Description.

Greater burdock is a biennial plant, rather tall, reaching as much as. It has large, alternating, cordiform leaves that have a long petiole and are pubescent on the underside.  The flowers are purple and grouped in globular capitula, united in clusters. They appear in mid-summer, from July to September. The capitula are surrounded by an involucre made out of many bracts, each curving to form a hook, allowing the mature fruits to be carried long distances on the fur of animals. The fruits are achenes; they are long, compressed, with short pappus hairs. These are a potential hazard for humans, horses, and dogs. The minute, sharply-pointed, bristly pappus hairs easily detach from the top of the achenes and are carried by the slightest breeze – attaching to skin, mucous membranes, and eyes where they can cause severe dermal irritation, possible respiratory manifestations, and ophthalmia. The fleshy tap-root can grow up to deep.

Distribution and ecology.

This species is native to the temperate regions of the Old World, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, and from the British Isles through Russia, and the Middle East to India, China, Taiwan and Japan.  It is naturalized almost everywhere and is usually found in disturbed areas, especially in soil rich in nitrogen. It is commonly cultivated in Japan where it gives its name to a particular construction technique, burdock piling.  The leaves of greater burdock provide food for the caterpillars of some Lepidoptera, such as the thistle ermine ("Myelois circumvoluta").

Cultivation.

It prefers a fresh, worked soil, rich in humus, and should be positioned in full sunlight. Burdock is very reactive to nitrogen fertilizer. Propagation is achieved through sowing the seeds midsummer. The harvest occurs three to four months after the seeding until late autumn, when the roots become too fibrous.

Culinary use.

Greater burdock root is known as "niúbàng" () in Chinese, which was borrowed into Japanese as "gobō" and Korean as "ueong" (), and is widely eaten in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. It was used in Europe during the Middle Ages as a vegetable, but now it is rarely used except in Italy, Brazil and Portugal, where it is known as "bardana" or "garduna". Plants are cultivated for their slender roots, which can grow about 1 meter long and 2 cm across. The root was traditionally used in Britain as a flavouring in the herbal drink dandelion and burdock, which is still commercially produced.  Immature flower stalks may also be harvested in late spring, before flowers appear. The taste resembles that of artichoke, a burdock relative.  In the second half of the 20th century, burdock achieved international recognition for its culinary use due to the increasing popularity of the macrobiotic diet, which advocates its consumption. The root contains a fair amount of dietary fiber (GDF, 6 g per 100 g), calcium, potassium, amino acids, and is low calorie. It contains polyphenols that causes darkened surface and muddy harshness by formation of tannin-iron complexes. Those polyphenols are caffeoylquinic acid derivatives.  The root is very crisp and has a sweet, mild, and pungent flavor with a little muddy harshness that can be reduced by soaking julienned/shredded roots in water for five to ten minutes. The harshness shows excellent harmonization with pork in miso soup (tonjiru) and takikomi gohan (a Japanese-style pilaf).  A popular Japanese dish is "kinpira gobō", julienned or shredded burdock root and carrot, braised with soy sauce, sugar, mirin and/or sake, and sesame oil. Another is burdock makizushi, rolled sushi filled with pickled burdock root; the burdock root is often artificially colored orange to resemble a carrot. Burdock root can also be found as a fried snack food similar in taste and texture to potato chips and is occasionally used as an ingredient in tempura dishes.  Fermentation of the root by "Aspergillus oryzae" is also used for making miso and rice wine in Japanese cuisine.

Use in traditional medicine.

Dried burdock roots (Bardanae radix) are used in folk medicine as a diuretic, diaphoretic, and a blood purifying agent. Anecdotal reports from the 19th century suggest that this medicinal plant has also been used by the Ojibwa tribe, and today, in form of an ingredient in Essiac tea for the alternative treatment of some cancers. As an oily macerate, it is a component of some cosmetics, shampoos and hair care products. The seeds of greater burdock are employed in traditional Chinese medicine particularly for skin conditions and in cold/flu formulas, under the name "niubangzi" (; some dictionaries list the Chinese as just 牛蒡 niúbàng.)

Chemical constituents.

Burdock roots contain mucilage, sulfurous acetylene compounds, polyacetylenes and bitter guaianolide-type constituents. Seeds contain arctigenin, arctiin, and butyrolactone lignans.

Arctium lappa, commonly called greater burdock,, edible burdock, lappa, beggar's buttons, thorny burr, or happy major is a Eurasian species of plants in the Aster family, cultivated in gardens for its root used as a vegetable. It has become an invasive weed of high-nitrogen soils in North America, Australia, and other regions.


Overview.

The genus was introduced into several Asian countries as a replacement source of mahogany timber around the time it was restricted in its native locations in the late 1990s. Trade in Asian grown plantation mahogany is not restricted. Fiji and India are the largest exporters of plantation mahogany and wild mahogany remains commercially unavailable to this day.  It is usually taken to consist of three species, geographically separated. They are medium-sized to large trees growing to 20–45 m tall, and up to trunk diameter. The leaves are 10–30 cm long, pinnate, with 3-6 pairs of leaflets, the terminal leaflet absent; each leaflet is 5–15 cm long. The leaves are deciduous to semi-evergreen, falling shortly before the new foliage grows. The flowers are produced in loose inflorescences, each flower small, with five white to greenish-yellowish petals. The fruit is a pear-shaped five-valved capsule 8–20 cm long, containing numerous winged seeds about 5–9 cm long.  The three species are poorly defined biologically, in part because they hybridize freely when grown in proximity.

Uses.

The genus is famed as the supplier of mahogany, at first yielded by "Swietenia mahagoni", a Caribbean species, which was so extensively used locally and exported that its trade ended by the 1950s. These days almost all mahogany is yielded by the mainland species, "Swietenia macrophylla" although no longer from its native locations due to the restrictions set by CITES (see following.)  As a timber, both "Swietenia macrophylla" and "Swietenia mahogoni" are both grown in plantations in several Asian countries such as Fiji, Indonesia, India, and Bangladesh and this plantation mahogany timber is the main source of the world's current supply of "genuine mahogany", due to cultivation and trade of it in its native locations being restricted by the Convention On International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) since the late 1990s. Trade in Swietenia grown and harvested in these non-native locations is not restricted. Species of this genus are only occasionally plantation-grown in Central America, in spite of the good growing conditions and high price of the wood, due to the ubiquitous presence of the mahogany shoot borer moth (also known as the cedar tip moth), Hypsipyla grandella, which damages the form of the tree by killing the terminal shoot, causing excessive branching. Control requires extensive and frequent spraying with pesticides, rendering the genus relatively uneconomic wherever the shoot borer is present.  The fruits of "Swietenia macrophylla" are called "sky fruit", because they seem to hang upwards from the tree. The "sky fruit" concentrate is sold as a natural remedy that is said to improve blood circulation and skin. It is also said to have Viagra-like qualities regarding erectile dysfunction.  A somewhat comparable wood is yielded by the related African genus "Khaya". This is traded as "African mahogany" and is from the same family as "Swietenia".

Conservation.

All species of "Swietenia" are CITES-listed. "Swietenia" timber that crosses a border needs its paperwork in order. International environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Rainforest Action Network have focused on "Swietenia" so as to expose illegal traffic in the wood, notably from Brazil.

Swietenia is a genus of trees in the chinaberry family, Meliaceae. It occurs natively in the Neotropics, from southern Florida, the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America south to Bolivia. The genus is named for Dutch-Austrian physician Gerard van Swieten (1700-1772). The wood of "Swietenia" trees is known as mahogany.


Early life.

Söderbaum was born in Stockholm, Sweden; her father, Professor Henrik Gustaf Söderbaum (1862–1933), was the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  After both her parents died shortly after one another, Söderbaum moved to Berlin and enrolled in a theatre school.

Career.

Nazi era.

Beginning in 1935, Söderbaum starred in a number of films with director Veit Harlan, whom she married in 1939. Harlan and Söderbaum made ten films together for the then state-controlled film production company UFA until 1945.  According to film historian Antje Ascheid, Söderbaum is frequently identified as "most singularly representative of the Nazi ideal, as the quintessential Nazi star". As a beautiful Swedish blonde, Söderbaum had the baby-doll looks that epitomized the model Aryan woman. In fact, she had already played the role of the innocent Aryan in a number of feature films and was well-known to German audiences. Her youth and beauty made her a symbol of health and purity and thus an exemplary specimen of the Nazi ideal of womanhood.  In a number of her films, she had been imperiled by the threat of "rassenschande" ("racial pollution"). Two such roles were Dorothea Sturm, the doomed heroine of the antisemitic historical melodrama "Jud Süß", who commits suicide by drowning after being raped by the villain and Anna in "Die goldene Stadt", a Sudeten German whose desire for the city (in defiance of blood and soil) and whose seduction by a Czech result in her drowning suicide. As a result of her watery fate in these two films, as well as a similar end in her debut in Harlan's 1938 film "Jugend", she was given the mock honorary title "Reichswasserleiche" ("Drowned Corpse of the Reich").  Other roles included Elske in "Die Reise nach Tilsit", the wholesome German wife whose husband betrays her with a Polish woman, but finally returns, repentant; Elisabeth in "Immensee", who marries a rich landowner to forget her unrequited love, and in the end decides to remain faithful even after she is widowed and her lover returns; Aels in "Opfergang", a woman who dies after her love affair; Luise Treskow in "The Great King", a miller's daughter who encourages Frederick the Great; and Maria in "Kolberg", a peasant girl who loyally supports the resistance to Napoleon and is the only survivor of her family.

Postwar.

In the first few years after the war, Söderbaum was often heckled off the stage and even had rotten vegetables thrown at her. In subsequent years, she frequently expressed regret for her roles in anti-semitic films.  After her husband was again permitted to direct films, Söderbaum played leading roles in a number of his films. These included "Blue Hour" (1952), "The Prisoner of the Maharaja" (1953), "Betrayal of Germany" (1954), and "I Will Carry You on My Hands" (1958). Their last joint project was a 1963 theater production of August Strindberg's "A Dream Play" in Aachen.  After Harlan's death in 1964, Söderbaum became a noted fashion photographer. In 1974 she took a role in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film "Karl May". In 1983 she published her memoirs under the title "Nichts bleibt immer so" ("Nothing Stays That Way Forever"). In her later years, Söderbaum faded into obscurity but still took roles in three movies and the television series "The Bergdoktor". Her last film was with Hugh Grant in the thriller "Night Train to Venice" in 1994. She died in 2001 in a nursing home in Hitzacker, Lower Saxony, Germany.

Beata Margareta Kristina Söderbaum (5 September 1912 – 12 February 2001) was a Swedish-born German film actress, producer, and photographer. She is most known for her roles in Nazi-era films.


Description.

The plant is a rosette-forming perennial herb, with leafless, silky, hairy flower stems (). The basal leaves are lanceolate spreading or erect, scarcely toothed with 3-5 strong parallel veins narrowed to a short petiole. The flower stalk is deeply furrowed, ending in an ovoid inflorescence of many small flowers each with a pointed bract. Each flower can produce up to two hundred seeds. Flowers are (calyx green, corolla brownish), 4 bent back lobes with brown midribs and long white stamens. It is native to temperate Eurasia, widespread throughout the British Isles, but scarce on the most acidic soils (pH < 4.5). It is present and widespread in the Americas and Australia as an introduced species.

Distribution.

"Plantago lanceolata" is native to Eurasia, but has been introduced to North America and many other parts of the world with suitable habitats.

History.

Considered to be an indicator of agriculture in pollen diagrams, "P. lanceolata" has been found in western Norway from the Early Neolithic onwards, which is considered an indicator of grazing in that area at the time. This would make sense, as "P. lanceolata" thrives in open fields where livestock are frequently disturbing the ground.

Uses.

"Plantago lanceolata" is used frequently in herbal teas and other herbal remedies. A tea from the leaves is used as a cough medicine. In the traditional Austrian medicine "Plantago lanceolata" leaves have been used internally (as syrup or tea) or externally (fresh leaves) for treatment of disorders of the respiratory tract, skin, insect bites, and infections.  Songbirds eat the seeds, and the leaves are eaten by rabbits.

Chemistry.

"Plantago lanceolata" contains phenylethanoids such as acteoside (verbascoside), cistanoside F, lavandulifolioside, plantamajoside and isoacteoside. It also contains the iridoid glycosides aucubin and catalpol. These iridoid glycosides make the plant inedible to some herbivores, but others are unperturbed by them--for example, the buckeye butterfly "Junonia coenia", whose larvae eat the leaves of "P. lanceolata" and ingest the iridoid glycosides to make themselves unpalatable to predators.

Habitat.

"Plantago lanceolata" can live anywhere from very dry meadows to places similar to a rain forest, but it does best in open, disturbed areas. It is therefore common near roadsides where other plants cannot flourish; it grows tall if it can do so, but in frequently-mowed areas it adopts a flat growth habit instead. Historically, the plant has thrived in areas where ungulates graze and turn up the earth with their hooves.

Reproduction.

The mode of reproduction can vary among populations of "P. lanceolata". Reproduction occurs sexually, with the pollen being wind dispersed for the most part, though the plant is occasionally pollinated by bees. "P. lanceolata" cannot self (reproduce asexually) in the way that many other species of "Plantago" can; instead, it is an obligate outcrosser.

Enemies.

Insect predation.

"Plantago lanceolata" is host to many different species of the order Lepidoptera. Species such as "Junonia coenia, Spilosoma congrua," and "Melitaea cinxia" lay their eggs on "P. lanceolata" plants so they can serve as a food source for the larvae when they hatch. The iridoid glycosides in the plant leaves accumulate in the caterpillars and make them unpalatable to predators.

Infection by powdery mildew.

"Podosphaera plantaginis" is a powdery mildew fungus that infects "P. lanceolata". All of the "P. lanceolata" populations are infected by several strains of this powdery mildew fungus. Once the populations are infected, the symptoms are minimal at first. Then, after a few weeks or months lesions start to appear covering the entire surface of the leaves and the stem, making it very noticeable. Another species that infects "P. lanceolata" is "Golovinomyces sordidus". Both of these mildews are obligate biotrophs, meaning that they can only infect living tissue. They cover the surface of the leaves and extend hyphae into the cell matrix in order to extract nutrients.

Resistance to powdery mildew.

After the populations are infected, they react in different ways. Some populations of "P. lanceolata" are more susceptible to different strains of powdery mildew. Also, some populations have multiple resistance phenotypes where on the other hand, others may only have one resistance phenotype. Overall, the populations that have the highest variety of resistance phenotypes will have the highest survival rates particularly when rates of infection are high.

In popular culture.

In the UK and Ireland the plant is used by children to play various simple games. In Edinburgh, Scotland this game is called ‘The 1 o’clock gun’ after the gun that fires everyday from Edinburgh Castle. Writer Sean Michael Wilson notes that: "When I was a kid in Edinburgh we used it for a cute wee game called ‘The 1 o’clock gun’ - we twisted the stalk around into a kind of noose, quickly pulled it (with the left hand pulling back sharply and the right hand moving forward) and then the head of the stalk would go shooting off. Piitttt!! We used to see how far we could get it to go - great fun." In the West Country of England the same game is called 'cannonballs'. Another game played with the plant in Scotland and Ireland and possibly also in England is called 'Bishops'. This game is a bit like conkers; a child tries to knock off the head of their friend's stalk using their own stalk, via a fast downward thrust.

Plantago lanceolata is a species of flowering plant in the plantain family Plantaginaceae. It is known by the common names ribwort plantain, narrowleaf plantain, English plantain, ribleaf, lamb's tongue, and buckhorn. It is a common weed on cultivated or disturbed land.


Early life and career.

Born in Hamburg on 23 November 1882, Rabe pursued a career in business and went to Africa for several years. In 1908 he left for China, and between 1910 and 1938, he worked for the Siemens AG China Corporation in Mukden, Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai and later Nanjing. Rabe suffered from diabetes by the time he was working in Nanking, which required him to have his regular dose of insulin. At the time of the Japanese attack on Nanking, Rabe was a staunch Nazi and the party's local head, as a Deputy Group Leader in the Nazi Party.

Establishment of the Nanjing Safety Zone.

Many Westerners were living in the Chinese capital city of the time as Nanking was, until December 1937, conducting trade or on missionary trips. As the Japanese army approached Nanking and initiated bombing raids on the city, all but 22 foreigners fled the city, with 15 American and European missionaries and businessmen forming part of the remaining group. On 22 November 1937, as the Japanese Army advanced on Nanking, Rabe, along with other foreign nationals, organized the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone and created the Nanking Safety Zone to provide Chinese refugees with food and shelter from the impending Japanese slaughter. He explained his reasons thus: "...there is a question of morality here... I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me." The zones were located in all of the foreign embassies and at Nanking University.  The International Committee was inspired by the establishment in November of a neutral zone in Shanghai, which protected 450,000 civilians.  Rabe was elected as its leader, in part because of his status as a member of the Nazi party and the existence of the German–Japanese bilateral Anti-Comintern Pact. This committee established the Nanking Safety Zone in the western quarter of the city. The Japanese government had agreed not to attack parts of the city that did not contain Chinese military forces, and the members of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone attempted to persuade the Chinese government to move all their troops out of the area. They were partly successful.  On 1 December 1937, Nanjing Mayor Ma Chao-chun ordered all Chinese citizens remaining in Nanking to move into the Safety Zone and then fled the city. By the fall of Nanjing on 13 December 1937, 500,000 non-combatants remained in the city.  Rabe also opened up his properties to help 650 more refugees.

Nanking Massacre.

According to Rabe, the Nanking Massacre resulted in the deaths of 50,000 to 60,000 civilians. Rabe and his zone administrators tried frantically to stop the atrocities. Modern estimates vary, but some put the number of murdered civilians as high as 300,000. Rabe's attempts to appeal to the Japanese by using his Nazi Party membership credentials only delayed them; but that delay allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to escape. The documentary "Nanking" credited him for saving the lives of 250,000 Chinese civilians. Other sources suggest that Rabe rescued between 200,000 and 250,000 Chinese people. In his diary Rabe documented Japanese atrocities committed during the assault upon and occupation of the city.  John Rabe gave a series of lectures in Germany after he came back to Berlin on 15 April 1938, in which he said, "We Europeans put the number [of civilian casualties] at about 50,000 to 60,000." Rabe was not the only figure to record the Japanese atrocity. By December 1937, after the defeat of the Chinese soldiers, the Japanese soldiers would often go house-to-house in Nanking, shooting any civilians they encountered. Evidence of these violent acts come from diaries kept by some Japanese soldiers and by Japanese journalists who were appalled by what was transpiring.

Return to Germany.

On 28 February 1938, Rabe left Nanking. He first traveled to Shanghai and then back to Germany. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking.  Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin and wrote to Hitler to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop any further inhumane violence. As a result, Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo and his letter was never delivered to Hitler. Due to the intervention of Siemens AG, Rabe was released. He was allowed to keep evidence of the massacre, excluding the film, but was not allowed to lecture again or write on the subject. Rabe continued working for Siemens, which posted him briefly to the safety of Siemens AG of Afghanistan. Rabe subsequently worked in the Berlin headquarters of the company until the end of the war.

Postwar.

After the war, Rabe was arrested first by the Soviet NKVD and then by the British Army. Both, however, let him go after intense interrogation. He worked sporadically for Siemens, earning very little. He was later denounced for his Nazi Party membership by an acquaintance. He was stripped of the work permit that he had previously been given by the British Zone, and had to undergo a very lengthy de-nazification process (his first attempt was rejected and he had to appeal) in the hope of regaining the permission to work. He had to pay his own legal defense costs, which depleted his savings.  Unable to work to support his family and with the savings spent the family survived in a one-room apartment by selling his Chinese art collection, but this did not provide enough to avoid malnutrition. He was formally declared "de-Nazified" by the British on 3 June 1946 but thereafter continued to live in poverty. The family lived on wild seeds that the children would eat with soup and on dry bread until that was no longer available either.  In 1948, the citizens of Nanking learned of the very dire situation of the Rabe family in occupied Germany and they quickly raised a very large sum of money, equivalent to US$ 2 000 ($ in ). The city mayor himself went to Germany, via Switzerland where he bought a large amount of food for the Rabe family. From mid-1948 until the communist takeover the people of Nanking also sent a food package each month, for which Rabe in many letters expressed deep gratitude.

Death and legacy.

On 5 January 1950, Rabe died of a stroke. In 1997 his tombstone was moved from Berlin to Nanjing (as it is now) where it received a place of honor at the massacre memorial site.  In 2005, Rabe's former residence in Nanking (as it then was) was renovated and now accommodates the "John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall", which opened in 2006. The Austrian Service Abroad was invited to send a Peace Servant.

War diaries.

His war-time diaries were published in English as "The Good German of Nanking" (UK title) or "The Good Man of Nanking" (US title) (original German title: "Der gute Deutsche von Nanking").

Portrayals in film.

John Rabe has been portrayed in numerous films:

John Heinrich Detlef Rabe (23 November 1882 – 5 January 1950) was a German businessman and Nazi Party member who is best known for his efforts to stop the atrocities of the Japanese army during the Nanking Occupation and his work to protect and help the Chinese civilians during the event. The Nanking Safety Zone, which he helped to establish, sheltered approximately 200,000 Chinese people from slaughter during the massacre. He officially represented Germany and acted as senior chief of the European–American establishment that remained in Nanking (now Nanjing), the Chinese capital at the time, when the city fell to the Japanese troops.


Structure.

A scroll is usually divided up into pages, which are sometimes separate sheets of papyrus or parchment glued together at the edges, or may be marked divisions of a continuous roll of writing material. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time, for writing or reading, with the remaining pages rolled up to the left and right of the visible page. It is unrolled from side to side, and the text is written in lines from the top to the bottom of the page. Depending on the language, the letters may be written left to right, right to left, or alternating in direction (boustrophedon).

History of scroll use.

Scrolls were the first form of editable record keeping texts, used in Eastern Mediterranean ancient Egyptian civilizations. Parchment scrolls were used by the Israelites among others before the codex or bound book with parchment pages was invented by the Romans, which became popular around the 1st century AD. Scrolls were more highly regarded than codices until well into Roman times, where they were usually written in single latitudinal column.  The ink used in writing scrolls had to adhere to a surface that was rolled and unrolled, so special inks were developed. Even so, ink would slowly flake off of scrolls.

Rolls.

Shorter pieces of parchment or paper are called "rolls" or "rotuli", although usage of the term by modern historians varies with periods. Historians of the classical period tend to use "roll" instead of "scroll". Rolls may still be many meters or feet long, and were used in the medieval and Early Modern period in Europe and various West Asian cultures for manuscript administrative documents intended for various uses, including accounting, rent-rolls, legal agreements, and inventories. A distinction that sometimes applies is that the lines of writing in rotuli run across the width of the roll (that is to say, are parallel with any unrolled portion) rather than along the length, divided into page-like sections. Rolls may be wider than most scrolls, up to perhaps 60 cm or two feet wide. Rolls were often stored together in a special cupboard on shelves.  A special Chinese form of short book, called the "whirlwind book," consists of several pieces of paper bound at the top with bamboo and then rolled up.

Scotland.

In Scotland, the term "scrow" was used from about the 13th to the 17th centuries for scroll, writing, or documents in list or schedule form. There existed an office of Clerk of the Scrow ("Rotulorum Clericus") meaning the Clerk of the Rolls or Clerk of the Register.

Replacement by the codex.

The Romans invented the "codex" form of the book, folding the scroll into pages which made reading and handling the document much easier. Legend has it that Julius Caesar was the first to fold scrolls, concertina-fashion, for dispatches to his forces campaigning in Gaul. Scrolls were awkward to read if a reader wished to consult material at opposite ends of the document. Further, scrolls were written only on one side, while both sides of the codex page were used.  Eventually, the folds were cut into sheets, or "leaves," and bound together along one edge. The bound pages were protected by stiff covers, usually of wood enclosed with leather. "Codex" is Latin for a "block of wood": the Latin "liber", the root of "library," and the German "Buch", the source of "book," both refer to wood. The codex was not only easier to handle than the scroll, but it also fit conveniently on library shelves. The spine generally held the book's title, facing out, affording easier organization of the collection.  The term "codex" technically refers only to manuscript books-those that, at one time, were handwritten. More specifically, a codex is the term used primarily for a bound manuscript from Roman times up through the Middle Ages.  From the fourth century on, the codex became the standard format for books, and scrolls were no longer generally used. After the contents of a parchment scroll were copied in codex format, the scroll was seldom preserved. The majority that did survive were found by archaeologists in burial pits and in the buried trash of forgotten communities.

Recent Torah scroll discovery.

The oldest complete Torah scroll was discovered stored in an academic library in Bologna, Italy, by Professor Mauro Perani in 2013. It had been mislabeled in 1889 as dating from the 17th century, but Perani suspected it was actually older as it was written in an earlier Babylonian script. Two tests conducted by laboratories at Italy’s University of Salento and at the University of Illinois confirmed that the scroll dates from the second half of the 12th century to the first quarter of the 13th century. Ancient Torah scrolls are rare because when they are damaged they stop being used for liturgies and are buried.  The scroll is made up of 58 sections of soft sheep leather. It is 36 meters long and 64 centimeters wide.

Modern technology.

Modern technology may be able to assist in reading ancient scrolls. In January 2015, computer software may be making progress in reading 2,000-year-old Herculaneum scrolls, computer scientists report. After working for more than 10 years on unlocking the contents of damaged Herculaneum scrolls, researchers may be able to progress towards reading the scrolls, which cannot be physically opened.

A scroll (from the Old French "escroe" or "escroue"), also known as a roll, is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing.


History.

The original metro line 1 (Földalatti) ran for 5 km from Vörösmarty tér to Széchenyi fürdő.  Work on line 2 started in the 1950s, although the first section did not open until 1970. It follows an east–west route, connecting the major "Keleti" (Eastern) and "Déli" (Southern) railway stations.  Planning for Line 3 began in 1963 and construction started in 1970 with help of Soviet specialists. The first section, consisting of six stations, opened in 1976. It was extended to the south in 1980 with five additional stations, and to the north in 1981, 1984, and 1990, with nine additional stations. With a length of approximately and a total of 20 stations, it is the longest line in Budapest.  In the 1980s and 1990s, Line 1 underwent major reconstruction. Of its 11 stations, eight are original and three were added during reconstruction. The original appearance of the old stations has been preserved, and each station feature displays of historical photographs and information. There is also a Millennium Underground Museum in the Deák Ferenc Square concourse.

Routes.

The metro consists of four lines (M1–M4), each denoted by a different colour. M1 (yellow) Földalatti runs from Mexikói út south-west towards the river. The M2 (red) line travels east–west through the city, crossing the Duna. The M3 (blue) runs in a broadly north–south alignment, interchanging with the three other lines. The M4 (green) line commences at Keleti pályaudvar and travels south-west, crossing the river, to terminate at Kelenföld vasútállomás.

Metro line M1.

Line 1 runs northeast from the city center on the Pest side under Andrássy út to the "Városliget", or City Park. Like Metro 3, it does not serve Buda. Line 1, the oldest of the metro lines operating in Budapest, has been in constant operation since 1896. There are plans for the future for a resurrection with more stations.

Metro line M2.

Line 2 runs east–west from Déli pályaudvar in Buda's Krisztinaváros, through the city center, to Örs vezér tere in eastern Pest. It offers connections to Hungarian State Railways at Déli and Keleti pályaudvars, to metro Lines 1 and 3 at Deák Ferenc tér, to line 4 at Keleti pályaudvar, to suburban railway lines 8 and 9 at Örs vezér tere, and to suburban railway line 5 at Batthány tér. Prior to line 4's opening, it was (for more than 45 years) the only metro line that served the Buda side of the river. Line 2 underwent major reconstruction in the late oughts, with all of the track and stations completed in 2008.

Metro line M3.

Line 3 runs in a north–south direction (more exactly, from north-northeast to southeast) on the Pest side of the river and connects several populous residential areas with the Inner City. It has a transfer station with Line 1 and Line 2 at Deák Ferenc tér, and a transfer station for Line 4 at Kálvin tér. It is the longest line in the Budapest Metro, its daily ridership is estimated at 610,000.

Metro line M4.

Line 4 runs southwest–northeast from Kelenföldi pályaudvar in Buda's Kelenföld neighborhood to Keleti Railway Station in Józsefváros. With a length of, it connects to Hungarian State Railways at its termini, to the metro's Line 3 at Kálvin tér, and to Line 2 at Keleti. Line 4 was completed in March 2014 and comprises ten stations.

Future expansion.

Metro line M5.

The Purple Line 5 is a proposed north–south railway tunnel to connect the currently separated elements of the suburban rail network, namely the H5, H6 and H7 HÉV-lines, and optionally the Budapest-Esztergom and Budapest-Kunszentmiklós-Tass railway lines. Currently the project does not have mainstream political support, only included in long-term plans. The first phase (planned until 2030) would be the extension and connection of the southern H6 and H7 lines to the Astoria metro station via the Kálvin tér, thus connecting these lines to the metro lines M2 M3 and M4. The second phase would create a connection to the metro line M1 as well at the Oktogon, the M3 at Lehel tér then cross the Danube to the Buda side to connect the H5 HÉV towards Szentendre.

General information.

Tickets and transfer system.

The usual BKK tickets and passes can be used on all lines. Single tickets can be re-used when changing metro lines.  There are plans for an automated fare collection system. A contract for a system was signed in 2014, but terminated in 2018 without completion.

In popular culture.

2003 film "Kontroll" is a gritty crime thriller set in the metro system, winning various awards.

The Budapest Metro () is the rapid transit system in the Hungarian capital Budapest. It is the oldest electrified underground railway system in continental Europe, and is only pre-dated by the London Underground. Budapest's iconic Line 1 was completed in 1896.


Marriage.

Judith was the daughter of Landgrave Louis I of Thuringia (d. 1140) and his wife Hedwig of Gudensberg. She was raised at the Thuringian court at Wartburg Castle. In 1153 she was married to Duke Vladislaus II of Bohemia, three years after the death of his first wife Gertrude of Babenberg. The main reason for the marriage was that Judith, by her brother Landgrave Louis II and his wife Judith of Hohenstaufen, was related to the new German King Frederick Barbarossa. Vladislaus' bride was about eighteen years old; he was 15–20 years her senior.  Probably in 1155, two years after the wedding, Judith gave birth to the first son. In medieval times the names for babies were chosen mostly by mothers, so it was probably Judith's idea to name the son Přemysl after the legendary founder of the Přemyslid dynasty.

Queen Judith.

A chronicler wrote about Judith that she was of great beauty and mind, educated in Latin and politics. It is said that she often deputized for Vladislaus in his absence. When he obtained the royal title from Emperor Frederick and was crowned King of Bohemia in 1158, Judith became Queen consort. Her coronation is not actually documented, but chronicles write about "Queen" Judith.  During Vladislaus' rule a new bridge across the Vltava river in Prague was built from about 1160, where the famous Charles Bridge stands today. It was the first stone bridge in central Europe and in honour of the queen it was called Judith Bridge. Drawn away by a 1342 flood, remnants of some pillars and arches are still visible, as well as the preserved bridge tower ("Juditina věž") on the Malá Strana bank.  In the ongoing struggle around the Prague throne, Judith backed the inheritance claims of her son Přemysl Ottokar, however, Duke Vladislaus named his stepbrother Frederick his successor. When her husband finally abdicated in 1172, his wife followed him to exile in Thuringia. Vladislaus died two years later at Meerane Castle.  It is not known where Judith died, but her remains were found in the former Benedictine monastery of Teplice, which she had founded about 1160. According to the historian Emanuel Vlček she died about 1210 at the age of 75, living to see the successful reign of her eldest son Přemysl.

Judith of Thuringia (; – 9 September after 1174), a member of the Ludovingian dynasty, was Queen consort of Bohemia from 1158 until 1172 as the second wife of King Vladislaus II. She was the second Queen of Bohemia after Świętosława of Poland, wife of King Vratislaus II, had received the title in 1085.


Life.

Yersin was born in 1863, to French parents, in Aubonne, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland. From 1883 to 1884, Yersin studied medicine at Lausanne, Switzerland; and then at Marburg, Germany and Paris (1884–1886). In 1886, he entered Louis Pasteur's research laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure, by invitation of Emile Roux, and participated in the development of the anti-rabies serum. In 1888 he received his doctorate with a dissertation titled "Étude sur le Développement du Tubercule Expérimental" and spent two months with Robert Koch in Germany. He joined the recently created Pasteur Institute in 1889 as Roux's collaborator and discovered with him the diphtheric toxin (produced by the "Corynebacterium diphtheriae" bacillus).  In order to be able to practice medicine in France, Yersin applied for and obtained French nationality in 1888. Soon afterwards (1890), he left for French Indochina (current Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) in Southeast Asia as a physician for the "Messageries Maritimes" company, on the Saigon-Manila line and then on the Saigon-Haiphong line. He participated in one of the Auguste Pavie missions. In 1894 Yersin was sent by request of the French government and the Pasteur Institute to Hong Kong, to investigate the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic.  There, in a small hut (according to "Plague" by Wendy Orent) since he was denied access to British hospitals at his arrival, he made his greatest discovery: that of the pathogen which causes the disease. Dr Kitasato Shibasaburō, also in Hong Kong, had identified a bacterium several days earlier. There is controversy whether this was the same pneumococci or a mix of the two. Because Kitasato's initial reports were vague and somewhat contradictory, some give Yersin sole credit for the discovery. However, a thorough analysis of the morphology of the organism discovered by Kitasato has determined that "we are confident that Kitasato had examined the plague bacillus in Hong Kong in late June and early July 1894", only days after Yersin announced his own discovery on 20 June. Therefore, Kitasato "should not be denied this credit". The plague bacillus develops better at lower temperatures, so Yersin's less well-equipped lab turned out to be an advantage in the race with Kitasato, who used an incubator. Therefore, although at first named “Kitasato-Yersin bacillus” by the scientific community, the microbe will later assume only the latter's name because of the one identified by Kitasato, a type of streptococcus, cannot be found in the lymphatic glands. Yersin was also able to demonstrate for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission. This important discovery was communicated to the French Academy of Sciences in the same year, by his colleague Emile Duclaux, in a classic paper titled "La peste bubonique à Hong-Kong".  From 1895 to 1897, Yersin further pursued his studies on the bubonic plague. In 1895 he returned to the Institute Pasteur in Paris and with Émile Roux, Albert Calmette and Amédée Borrel, prepared the first anti-plague serum. In the same year, he returned to Indochina, where he installed a small laboratory at Nha Trang to manufacture the serum (in 1905 this laboratory became a branch of the Pasteur Institute). Yersin tried the serum received from Paris in Canton and Amoy, in 1896, and in Bombay, India, in 1897, with disappointing results. Having decided to stay in his country of adoption, he participated actively in the creation of the Medical School of Ha Noi in 1902, and was its first director, until 1904.  Yersin tried his hand at agriculture and was a pioneer in the cultivation of rubber trees ("Hevea brasiliensis") imported from Brazil into Indochina. For this purpose, he obtained in 1897 a concession from the government to establish an agricultural station at Suoi Dau. He opened a new station at Hon Ba in 1915, where he tried to acclimatize the quinine tree ("Cinchona ledgeriana"), which was imported from the Andes in South America by the Spaniards, and which produced the first known effective remedy for preventing and treating malaria (a disease which prevails in Southeast Asia to this day).  Alexandre Yersin is well remembered in Vietnam, where he was affectionately called Ông Năm (Mr. Nam/Fifth) by the people.  On 8 January 1902, Yersin was accredited to be the first Headmaster of Hanoi Medical University by the Governor-General of French Indochina, Paul Doumer. Following the country's independence, streets named in his honor kept their designation and his tomb in Suoi Dau was graced by a pagoda where rites are performed in his worship. His house in Nha Trang is now the Yersin Museum, and the epitaph on his tombstone describes him as a "Benefactor and humanist, venerated by the Vietnamese people". In Ha Noi, a French lycée has his name. A private university founded in 2004 in Da Lat was named "Yersin University" in his honour.  In 1934 he was nominated honorary director of Pasteur Institute and a member of its Board of Administration. He died during World War II at his home in Nha Trang, in 1943.

Miscellaneous.

Dr. Yersin was credited with finding the site for the town of Dalat (300 km northeast of Saigon) in 1893. Because of the high altitude and European-like climate, Dalat soon became an R&R spot for French officers. There was a high school named after him which was built in the 1920s, the Lycée Yersin, aka Grand Lycée (grade 6 to 12), the Petit Lycée (elementary to grade 5) and a university named for him which was built in the 2000s.  While in Hong Kong, Yersin was helped in his research by an Italian priest of the PIME order, Bernardo Viganò (1837–1901). He provided cadavers and assisted him with his quest to find a remedy for the plague.

Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin (22 September 1863 – 1 March 1943) was dual national Swiss and French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour: "Yersinia pestis". Another bacteriologist, Kitasato Shibasaburō, is often credited with independently identifying the bacterium a few days earlier but may have identified a different bacterium and not the pathogen causing plague. Yersin also demonstrated for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission.


Early career.

Born in 1885, Hoth joined the army in 1903 and was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross during World War I. He remained in the "Reichswehr" (the armed forces of the Weimar Republic) in the interwar period. Following the reorganization of the German military into the Wehrmacht in 1935, he was appointed to command the 18th Infantry Division.

World War II.

Hoth was promoted to Lieutenant-General and given command of the XV Motorised Corps in 1938, leading it in the invasion of Poland the following year. During the invasion of France in May 1940, his panzer corps was on Guderian's right flank during their advance through the Ardennes, and contained the 5th Panzer and 7th Panzer Divisions. Hoth was promoted to Generaloberst in July 1940.

Operation Barbarossa.

In Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Hoth commanded the 3rd Panzer Group which captured Minsk and Vitebsk as part of Army Group Center's operations. In mid July, the 3rd Panzer Group was subordinated to Army Group North to shore up the flanks and attempted to seize Velikie Luki. Hoth's forces were driven back on 20 July when Red Army forces broke through the German lines, prompting criticism from Field Marshal von Bock, commander of Army Group Center for unnecessarily striking out too far to the north east. In mid to late August, Hoth's forces faced another setback owing to heavy losses and dispersal of efforts: facing the heavily reinforced Soviet 19th Army, he committed the 7th Panzer Division without infantry support, which resulted in what the historian David Stahel describes as a "debacle". The division's attack ran into fortified Soviet lines and was repulsed with the loss of 30 tanks. As with all German armies on the Eastern Front, Hoth's Panzer Group implemented the Commissar Order. According to reports from subordinate units, the order was carried out on a widespread basis.  In October Hoth was appointed commander of the 17th Army in Ukraine. Hoth was an active supporter of the war of annihilation ("") against the Soviet Union, calling on his men to understand the need for "harsh punishment of Jewry". Under Hoth's command, units of the 17th Army took part in the hunt for and murder of Jews in its territory of control. Following the issuance of the Severity Order by Walter von Reichenau in October 1941, he issued the following directive to troops under his command in November 1941:

Battle of Stalingrad.

During the Soviet winter offensives of early 1942, Hoth's 17th Army was driven back in the Second Battle of Kharkov. In June 1942, he took over from General Richard Ruoff as commander of 4th Panzer Army. As part of Operation Blue, the German offensive in southern Russia, the army reached the Don River at Voronezh. Hoth was then ordered to drive to Rostov-on-Don. It then advanced to the north in support of the Sixth Army's attempt to capture Stalingrad.  In November 1942, the Soviet Operation Uranus broke through the Axis lines and trapped the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Hoth's panzer army led the unsuccessful attempt to relieve the Sixth Army (Operation Winter Storm), under the overall command of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein's Army Group Don. By 25 December, the operation had failed.

Third Battle of Kharkov.

In February 1943, Hoth's 4th Panzer Army participated in the counteroffensive against the Soviet forces advancing in the Donbass region. The operation was hastily prepared and did not receive a name. Later known as Third Battle of Kharkov, it commenced on 21 February, as the 4th Panzer Army launched a counter-attack. The German forces cut off the Soviet mobile spearheads and continued the drive north, retaking Kharkov on 15 March and Belgorod on 18 March. Exhaustion of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army coupled with the loss of mobility due to the onset of the spring rasputitsa resulted in the cessation of operations for both sides by mid-March. The counteroffensive left a salient extending into the German area of control, centered around the city of Kursk, and leading up to Operation Citadel.

Battle of Kursk.

In July 1943, Hoth commanded the 4th Panzer Army in the Battle of Kursk as part of Army Group South. Operation Citadel called for a double envelopment, directed at Kursk, to surround the Soviet defenders and seal off the salient. The Army Group South committed Hoth's 4th Panzer Army, alongside Army Detachment "Kempf". Hoth's divisions, reinforced by the II SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser, penetrated several Soviet defensive lines, before being brought to a halt in the Battle of Prokhorovka. In the aftermath of Kursk, the Red Army mounted a series of successful offensives that crossed the Dnieper, retook Kiev and pushed the Germans out of eastern Ukraine. In September 1943, Hoth's army was operationally penetrated by Red Army units and was unable to maintain a continuous front line even in retreat. The army crossed the Dnieper south and north of Kiev with heavy losses. On 10 December 1943, Hoth was relieved of command, and was not recalled until April 1945.

Trial and conviction.

Following the end of the war, Hoth was tried at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, in the High Command Trial. During his testimony he sought to explain his November 1941 order aimed at elimination of the "Bolshevik-Jewish resistance". He claimed that his instructions only meant that his troops should be vigilant and were intended to improve morale: "The German soldier in his good nature... easily forgot that he was still in enemy territory" and that the "power of Bolshevism [had to be] broken". He insisted that no physical harm came to civilians as the result of this measure, which his troops executed with "clean hands". Hoth maintained that if any Jews had been killed it was due to their connection to crimes against the German forces. "It was a matter of common knowledge in Russia that it was the Jew in particular who participated in a very large extent in sabotage, espionage, etc.," Hoth claimed.  Hoth was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. On 27 October 1948 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In January 1951, the sentence was reviewed with no changes. Hoth was released on parole in 1954; his sentence was reduced to time served in 1957.  Hermann Hoth died in 1971.

References.

Citations Bibliography

Hermann Hoth (12 April 1885 – 25 January 1971) was a German army commander and war criminal during World War II. He fought in the Battle of France and as a panzer commander on the Eastern Front. Hoth commanded the 3rd Panzer Group during Operation Barbarossa in 1941, and the 4th Panzer Army during the Wehrmacht's 1942 summer offensive.


History.

Twenty-first Dynasty.

The period of the Twenty-first Dynasty is characterized by the country's fracturing kingship. Already during Ramesses XI's reign, the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt was losing its grip on the city of Thebes, whose priests were becoming increasingly powerful. After his death, his successor, Smendes I, ruled from the city of Tanis, but was mostly active only in Lower Egypt, which he controlled. Meanwhile, the High Priests of Amun at Thebes ruled Middle and Upper Egypt in all but name. However, this division was less significant than it seems, since both the priests and pharaohs came from the same family.

Twenty-second and Twenty-third Dynasty.

The country was firmly reunited by the Twenty-second Dynasty founded by Shoshenq I in 945 BC (or 943 BC), who descended from Meshwesh immigrants, originally from Ancient Libya. This brought stability to the country for well over a century, but after the reign of Osorkon II, particularly, the country had effectively split into two states, with Shoshenq III of the Twenty-second Dynasty controlling Lower Egypt by 818 BC while Takelot II and his son Osorkon (the future Osorkon III) ruled Middle and Upper Egypt. In Thebes, a civil war engulfed the city, pitting the forces of Pedubast I, who had proclaimed himself pharaoh, against the existing line of Takelot II/Osorkon B. The two factions squabbled continuously and the conflict was only resolved in Year 39 of Shoshenq III when Osorkon B comprehensively defeated his enemies. He proceeded to found the Upper Egyptian Libyan Twenty-third Dynasty of Osorkon III – Takelot III – Rudamun, but this kingdom quickly fragmented after Rudamun's death, with the rise of local city states under kings such as Peftjaubast of Herakleopolis, Nimlot of Hermopolis, and Ini at Thebes.

Twenty-fourth Dynasty.

The Nubian kingdom to the south took full advantage of this division and the ensuing political instability. Prior to Piye's Year 20 campaign into Egypt, the previous Nubian ruler – Kashta – had already extended his kingdom's influence into Thebes when he compelled Shepenupet, the serving Divine Adoratice of Amun and Takelot III's sister, to adopt his own daughter Amenirdis, to be her successor. Then, 20 years later, around 732 BC his successor, Piye, marched north and defeated the combined might of several native Egyptian rulers: Peftjaubast, Osorkon IV of Tanis, Iuput II of Leontopolis and Tefnakht of Sais.

Twenty-fifth Dynasty.

Piye established the Twenty-fifth Dynasty and appointed the defeated rulers as his provincial governors. He was succeeded first by his brother, Shabaka, and then by his two sons Shebitku and Taharqa. The reunited Nile valley empire of the 25th Dynasty was as large as it had been since the New Kingdom. Pharaohs of the dynasty, among them Taharqa, built or restored temples and monuments throughout the Nile valley, including at Memphis, Karnak, Kawa, and Jebel Barkal. The 25th Dynasty ended with its rulers retreating to their spiritual homeland at Napata. It was there (at El-Kurru and Nuri) that all 25th Dynasty pharaohs were buried under the first pyramids to be constructed in the Nile valley in hundreds of years. The Napatan dynasty led to the Kingdom of Kush, which flourished in Napata and Meroe until at least the 2nd century AD.  The international prestige of Egypt had declined considerably by this time. The country's international allies had fallen firmly into the sphere of influence of Assyria and from about 700 BC the question became when, not if, there would be war between the two states as Esarhaddon had realised that a conquest of Lower Egypt was necessary to protect Assyrians interests in the Levant.  Despite Egypt's size and wealth, Assyria had a greater supply of timber, while Egypt had a chronic shortage, allowing Assyria to produce more charcoal needed for iron-smelting and thus giving Assyria a greater supply of iron weaponry. This disparity became critical during the Assyrian invasions of Egypt over the period 670-663 BC. Consequently, pharaoh Taharqa's reign, and that of his successor Tantamani, were filled with constant conflict with the Assyrians. In 664 BC the Assyrians delivered a mortal blow, sacking Thebes and Memphis. Following these events, and starting with Atlanersa, no Kushite ruler would ever rule over Egypt again.

End of the Third Intermediate Period.

Upper Egypt remained for a time under the rule of Taharqa and Tantamani, whilst Lower Egypt was ruled from 664 BC by the nascent 26th Dynasty, client kings established by the Assyrians. In 663 BC, Tantamani launched a full-scale invasion of Lower Egypt, taking Memphis in April of this year, killing Necho I of Sais in the process as Necho had remained loyal to Ashurbanipal. Tantamani barely had the time to receive the submission of some Delta kinglets and expel the remaining Assyrians that a large army led by Ashurbanipal and Necho's son Psamtik I came back. Tantamani was defeated north of Memphis and Thebes was thoroughly sacked shortly after. The Kushite king withdrew to Nubia while the Assyrian influence in Upper Egypt quickly waned. Permanently weakened by the sack, Thebes peacefully submitted itself to Psamtik's fleet in 656 BC. To affirm his authority, Psamtik placed his daughter in position to be the future Divine Adoratrice of Amun, thereby also submitting the priesthood of Amun and effectively uniting Egypt. Tantamani's successor Atlanersa was in no position to attempt a reconquest of Egypt as Psamtik also secured the southern border at Elephantine and may even have sent a military campaign to Napata. Concurrently, Psamtik managed to free himself from the Assyrian vassalage while remaining on good terms with Ashurbanipal, possibly owing to an ongoing rebellion in Babylon. By doing so, hebrought increased stability to the country during his 54-year reign from the city of Sais.  Four successive Saite kings continued guiding Egypt into another period of peace and prosperity from 610 to 525 BC. Unfortunately for this dynasty, a new power was growing in the Near East – the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. Pharaoh Psamtik III had succeeded his father Ahmose II for only 6 months before he had to face the Persian Empire at Pelusium. The Persians had already taken Babylon and Egypt was no match for them. Psamtik III was defeated and briefly escaped to Memphis, before he was ultimately imprisoned and, later, executed at Susa, the capital of the Persian king Cambyses, who now assumed the formal title of Pharaoh.

Historiography.

The historiography of this period is disputed for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there is a dispute about the utility of a very artificial term that covers an extremely long and complicated period of Egyptian history. The Third Intermediate Period includes long periods of stability as well as chronic instability and civil conflict: its very name rather clouds this fact. Secondly, there are significant problems of chronology stemming from several areas: first, there are the difficulties in dating that are common to all of Egyptian chronology but these are compounded due to synchronisms with Biblical archaeology that also contain heavily disputed dates. James et al. argued contra Kitchen that the period lasted less than 200 years - starting later than 850 BC but ending at the conventional date - as the five dynasties had many years of overlap. Finally, some Egyptologists and biblical scholars, such as Kenneth Kitchen and David Rohl have novel or controversial theories about the family relationships of the dynasties comprising the period.

The Third Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt began with the death of Pharaoh Ramesses XI in 1070 BC, which ended the New Kingdom, and was eventually followed by the Late Period. Various points are offered as the beginning for the latter era, though it is most often regarded as dating from the foundation of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty by Psamtik I in 664 BC, following the expulsion of the Nubian Kushite rulers of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty by the Assyrians under King Assurbanipal. The concept of a "Third Intermediate Period" was coined in 1978 by British Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen.


Life.

Born in Berlin, he was the oldest son of the public health doctor Hermann Davidsohn and his wife Doris, née Kempner. Mrs Davidsohn gave birth to twins, but the other baby was stillborn. He had four other siblings, Marie, Anna, Ludwig, and Ernst. The poet Friederike Kempner (1836-1904) was his great-aunt. He attended the renowned Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium; however, due to his temper (although he was extremely intelligent), he was not a successful student. He left school in 1905, to preempt his exclusion, but obtained his "Abitur" degree as an "external" student in the following year. The young man began studying architecture at the Technical College of Charlottenburg; in 1907, he joined the University of Jena to study classical philology. Later he returned to Berlin and continued his studies at the Frederick William University; here he met law graduate Kurt Hiller who encouraged him to develop his literary talents.  Davidsohn had already composed poems during his schooldays. In 1909 he and his friend Kurt Hiller created the Expressionist "Der Neue Club" ("The New Club") artists' society in the Hackesche Höfe courtyards; in March of the following year, they introduced their ideas at literary evenings they called "Neopathetisches Cabaret" ("Neo-pathetic Cabaret"). They were joined by Georg Heym, Ernst Blass and Erich Unger, soon followed by others, for example Alfred Lichtenstein. Else Lasker-Schüler participated too (she said about van Hoddis' performances ""His verses are so ardent that one wants to steal them"" ). The last, ninth, evening of the Cabaret took place in the spring of 1912; it was a tribute to the tragically deceased Georg Heym. The Cabaret was very popular, often attracting hundreds of spectators. It was during one of these evenings when "Weltende" was recited, and electrified the audience totally. Many artists later remembered the impact the eight lines had on them that day.  He used the pen name "van Hoddis" since the death of his father in 1909. During this part of his life, things started to get worse. Not only was he expelled from university for inactivity, but he lost his close friends, Georg Heym and Ernst Balcke, who both drowned in January 1912 ice-skating on the Havel river. He left Berlin for Munich, turned to Catholicism and, after he suffered a nervous breakdown, voluntarily entered a mental hospital. Although he was released and returned to Berlin, he was soon hospitalized again after attacking his mother. His mental health continued to decline, and he lived in private care from 1914 until 1922. In 1915, his younger brother Ludwig was killed in action as a soldier in World War I. From 1922, Van Hoddis lived in Tübingen, where his mother had placed him under the guardianship of his uncle. After 1927, when his mother lost her money, he came under the care of a state clinic ("Christophsbad" in Göppingen).  In 1933, immediately after Hitler's nomination as Reich Chancellor, Van Hoddis' family escaped to Tel Aviv (where his broken-hearted mother died a few months later). However, it proved impossible for him to secure an entrance certificate to the British Mandate of Anglo-Palestine due to his mental illness. He thus was forced to remain in Nazi Germany where Expressionism had come to be seen as an absolutely unacceptable or "degenerate art" form.  Some Expressionist artists managed to flee the country with many more either committing suicide or who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Given that Van Hoddis was Jewish, an Expressionist writer, and also mentally ill (which then meant in Germany that he was subject to "mercy killing"), his murder in Nazi Germany was almost guaranteed. On 30 April 1942, he and all the other patients and staff (about 500 people) of his sanatorium near Koblenz were transported to the Sobibór extermination camp via Krasnystaw. None of them survived. The exact date of van Hoddis' death remains unknown.

Works.

Van Hoddis published numerous poems, characterised by cipher-like Dadaistic elements, in literary magazines such as "Die Aktion" or "Der Sturm". Only one collection, "Weltende", was published during his life, by Franz Pfemfert in 1918. André Breton included van Hoddis in his 1940 "Anthology of Black Humor". A major rediscovery of his work began after a new edition by Paul Pörtner in 1958. In the English-speaking world he remains almost unknown.  Posthumous collections:

Weltende.

Van Hoddis’ poem "Weltende" was first published in 1911 and has been often translated into English. One of the closest versions—considering both the verse form and the spirit of the original, may be the adaption of Natias Neutert.  Weltende  Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut, In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei, Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei. Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.  Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken. Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen. Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken. Worlds’ End  From burgher's pointy head the hat flies. In all quarters resounds hullaballoo. Roof tilers plummet down and break in two. Along the coasts— one reads — the floodings rise.  The storm is here, wuthering seas are hopping Ashore to crush dams as if they were midges. Most people have a cold that is not stopping. The railway waggons tumble down from bridges. Fine del mondo  Volano via cappelli dalle teste  aguzze dei borghesi e ad ogni vento  echeggia un solo grido.  Cadono giù le tegole e si spezzano,  sulle coste -si legge- alta marea.  La tempesta è vicina, fiere ondate  percuotono la riva, spezzano gli argini.  Quasi tutta la gente è raffreddata  dai ponti cade giù la via ferrata.

Literary influence.

"Weltende" is referenced in a poem by Catalan author Gabriel Ferrater called "Fi del món" ("End of the world"), which paraphrases some of its images.

Jakob van Hoddis (16 May 1887 – May/June 1942) was the pen name of the German-Jewish expressionist poet Hans Davidsohn, of which name "Van Hoddis" is an anagram. His most famous poem "Weltende" ("End of the world") published on 11 January 1911 in the "Der Demokrat" magazine, is generally regarded as the preliminary Expressionist poem which inspired many other poets to write in a similarly grotesque style; he is also seen as perhaps the only German predecessor of surrealism (which did not exist as a movement in Germany).


Etymology.

Both the specific name, "horsfieldii", and the common name "Horsfield's tortoise" are in honor of the American naturalist Thomas Horsfield.

Systematics.

This species is traditionally placed in "Testudo". Due to distinctly different morphological characteristics, the monotypic genus "Agrionemys" was proposed for it in 1966. Today, "Agrionemys horsfieldii" is currently being accepted. DNA sequence analysis generally concurs, but not too robustly so. Some sources also list three separate subspecies of Russian tortoise, but they are not widely accepted by taxonomists:

Description.

The Russian tortoise is a small tortoise species, with a size range of. Females grow slightly larger () to accommodate more eggs. Males average. Russian tortoises are sexually dimorphic. Males tend to have longer tails generally tucked to the side, and longer claws; females have a short, fat tail, with shorter claws than the males. The male has a slit-shaped vent (cloaca) near the tip of its tail; the female has an asterisk-shaped vent (cloaca). Russian tortoises have four toes. Coloration varies, but the shell is usually a ruddy brown or black, fading to yellow between the scutes, and the body is straw-yellow and brown depending on the subspecies.  The male Russian tortoise courts a female through head bobbing, circling, and biting her forelegs. When she submits, he mounts her from behind, making high-pitched squeaking noises during mating.  The species can spend as much as 9 months of the year in dormancy. Russian tortoises can live up to 100 years.

In captivity.

In captivity, diet typically consists of lamb's lettuce, plantains and other dark leafy greens. The diet should be varied and may include juvenile dandelions and different species of lettuce, though like very many plants, they should be fed rarely due to potentially harmful side effects (for the former) or a lack of nutritional value (for the latter). Water is important for all species, but the tortoise, being an arid species, will typically get water from their food, but they still need a constant supply. Tortoises should be soaked in warm water up to the mid shell. Tortoises typically empty their bowels in water as to hide their scent, this is an instinct, and it also helps keep their enclosure cleaner.  Russian tortoises do not require a CITES Article X certificate.

1968 Moon flight.

In September 1968 two Russian tortoises flew to the Moon, circled it, and returned safely to Earth on the Russian Zond 5 mission. Accompanied by mealworms, plants, and other lifeforms, they were the first Earth creatures to travel to the Moon.

The Russian tortoise ("Agrionemys horsfieldii"), also commonly known as the Afghan tortoise, the Central Asian tortoise, Horsfield's tortoise, four-clawed tortoise, and the (Russian) steppe tortoise, is a threatened species of tortoise in the family Testudinidae. The species is endemic to Central Asia. Human activities in its native habitat contribute to its threatened status.


Problem statement.

Five silent philosophers sit at a round table with bowls of spaghetti. Forks are placed between each pair of adjacent philosophers.  Each philosopher must alternately think and eat. However, a philosopher can only eat spaghetti when they have both left and right forks. Each fork can be held by only one philosopher and so a philosopher can use the fork only if it is not being used by another philosopher. After an individual philosopher finishes eating, they need to put down both forks so that the forks become available to others. A philosopher can only take the fork on their right or the one on their left as they become available and they cannot start eating before getting both forks.  Eating is not limited by the remaining amounts of spaghetti or stomach space; an infinite supply and an infinite demand are assumed.  The problem is how to design a discipline of behavior (a concurrent algorithm) such that no philosopher will starve; "i.e.", each can forever continue to alternate between eating and thinking, assuming that no philosopher can know when others may want to eat or think.

Problems.

The problem was designed to illustrate the challenges of avoiding deadlock, a system state in which no progress is possible. To see that a proper solution to this problem is not obvious, consider a proposal in which each philosopher is instructed to behave as follows:  This attempted solution fails because it allows the system to reach a deadlock state, in which no progress is possible. This is a state in which each philosopher has picked up the fork to the left, and is waiting for the fork to the right to become available. With the given instructions, this state can be reached, and when it is reached, each philosopher will eternally wait for another (the one to the right) to release a fork.  Resource starvation might also occur independently of deadlock if a particular philosopher is unable to acquire both forks because of a timing problem. For example, there might be a rule that the philosophers put down a fork after waiting ten minutes for the other fork to become available and wait a further ten minutes before making their next attempt. This scheme eliminates the possibility of deadlock (the system can always advance to a different state) but still suffers from the problem of livelock. If all five philosophers appear in the dining room at exactly the same time and each picks up the left fork at the same time the philosophers will wait ten minutes until they all put their forks down and then wait a further ten minutes before they all pick them up again.  Mutual exclusion is the basic idea of the problem; the dining philosophers create a generic and abstract scenario useful for explaining issues of this type. The failures these philosophers may experience are analogous to the difficulties that arise in real computer programming when multiple programs need exclusive access to shared resources. These issues are studied in concurrent programming. The original problems of Dijkstra were related to external devices like tape drives. However, the difficulties exemplified by the dining philosophers problem arise far more often when multiple processes access sets of data that are being updated. Complex systems such as operating system kernels use thousands of locks and synchronizations that require strict adherence to methods and protocols if such problems as deadlock, starvation, and data corruption are to be avoided.

Solutions.

Resource hierarchy solution.

This solution to the problem is the one originally proposed by Dijkstra. It assigns a partial order to the resources (the forks, in this case), and establishes the convention that all resources will be requested in order, and that no two resources unrelated by order will ever be used by a single unit of work at the same time. Here, the resources (forks) will be numbered 1 through 5 and each unit of work (philosopher) will always pick up the lower-numbered fork first, and then the higher-numbered fork, from among the two forks they plan to use. The order in which each philosopher puts down the forks does not matter. In this case, if four of the five philosophers simultaneously pick up their lower-numbered fork, only the highest-numbered fork will remain on the table, so the fifth philosopher will not be able to pick up any fork. Moreover, only one philosopher will have access to that highest-numbered fork, so they will be able to eat using two forks.  While the resource hierarchy solution avoids deadlocks, it is not always practical, especially when the list of required resources is not completely known in advance. For example, if a unit of work holds resources 3 and 5 and then determines it needs resource 2, it must release 5, then 3 before acquiring 2, and then it must re-acquire 3 and 5 in that order. Computer programs that access large numbers of database records would not run efficiently if they were required to release all higher-numbered records before accessing a new record, making the method impractical for that purpose.

Arbitrator solution.

Another approach is to guarantee that a philosopher can only pick up both forks or none by introducing an arbitrator, e.g., a waiter. In order to pick up the forks, a philosopher must ask permission of the waiter. The waiter gives permission to only one philosopher at a time until the philosopher has picked up both of their forks. Putting down a fork is always allowed. The waiter can be implemented as a mutex. In addition to introducing a new central entity (the waiter), this approach can result in reduced parallelism: if a philosopher is eating and one of his neighbors is requesting the forks, all other philosophers must wait until this request has been fulfilled even if forks for them are still available.

Chandy/Misra solution.

In 1984, K. Mani Chandy and J. Misra proposed a different solution to the dining philosophers problem to allow for arbitrary agents (numbered "P",..., "P") to contend for an arbitrary number of resources, unlike Dijkstra's solution. It is also completely distributed and requires no central authority after initialization. However, it violates the requirement that "the philosophers do not speak to each other" (due to the request messages).  This solution also allows for a large degree of concurrency, and will solve an arbitrarily large problem.  It also solves the starvation problem. The clean / dirty labels act as a way of giving preference to the most "starved" processes, and a disadvantage to processes that have just "eaten". One could compare their solution to one where philosophers are not allowed to eat twice in a row without letting others use the forks in between. Chandy and Misra's solution is more flexible than that, but has an element tending in that direction.  In their analysis they derive a system of preference levels from the distribution of the forks and their clean/dirty states. They show that this system may describe an Acyclic Graph, and if so, the operations in their protocol cannot turn that graph into a cyclic one. This guarantees that deadlock cannot occur. However, if the system is initialized to a perfectly symmetric state, like all philosophers holding their left side forks, then the graph is cyclic at the outset, and their solution cannot prevent a deadlock. Initializing the system so that philosophers with lower IDs have dirty forks ensures the graph is initially acyclic.

In computer science, the dining philosophers problem is an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them.


Life and Marriage.

Adelaide was born about 1160 as the daughter of Margrave Otto II of Meissen (1125–1190) and his wife Hedwig of Brandenburg (d. 1203), a daughter of the Ascanian margrave Albert the Bear. She met her future husband in the 1170s, in the time of his exile during internal struggles within the Bohemian Přemyslid dynasty. The couple married in 1178 without attendance and consent from their families. It is possible that the marriage was forced on grounds of her pregnancy. Adelaide gave birth to a son, Vratislaus, soon.  Shortly after the marriage the couple could return to Bohemia, when Ottokar's brother Frederick (Bedřich) assumed the reins and made Ottokar one of the leaders of his armed forces in the Moravian lands. In 1192 Ottokar himself ascended the Prague throne and even achieved his recognition by the Hohenstaufen emperor Henry VI, however, he lost support and was deposed soon after. He again had to leave Bohemia, together with his wife and four children.  Adelaide came to Meissen at the court of her brother Margrave Albert the Proud. Meanwhile, Ottokar became a mercenary of German princes to profit from the German throne dispute between Emperor Henry's brother Philip of Swabia and the Welf duke Otto of Brunswick. In this time the couple got estranged. Ottokar decided to solve the problem in a way exclusive to all dynastic principles.

Two queens.

By the end of 1197 Ottokar came to terms with his younger brother Vladislaus III and succeeded as Bohemian duke for the second time. He finally obtained the hereditary royal title according to the Golden Bull of Sicily issued by Philip of Swabia. Shortly thereafter, he repudiated his wife and also his adult son Vratislav. Ottokar was at least 40 at that time and risked losing the heir. Adelaide and her daughters again stayed in Meissen, while Vratislav became a mercenary in Germany and Italy.  In 1199, King Ottokar divorced Adelaide, officially on grounds of consanguinity. They were both descendants of Margrave Henry of Schweinfurt and the Polish king Mieszko II Lambert and were fifth cousin once removed or fourth cousin once removed. Ottokar married Princess Constance of Hungary, daughter of King Béla III, who was his fourth cousin thrice removed, later in the same year.  Adelaide, however, had no intention to waive her rights nor to have her children considered as illegitimate. She began a litigation in 1199, calling the Hohenstaufen family and Pope Innocent III for help. In the German throne dispute, both the Hohenstaufen and Welf party alternating stood for her rights. In 1205 Adelaide could even return to Prague for a while, after Ottokar had signed an agreement with Philip of Swabia. Moreover, his first-born son with Constance of Hungary had died, and Ottokar decided to marry his daughter with Adelaide, Margaret (Dagmar), to King Valdemar II of Denmark in this time. However, when Constance gave birth to another son, later king Wenceslaus I, in 1205, Adelaide with her daughters had to leave Bohemia permanently. She retired to the Holy Cross monastery in Meissen.  The Pope still used the pending lawsuit for leverage, but finally decided that the cessation of marriage was legal. Adelaide still struggled, though in 1210 she had definitely lost. She died one year later in her Meissen exile.

Adelaide of Meissen (, ; – 2 February 1211), a member of the House of Wettin, was Queen of Bohemia from 1198 to 1199 as the first wife of King Ottokar I. When her husband declared their marriage null and void, she began a longstanding legal dispute that involved numerous religious and secular dignitaries of her time.


Biography.

Soviet legal scholar.

Anatoly Sobchak was born in Chita, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, on 10 August 1937. His father, Aleksander Antonovich, was a railroad engineer, and his mother, Nadezhda Andreyevna Litvinova, was an accountant. Anatoly was one of four brothers. In 1939, the family moved to Uzbekistan, where Anatoly lived until 1953 before entering Stavropol Law College. In 1954, he transferred to Leningrad State University. In 1958, he married Nonna Gandzyuk, a student of Hertzen Teacher's College. They had a daughter called Maria Sobchak, born in 1965, who is currently a St Petersburg lawyer while her son Gleb Sobchak, born in 1983, graduated from the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg State University.  After graduating from Leningrad State University, he worked for three years as a lawyer in Stavropol, then returned to Leningrad State University for graduate studies (1962–1965). After obtaining his Ph.D., he taught law at the Leningrad Police School and the Leningrad Institute for Cellulose and Paper Industries' Technology (1965–1973), and between 1973 and 1990 he taught at Leningrad State University. In 1980, he married Lyudmila Narusova, at that time a history student at the Leningrad Academy of Soviet Culture and later a prominent MP. They had a daughter, Ksenia Sobchak.  After obtaining his D.Sc. in 1982, he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Common Law in Socialist Economics. He was very popular among law students, especially for his mildly anti-government comments. During his work at Leningrad State University, he established close relations with its then administrator of international affairs, Vladimir Putin, which he maintained for the rest of his life.

Legislator.

In 1989, after election laws changed during Perestroika, he was elected as an independent candidate to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union. He was one of only a few deputies who had a legal background, so he contributed enormously to most of the laws created from 1989 to 1991. He became one of the founders and a co-chairman of the Inter-Regional Deputies Group along with Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin. He also was a chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on the Investigation of the events of 9 April 1989 in Tbilisi. The Commission condemned the military, which was blamed for many deaths when dispersing demonstrators. The Commission's report made it more difficult to use military force against civil demonstrations in the Soviet Union and Russia.  He was a member of the President's Consultative Council during Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure and contributed to legislation that originated from the presidential administration.  After the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, Sobchak was not a member of the central Parliament but was a member of Yeltsin's Presidential Council and the chairman of the Constitutional Assembly that prepared the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 1993. The constitution is often informally called "Sobchak's constitution", although its real authors have been somewhat less known.

Mayor of Saint Petersburg.

In April 1990, Sobchak was elected a deputy of the Leningrad City Council, and in May he became the chairman of the Council. From the beginning, his leadership was marked by a strongly authoritarian bent. The Council decided to change the structure of the city governance so as to have a Mayor elected by direct elections. The first of such elections in June 1991 were combined with the referendum on the city name. Sobchak won the elections, and the city voted to return to its historical name of Saint Petersburg. The name change was established in one of the last sessions of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union, held on 12 September 1991. The change needed an amendment of the Constitution of the Soviet Union and its passage required much effort by Sobchak.  Sobchak was Mayor of Saint Petersburg from 1991 to 1996. During his tenure, the city became a place of glamorous cultural and sporting events. Most of the everyday control of the city structure was handled by two Mayor's deputies – Vladimir Yakovlev and Vladimir Putin; critics alleged deterioration of city infrastructure, growing corruption, and crime during this time. In the 1996 mayoral election, Sobchak was opposed by his former first deputy Vladimir Yakovlev and lost by a margin of 1.2%. The major pitch of Yakovlev's campaign was that Sobchak's patronage of the arts (with city money) and involvement in federal politics prevented him from solving the real problems of the city.

Emigration and return.

In 1997, a criminal investigation started against Sobchak. He was accused of irregularities in the privatization of his own apartment, his elder daughter's apartment, and his wife's art studio. By the standards of the 1990s in Russia, the allegations were relatively minor (although the alleged losses for city finances were still in the tens of thousands of dollars). Thus, Sobchak's supporters saw the criminal proceedings as a political repression. According to Ksenia Sobchak, this campaign was started in 1995 from Moscow to prevent her father from running in future presidential elections.  On 7 November 1997, Sobchak flew to Paris on a private plane without passport processing on the Russian side. The formal reason for his departure was medical treatment in a Paris hospital for his heart condition, but Sobchak never checked in at the hospital. Between 1997 and 1999, he lived the typical life of a political émigré in Paris.  In June 1999, his friend Vladimir Putin became much stronger politically (in a few weeks he became the Prime Minister of Russia), and he was able to make the prosecutors drop the charges against Sobchak. On 12 June 1999, Sobchak returned to Russia. After his return, Sobchak became a very active supporter of Putin in his quest for the Russian presidency.

Death.

On 17 February 2000, Putin met with Sobchak and urged him to travel to Kaliningrad to support his election campaign. Sobchak traveled there, accompanied by two assistants who also served as his bodyguards. On 20 February 2000, Sobchak died suddenly in the town of Svetlogorsk of the Kaliningrad Oblast. The initial suspected cause of death was a heart attack, but the findings of two medical experts were contradictory. A criminal investigation of Sobchak's death as a possible "premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances" was opened only on 6 May 2000, more than two months later. After three months, the investigation was closed without a finding. The Democratic Union party led by Valeria Novodvorskaya made an official statement that not only Sobchak, but also two of his aides had heart attacks simultaneously, which indicated poisoning. Two other men were present with Sobchak during his death, but their names were not publicly disclosed.  According to an independent investigation by Arkady Vaksberg, both bodyguards of Sobchak were treated for symptoms of poisoning after Sobchak's death, indicating at a probable contract killing by poisoning. Sobchack's widow Lyudmila had her own autopsy done on her husband's body, but never made the results public; she told the BBC that she keeps the findings in a secure location outside Russia.  He was interred in Nikolskoe Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg, near the grave of Galina Starovoitova.

Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak (, 10 August 1937 – 19 February 2000) was a Russian politician, a co-author of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg, and a mentor and teacher of both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.


History.

The church on St Isaac's Square was ordered by Tsar Alexander I, to replace an earlier structure by Vincenzo Brenna, and was the fourth consecutive church standing at this place. A specially appointed commission examined several designs, including that of the French-born architect Auguste de Montferrand (1786–1858), who had studied in the atelier of Napoleon's designer, Charles Percier. Montferrand's design was criticised by some members of the commission for the dry and allegedly boring rhythm of its four identical pedimented octastyle porticos. It was also suggested that despite gigantic dimensions, the edifice would look squat and not very impressive. The members of the commission, which consisted of well-known Russian architects, were also particularly concerned by necessity to build a new huge building on the old unsecure foundation. The emperor, who favoured the ponderous Empire style of architecture, had to step in and solve the dispute in Montferrand's favour.  The cathedral took 40 years to construct, under Montferrand's direction, from 1818 to 1858. The building of the cathedral took so long, that it left an idiom to Finnish language: "rakentaa kuin Iisakinkirkkoa" ("To build like the church of Isaac") when speaking of long-term construction projects.  To secure the construction, the cathedral's foundation was strengthened by driving 25,000 piles into the fenland of Saint Petersburg. Innovative methods were created to erect the giant columns of the portico. The construction costs of the cathedral totalled an incredible sum of 1 000 000 gold rubles. Under the Soviet government, the building was stripped of religious trappings. In 1931, it was turned into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, the dove sculpture was removed, and replaced by a Foucault pendulum. On 12 April 1931, the first public demonstration of the Foucault pendulum was held to visualize Copernicus's theory. In 1937, the museum was transformed into the museum of the cathedral, and former collections were transferred to the Museum of the History of Religion (located in the Kazan Cathedral).  During World War II, the dome was painted over in gray to avoid attracting attention from enemy aircraft. On its top, in the skylight, a geodesical intersection point was placed, to determine the positions of German artillery batteries.  With the fall of communism, the museum was removed and regular worship activity has resumed in the cathedral, but only in the left-hand side chapel. The main body of the cathedral is used for services on feast days only.  On 10 January 2017 Georgy Poltavchenko, the Governor of St. Petersburg, announced that the cathedral would be transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church. The key protocols of the transfer were defined by the order issued by St. Petersburg's Committee on Property Relations on 30 December 2016. The document expired on 30 December 2018. The new order can be issued upon request from the Russian Orthodox Church, but no such request has yet been submitted..  The transfer of Saint Isaac's Cathedral in use the ROC agreed in January 2017, but the decision has caused discontent of the townspeople, who defended the status of the museum. The decision of the city authorities was disputed in the courts. Currently, the status of the building is museum. Today, church services are held here only ecclesiastical occasions.

Exterior.

The neoclassical exterior expresses the traditional Russian-Byzantine formula of a Greek-cross ground plan with a large central dome and four subsidiary domes. It is similar to Andrea Palladio's Villa Capra "La Rotonda", with a full dome on a high drum substituted for the Villa's low central saucer dome. The design of the cathedral in general and the dome in particular later influenced the design of the United States Capitol dome, Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Lutheran Cathedral in Helsinki.  The exterior is faced with gray and pink stone, and features a total of 112 red granite columns with Corinthian capitals, each hewn and erected as a single block: 48 at ground level, 24 on the rotunda of the uppermost dome, 8 on each of four side domes, and 2 framing each of four windows. The rotunda is encircled by a walkway accessible to tourists. 24 statues stand on the roof, and another 24 on top of the rotunda.

Dome.

The cathedral's main dome rises ; its exterior is gilded. The dome is decorated with twelve statues of angels by Josef Hermann. These angels were likely the first large sculptures produced by the then novel process of electrotyping, which was an alternative to traditional bronze casting of sculptures. Montferrand's design of the dome is based on a supporting cast iron structure. It was the third historical instance of cast iron cupola after the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk (1732) and Mainz Cathedral (1826).

Interior.

The cathedral's bronze doors, covered in reliefs by Ivan Vitali, are patterned after the celebrated doors of the Battistero di San Giovanni in Florence, designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Suspended underneath the peak of the dome is a sculpted white dove representing the Holy Spirit. Internal features such as columns, pilasters, floor, and statue of Montferrand are composed of multicolored granites and marbles gathered from all parts of Russia. The iconostasis is framed by eight columns of semiprecious stone: six of malachite and two smaller ones of lazurite. The four pediments are also richly sculpted.  The interior was originally decorated with scores of paintings by Karl Bryullov and other great Russian masters of the day. When these paintings began to deteriorate due to the cold, damp conditions inside the cathedral, Montferrand ordered them to be painstakingly reproduced as mosaics, a technique introduced in Russia by Mikhail Lomonosov. This work was never completed.

Technologies.

William Handyside and other engineers used a number of technological innovations in the construction of the building. The portico columns were raised with the use of large wooden frameworks before the walls were erected. The building rests on 10,000 tree trunks that were sunk by a large number of workers into the marshy banks upon which the cathedral is situated. The dome was gilded by a technique similar to spraypainting; the solution used included toxic mercury, the vapors of which caused the deaths of sixty workers. The dozen gilded statues of angels, each six metres tall, facing each other across the interior of the rotunda, were constructed using galvanoplastic technology, making them only millimeters thick and very lightweight. St. Isaac's Cathedral represents the first use of this technique in architecture.  The meticulous and painstakingly detailed work on constructing the St. Isaac's Cathedral took 40 years to complete. This extended construction left an expression in the Finnish language, "" ("to build like St. Isaac's Church"), for lengthy and never-ending megaprojects.

Saint Isaac's Cathedral or Isaakievskiy Sobor () is a cathedral that currently functions as a museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia, a patron saint of Peter the Great, who had been born on the feast day of that saint. It was originally built as a cathedral but was turned into a museum by the Soviet government in 1931 and has remained a museum ever since. In 2017, the Governor of Saint Petersburg offered to transfer the cathedral back to the Russian Orthodox Church, but this was not accomplished due to the protests of St Petersburg citizens opposing the offer.


Creation.

The museum was established on April 13, 1895, upon enthronement of the emperor Nicholas II to commemorate his father, Alexander III. Its original collection was composed of artworks taken from the Hermitage Museum, Alexander Palace, and the Imperial Academy of Arts. The task to restructure the interiors according to the need of future exposition was imposed on Vasily Svinyin. The grand opening took place on the 17 of March, 1898.  After the Russian Revolution of 1917, many private collections were nationalized and relocated to the Russian Museum. These included Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square".

Architecture.

The main building of the museum is the Mikhailovsky Palace, the Neoclassical former residence of Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, erected in 1819–25 to a design by Carlo Rossi on Square of Arts in St Petersburg. Upon the death of the Grand Duke the residence was named after his wife as the "Palace of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna", and became famous for its many theatrical presentations and balls.  Some of the halls of the palace retain the Italianate opulent interiors of the former imperial residence. Other buildings and locations, assigned to the Russian museum, include the Summer Palace of Peter I (1710–14) with the Summer Garden, the Marble Palace of Count Orlov (1768–85), St Michael's Castle of Emperor Paul (1797–1801), the cabin of Peter the Great, and the Rastrelliesque Stroganov Palace on the Nevsky Prospekt (1752–54).  The project of Benois Building (or 'Corpus Benua') was developed in 1910-1912 by the famous Russian architect Leon Benois. The construction started in 1914, but was interrupted by the First World War. After Russian revolution, in 1919 the Benois Building was completed. In 1930s it was assigned to the Russian museum.

Collection.

Today the collection shows Russian art from the 10th century up to the 21st century, covering all genres from the old Russian icon painting to contemporary art.

Exhibits.

The Ethnographic Department was originally set up in a building specially designed by Vladimir Svinyin in 1902. The museum soon housed gifts received by Emperor's family from representatives of peoples inhabiting various regions of the Russian Empire. Further exhibits were purchased by Nicholas II and other members of his family as State financing was not enough to purchase new exhibits. In 1934, the Ethnographic Department was given the status of an independent museum: the Russian Museum of Ethnography.

Málaga branch.

The city of Málaga, home to thousands of Russian expats, has signed an agreement to host the first overseas branch of the State Russian Museum. Works displayed in Malaga will range from Byzantine-inspired icons to social realism of the Soviet era. They will be on display in yards) of exhibition space in La Tabacalera, a 1920s tobacco factory. The new museum is scheduled to open in early 2015.

The State Russian Museum (), formerly the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III (), on Arts Square in Saint Petersburg, is the world's largest depository of Russian fine art. It is also one of the largest art museums in the world with total area over 30 hectares.