army of Hungary, some 25,000 men under the twenty-year-old King Louis II, waits for hours in the heat on the plain south of Mohács as Suleiman the Magnificent's far larger army appears on the ridge ahead. By nightfall the king has drowned in flight and the medieval Kingdom of Hungary has collapsed.
1588 · Essex
Tilbury Camp, Essex
On 9 August 1588, with the Spanish Armada driven north round Scotland but Parma's invasion army still waiting in Flanders, Elizabeth I rides among her troops camped at West Tilbury in white with a silver breastplate and tells them she has 'the heart and stomach of a king'. It becomes the defining image of the Armada year.
1590 · Bohemia
Rožmberk Pond Dam, Třeboň
In 1590 the Rosenberg regent Jakub Krčín finishes a six-year project: hundreds of peasants have raised an earth dam over two kilometres long across the Lužnice floodplain near Třeboň. Behind it lies Rožmberk, still the largest fishpond in the world and the crown of the South Bohemian pond system.
15th century AD · Hebei
Great Wall of China, Jinshanling
Around 1500, Ming China rebuilds the Great Wall in brick and stone across the mountain ridges north of Beijing: a battlemented rampart with watchtowers that climbs and plunges over the peaks as far as the eye can see, the most ambitious fortification ever built.
1420 · Beijing
Forbidden City, Beijing
In 1420, the Yongle Emperor's new palace is finished at the heart of Beijing: the Forbidden City, nearly a thousand timber halls behind a moat and vermilion walls, the largest palace complex on Earth and the seat of Chinese emperors for the next five centuries.
1450s · Rhineland
Gutenberg's workshop, Mainz
Around 1450 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg pulls the first sheets from a printing press of movable metal type: the workshop where the printed book is born, and with it the fastest spread of ideas in human history.
1560s · Vatican City
St. Peter's Basilica under construction, Vatican
Around 1560, the new St. Peter's is a colossal building site at the heart of Rome: the old basilica half-demolished, vast new piers and arches rising, and the aged Michelangelo driving up the great drum that will carry the largest dome in Christendom.
1450s · Cusco, Vilcabamba range, Andes
Machu Picchu
Around 1450 AD, Inca masons build the royal estate of Pachacuti at Machu Picchu, fitting andesite blocks without mortar so precisely that a knife blade cannot enter the joints.
1444 · Florence, Tuscany
Florence Cathedral, Florence
In 1444, Brunelleschi's revolutionary double-shell brick dome over Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence approaches completion: the largest masonry dome in the world, raised without scaffolding.
1500s · Karnataka, southern India
Hampi (Vijayanagara)
Around 1500 AD, the Vijayanagara empire reigns from Hampi (the largest Hindu state in Indian history) and its bazaars throng with Arabian horse merchants and diamond dealers from across the Indian Ocean.
1519 · Valley of Mexico, Aztec Empire
Iztapalapa causeway, Tenochtitlán
On November 8, 1519, Hernán Cortés and 400 Spanish conquistadors meet the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II on the southern causeway of Tenochtitlán, the meeting of two civilizations that have never seen each other.
1492 · Bahamas (Guanahani / San Salvador Island)
Guanahani (San Salvador Island), Bahamas
At dawn on 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus and about 40 Spanish sailors land at a Lucayan-Taíno island in the Bahamas they will rename *San Salvador*: the encounter that begins five centuries of Atlantic exchange and the destruction of indigenous Caribbean populations.
early_modern
Early modern
1666 · London
Bankside, Southwark
At dusk on Sunday 2 September 1666 Samuel Pepys sits in a little alehouse on Bankside and watches the City of London burn across the Thames, 'one entire arch of fire' from the Three Cranes opposite to beyond London Bridge and up the hill. Driven by an east wind, the Great Fire will destroy most of the medieval City and Old St Paul's in four days.
1791 · Masovia
Świętojańska Street, Warsaw
On 3 May 1791, after a stormy seven-hour session in the Royal Castle guarded by troops, the Great Sejm adopts the Government Act, regarded as Europe's first written constitution. Deputies and senators then walk through a cheering crowd along Świętojańska Street to St John's collegiate church to swear it before God.
1655 · Holland (North Holland)
Dam Square and the New Town Hall, Amsterdam
On 29 July 1655 Amsterdam's burgomasters process from the Prinsenhof to the Dam to inaugurate Jacob van Campen's new Town Hall, a classical palace for a city of merchants, though it is still far from finished. Six companies of civic guards fire three volleys as the city at the height of its Golden Age celebrates.
1618 · Prague, Bohemia
Prague Castle (Ludwig Wing)
On May 23, 1618, Bohemian Protestant nobles throw two imperial Catholic regents out of the upper window of the Ludwig Wing of Prague Castle, triggering the Thirty Years' War.
1741 · Pressburg (Pozsony), coronation city of the Kingdom of Hungary
Coronation Hill, Pressburg (Bratislava)
Sunday, 25 June 1741: freshly crowned in St Martin's Cathedral, 24-year-old Maria Theresa rides up an earthen mound by the Danube and swings St Stephen's sword to the four corners of the world, vowing to defend Hungary. That September the Hungarian estates, gathered in this city, pledged her 'our life and blood' and saved her throne.
1648 · Westphalia, North Rhine-Westphalia
Town Hall on the Prinzipalmarkt, Münster
On 25 October 1648, the day after the treaties were signed in Münster, the city proclaims the Peace of Westphalia: the town secretary, with a kettledrummer and six trumpeters, reads the council's announcement at the city's squares while every bell rings from noon to one. Thirty years of war in the Empire are over.
1655 · Lesser Poland
Jasna Góra, Częstochowa
On 27 December 1655, after almost six weeks of siege, the Swedish corps of General Burchard Müller marches away from Jasna Góra, the fortified Pauline monastery that guards the icon of the Black Madonna, held by some 250 monks, soldiers and local nobles under Prior Augustyn Kordecki. The news rallies the country against the Swedish invasion known as the Deluge.
1620s · Pomerania (Royal Prussia)
The Crane on the Motława, Gdańsk
Around 1620, at the peak of the grain trade, Gdańsk is the Commonwealth's gateway to the sea: rye from noble estates along the Vistula floats down on barges, fills the granaries of Granary Island and is loaded onto Dutch ships under the great Crane, whose treadwheels, walked by men, lift two tonnes at a time.
1620 · Bohemia
White Mountain, Prague
Around midday on Sunday 8 November 1620 the imperial and Catholic League armies storm the Bohemian Estates' position on White Mountain outside Prague; within about ninety minutes the rebel army breaks, and only the Moravian regiment fights on at the wall of the Hvězda game preserve. The defeat ends the Bohemian revolt and opens three centuries of Habsburg rule.
1754 · Moravia
Holy Trinity Column, Upper Square, Olomouc
On 9 September 1754 Olomouc consecrates its Holy Trinity Column, 38 years in the making and raised entirely by local masters, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I. With its gilded copper Trinity and a chapel inside its base, it has no equal among the Baroque columns of Central Europe.
1682 · Île-de-France
Place d'Armes, Versailles
On 6 May 1682 Louis XIV makes Versailles the permanent seat of his court and government, turning his father's hunting lodge, now wrapped in new wings, into the stage of absolute monarchy. The palace is still a vast building site: the Hall of Mirrors is being decorated, the Grand Commun is just begun and the north wing not yet started.
1747 · Brandenburg (Prussia)
Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam
On 1 May 1747 Frederick II of Prussia inaugurates Sanssouci, the small summer palace built to his own sketches on top of six curved vineyard terraces outside Potsdam, though not all its rooms are finished. Here the philosopher king will spend every summer, playing the flute and gathering Voltaire and other guests at his table.
1782 · Central Slovak mining towns, Kingdom of Hungary
Holy Trinity Square, Banská Štiavnica
1782: counted at more than 23,000 people, silver-rich Banská Štiavnica is the third-largest town in the Kingdom of Hungary after Pressburg and Debrecen and home of the pioneering Mining Academy. On market day its steep main square, built on a heap of mine waste, crowds around the tall Baroque Holy Trinity column.
1790s · Castile (Madrid)
Cibeles Fountain and the Salón del Prado, Madrid
In the 1790s water finally flows from Ventura Rodríguez's Cibeles fountain, set up in 1782 at the head of the Salón del Prado, the tree-lined promenade Charles III laid out to beautify his capital. Water-carriers fill their jars at one spout, the public at the other, and carriages parade toward the Neptune fountain.
1756 · Salzburg (Prince-Archbishopric)
Salzburg Cathedral, Domplatz
On the morning of 28 January 1756, the day after his birth in the Getreidegasse, the son of court musician Leopold Mozart is baptised in Salzburg Cathedral as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus. The city of the prince-archbishops, crowned by its marble-fronted cathedral and hilltop fortress, will be Wolfgang's home for the next 25 years.
1745 · Lochaber, Scottish Highlands
Glenfinnan, Loch Shiel
On 19 August 1745 Charles Edward Stuart, landed from France four weeks earlier, raises his father's standard at the head of Loch Shiel, and the Camerons of Lochiel march in to join him, some 700 men by one eyewitness count. The last Jacobite rising has begun; it will end at Culloden eight months later.
1770s · Campania (Kingdom of Naples)
Bay of Naples from Mergellina
In the 1770s fishermen draw their boats up on the beach of Mergellina while, across the bay, Vesuvius trails a plume of smoke directly behind Castel dell'Ovo. Naples is then the largest city in Italy, capital of the Bourbon kingdom and a magnet for Grand Tour travellers.
1660s · Buda (Ottoman Hungary)
Tomb of Gül Baba, Buda
In the 1660s, when the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi visits Buda, the hillside tomb of Gül Baba, the 'father of roses', is a busy pilgrimage place kept by Bektashi dervishes. Below it lies a Muslim city of 24 great mosques, domed baths and minarets, the seat of an Ottoman pasha since 1541 and until 1686.
1645 · Moravia
Petrov Hill, Brno
On 15 August 1645, after more than three months of siege, some 28,000 Swedes under Lennart Torstensson launch their general assault on Brno, held by about 1,500 soldiers, burghers and Jesuit students under Louis Raduit de Souches. The attack fails by evening; legend says the city was saved by ringing noon an hour early, which the Petrov bells still do every day at eleven.
1640s · Uttar Pradesh
Taj Mahal under construction, Agra
Around 1640, the white marble dome of the Taj Mahal rises on its riverside platform at Agra: some twenty thousand workers and a thousand elephants raising Shah Jahan's tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, partway through a project that will take more than twenty years.
1650s · Edo period, Tōkaidō
Tōkaidō road, Mt. Fuji
Around 1650 AD, a daimyō and his retinue of 2,000 retainers march along the Tōkaidō road past Mt. Fuji on the mandatory alternate-year residence journey to Edo: the Tokugawa shogunate's masterstroke of social control.
1755 · Lisbon, Estremadura
Praça do Comércio, Lisbon
On November 1, 1755, a magnitude 8.5+ earthquake strikes Lisbon during All Saints' Day Mass, followed by fire and a 6-meter tsunami up the Tagus, killing perhaps 50,000 in a city of 200,000.
industrial
The industrial age
1899 · Łódź Land (Congress Poland)
Piotrkowska Street, Łódź
In 1899, the year Reymont's The Promised Land appears as a book, Łódź is the booming textile capital of the Russian partition, and its main street, Piotrkowska, has just got the first electric trams in Congress Poland, running since December 1898 past factory owners' palaces, new tenements and mill chimneys, while Warsaw still rides horse trams.
1813 · Holland (South Holland)
Beach of Scheveningen
On the afternoon of 30 November 1813, as French rule in Holland collapses, Prince William Frederick of Orange, son of the last stadtholder, is rowed ashore from the British warship Warrior and lifted onto a farm wagon in the surf at Scheveningen. Two days later he is proclaimed sovereign prince in Amsterdam, the start of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
1875 · Paris
Palais Garnier, Paris
On the evening of Tuesday 5 January 1875 President MacMahon inaugurates Charles Garnier's opera house, fourteen years in the making, before the Lord Mayor of London, the Burgomaster of Amsterdam, the Spanish royal family and some 2,000 guests, while the avenue meant to frame it is still a building site. Garnier himself has had to pay for his seat.
1810 · Bavaria
Theresienwiese, Munich
On 17 October 1810 a horse race on a meadow outside Munich crowns the celebrations for the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen; 50,000 spectators watch from the hillside, and the field is named Theresienwiese after the bride. Repeated the next year, the race becomes the Oktoberfest.
1869 · Ismailia, Suez Canal
Suez Canal at Ismailia
On November 17, 1869, the Suez Canal opens with a procession of 68 ships led by the French Empress Eugénie's yacht L'Aigle: the first direct shipping link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
1848 · Pest
Hungarian National Museum, Pest
At three in the afternoon of 15 March 1848, in pouring rain, some ten thousand people crowd the yard of the new National Museum in Pest while the young radicals of March read the Twelve Points from the stair parapet and hand out the first uncensored prints, among them Petőfi's National Song. The revolution takes Pest that day without bloodshed; the image of Petőfi reciting on these steps is a later legend.
1842 · Rhineland (Prussian Rhine Province)
Cologne Cathedral
On 4 September 1842 King Frederick William IV of Prussia and the coadjutor Johannes von Geissel lay the foundation stone for completing Cologne Cathedral, a torso for almost three centuries with a medieval crane on its unfinished south tower. Funded by donors across Germany, the work becomes a national project and is finished in 1880.
1867 · Pest
Coronation Mound at the Chain Bridge, Pest
On 8 June 1867, crowned king in Buda to seal the Compromise with Austria, Franz Joseph rides across the Chain Bridge to Pest, swears the constitutional oath and gallops up a mound heaped from the earth of every county of the kingdom to cut the air with St Stephen's sword towards the four points of the compass. The ceremony seals the birth of Austria-Hungary.
1841 · Liptov, High Tatras
Summit of Kriváň, High Tatras
16 August 1841: 25-year-old Ľudovít Štúr, his Greek pupil Prince Aristarchos and a party of Liptov patriots, women among them, reach the crooked summit of Kriváň, the first recorded ascent with women. The climb made the mountain a symbol of the Slovak nation and began the national ascents still held every August.
1881 · Bohemia
National Theatre, Prague
On the afternoon of 12 August 1881, two months after its opening, the National Theatre, built over thirteen years from the pennies of a whole nation, catches fire and loses its copper dome, auditorium and stage. Within 47 days the Czechs collect a million gulden to rebuild it, and it reopens in 1883.
1839 · Silesia
Gräfenberg Spa, Jeseník
In 1839 some 1,500 patients, among them a monarch, 22 princes and 149 counts and countesses, climb to Gräfenberg in the Jeseníky mountains of Austrian Silesia to take the cold-water cure of Vincenz Priessnitz, a self-taught farmer whose spa is the first hydrotherapy resort in the world; 120 doctors come to study his methods.
1869 · Vienna
Court Opera on the Ringstraße, Vienna
On the evening of 25 May 1869 Emperor Franz Joseph opens the new Court Opera, the first great public building on Vienna's Ringstraße, with Mozart's Don Giovanni sung in German. Neither of its architects lives to see the night: both died in 1868, after Viennese mockery of the 'sunken box'.
1897 · Vienna
Giant Ferris Wheel, Prater, Vienna
On 3 July 1897, a hot summer day, Vienna's Giant Ferris Wheel opens in the Prater, built by English engineers for the jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph's 50 years on the throne. Its 30 cabins turn up to 64.75 m above the canals of the 'Venice in Vienna' pleasure park, making it one of the largest wheels in the world; a ride costs a gulden.
1886 · Bavaria (Allgäu)
Neuschwanstein Castle
Before dawn on 10 June 1886 a government commission arrives at Neuschwanstein to take King Ludwig II, just declared unfit to rule, into custody; gendarmes loyal to the king bar the gate of his unfinished castle, and after half an hour in the rain the commissioners must turn back. Three days later Ludwig is dead in Lake Starnberg.
1848 · Hesse (Free City of Frankfurt)
St Paul's Church, Frankfurt
On 18 May 1848 the first freely elected all-German parliament gathers in the Kaisersaal of the Römer and then walks in solemn procession, several hundred deputies strong, to St Paul's Church, hung inside with the new black-red-gold colours. The National Assembly will draft Germany's first democratic constitution.
1829 · Lancashire
Rainhill Level, Liverpool and Manchester Railway
On 8 October 1829, before crowds at Rainhill, Robert Stephenson's yellow-and-black Rocket runs twenty trips along a level mile of the unfinished Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 70 miles in all, and becomes the only engine to meet the trial's conditions. Its victory settles that steam locomotives will work the first inter-city railway.
1805 · Moravia
Žuráň Hill, Battlefield of Austerlitz
At half past seven on 2 December 1805 a red sun breaks through the fog over Slavkov (Austerlitz), and Napoleon on Žuráň hill sends Soult's divisions up the Pratzen Heights against the Russian and Austrian armies. By afternoon the Battle of the Three Emperors is his greatest victory, fought in the fields east of Brno.
1888 · Catalonia
Arc de Triomf and Saló de Sant Joan, Barcelona
On 20 May 1888 the Queen Regent Maria Christina and the two-year-old King Alfonso XIII inaugurate Spain's first Universal Exposition in Barcelona. Crowds pour under Josep Vilaseca's brand-new red-brick Arc de Triomf and down the Saló de Sant Joan toward the Ciutadella park, where Domènech i Montaner's restaurant heralds modernisme.
1870 · Lazio (Papal States)
Porta Pia, Rome
Just after 10 am on 20 September 1870, after five hours of Italian artillery fire, a 30-metre breach gapes in the Aurelian Walls beside Porta Pia, white flags go up along the papal ramparts and plumed bersaglieri surge through. The capture of Rome ended more than a thousand years of the popes' temporal power and gave Italy its capital.
1860 · Sicily (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies)
Harbour of Marsala
Around 1.30 pm on 11 May 1860 the steamer Piemonte ties up among British merchant ships in Marsala harbour and Giuseppe Garibaldi's volunteers, some in red woollen shirts, pour ashore, while their second ship, the Lombardo, lies stranded on a shoal. Almost unopposed, the Expedition of the Thousand began the conquest of the Bourbon south and the unification of Italy.
1848 · Lombardy
Piazza del Duomo, Milan
On the morning of 23 March 1848 Milan wakes up free: after five days of street fighting behind some 1,700 barricades, Marshal Radetzky's Austrian army has withdrawn in the night, and the square in front of the Duomo fills with tricolours. The Cinque Giornate became the founding legend of the Risorgimento.
1830 · Masovia
Krakowskie Przedmieście, Warsaw
On 11 May 1830 Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz unveils Thorvaldsen's bronze Copernicus in front of the Staszic Palace, seat of the Society of Friends of Learning, paid for by Staszic and a public collection. It is Warsaw's last spring before the November Uprising; young Chopin, living a few hundred metres up the street, will leave the city for good in November.
1842 · Bohemia
Main Square, Plzeň
On 11 November 1842, at the St Martin's market, Plzeň first tastes the bottom-fermented pale beer of its new Burghers' Brewery, brewed on 5 October by the Bavarian brewer Josef Groll. The first pilsner is a hit, and the style it founded is now brewed all over the world.
1861 · Turiec, Upper Hungary
Lutheran Church Green, Martin (Memorandum Square)
6 and 7 June 1861: thousands of Slovaks gather under the old lindens before the Lutheran church of Turčiansky Svätý Martin and adopt the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation, demanding recognition as a nation and a self-governing Slovak district within Hungary. It was the most important Slovak mass political gathering between 1849 and 1918, and Matica slovenská grew directly out of it.
1860s · Moravia
Mendel's Garden, St Thomas's Abbey, Brno
Between 1856 and 1863 the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel grows and records some 28,000 plants, most of them peas, in the garden of St Thomas's Abbey in Old Brno. In 1865 he presents the results to the Brno natural history society, laying down the laws of heredity that make him the father of genetics.
1863 · Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Soldiers' National Cemetery, Gettysburg
On 19 November 1863, four months after the Civil War's largest battle, President Lincoln delivers a 272-word address at the dedication of the new *Soldiers' National Cemetery* in Gettysburg: the speech that redefines the war's purpose.
1804 · Paris, Île de la Cité
Notre-Dame de Paris
On 2 December 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of the French inside Notre-Dame de Paris, taking the gold laurel wreath from Pope Pius VII's hands and placing it on his own head, the gesture David captured in the most famous coronation painting of the nineteenth century.
modern_early
The early 20th century
1911 · Ulster, Northern Ireland
Harland & Wolff Shipyard, Belfast
At 12.15 on 31 May 1911 the hull of the Titanic, the largest ship yet built, slides stern first from Slipway No. 3 at Harland & Wolff into the River Lagan before some 100,000 onlookers, greased by 22 tonnes of soap and tallow and never christened. Her finished sister Olympic lies the same day in Belfast Lough, awaiting her owners.
1944 · Masovia
PAST Building, Warsaw
On the morning of 20 August 1944, after a night assault that began at 2:30, Home Army soldiers of the Kiliński Battalion take the PAST telephone exchange, the German stronghold in central Warsaw, setting it ablaze with improvised flamethrowers from fire pumps and capturing over a hundred Germans. The white-and-red flag goes up over the burning tower.
1920 · Pomerania (Kashubia)
Shore of the Bay of Puck, Puck
On a rainy 10 February 1920 General Józef Haller rides his horse into the Bay of Puck and throws a platinum ring into the water, wedding Poland to the Baltic after the Treaty of Versailles returns a strip of Pomeranian coast. A naval ensign is raised to a 21-gun salute and a Kashubian skipper hands the watch over the sea to a Polish sailor.
1944 · Paris
Champs-Élysées, Paris
On the afternoon of 26 August 1944, the day after the German garrison surrendered, General de Gaulle rekindles the flame of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe and walks down the Champs-Élysées ahead of Leclerc and the Resistance leaders, through a crowd estimated at two million. The march seals his authority as head of liberated France.
1918 · Masovia
Saxon Square, Warsaw
On 11 November 1918, the day the Regency Council hands Józef Piłsudski command of the army and Germany signs the armistice, Polish soldiers, members of the Polish Military Organisation and Warsaw residents disarm German troops in front of their garrison command on Saxon Square. After 123 years of partitions Poland is free.
1937 · Biscay (Basque Country)
Tree of Gernika and the Assembly House
On the morning of 27 April 1937, the day after German and Italian aircraft fighting for Franco bombed and burned Gernika, smoke still rises from the ruins of the Basque town. Up the hill the Assembly House of Biscay and the oak of Gernika, symbol of Basque liberties, stand untouched.
1916 · Lorraine (Meuse)
Voie Sacrée, Souilly
In March 1916, as the Battle of Verdun rages to the north, lorries grind along the one road that keeps the city supplied, on average one every fourteen seconds, carrying fresh troops and shells up and the wounded back. General Pétain directs the defence from Souilly town hall, beside the road Maurice Barrès will call the Voie Sacrée.
1944 · Central Slovakia, insurgent territory
Main Square, Banská Bystrica
30 August 1944, the day after the Slovak National Uprising broke out against the German occupation: Banská Bystrica is in insurgent hands, partisans march in, and late in the morning the Free Slovak Radio goes on air from a building a few hundred metres away. For sixty days the town was the capital of free Slovakia.
1944 · Calvados, Normandy
Omaha Beach, Normandy
At 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, the first waves of American soldiers from the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions wade ashore at Omaha Beach under heavy German machine-gun fire in the bloodiest landing of D-Day.
1932 · Zuiderzee (North Holland and Friesland)
The Vlieter, Afsluitdijk
At 13:02 on Saturday 28 May 1932 three floating cranes drop the last loads of boulder clay into the Vlieter, the final gap in the Afsluitdijk, while every ship's steam whistle sounds. The Zuiderzee, for centuries an arm of the North Sea, becomes a lake, soon renamed the IJsselmeer.
1939 · Pomerania (Free City of Danzig)
Westerplatte, Gdańsk
At 4:45 on Friday 1 September 1939 the German training battleship Schleswig-Holstein, moored in the Gdańsk harbour channel, opens fire on the Polish Military Transit Depot at Westerplatte, the first shots of the Second World War in Europe. The 182 defenders, expected to hold for up to twelve hours, hold out for seven days.
1939 · Bohemia
Lower Wenceslas Square, Prague
On the morning of 15 March 1939, in a heavy fall of wet snow, German columns roll down Wenceslas Square as Hitler's troops occupy what remains of Czechoslovakia. Thousands of Praguers watch from the pavements, weeping, booing and singing the national anthem; that evening Hitler reaches Prague Castle, and the next day he proclaims the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
1937 · Moravia
Square of Work, Zlín
On 16 September 1937 the concrete frame of the Baťa company's new headquarters reaches its sixteenth floor above Zlín: at 77.5 m it is the second-tallest modern building in Europe. Around it stands the factory town the shoe empire built in brick, concrete and glass, the showcase of interwar Czechoslovakia.
1918 · Bohemia
Wenceslas Square, Prague
Late in the morning of 28 October 1918, as news spreads that Austria-Hungary has accepted President Wilson's terms, crowds pour onto Wenceslas Square and the priest Isidor Zahradník proclaims an independent Czechoslovak state at the St Wenceslas monument. That evening the National Committee passes the new republic's first law.
1928 · Myjava Hills (kopanice), First Czechoslovak Republic
Štefánik's Tomb, Bradlo
Sunday, 23 September 1928: on the tenth anniversary of Czechoslovakia, state officials and diplomats unveil Dušan Jurkovič's gleaming travertine tomb for General Milan Rastislav Štefánik on Bradlo hill above his native village. Built in 280 working days, it holds the astronomer, aviator and diplomat who co-founded the republic and died in a plane crash in 1919.
1918 · Vienna
Parliament, Vienna
Shortly before four on the afternoon of 12 November 1918, the day after Emperor Karl gave up power, the presidents of the Provisional National Assembly proclaim the Republic of German-Austria from the ramp of the Parliament to tens of thousands standing in the rain. As red-white-red flags go up, Red Guards tear out their white stripes.
1917 · Petrograd (St. Petersburg)
Palace Square, Winter Palace
On the night of October 25, 1917 (November 7 New Style), Bolshevik forces cross Palace Square in Petrograd to arrest the Provisional Government inside the Winter Palace; Sergei Eisenstein's later film would mythologize this as a heroic charge.
1919 · Versailles, Île-de-France
Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles
On June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, exactly five years after the Sarajevo assassination, German delegates sign the Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War.
1945 · Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands
Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima
At midday on February 23, 1945, six United States Marines raise a larger replacement American flag on a length of iron pipe atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima, captured in Joe Rosenthal's photograph.
1914 · Ypres Salient, West Flanders
No man's land near Ploegsteert, Belgium
On Christmas Day 1914, an estimated 100 000 British and German soldiers across the Western Front spontaneously declare their own truce, meeting in no-man's-land to exchange tobacco, sing carols, bury their dead, and in places play football with empty bully- beef tins.
1941 · Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii
Battleship Row, Pearl Harbor
At 8:06 a.m. on December 7, 1941, the USS Arizona's forward magazine detonates during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, sending a 300-meter black plume vertically into the Hawaiian sky.
modern_postwar
The post-war era
1968 · Paris
Rue Gay-Lussac, Paris
At dawn on Saturday 11 May 1968, after the Night of the Barricades, rue Gay-Lussac lies wrecked: overturned and burnt cars, felled trees and heaps of paving stones where students held barricades until riot police stormed them after 2 a.m. Outrage at the police assault turns a student revolt into the largest general strike in French history.
1953 · Zeeland
Dike Gap at Ouwerkerk
Three minutes before midnight on 6 November 1953, under searchlights and sodium lamps, the fourth concrete Phoenix caisson settles into the last open breach of the February flood at Ouwerkerk, on Duiveland. Sirens and cheers break out: nine months after the disaster that killed 1,836 people, the last dike gap is closed.
1957 · Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakh SSR
Site 1 (Gagarin's Start), Baikonur
At 22:28 Moscow time on 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launches *Sputnik 1*: an 84-kilogram polished aluminium sphere that becomes the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth.
1969 · Bohemia
Jan Palach Square, Prague
On 25 January 1969 some 200,000 people follow the coffin of Jan Palach in complete silence. The 20-year-old student had set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square on 16 January in protest against the resignation that followed the Soviet invasion; the procession halts before his Faculty of Arts, on a square students have already renamed after him.
1968 · Bohemia
National Museum, Wenceslas Square, Prague
On the morning of 21 August 1968, hours after Warsaw Pact armies invaded to crush the Prague Spring, Soviet tanks coming from Vinohradská rake the facade of the National Museum with machine-gun fire. Praguers fill the upper square, surround the tanks to argue with their crews and cover the statue of St Wenceslas with flags and slogans.
1945 · Bohemia
Czech Radio Building, Vinohradská, Prague
On Saturday 5 May 1945 the Prague Uprising breaks out at the radio building on Vinohradská: at 12:15 the staff hoist the Czechoslovak and American flags, the station broadcasts desperate calls for help, and at six in the evening the SS inside surrender. That night about 100,000 Praguers raise some 1,600 barricades across the city.
1948 · Bohemia
Kinsky Palace, Old Town Square, Prague
On Saturday 21 February 1948, the day after the non-communist ministers resign, Klement Gottwald speaks from the balcony of the Kinsky Palace to more than 100,000 people standing in hard frost. Four days later President Beneš gives way and the communists take power for 41 years; the photo from this balcony, with Vladimír Clementis later airbrushed out, went round the world.
1979 · Masovia
Victory Square, Warsaw
On the afternoon of Saturday 2 June 1979, on his first visit home as pope, John Paul II says Mass for about half a million people on Victory Square in communist Warsaw and prays that the Holy Spirit will renew the face of the earth, adding "this land". The words are remembered as the spark of the Solidarity movement.
1955 · Vienna
Upper Belvedere, Vienna
Around noon on Sunday 15 May 1955, just after the State Treaty is signed in the Marble Hall of the Upper Belvedere, Foreign Minister Leopold Figl steps onto the balcony with the Allied foreign ministers and holds up the signed treaty to the crowd waiting in the palace garden. After ten years of occupation, Austria is free.
1960 · Lazio
Arch of Constantine, Rome
At about 7.45 pm on 10 September 1960, after running the Appian Way barefoot between torches held by Italian soldiers, Ethiopia's Abebe Bikila breaks the tape under the Arch of Constantine in a world-best time. Rome's first Olympics showed off an Italy reborn after the war, and Bikila won in the capital of the country that had invaded his own.
1966 · Tuscany
Piazza Santa Croce, Florence
On 5 November 1966, the morning after the Arno burst into Florence, Piazza Santa Croce lies under a crust of mud and heating oil, wrecked cars are heaped against the palaces and Dante's statue stands smeared to its pedestal as residents and the first volunteers begin to dig. The flood ravaged thousands of artworks and books, and the young 'angeli del fango' who came to save them became a national legend.
1956 · Budapest
Stalin Monument, Budapest
On the evening of 23 October 1956, the first day of the Hungarian Revolution, a huge crowd pulls down the eight-metre bronze Stalin on Stalin Square in Budapest: after hours of work with cables, lorries and cutting torches it falls at 21:37, leaving only the boots on the tribune. It is the revolution's first common act and becomes its emblem.
1945 · North Holland
Berlage Bridge, Amsterdam
On Tuesday 8 May 1945, three days after the German capitulation in the Netherlands, the first Canadian columns roll into Amsterdam over the Berlage Bridge. After the Hunger Winter, thin but jubilant crowds swarm the vehicles, wave orange and red-white-blue flags and ride along on the carriers and on motorbikes.
1953 · Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest), Solukhumbu
Summit of Mount Everest
At 11:30 on 29 May 1953, the New Zealand beekeeper *Edmund Hillary* and the Nepalese Sherpa *Tenzing Norgay* stand on the 8 849-metre summit of *Mount Everest*: the first humans confirmed to reach the highest point on Earth.
1989 · Berlin, Brandenburg Gate
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin
On the night of November 9–10, 1989, East and West Berliners climb the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, chipping at the concrete with hammers and dancing on top: the symbolic collapse of the Iron Curtain.
1980 · Gdańsk, Pomerania
Lenin Shipyard, Gate No. 2, Gdańsk
On August 31, 1980, Lech Wałęsa signs the 21 Demands with a giant souvenir pen at Gate No. 2 of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk: the agreement that legalizes the Solidarity trade union and begins the unraveling of communism in Eastern Europe.
1948 · Berlin (West), Tempelhof
Tempelhof Airport, West Berlin
For 462 days between June 1948 and September 1949, British and American transport aircraft fly food and coal into blockaded West Berlin: one plane landing at Tempelhof every 90 seconds at the peak.
contemporary
Contemporary
2012 · London
Olympic Stadium, London
At about 9.25 pm on 27 July 2012, in Danny Boyle's 'Isles of Wonder' ceremony, five glowing rings forged in a staged industrial revolution rise over the Olympic Stadium in Stratford and rain sparks. Watched by some 900 million people, it opens the Games many Britons remember as a high point of national pride.
1989 · Saxony (GDR)
Karl-Marx-Platz (Augustusplatz), Leipzig
On the evening of 9 October 1989 more than 70,000 people leave the peace prayers in Leipzig's churches and march around the inner ring past armed police and militia, carrying candles and chanting 'Wir sind das Volk' and 'Keine Gewalt'. The security forces hold back, and the peaceful revolution breaks through, a month before the Berlin Wall falls.
2005 · Saxony
Frauenkirche, Dresden
On 30 October 2005 the rebuilt Frauenkirche is consecrated, sixty years after the air raids of February 1945 turned it into a heap of rubble that stood as a memorial against war throughout East German times. Some 60,000 people follow the service on screens on the Neumarkt, beneath a golden cross made by the son of a British bomber pilot.
2002 · Bohemia
Kampa from Charles Bridge, Prague
At noon on 14 August 2002 the Vltava peaks at 5,160 cubic metres per second, Prague's worst flood in centuries. Kampa and the lower Lesser Town stand under water to the first floor, every bridge is closed to all but rescuers, and on the Old Town bank the mobile barriers hold with barely half a metre to spare.
1989 · Bohemia
Národní třída, Prague
On the evening of 17 November 1989 a student march marking fifty years since the Nazis closed the Czech universities is trapped on Národní třída between police cordons. About ten thousand people sit down before the white helmets with candles and flowers, chanting 'We have bare hands!', until the riot police beat them; outrage at the attack starts the Velvet Revolution.
1992 · Moravia
Villa Tugendhat, Brno
On the hot afternoon of 26 August 1992 the Czech and Slovak prime ministers, Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar, talk for hours in shirtsleeves under a plane tree in the garden of Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in Brno. Shortly before midnight they announce that Czechoslovakia will cease to exist on 1 January 1993.
1989 · Bratislava, Czechoslovakia
SNP Square, Bratislava
Thursday evening, 23 November 1989: a crowd fills Bratislava's SNP Square, where rallies now gather every day, and hears Alexander Dubček, the face of the 1968 Prague Spring, call for the renewal of society. Five weeks later Václav Havel was president and Dubček chaired the federal parliament.
1989 · Western Transdanubia (Sopron)
Border Gate on the Old Pozsony Road, Sopron
Shortly before three in the afternoon of 19 August 1989, during a 'Pan-European Picnic' on the Austrian border near Sopron, several hundred East Germans push through a rusty, wooden-framed wire gate on the old Pozsony road and run into Austria while the Hungarian border guards stand aside. The largest escape from East Germany since 1961 helped bring down the Berlin Wall less than three months later.
2003 · Baghdad, central Iraq
Firdos Square, Baghdad
At about 6:50 p.m. on April 9, 2003, a U.S. Marine M88 recovery vehicle pulls down the 12-meter bronze statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in central Baghdad: the visual symbol of the regime's end.
present
The present day
2019 · Paris, Île de la Cité
Notre-Dame de Paris
At 7:53 p.m. on April 15, 2019, the 96-meter wooden flèche of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral collapses through the burning roof; Parisians on the bridges and quays kneel and sing Ave Maria.
2011 · Cairo, central Egypt
Tahrir Square, Cairo
Just after 6:00 p.m. on February 11, 2011, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in Tahrir Square erupt in celebration as Vice-President Omar Suleiman announces that President Hosni Mubarak has resigned after 30 years.