History.

Old Prussian village.

Baltiysk was originally the site of an Old Prussian fishing village that was established on the coast of the Vistula Spit at some point in the 13th century. The village was named as "Pile" or "Pil" in several documents, possibly taking its name from "pils" the Old Prussian language word for fort. It was eventually conquered by the Teutonic Knights, with the name evolving into the German form of Pillau. In 1497, a storm surge dug a new gat in front of the village, and another large storm created the navigable Strait of Baltiysk through the gat on September 10, 1510. This fostered the growth of Pillau into an important port of the Duchy of Prussia, and a blockhouse was constructed in 1537, followed by a system of storehouses in 1543, and the earliest fortifications in 1550. During the Thirty Years' War, the harbor was occupied by Sweden in the aftermath of their victory over the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and King Gustavus Adolphus landed there with his reinforcements in May 1626. After the ceasefire of Altmark in 1629, the Swedes retained Pillau and set out upgrading its fortifications, constructing a star fort which remains one of the town's landmarks. In 1635, the citizens of Pillau paid the ransom of 10,000 thalers, whereupon Swedish forces handed over the settlement to the Elector of Brandenburg.

Prussian town.

By the end of the 17th century, Pillau had expanded considerably, and a lighthouse and a stone church were built. Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia, visited Pillau on three occasions, the first being in 1697 in connection with his Grand Embassy to Western Europe. A statue of the Peter the Great currently stands next to the lighthouse. After Pillau was granted town privileges in 1725, the Baroque-style town hall was constructed and inaugurated in May 1745, but was destroyed at the end of World War II. Russian forces occupied the town during the Seven Years' War and built a small Orthodox church there, with the event commemorated by the equestrian statue of Empress Elizabeth, unveiled in 2004. In June 1807, Pillau was stormed by Napoleon's Grande Armée during the Napoleonic Wars, although no outstanding events took place during the rest of the 19th century. Records of a Scottish "colony" established in Pillau in 1815 appeared in an 1890 publication, although their authenticity is questionable. The lighthouse was built up to a height of and the entire fortress was updated and rebuilt by the Prussians in 1871.  The importance of Pillau declined from November 15, 1901, when a shipping canal was opened linking the Vistula Lagoon near Zimmerbude (now Svetly) to Königsberg. Pillau's economy was heavily based on large shipping vessels being forced to dock in the town due to the shallow depth of the lagoon near Königsberg, the capital and the largest city of East Prussia, and the goods would then be transported from Pillau to Königsberg by other means. Constructed at a huge cost of thirteen million marks, the canal allowed vessels of a draught to moor alongside the city or to sail directly to Königsberg without stopping at Pillau, causing a serious decline to the town's economy.

World War II.

During World War II, Pillau had a U-boat training facility, and on April 16, 1945, the was sunk by Red Army artillery fire while she was docked near the electricity supply pier in Pillau port, and was the only U-boat to be ever sunk by land-based forces in World War II. As the Red Army entered East Prussia, more than 450,000 refugees were ferried from Pillau to central and western Germany, with the town eventually being captured by Soviets on April 25, 1945.

Modern Baltiysk.

After the war, Pillau was included in the northern part of East Prussia passed to the Soviet Union that became Kaliningrad Oblast, and the German inhabitants were expelled. During the Russification campaign, the town's name was changed to Baltiysk in 1946.  In 1952, the Soviet authorities inaugurated a naval base for the Baltic Fleet of the Soviet Navy at Baltiysk, and as a result it became a closed town with access was forbidden to foreigners or those without a permit. During the Cold War it was served by the Baltiysk Air Base. The town, along with Kaliningrad, remains one of only two year-round ice-free ports along the Baltic Sea coastline available to Russia.  In 2019, on a wave of anti-Western sentiment following Russia's annexation of Crimea, there were calls to change the town's German-era coat of arms, which features a sturgeon wearing the crown of King Frederick William I of Prussia. The historic arms had been granted to the town, then known as Pillau, in 1725.

Administrative and municipal status.

Within the framework of administrative divisions, Baltiysk serves as the administrative center of Baltiysky District. As an administrative division, it is, together with two rural localities, incorporated within Baltiysky District as the town of district significance of Baltiysk. As a municipal division, the town of district significance of Baltiysk is incorporated within Baltiysky Municipal District as Baltiyskoye Urban Settlement.

Climate.

Baltiysk has a temperate oceanic climate (Köppen "Cfb" borders on "Dfb"). Winters are cold to mild, while summers are warm. In July and August, the warmest season, high temperatures average and low temperatures average. In January and February, the coldest season, high temperatures average with low temperatures averaging.

Landmarks.

Historical buildings in and around the town include the pentagonal Pillau Citadel, founded by the Swedes in 1626, completed by the Prussians in 1670, renovated in 1870, and currently holding a naval museum; the ruins of the 13th-century Lochstadt Castle; a maze of 19th-century naval fortifications; the Naval Cathedral of St. George (1866); the Expressionist observation tower (1932); the Gothic Revival building of the Baltic Fleet Museum (1903); and an elegant lighthouse, dating from 1813-1816. A stone cross, erected in 1830 to commemorate the supposed spot of St. Adalbert of Prague's martyrdom, was destroyed by the Soviets and restored a millennium after the event, in 1997.

International relations.

Twin towns and sister cities.

Baltiysk is twinned with:

Baltiysk (), prior to 1946 known by its German name Pillau (; ; Yiddish: פּילאַווע, "Pilave"), is a seaport town and the administrative center of Baltiysky District in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia, located on the northern part of the Vistula Spit, on the shore of the Strait of Baltiysk separating the Vistula Lagoon from Gdańsk Bay. Population:


History.

Chernyakhovsk was founded in 1336 by the Teutonic Knights on the site of a former Old Prussian fortification when Dietrich von Altenburg, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, built a castle called Insterburg following the Prussian Crusade. During the Teutonic Knights' Northern Crusades campaign against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the town was devastated in 1376 and then again by Polish troops in 1457. The castle had been rebuilt as the seat of a Procurator and a settlement also named Insterburg grew up to serve it.  When the Prussian Duke Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach in 1525 secularized the monastic State of the Teutonic Order, Insterburg became part of the Duchy of Prussia and was granted town privileges on 10 October 1583 by the Prussian regent Margrave George Frederick. Insterburg became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, and because the area had been depopulated by plague in the early 18th century, King Frederick William I of Prussia invited Protestant refugees who had been expelled from the Archbishopric of Salzburg to settle in Insterburg in 1732.  In 1818, after the Napoleonic Wars, the town became the seat of Insterburg District within the Gumbinnen Region. Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly died at Insterburg in 1818 on his way from his Livonian manor to Germany, where he wanted to renew his health. In 1863, a Polish secret organization was founded and operated in Insterburg, which was involved in arms trafficking to the Russian Partition of Poland during the January Uprising. Since May 1864, the leader of the organization was Józef Racewicz. Insterburg became a part of the German Empire following the 1871 unification of Germany, and on May 1, 1901, it became an independent city separate from Insterburg District. During World War I the Russian Army seized Insterburg on 24 August 1914, but it was retaken by Germany on 11 September 1914. The Weimar Germany era after World War I saw the town separated from the rest of the country as the province of East Prussia had become an exclave. The association football club Yorck Boyen Insterburg was formed in 1921. During World War II, Insterburg was heavily bombed by the British Royal Air Force on July 27, 1944. The town was stormed by Red Army troops on January 21–22, 1945. As part of the northern part of East Prussia, Insterburg was transferred from Germany to the Soviet Union after the war as previously agreed between the victorious powers at the Potsdam Conference. The German population was either evacuated or expelled and replaced with Russians. In 7 April 1946, Insterburg was renamed as Chernyakhovsk in honor of the Soviet World War II Army General, Ivan Chernyakhovsky, who commanded the army that first entered East Prussia in 1944.  After 1989, a group of people introduced the Akhal-Teke horse breed to the area and opened an Akhal-Teke breeding stable.

Administrative and municipal status.

Within the framework of administrative divisions, Chernyakhovsk serves as the administrative center of Chernyakhovsky District. As an administrative division, it is, together with five rural localities, incorporated within Chernyakhovsky District as the town of district significance of Chernyakhovsk. As a municipal division, the town of district significance of Chernyakhovsk is incorporated within Chernyakhovsky Municipal District as Chernyakhovskoye Urban Settlement.

Military.

Chernyakhovsk is home to the Chernyakhovsk naval air facility.

Coat of Arms Controversy.

On September 2019 the local court ruled that the coat of arms was illegal because it carries "elements of foreign culture." The local court alleged that Russian laws do not allow the use of foreign languages and symbols in Russian state symbols and ordered the town "to remove any violations of the law."  The town's coat of arms, adopted in 2002, was based on the historic coat of arms of the town that before 1946 was known under its original Prussian name - Insterburg.  The full version of coat of arms in question has a picture of a Prussian man with a horn and the Latin initials G.F. for the Regent of Prussia George Frederick, margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1543–1603), who gave Insterburg the status of town and with it his family coat of arms.  The case brought before the court follows a trend among several towns in the region that have announced their intentions to change their coat of arms as tensions mount between Russia and the West following Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea in 2014 and its support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine's east.

Twin towns and sister cities.

Chernyakhovsk is twinned with:

Chernyakhovsk () – known prior to 1946 by its German name of (; ) – is a town in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, where it is the administrative center of Chernyakhovsky District. Located at the confluence of the Instruch and Angrapa Rivers, which unite to become the Pregolya River below Chernyakhovsk, the town had a population in 2017 of 36,423.


Early life.

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was born to a peasant family of ethnic Russian origin in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa (), Tver Governorate, Russia. He was the elder brother of Fedor Kalinin.  Kalinin finished his education at a local school in 1889 and worked for a time on a farm. He moved to Saint Petersburg, where he found employment as a metal worker in 1895. He also worked as a butler and then as a railway worker at Tbilisi depot, where he met Sergei Alliluyev, the father of Stalin's second wife.  In 1906, he married the ethnic Jew Ekaterina Lorberg who originated from Estonia ( (, 1882–1960).

Early political career.

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898, the year of its foundation. He came to know Stalin through the Alliluyev family.  During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Kalinin worked for the Bolshevik party and on the staff of the Central Union of Metal Workers. He later became active on behalf of the RSDLP in Tiflis, Georgia (now Tbilisi), Reval, Estonia (now Tallinn), and Moscow. In April 1906 he served as a delegate at the 4th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.  Kalinin was an early and devoted adherent of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, headed by Vladimir Lenin. He was a delegate to the 1912 Bolshevik Party Conference held in Prague, where he was elected an alternate member of the governing Central Committee and sent to work inside Russia. He did not become a full member because he was suspected of being an Okhrana agent (the real agent was Roman Malinovsky, a full member).  Kalinin was arrested for his political activities in 1916 and freed during the February Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the tsarist state.

Russian Revolutions.

Kalinin joined the Petrograd Bolshevik committee and assisted in the organization of the party daily "Pravda," now legalized by the new regime.  In April 1917 Kalinin, like many other Bolsheviks, advocated conditional support for the Provisional Government in cooperation with the Menshevik faction of the RSDLP, a position at odds with that of Lenin. He continued to oppose an armed uprising to overthrow the government of Alexander Kerensky throughout that summer.  In the elections held for the Petrograd City Duma in autumn 1917, Kalinin was chosen as mayor of the city, which he administered during and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 7 November.  In 1919, Kalinin was elected a member of the governing Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party as well as a candidate member of the Politburo. He was promoted to full membership on the Politburo in January 1926, a position which he retained until his death in 1946.  When Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov died in March 1919 (from influenza, a beating or poisoning; sources differ), Kalinin replaced him as President of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the titular head of state of Soviet Russia. The name of this position was changed to Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR in 1922 and to Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1938. Kalinin continued to hold the post without interruption until his retirement at the end of World War II.  In 1920, Kalinin attended the Second World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow as part of the Russian delegation. He was seated on the presidium rostrum and took an active part in the debates.

Soviet Union.

Kalinin was a factional ally of Stalin during the bitter struggle for power after the death of Lenin in 1924. He delivered a report on Lenin and the Comintern to the Fifth World Congress in 1924.  Kalinin was one of the comparatively few members of Stalin's inner circle springing from peasant origins. The lowly social origins were widely publicised in the official press, which habitually referred to Kalinin as the "All-Union headman" (Всесоюзный староста), a term hearkening to the village commune, in conjunction with his role as titular head of state. In practical terms, by the 1930s, Kalinin's role as a decision-maker in the Soviet government was nominal.  He held little power or influence beyond receiving diplomatic letters from abroad. Recalling him, future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said, "I don't know what practical work Kalinin carried out under Lenin. But under Stalin he was the nominal signatory of all decrees, while in reality he rarely took part in government business. Sometimes he was made a member of a commission, but people didn't take his opinion into account very much. It was embarrassing for us to see this; one simply felt sorry for Mikhail Ivanovich."  On 5 March 1940, six members of the Soviet Politburo—Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin—signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus, part of the Katyn massacre.  Kalinin was unable to protect even his own wife. Ekaterina Kalinina, who was critical of Stalin's policies, and was arrested on 25 October 1938 on charges of being a "Trotskyist". Although her husband was the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1938–46), she was tortured in Lefortovo Prison and on 22 April 1939, she was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment in a labour camp. She was released shortly before her husband's death in 1946.

Death and legacy.

Kalinin retired in 1946 and died of cancer on 3 June of that same year in Moscow. Kalinin was honoured with a major state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.  Three large cities (Tver, Korolyov and Königsberg) were named or renamed in his honour; only the last of those, Kaliningrad, has retained the name after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Kalinin coal mine was excavated in 1961 and named after M. I. Kalinin.  Kalinin Square and Kalinin Street which were named after Kalinin are located in Minsk, Belarus. The Kalinin avenue in Dnipro, Ukraine was renamed into Prospekt Serhiy Nigoyan in January 2015.

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (; 3 June 1946), known familiarly by Soviet citizens as "Kalinych", was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He served as head of state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946. From 1926, he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.


Geography.

The range is among the westernmost extensions of the Sudetes, which stretch along the border between the historic region of Silesia in the north, and Bohemia and Moravia in the south up to the Moravian Gate in the east, where they join the Carpathian Mountains. The northwestern foothills of the Lusatian Mountains are called the Lusatian Highlands; in the southwest the range borders on the České Středohoří mountains.  The range is largely made up of sandstone sedimentary rocks leaning on a Precambrian crystalline basement. The northern ridge is marked by the Lusatian Fault, a geological disturbance zone separating the Bohemian sandstones from the Lusatian granodiorite. During the Tertiary volcanic magma streams broke through the sandstone layer and solidified into basalt and phonolite. Several sandstone contact areas were also hardened to columns and distinct rock formations.

Mountains and hills.

The highest peak is the Lausche (793 m). Other notable peaks include the Pěnkavčí vrch (792m), Jedlová (774m), Klíč (760m), Hochwald (750m) and Studenec (736m).

Protections.

The Czech part of the Lusatian Mountains have been a nature reserve since 1976, covering an area of 264 km2. Administratively it is known as the Lusatian Mountains Protected Landscape Area ("CHKO Lužické hory") and has the status of CHKO, a so-called Landscape park. The smaller German part of the mountains also became a nature protection in 2008, when the Zittau Mountain Nature Park was established, with the effect that the entire Lusatian Mountains is now under some form of nature protection.

The Lusatian Mountains (; ; ) are a mountain range of the Western Sudetes on the southeastern border of Germany with the Czech Republic. They are a continuation of the Ore Mountains range west of the Elbe valley. The mountains of the northern, German, part are called the Zittau Mountains.


Etymology.

The origin of the name "beskydy" has not been conclusively established. A Thracian or Illyrian origin has been suggested, however, as yet, no theory has majority support among linguists. The word appears in numerous mountain names throughout the Carpathians and the adjacent Balkan regions, like in Albanian "bjeshkë". The Slovak name "Beskydy" refers to the Polish Bieszczady Mountains, which is not a synonym for the entire Beskids but one single range, belonging to the Eastern Beskids. According to another linguistic theory, it may be related to Middle Low German "beshêt", "beskēt", meaning watershed.  Historically, the term was used for hundreds of years to describe the mountain range separating the old Kingdom of Hungary from the old Kingdom of Poland. In 1269, the Beskids were known by the Latin name ""Beschad Alpes Poloniae"" (translated as: "Beskid Mountains of Poland").

Definition.

The Beskids are approximately 600 km in length and 50–70 km in width. They stand mainly along the southern border of Lesser Poland with northern Slovakia, stretching to the Moravia and Czech Silesia regions of the eastern Czech Republic and to Carpathian Ruthenia in western Ukraine. Parts form the European Watershed, separating the Oder and Vistula basins in the north from the Eastern Slovak Lowland, part of the Great Hungarian Plain drained by the Danube River.  Geologically all of the Beskids stand within the Outer Western Carpathians and the Outer Eastern Carpathians. In the west they begin at the natural pass of the Moravian Gate, which separates them from the Eastern Sudetes, continue east in a band to the north of the Tatra Mountains, and end in Ukraine. The eastern termination of the Beskids is disputed. According to older sources, the Beskids end at the source of the Tisza River, while newer sources state that the Beskids end at the Uzhok Pass at the Polish-Ukrainian border.

Subdivisions.

Multiple traditions, languages and nationalities have developed overlapping variants for the divisions and names of the Beskid ranges. According to the divisions of the Carpathians, they are categorized within:

Eastern Beskids.

Eastern Beskids are divided into two parallel ridges: "Wooded Beskids" and "Polonynian Beskids".

Infrastructure.

The Beskids are currently rich in forest and coal. In the past they were rich in iron ore, with important plants in Ostrava and Třinec – Třinec Iron and Steel Works.  There are many tourist attractions, including historic wooden churches (see Wooden Churches of Southern Little Poland, Carpathian Wooden Churches of Slovakia, and Wooden Churches of Ukraine) and the increasingly popular skiing resorts.  A number of environmental groups support a small but growing population of bears, wolves and lynx in the ecosystem of the Beskidy mountains. The Central Beskids include the Polish Babia Góra National Park and the adjacent Slovak Horná Orava Protected Landscape Area.

The Beskids or Beskid Mountains (,,, ("Beskydŷ"), ("Beskydy")) are a series of mountain ranges in the Carpathians, stretching from the Czech Republic in the west along the border of Poland with Slovakia up to Ukraine in the east.


Description.

The mountain range borders the Belianske Tatras to the east, the Podtatranská kotlina to the south, and the Western Tatras to the west. Most of the range, and all the highest peaks, are in Slovakia. The highest peak is Gerlachovský štít, at.

Natural history.

The High Tatras, having 29 peaks over AMSL are, with the Southern Carpathians, the only mountain ranges with an alpine character and habitats in the entire length of the Carpathian Mountains system. The first European cross-border national park was founded here—Tatra National Park—with Tatra National Park ("Tatranský národný park") in Slovakia in 1948, and Tatra National Park ("Tatrzański Park Narodowy") in Poland in 1954. The adjacent parks protect UNESCO's trans-border Tatra Biosphere Reserve. Many rare and endemic animals and plant species are native to the High Tatras. They include the Tatras' endemic goat-antelope and critically endangered species, the Tatra chamois ("Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica"). Predators include Eurasian brown bear, Eurasian lynx, marten, wolf and fox. The Alpine marmot is common in the range. Flora of the High Tatras includes: the endemic Tatra scurvy-grass ("Cochlearia tatrae"), yellow mountain saxifrage ("Saxifraga aizoides"), ground covering net-leaved willow ("Salix reticulata"), Norway spruce ("Picea abies"), Swiss pine ("Pinus cembra"), and European larch ("Larix decidua").

Peaks.

Highest peaks.

The 15 highest peaks of the High Tatras—all located in Slovakia—are:

Culture.

The area is well known for winter sports. Ski resorts include Štrbské pleso, Starý Smokovec and Tatranská Lomnica in Slovakia, and Zakopane in Poland. The town of Poprad is the gateway to the Slovak Tatra resorts.  The Górale people ("highlanders"), a group of indigenous people with a distinctive traditional culture, are of the High Tatras and other mountain ranges and valleys in the Tatra Mountains region.  Ludwig Greiner identified Gerlachovský štít (Gerlachovský Peak) () as the highest summit of the Tatra Mountains, and the entire Carpathian Mountains system. It is also the highest point of Slovakia.

The High Tatras or High Tatra Mountains (Slovak: Vysoké Tatry; ; ; ), are a mountain range along the border of northern Slovakia in the Prešov Region, and southern Poland in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship. They are a range of the Tatra Mountains chain.


History.

The town began as an important trading settlement in Celtic times, straddling east-west and north-south trade routes across the Ardennes. The Romans established a presence after Julius Caesar defeated the local Aduatuci tribe.  Namur came to prominence during the early Middle Ages when the Merovingians built a castle or citadel on the rocky spur overlooking the town at the confluence of the two rivers. In the 10th century, it became a county in its own right. The town developed somewhat unevenly, as the counts of Namur could only build on the north bank of the Meuse - the south bank was owned by the bishops of Liège and developed more slowly into the town of Jambes (now effectively a suburb of Namur). In 1262, Namur fell into the hands of the Count of Flanders, and was purchased by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1421.  After Namur became part of the Spanish Netherlands in the 1640s, its citadel was considerably strengthened. Louis XIV of France invaded in 1692, capturing the town and annexing it to France. His renowned military engineer Vauban rebuilt the citadel. French control was short-lived, as William III of Orange-Nassau captured Namur only three years later in 1695 during the War of the Grand Alliance. Under the Barrier Treaty of 1709, the Dutch gained the right to garrison Namur, although the subsequent Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 gave control of the formerly Spanish Netherlands to the Austrian House of Habsburg. Thus, although the Austrians ruled the town, the citadel was controlled by the Dutch. It was rebuilt again under their tenure.  General Jean-Baptiste Cyrus de Valence's column laid siege to the city on 19 November 1792 during the War of the First Coalition and, after 12 days, the city surrendered on 1 December and its whole garrison of 3,000 men was taken prisoner. France invaded the region again in 1794, annexing Namur and imposing a repressive regime. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Congress of Vienna incorporated what is now Belgium into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Belgium broke away from the Netherlands in 1830 following the Belgian Revolution, and Namur continued to be a major garrison town under the new government. The citadel was rebuilt yet again in 1887.  Namur was a major target of the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, which sought to use the Meuse valley as a route into France. On August 21, 1914, the Germans bombarded the town of Namur without warning. Several people were killed. Despite being billed as virtually impregnable, the citadel fell after only three days' fighting and the town was occupied by the Germans for the rest of the war. Namur fared little better in World War II; it was in the front lines of both the Battle of the Ardennes in 1940 and the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. The town suffered heavy damage in both wars.  Namur continued to host the Belgian Army's paratroopers until their departure in 1977.  After the creation of the Walloon Region, Namur was chosen as the seat of its executive and parliament. In 1986, Namur was officially declared capital of Wallonia. Its position as regional capital was confirmed by the Parliament of Wallonia in 2010.

Economy.

Namur is an important commercial and industrial centre, located on the Walloon industrial backbone, the Sambre and Meuse valley. It produces machinery, leather goods, metals and porcelain. Its railway station is also an important junction situated on the north-south line between Brussels and Luxembourg City, and the east-west line between Lille and Liège. River barge traffic passes through the middle of the city along the Meuse.

Culture and sights.

Namur has taken on a new role as the capital of the federal region of Wallonia. Its location at the head of the Ardennes has also made it a popular tourist centre, with a casino located in its southern district on the left bank of the Meuse.  The town's most prominent sight is the citadel, now demilitarised and open to the public. Namur also has a distinctive 18th-century cathedral dedicated to Saint Aubain and a belfry classified by UNESCO as part of the Belfries of Belgium and France which are listed as a World Heritage Site.  The Couvent des Soeurs de Notre-Dame used to contain masterpieces of Mosan art by Hugo d'Oignies, currently presented in the Musée des Arts Anciens (Rue de Fer). Elsewhere there is an archeological museum and a museum dedicated to Félicien Rops.  An odd Namurois custom is the annual Combat de l'Échasse d'Or ("Fight for the Golden Stilt"), held on the third Sunday in September. Two teams, the Mélans and the Avresses, dress in medieval clothes while standing on stilts and do battle in one of the town's principal squares.  Namur possesses a distinguished university, the University of Namur (previously known as the Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, FUNDP), founded in 1831. The University of Louvain (UCLouvain) also has several facilities in the city through its UCLouvain Namur University Hospital (CHU UCLouvain Namur), the provinces' largest employer.  Since 1986 Namur has been home to the Namur International Festival of French-Speaking Film. A jazz (Nam'in'Jazz) and a rock (Verdur Rock) festival both take place in Namur annually.  The local football team is named Union Royale Namur.  The local baseball team is named Namur Angels.  The annual Namur cyclo-cross race, part of the UCI Cyclo-cross World Cup, takes place on the hills around the citadel.  Sights near Namur include Maredsous Abbey, Floreffe Abbey, and Annevoie Castle with its surrounding "Jardins d'Annevoie".

Twin towns — sister cities.

Namur is twinned with:

Namur (, ; ; ) is a city and municipality in Wallonia, Belgium. It is both the capital of the province of Namur and of Wallonia, hosting the Parliament of Wallonia, Walloon Government and administration.


Biography.

Varro was born in or near Reate (now Rieti) to a family thought to be of equestrian rank, and always remained close to his roots in the area, owning a large farm in the Reatine plain, reported as near Lago di Ripa Sottile, until his old age. He supported Pompey, reaching the office of praetor, after having been tribune of the people, "quaestor" and "curule aedile". He was one of the commission of twenty that carried out the great agrarian scheme of Caesar for the resettlement of Capua and Campania (59 BC). During Caesar's civil war he commanded one of Pompey's armies in the Ilerda campaign. He escaped the penalties of being on the losing side in the civil war through two pardons granted by Julius Caesar, before and after the Battle of Pharsalus. Caesar later appointed him to oversee the public library of Rome in 47 BC, but following Caesar's death Mark Antony proscribed him, resulting in the loss of much of his property, including his library. As the Republic gave way to Empire, Varro gained the favour of Augustus, under whose protection he found the security and quiet to devote himself to study and writing.  Varro studied under the Roman philologist Lucius Aelius Stilo, and later at Athens under the Academic philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon. Varro proved to be a highly productive writer and turned out more than 74 Latin works on a variety of topics. Among his many works, two stand out for historians; "Nine Books of Disciplines" and his compilation of the "Varronian chronology". His "Nine Books of Disciplines" became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. The most noteworthy portion of the "Nine Books of Disciplines" is its use of the liberal arts as organizing principles. Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro's list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical "liberal arts of the medieval schools".  In 37 BC, in his old age, he also wrote on agriculture for his wife Fundania, writing a "voluminous" work "De re rustica" (also called "Res rusticae")—similar to Cato the Elder's similar work "De agri cultura"—on the management of large slave-run estates.

Calendars.

The compilation of the "Varronian chronology" was an attempt to determine an exact year-by-year timeline of Roman history up to his time. It is based on the traditional sequence of the consuls of the Roman Republic—supplemented, where necessary, by inserting "dictatorial" and "anarchic" years. It has been demonstrated to be somewhat erroneous but has become the widely accepted standard chronology, in large part because it was inscribed on the arch of Augustus in Rome; though that arch no longer stands, a large portion of the chronology has survived under the name of "Fasti Capitolini."

Works.

Varro's literary output was prolific; Ritschl estimated it at 74 works in some 620 books, of which only one work survives complete, although we possess many fragments of the others, mostly in Gellius' "Attic Nights". He was called "the most learned of the Romans" by Quintilian, and also recognized by Plutarch as "a man deeply read in Roman history".  Varro was recognized as an important source by many other ancient authors, among them Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Virgil in the "Georgics", Columella, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, Augustine, and Vitruvius, who credits him (VII.Intr.14) with a book on architecture.  His only complete work extant, "Rerum rusticarum libri tres" ("Three Books on Agriculture"), has been described as "the well digested system of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records."  One noteworthy aspect of the work is his anticipation of microbiology and epidemiology. Varro warned his contemporaries to avoid swamps and marshland, since in such areas ...there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases.

Known lost works.

Most of the extant fragments of these works (mostly the grammatical works) can be found in the Goetz–Schoell edition of "De Lingua Latina", pp. 199–242; in the collection of Wilmanns, pp. 170–223; and in that of Funaioli, pp. 179–371.

Marcus Terentius Varro (; 116–27 BC) was one of ancient Rome's greatest scholars and a prolific author. He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus () to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.


Etymology.

The name "electrum" is the Latinized form of the Greek word ἤλεκτρον ("ḗlektron"), mentioned in the "Odyssey" referring to a metallic substance consisting of gold alloyed with silver. The same word was also used for the substance amber, likely because of the pale yellow colour of certain varieties. It is from amber's electrostatic properties that the modern English words "electron" and "electricity" are derived. Electrum was often referred to as "white gold" in ancient times, but could be more accurately described as "pale gold", as it is usually pale yellow or yellowish-white in colour. The modern use of the term "white gold" usually concerns gold alloyed with any one or a combination of nickel, silver, platinum and palladium to produce a silver-coloured gold.

Composition.

Electrum consists primarily of gold and silver but is sometimes found with traces of platinum, copper, and other metals. The name is mostly applied informally to compositions between about 20–80% gold and 20–80% silver atoms, but these are strictly called gold or silver depending on the dominant element. Analysis of the composition of electrum in ancient Greek coinage dating from about 600 BC shows that the gold content was about 55.5% in the coinage issued by Phocaea. In the early classical period, the gold content of electrum ranged from 46% in Phokaia to 43% in Mytilene. In later coinage from these areas, dating to 326 BC, the gold content averaged 40% to 41%. In the Hellenistic period, electrum coins with a regularly decreasing proportion of gold were issued by the Carthaginians. In the later Eastern Roman Empire controlled from Constantinople, the purity of the gold coinage was reduced, and an alloy that can be called electrum began to be used.

History.

Electrum is mentioned in an account of an expedition sent by Pharaoh Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt. It is also discussed by Pliny the Elder in his "Naturalis Historia". Electrum is also mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, whose prophet Ezekiel is said to have had a vision of Jehovah on a celestial chariot (Ezekiel 1:4).

Early coinage.

The earliest known electrum coins, Lydian and East Greek coins found under the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, are currently dated to the last quarter of the 7th century BC (625-600 BC). Electrum is believed to have been used in coins c.600 BC in Lydia during the reign of Alyattes. Electrum was much better for coinage than gold, mostly because it was harder and more durable, but also because techniques for refining gold were not widespread at the time. The discrepancy between gold content of electrum from modern Western Anatolia (70–90%) and ancient Lydian coinage (45–55%) suggests that the Lydians had already solved the refining technology for silver and were adding refined silver to the local native electrum some decades before introducing the pure silver coins cited below.  In Lydia, electrum was minted into coins weighing, each valued at 1/3 "stater" (meaning "standard"). Three of these coins—with a weight of about —totaled one stater, about one month's pay for a soldier. To complement the stater, fractions were made: the "trite" (third), the "hekte" (sixth), and so forth, including 1/24 of a stater, and even down to 1/48 and 1/96 of a stater. The 1/96 stater was only about to. Larger denominations, such as a one stater coin, were minted as well.  Because of variation in the composition of electrum, it was difficult to determine the exact worth of each coin. Widespread trading was hampered by this problem, as the intrinsic value of each electrum coin could not be easily determined.  These difficulties were eliminated circa 570 BC when the Croeseids, coins of pure gold and silver were introduced. However, electrum currency remained common until approximately 350 BC. The simplest reason for this was that, because of the gold content, one 14.1 gram stater was worth as much as ten 14.1 gram silver pieces.

Electrum is a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, with trace amounts of copper and other metals. The ancient Greeks called it 'gold' or 'white gold', as opposed to'refined gold'. Its colour ranges from pale to bright yellow, depending on the proportions of gold and silver. It has also been produced artificially, and is often known as green gold.


History.

Before 1945.

Vitebsk developed from a river harbor where the Vićba River (Віцьба, from which it derives its name) flows into the larger Western Dvina, which is spanned in the city by the Kirov Bridge.  Archaeological research indicates that Baltic tribes had settlements at the mouth of Vitba. In the 9th century, Slavic settlements of the tribal union of the Krivichs replaced them. According to the "Chronicle of Michael Brigandine" (1760), Princess Olga of Kiev founded Vitebsk (also recorded as Dbesk, Vidbesk, Videbsk, Vitepesk, or Vicibesk) in 974. Other versions give 947 or 914. Academician Boris Rybakov and historian Leonid Alekseyev have come to the conclusion, based on the chronicles, that Princess Olga of Kiev could have established Vitebsk in 947. Leonid Alekseyev suggested that the chroniclers, when transferring the date from the account of the Byzantine era (since the creation of the world) to a new era, obtained the year 947, later mistakenly written in copying manuscripts as 974. An important place on trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks, Vitebsk became by the end of the 12th century a center of trade and commerce, and the center of an independent principality, following Polotsk, and at times, Smolensk and Kiev princes.  The official year of the founding of Vitebsk is 974, based on an anachronistic legend of founding by Olga of Kiev, but the first mention in historical records dates from 1021, when Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev gave it to Bryachislav Izyaslavich, Prince of Polotsk.  In the 12th and 13th centuries Vitebsk functioned as the capital of the Principality of Vitebsk, an appanage principality which thrived at the crossroads of the river routes between the Baltic and Black seas. In 1320 the city was incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as dowry of the Princess Maria, the first wife of Grand Duke of Lithuania Algirdas. By 1351 the city had erected a stone Upper and Lower Castle, the prince's palace. In 1410 Vitebsk participated in the Battle of Grunwald. In 1569 it became a part of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1597 the townsfolk of Vitebsk were privileged with Magdeburg rights. However, the rights were taken away in 1623 after the citizens revolted against the imposed Union of Brest and killed Archbishop Josaphat Kuntsevych of Polotsk. The city was almost completely destroyed in 1708, during the Great Northern War. In the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the Russian Empire annexed Vitebsk.  Under the Russian Empire the historic centre of Vitebsk was rebuilt in the Neoclassical style.  Before World War II Vitebsk had a significant Jewish population: according to Russian census of 1897, out of the total population of 65,900, Jews constituted 34,400 (around 52% percent). The most famous of its Jewish natives was the painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985).  In 1919 Vitebsk was proclaimed to be part of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia (January to February 1919), but was soon transferred to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later to the short-lived Lithuanian–Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (February to July 1919). In 1924 it was returned to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.  During World War II the city came under Nazi German occupation (11 July 1941 – 26 June 1944). Much of the old city was destroyed in the ensuing battles between the Germans and Red Army soldiers. Most of the local Jews perished in the Vitebsk Ghetto massacre of October 1941. The Soviets recaptured the city during the 1944 Vitebsk–Orsha Offensive.

Post-war period.

In the first postwar five-year period the city was rebuilt. Its industrial complex covered machinery, light industry, and machine tools.  In 1959 a TV tower was commissioned and started broadcasting the 1st Central Television program. In the same year, during excavations on Liberation Square, a birch-bark scroll was found dating from the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries. It read:

Independence of Belarus.

In January 1991 Vitebsk celebrated the first Marc Chagall Festival. In June 1992, a monument to Chagall was erected on his native Pokrovskaja Street and a memorial inscription was placed on the wall of his house.  Since 1992 Vitebsk has been hosting the annual Slavianski Bazaar in Vitebsk, an international art festival. The main participants are artists from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, with guests from many other countries, both Slavic and non-Slavic. In 1999 a free economic zone "Vitebsk" was established. The city built the Ice Sports Palace, and there was a remarkable improvement and expansion in the city. The central stadium was reconstructed and the Summer Amphitheatre for the international art festival, the Slavic Bazaar, the railway station and other historical sites and facilities were restored, and a number of new churches and other public facilities were built, together with the construction of new residential areas.

Attractions.

The city has one of the oldest buildings in the country: the Annunciation Church. This magnificent six-pillared building dates back to the period of Kievan Rus since the city at the time was pagan and didn't belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church or the Russian Orthodox Church or the Kievan Rus state. It was constructed in the 1140s as a pagan church, rebuilt in the 14th and 17th centuries as Roman Catholic Church, repaired in 1883 and destroyed by the Communist administration in 1961. The church was in ruins until 1992, when it was restored to its presumed original appearance.  Churches from the Polish-Lithuanian period were likewise destroyed, although the Resurrection Church (1772–77) has been rebuilt. The Orthodox cathedral, dedicated to the Intercession of the Theotokos, was erected in 1760. There are also the town hall (1775); the Russian governor's palace, where Napoleon celebrated his 43rd birthday in 1812; the Neo-Romanesque Roman Catholic cathedral (1884–85); and an obelisk commemorating the centenary of the Russian victory over Napoleon.  Vitebsk is also home to a lattice steel TV tower carrying a horizontal cross on which the antenna mast is guyed. This tower, which is nearly identical to that at Grodno, but a few metres shorter (245 metres in Vitebsk versus 254 metres at Grodno) was completed in 1983. The city is also home to the Marc Chagall Museum and the Vitebsk regional museum.

Geography.

Climate.

Vitebsk has warm summer humid continental climate, Köppen: "Dfb". Summers are generally warm, while winters are relatively cold but still warmer than in Moscow. Approximately 724 mm of precipitation falls here per annum.

Education.

The main universities of Vitebsk are Vitebsk State Technological University, Vitebsk State Medical University and Vitebsk State University named in honor of Pyotr Masherov.

Website.

The website of the city of Vitebsk www.gorod212.by, a news portal.

Vitebsk, or Viciebsk (, Łacinka: "Viciebsk", ;, ), is a city in Belarus. The capital of the Vitebsk Region, it has 366,299 inhabitants, making it the country's fourth-largest city. It is served by Vitebsk Vostochny Airport and Vitebsk Air Base.


Prior trial in Poland.

Most of the senior leaders of the camp, including Rudolf Höss, the longest-standing commandant of the camp, were turned over to the Polish authorities in 1947 following their participation as witnesses in the Nuremberg Trial. Subsequently, the accused were tried in Kraków and many sentenced to death for violent crimes and torturing of prisoners. Only "SS-Untersturmführer" Hans Münch was set free, having been acquitted of war crimes. That original trial in Poland is usually known as the first Auschwitz Trial.

Course of proceedings.

"SS-Sturmbannführer" Richard Baer, the last camp commandant, died in detention while still under investigation as part of the trials. Defendants ranged from members of the SS to "kapos," privileged prisoners responsible for low-level control of camp internees, and included some of those responsible for the process of "selection," or determination of who should be sent to the gas chambers directly from the "ramp" upon disembarking the trains that brought them from across Europe ("selection" generally entailed inclusion of all children held to be ineligible for work, generally under the age of 14, and any mothers unwilling to part with their "selected" children). In the course of the trial, approximately 360 witnesses were called, including around 210 survivors. Proceedings began in the "Bürgerhaus Gallus", in Frankfurt am Main, which was converted into a courthouse for that purpose, and remained there until their conclusion.  State Attorney General (Hessian Generalstaatsanwalt) Fritz Bauer, himself briefly interned in 1933 at the Heuberg concentration camp, led the prosecution. Bauer was concerned with pursuing individual defendants serving at Auschwitz-Birkenau; only 22 SS members were charged of an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 thought to have been involved in the administration and operation of the camp. The men on trial in Frankfurt were tried only for murders and other crimes that they committed on their own initiative at Auschwitz and were not tried for genocidal actions perpetrated "when following orders", considered by the courts to be the lesser crime of accomplice to murder.  At a 1963 trial, KGB assassin Bohdan Stashynsky, who had committed several murders in the Federal Republic in the 1950s, was found by a German court not legally guilty of murder. Instead, Stashynsky was found to be only an accomplice to murder as the courts ruled that the responsibility for his murders rested only with his superiors in the KGB who had given him his orders.  The legal implication of the Stashynsky case were that the courts had ruled that in a totalitarian system only executive decision-makers could be convicted of murder and that anyone who followed orders and killed someone could be convicted only of being accomplices to murder. The term executive decision-maker was so defined by the courts to apply only to the highest levels of the "Reich" leadership during the National Socialist period, and that all who just followed orders when killing were just accomplices to murder. Someone could be only convicted of murder if it was shown that they had killed someone on their own initiative, and thus all of the accused of murder at the Auschwitz trial were tried only for murders that they had done on their own initiative.  Thus, Bauer could only indict for murder those who killed when not following orders, and those who had killed while following orders could be indicted as accomplices to murder. Moreover, because of the legal distinction between murderers and accomplices to murder, this meant that an SS man who killed thousands while operating the gas chambers at Auschwitz could only be found guilty of being accomplice to murder because he had been following orders, while an SS man who had beaten one inmate to death on his own initiative could be convicted of murder because he had not been following orders.  Bauer is said to have been opposed in the former purpose by the young Helmut Kohl, then a junior member of the Christian Democratic Union. In furtherance of that purpose Bauer sought and received support from the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. The following historians from the Institute served as expert witnesses for the prosecution; Helmut Krausnick, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Hans Buchheim, and Martin Broszat. Subsequently, the information the four historians gathered for the prosecution served as the basis for their 1968 book, "Anatomy of the SS State", the first thorough survey of the SS based on SS records.  Information about the actions of those accused and their whereabouts had been in the possession of West German authorities since 1958, but action on their cases was delayed by jurisdictional disputes, among other considerations. The court's proceedings were largely public and served to bring many details of the Holocaust to the attention of the public in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as abroad. Six defendants were given life sentences and several others received the maximum prison sentences possible for the charges brought against them.

Documentation.

The trial comprised 183 days of hearings held from 1963 to 1965. The 430 hours of the testimony of 319 witnesses, including 181 survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp and 80 members of the camp staff, the SS, and the police were recorded on 103 tapes, and 454 volumes of files that were stored at the Hessian State Archives in Wiesbaden.  In 2017, the original magnetic tapes recording the main proceedings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, which focused the world's attention on the systemic industrialized mass-murder of the Holocaust, were submitted by Germany and included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Outcomes.

The trial attracted much publicity in Germany, but was considered by Bauer to be a failure. Bauer complained that the media treated the accused in such a manner as to imply that they were all freakish monsters, which allowed the German public to distance themselves from feeling any moral guilt about what had happened at Auschwitz, which was instead presented as the work of a few sick people who were not at all like normal Germans. Moreover, Bauer felt that because the law treated those who had followed orders when killing as accomplices to murder it implied that the policy of genocide and the Nazi rules for treating inmates at Auschwitz were in fact legitimate.  Bauer wrote that the way that the media had portrayed the trial had supported the  Furthermore, Bauer charged that the judges, in convicting the accused, had made it appear that Germany in the Nazi era had been an occupied country, with most Germans having no choice but to follow orders. He said,  A public opinion poll conducted after the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials indicated that 57% of the German public were not in favor of additional Nazi trials.

Additional trial.

In September 1977 an additional trial was held in Frankfurt against two former members of the "SS" for killings in the Auschwitz satellite camp of Lagischa (Polish: Lagisza), and on the so-called "evacuation" (i.e. death march) from Golleschau (Goleszow) to Wodzisław Śląski (German: Loslau). This and the previous trial inspired the one in the film "The Reader".

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as "der Auschwitz-Prozess", or "der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess," (the "second Auschwitz trial") was a series of trials running from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965, charging 22 defendants under German criminal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp complex. Hans Hofmeyer led as Chief Judge the "criminal case against Mulka and others" (reference number 4 Ks 2/63).


Features.

Windows 2.0 allowed application windows to overlap each other, unlike its predecessor Windows 1.0, which could display only tiled windows. Windows 2.0 also introduced more sophisticated keyboard-shortcuts and the terminology of "Minimize" and "Maximize", as opposed to "Iconize" and "Zoom" in Windows 1.0. The basic window setup introduced here would last through Windows 3.1.  New features in Windows 2.0 included support for the new capabilities of the 80386 CPU (in some versions - see Editions), 16-color VGA graphics, and EMS memory support. It was also the last version of Windows that did not require a hard disk.  With the improved speed, reliability and usability, computers now started becoming a part of daily life for some workers. Desktop icons and use of keyboard shortcuts helped to speed up work.  The Windows 2.x EGA, VGA, and Tandy drivers notably provided a workaround in Windows 3.0 for users who wanted color graphics on 8086 machines (a feature that version normally did not support).  IBM licensed Windows's GUI for OS/2 as Presentation Manager, and the two companies stated that it and Windows 2.0 would be almost identical.

Editions.

Windows 2.0x came in two different variants with different names and CPU support. The first variant simply said "Windows" on the box, with a version number on the back distinguishing it from Windows 1.x. The second was billed on the box as "Windows/386"  This distinction continued to Windows 2.1x, where the naming convention changed to "Windows/286" and "Windows/386" to clarify that they were different versions of the same product.

Windows.

The base version of Windows 2.0 uses the HMA feature of the 80286 CPU to increase the memory available to Windows programs. It introduced the HIMEM.SYS DOS driver for this purpose. While this variant was renamed "Windows/286" in the 2.1 versions, both would run on an 8088 or 8086 processor, simply without HMA support.  Windows 2.0 also includes support for EMS, which works on 8086 and 8088 CPUs. The segmented nature of 16-bit Windows programs is quite suited to the usage of EMS, as portions of code and data can be made visible in the first megabyte of memory accessible to real-mode programs only when the program using them is given control. Microsoft encouraged users to configure their computers with only 256KB of main memory, leaving the address space from 256-640KB available for dynamic mapping of EMS memory.

Windows/386.

Windows/386 was much more advanced than its 286 sibling. It introduced a protected mode kernel, above which the GUI and applications run as a virtual 8086 mode task. It allowed several MS-DOS programs to run in parallel in "virtual 8086" CPU mode, rather than always suspending background applications. (Windows applications could already run in parallel through cooperative multitasking.) With the exception of a few kilobytes of overhead, each DOS application could use any available low memory before Windows was started. Windows/386 ran Windows applications in a single Virtual 8086 box, with EMS emulation. In contrast, Windows 3.0 in standard or enhanced mode ran Windows applications in 16 bits protected mode segments.  Windows/386 also provided EMS emulation, using the memory management features of the 80386 to make RAM beyond 640k behave like the banked memory previously only supplied by add-in cards and used by popular DOS applications. (By overwriting the WIN200.BIN file with COMMAND.COM, it is possible to use the EMS emulation in DOS without starting the Windows GUI.) There was no support for disk-based virtual memory, so multiple DOS programs had to fit inside the available physical memory; therefore, Microsoft suggested buying additional memory and cards if necessary.  Neither of these versions worked with DOS memory managers like CEMM or QEMM or with DOS extenders, which have their own extended memory management and run in protected mode as well. This was remedied in version 3.0, which is compatible with Virtual Control Program Interface (VCPI) in "standard mode" and with DOS Protected Mode Interface (DPMI) in "386 enhanced" mode (all versions of Windows from 3.0 to 98 exploit a loophole in EMM386 to set up protected mode). Windows 3.0 also had the capability of using the DWEMM Direct Write Enhanced Memory Module. This is what enables the far faster and more sleek graphical user interface, as well as true extended memory support.  "BYTE" in 1989 listed Windows/386 as among the "Distinction" winners of the BYTE Awards, describing it as "serious competition for OS/2" as it "taps into the power of the 80386".

Application support.

The first Windows versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel ran on Windows 2.0. Third-party developer support for Windows increased substantially with this version (some shipped the Windows Runtime software with their applications, for customers who had not purchased the full version of Windows). However, most developers still maintained DOS versions of their applications, as Windows users were still a distinct minority of their market. Windows 2.0 was still very dependent on the DOS system and it still hadn't passed the 1 megabyte mark in terms of memory. Stewart Alsop II predicted in January 1988 that "Any transition to a graphical environment on IBM-style machines is bound to be maddeningly slow and driven strictly by market forces", because the GUI had "serious deficiencies" and users had to switch to DOS for many tasks.  There were some applications that shipped with Windows 2.0. They are:

Legal conflict with Apple.

On March 17, 1988, Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, accusing them of violating copyrights Apple held on the Macintosh System Software. Apple claimed the "look and feel" of the Macintosh operating system, taken as a whole, was protected by copyright and that Windows 2.0 violated this copyright by having the same icons. The judge ruled in favor of Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft on all but 10 of the 189 graphical user interface elements that Apple sued on, and the court found the remaining 10 GUI elements could not be copyrighted.

Windows 2.1x.

The successor to Windows 2.0, called Windows 2.1x was officially released in the United States and Canada on May 27, 1988. The final entry in the 2.x series, Windows 2.11, was released in March 1989.

Windows 2.0 is a 16-bit Microsoft Windows GUI-based operating environment that was released on December 9, 1987, and the successor to Windows 1.0.


History.

The first connection between the North and Baltic Seas was constructed while the area was ruled by Denmark–Norway. It was called the Eider Canal, which used stretches of the Eider River for the link between the two seas. Completed during the reign of Christian VII of Denmark in 1784, the "Eiderkanal" was a part of a waterway from Kiel to the Eider River's mouth at Tönning on the west coast. It was only wide with a depth of, which limited the vessels that could use the canal to 300 tonnes.  After 1864 Second Schleswig War put Schleswig-Holstein under the government of Prussia (from 1871 the German Empire), a new canal was sought by merchants and by the German navy, which wanted to link its bases in the Baltic and the North Sea without the need to sail around Denmark.

Construction and expansion.

In June 1887, construction started at Holtenau (), near Kiel. The canal took over 9,000 workers eight years to build. On 20 June 1895 the canal was officially opened by Kaiser Wilhelm II for transiting from Brunsbüttel to Holtenau. The next day, a ceremony was held in Holtenau, where Wilhelm II named it the "Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal" (after his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I), and laid the final stone. The opening of the canal was filmed by British director Birt Acres; surviving footage of this early film is preserved in the Science Museum in London. The first vessel to pass through the canal was the aviso ; she was sent through in late April, before the canal officially opened, to determine if it was ready for use.  The first Trans-Atlantic sailing ship to pass through the canal was "Lilly", commanded by Johan Pitka. "Lilly", a barque, was a wooden sailing ship of about 390 tons built 1866 in Sunderland, U.K. She had a length of, beam, depth of and a keel.  In order to meet the increasing traffic and the demands of the Imperial German Navy, between 1907 and 1914 the canal width was increased. The widening of the canal allowed the passage of a "Dreadnought"-sized battleship. This meant that these battleships could travel from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea without having to go around Denmark. The enlargement projects were completed by the installation of two larger canal locks in Brunsbüttel and Holtenau.

After World War I.

After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles required the canal to be open to vessels of commerce and of war of any nation at peace with Germany, while leaving it under German administration. (The United States opposed this proposal to avoid setting a precedent for similar concessions on the Panama Canal.) The government under Adolf Hitler repudiated its international status in 1936, but the canal was reopened to all traffic after World War II. In 1948, the current name was adopted.  The canal was partially closed in March 2013 after two lock gates failed at the western end near Brunsbüttel. Ships larger than were forced to navigate via Skagerrak, a detour. The failure was blamed on neglect and a lack of funding by the German Federal Government, which has been in financial dispute with the state of Schleswig-Holstein regarding the canal. Germany's Transport Ministry promised rapid repairs.

Operation.

There are detailed traffic rules for the canal. Each vessel in passage is classified in one of six traffic groups according to its dimensions. Larger ships are obliged to accept pilots and specialised canal helmsmen, in some cases even the assistance of a tugboat. Furthermore, there are regulations regarding the passing of oncoming ships. Larger ships may also be required to moor at the bollards provided at intervals along the canal to allow the passage of oncoming vessels. Special rules apply to pleasure craft.  All permanent, fixed bridges crossing the canal since its construction have a clearance of.  Maximum length for ships passing the Kiel Canal is, with the maximum width (beam) of ; these ships can have a draught of up to. Ships up to a length of may have a draught up to. The bulker "Ever Leader" (deadweight 74001 t) is considered to be the cargo ship that to date has come closest to the overall limits.

Crossings.

Several railway lines and federal roads (Autobahnen and Bundesstraßen) cross the canal on eleven fixed links. The bridges have a clearance of allowing for ship heights up to. The oldest bridge still in use is the "Levensau High Bridge" from 1893; however, the bridge will have to be replaced in the course of a canal expansion already underway. In sequence and in the direction of the official kilometre count from west (Brunsbüttel) to east (Holtenau) these crossings are:  Local traffic is also served by 14 ferry lines. Most noteworthy is the “hanging ferry” () beneath the "Rendsburg High Bridge". All ferries are run by the Canal Authority and their use is free of charge.

The Kiel Canal (, literally "North-[to]-Baltic Sea canal", formerly known as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kanal) is a freshwater canal in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. The canal was finished in 1895, but later widened, and links the North Sea at Brunsbüttel to the Baltic Sea at Kiel-Holtenau. An average of is saved by using the Kiel Canal instead of going around the Jutland Peninsula. This not only saves time but also avoids storm-prone seas and having to pass through the Sound or Belts.


By month or season.

Mid-April (Spring in the Northern Hemisphere).

The new year of many South and Southeast Asian calendars falls between April 13–15, marking the beginning of spring.

Christian liturgical year.

The early development of the Christian liturgical year coincided with the Roman Empire (east and west), and later the Byzantine Empire, both of which employed a taxation system labeled the Indiction, the years for which began on September 1. This timing may account for the ancient church's establishment of September 1 as the beginning of the liturgical year, despite the official Roman New Year's Day of January 1 in the Julian calendar, because the indiction was the principal means for counting years in the empires, apart from the reigns of the Emperors. The September 1 date prevailed throughout all of Christendom for many centuries, until subsequent divisions eventually produced revisions in some places.  After the sack of Rome in 410, communications and travel between east and west deteriorated. Liturgical developments in Rome and Constantinople did not always match, although a rigid adherence to form was never mandated in the church. Nevertheless, the principal points of development were maintained between east and west. The Roman and Constantinopolitan liturgical calendars remained compatible even after the East-West Schism in 1054. Separations between the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical year and Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar grew only over several centuries' time.  During those intervening centuries, the Roman Catholic ecclesiastic year was moved to the first day of Advent, the Sunday nearest to St. Andrew's Day (November 30). According to the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, the liturgical year begins at 4:00 PM on Saturday preceding the fourth Sunday prior to December 25 (between November 26 and December 2). By the time of the Reformation (early 16th century), the Roman Catholic general calendar provided the initial basis for the calendars for the liturgically-oriented Protestants, including the Anglican and Lutheran Churches, who inherited this observation of the liturgical new year.  The present-day Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar is the virtual culmination of the ancient eastern development cycle, though it includes later additions based on subsequent history and lives of saints. It still begins on September 1, proceeding annually into the Nativity of the Theotokos (September 8) and Exaltation of the Cross (September 14) to the celebration of Nativity of Christ (Christmas), through his death and resurrection (Pascha/Easter), to his Ascension and the Dormition of the Theotokos ("falling asleep" of the Virgin Mary, August 15). This last feast is known in the Roman Catholic church as the Assumption. The dating of "September 1" is according to the "new" (revised) Julian calendar or the "old" (standard) Julian calendar, depending on which is used by a particular Orthodox Church. Hence, it may fall on 1 September on the civil calendar, or on 14 September (between 1900 and 2099 inclusive).  The Coptic and Ethiopian liturgical calendars are unrelated to these systems but instead follow the Alexandrian calendar which fixed the wandering ancient Egyptian calendar to the Julian year. Their New Year celebrations on Neyrouz and Enkutatash were fixed; however, at a point in the Sothic cycle close to the Indiction, between the years 1900 and 2100, they fall on September 11 during most years and September 12 in the years before a leap year.

Historical European new year dates.

During the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire years beginning on the date on which each consul first entered the office. This was probably May 1 before 222 BC, March 15 from 222 BC to 154 BC, and January 1 from 153 BC. In 45 BC, when Julius Caesar's new Julian calendar took effect, the Senate fixed January 1 as the first day of the year. At that time, this was the date on which those who were to hold civil office assumed their official position, and it was also the traditional annual date for the convening of the Roman Senate. This civil new year remained in effect throughout the Roman Empire, east and west, during its lifetime and well after, wherever the Julian calendar continued in use.  In England, the Angle, Saxon, and Viking invasions of the fifth through tenth centuries plunged the region back into pre-history for a time. While the reintroduction of Christianity brought the Julian calendar with it, its use was primarily in the service of the church to begin with. After William the Conqueror became king in 1066, he ordered that January 1 be re-established as the civil New Year. Later, however, England and Scotland joined much of Europe to celebrate the New Year on March 25.  In the Middle Ages in Europe a number of significant feast days in the ecclesiastical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church came to be used as the beginning of the Julian year:  Southward equinox day (usually September 22) was "New Year's Day" in the French Republican Calendar, which was in use from 1793 to 1805. This was "primidi Vendémiaire", the first day of the first month.

Adoptions of January 1.

It took quite a long time before January 1 again became the universal or standard start of the civil year. The years of adoption of 1 January as the new year are as follows:  March 1 was the first day of the numbered year in the Republic of Venice until its destruction in 1797, and in Russia from 988 until 1492 (Anno Mundi 7000 in the Byzantine calendar). September 1 was used in Russia from 1492 (A.M. 7000) until the adoption of the Anno Domini notation in 1700 via a December 1699 decree of Tsar Peter I.

Time zones.

Because of the division of the globe into time zones, the new year moves progressively around the globe as the start of the day ushers in the New Year. The first time zone to usher in the New Year, just west of the International Date Line, is located in the Line Islands, a part of the nation of Kiribati, and has a time zone 14 hours ahead of UTC. All other time zones are 1 to 25 hours behind, most in the previous day (December 31); on American Samoa and Midway, it is still 11 PM on December 30. These are among the last inhabited places to observe New Year. However, uninhabited outlying U.S. territories Howland Island and Baker Island are designated as lying within the time zone 12 hours behind UTC, the last places on earth to see the arrival of January 1. These small coral islands are found about midway between Hawaii and Australia, about 1,000 miles west of the Line Islands. This is because the International Date Line is a composite of local time zone arrangements, which winds through the Pacific Ocean, allowing each locale to remain most closely connected in time with the nearest or largest or most convenient political and economic locales with which each associate. By the time Howland Island sees the new year, it is 2 AM on January 2 in the Line Islands of Kiribati.

New Year is the time or day at which a new calendar year begins and the calendar's year count increments by one.


Etymology.

The word "sgraffito" comes from the Italian language and is derived from "graffiare" ("to scratch"), ultimately from the Greek ("gráphein", "to write"). Related terms include graffito and graffiti.

History.

Sgraffito on walls has been used in Europe since classical times, it was popularized in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries and can be found in African art. In combination with ornamental decoration these techniques formed an alternative to the prevailing painting of walls. Of late there has been an unmistakable growing interest in this old technique. The technical procedure is relatively simple, and the procedures are similar to the painting of frescoes.  Sgraffito played a significant role during the Italian Renaissance, with two of Raphael's workshop, Polidoro da Caravaggio and his partner Maturino da Firenze, among the leading specialists, painting palace facades in Rome and other cities. Most of their work has now weathered away. During the 16th century, the technique was brought to Germany by the master builders of the Renaissance and taken up with enthusiasm. As a simple native art, old examples of sgraffito can be found in the wide surroundings of Wetterau and Marburg. In Germany, the technique is most predominant in Bavaria. The use of sgraffito was common in the creation of housing façades for the purposes of advertising. The technique was also used in Thuringia, the Engadin, Austria and Transylvania.  In Catalonia, sgraffito was implemented in the early 20th century by the Noucentista neo-classical architects and became a recurrent technique in façade decoration.  Another use of sgraffito is seen in its simplified painting technique. One coat of paint is left to dry on a canvas or sheet of paper. Another coat of a different color is painted on top of the first layer. The artist then uses a palette knife or oil stick to scratch out a design, leaving behind an image in the color of the first coat of paint. This can also be achieved by using oil pastels for the first layer and black ink for the top layer. Sometimes a first coat of paint is not needed, and the wet coat scraped back reveals the canvas. This cannot be achieved by using the oil pastel method. This technique is often used in art classes to teach the sgraffito technique to novice art students.  In glass making, sgraffito refers to creating imagery with finely powdered black glass on a sheet glass substrate. Sgraffito is a subtractive technique; light areas are created by scraping away the powdered glass, while dark areas are made by adding piles of powder. The powdered glass is manipulated with a variety of tools. The finished drawing is very vulnerable until the piece is fired in a kiln.

Art Nouveau.

Examples of graphic work on facades saw a resurgence circa 1890 through 1915, in the context of the rise of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Vienna Secession, and particularly the Art Nouveau movement in Belgium and France.  The English artist Heywood Sumner has been identified as this era's pioneer of the technique, for example his work at the 1892 St Mary's Church, Sunbury, Surrey. Sumner's work is sgraffito "per se", scratched plaster, but the term has come to encompass a variety of techniques for producing exterior graphic decoration.  Other examples include:

Sgraffito (; plural: "sgraffiti") is a technique either of wall decor, produced by applying layers of plaster tinted in contrasting colours to a moistened surface, or in pottery, by applying to an unfired ceramic body two successive layers of contrasting slip or glaze, and then in either case scratching so as to reveal parts of the underlying layer. The Italian past participle "sgraffiato" is also used, especially of pottery.


Life.

Langhans was born in Landeshut, Silesia (now Kamienna Góra in Poland). He was not educated as an architect. He studied law from 1753 to 1757 in Halle, and then mathematics and languages, and engaged himself autodidactically with architecture, at which he concentrated primarily on the antique texts of the Roman architecture theorist Vitruvius (and the new version by the classics enthusiast Johann Joachim Winckelmann).  His draft for "Zum Schifflein Christi" (1764), the Protestant Church in Groß-Glogau, earned him his first recognition as an architect. In the same year, he received an appointment as building inspector for the Count of Hatzfeld, whose war-ravaged palace Langhans rebuilt to his own design between 1766 and 1774. Through the intervention of the Count of Hatzfeld, he also became known in the royal court in Berlin. As his first work in the service of the royal family, he built in 1766 the stairwell and the Muschelsaal in Rheinsberg Palace.  From 1775 until 1788, Langhans headed the building authority for the Prussian province of Silesia (now Poland). In 1788, the Prussian King Frederick William II appointed him as first director of the royal building commission in Berlin.  He died on his estate at Grüneiche (Dąbie after 1945 and part of Śródmieście borough of Wrocław) near Breslau.

Family.

In 1771, Langhans married Anna Elisabeth Jaeckel, the daughter of a jurist in Breslau. They had five children: daughters Louise Amalie and Juliane Wilhelmine, a son, theater architect Carl Ferdinand, as well as two other children, who died soon after birth.  From 1782 he lived with his family in his in-laws' house at Albrechtstraße 18 in Breslau. In 1788, they moved to Berlin, where he built his own house and lived at Charlottenstraße 31 (now 48), at the corner of Behrenstraße.

Study trips.

Toward the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, it was a great dream for every artist to undertake a trip to Italy in order to be able to study the antique buildings with one's own eyes. The fulfillment of this dream was not granted only to Goethe and Schinkel, but Langhans, too, was able to afford a trip in 1768 and 1769 thanks to the support of the Count of Hatzfeld. When he was later assigned to be the head of the Breslau war and dominion chamber, he visited England, Holland, Belgium, and France on behalf of and at the expense of the king.

Carl Gotthard Langhans (15 December 1732 – 1 October 1808) was a Prussian master builder and royal architect. His churches, palaces, grand houses, interiors, city gates and theatres in Silesia (now Poland), Berlin, Potsdam and elsewhere belong to the earliest examples of Neoclassical architecture in Germany. His best-known work is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, national symbol of today’s Germany and German reunification in 1989/90.


Tournament hills.

Traditionally, the order of the tournament competitions has been: Oberstdorf, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Innsbruck, Bischofshofen – with the following exceptions:

Knock-out system.

One of the tournament's peculiarities is its qualifying system. Unlike other ski jumping events where the best 30 competitors in the first round qualify for the second round, all Four Hills events follow a knock-out system first introduced for the 1996–97 season.  The 50 competitors are divided into 25 pairs. All 25 winners of these duels plus the five best losers qualify for the second round. It is theoretically possible that a competitor who finishes the first round 12th will not qualify for the second round (if he loses his internal duel, five lucky losers and winners of their duels have better results) while the one with the 49th first series result may still qualify (if his "rival" has the worst result). On the other hand, jumpers are less likely to be disadvantaged by a possible significant change in weather conditions between the start and end of the first series. A change in the direction and speed of the wind can make it impossible for the best jumpers to produce a good result. In the event of significantly worse conditions during the second half of the first series, the possibility exists that most of the best jumpers would be eliminated by bad luck alone. Directly pairing rivals reduces the impact of these conditions. In this competition format the qualifying series are valued as well, since jumpers with a better qualification result will have the opportunity to compete against jumpers with worse result. Therefore, it is not enough for a jumper to be among 50 best jumpers in qualifications (with whatever result), but it is better for him to achieve a result as good as possible.  The first jumper in the competition is the one who qualified 26th, followed by his pair who qualified 25th. The next pair has 27th and 24th from the qualification, one after that 28th and 23rd etc. The last pair has last qualified jumper against qualification winner.  If qualification is postponed until the day of competition, the knock-out system is not used, and competition follows regular world cup rules. Because of that in the 2007/08 tournament, the knock-out system was used only in Oberstdorf.

Records.

Janne Ahonen is the only ski jumper to have won the tournament five times, with wins in 1998–99, 2002–03, 2004–05, 2005–06 and 2007–08. Jens Weißflog was the first ski jumper to reach four wins, winning the tournament in 1984, 1985, 1991 and 1996. Helmut Recknagel and Bjørn Wirkola have the next best record, winning three titles each. Wirkola's victories came in three consecutive years (1967–1969), a record still uncontested.  Janne Ahonen's fourth victory in 2005–06 was also the first time the tournament victory was shared, with Jakub Janda, who claimed his first 4 Hills Tournament crown.  Jens Weißflog and Bjørn Wirkola have both won ten Four Hills Tournament events. Janne Ahonen and Gregor Schlierenzauer are next with 9 victories, followed by Matti Nykänen who has seven.  In 2000–01, the 49th edition of the tournament, Adam Małysz beat second placed Janne Ahonen by 104.4 points. This is the biggest winning margin in the tournament's history. He also won all four qualifications that year. The following year Sven Hannawald became the first person to win all four competitions in a single season. In 2017-18 Kamil Stoch has repeated Hannawald's record and year after, Ryōyū Kobayashi became the third person to win all four events.  Three nations each have sixteen victories: Austria, Finland and Germany (including nine victories earned by ski jumpers from East Germany, four - from West Germany and three - from unified German team). Fourth is Norway with ten victories. Poland has four victories. Czechoslovakia and one of its successors the Czech Republic have two victories altogether, as have Slovenia and Japan. USSR has a single victory.

National quota.

During the Four Hills Tournament many national jumpers from Germany and Austria are allowed to qualify for the competition. This allows them to show themselves and get experience. The national jumping team starts first in the qualification.

Notable participants.

In 1965, the Polish old-boy jumper, Stanisław Marusarz (silver medal in World Championship, 1938 in Lahti) who was visiting the tournament, asked the jury in Garmisch-Patenkirchen to allow him a showcase jump. After a long debate, the jury agreed. Marusarz, who at this time was 53 years old (and not practicing jumping for 9 years) achieved 66 meters, using borrowed skies and boots and making his try in official suit (in which he attended the New Years Party), which made the crowd applaud.

The Four Hills Tournament () or the German-Austrian Ski Jumping Week () is a ski jumping event composed of four World Cup events and has taken place in Germany and Austria each year since 1953. With a few exceptions the ski jumping events are held chronologically at Oberstdorf, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Innsbruck and Bischofshofen. Winning these all four events in one Four Hills Tournament edition is called the grand slam.


Etymology.

The common name "alder" evolved from the Old English word "alor", which in turn is derived from Proto-Germanic root "aliso". The generic name "Alnus" is the equivalent Latin name (which is also the source for "Alamo", the Spanish term for the tree).

Description.

With a few exceptions, alders are deciduous, and the leaves are alternate, simple, and serrated. The flowers are catkins with elongate male catkins on the same plant as shorter female catkins, often before leaves appear; they are mainly wind-pollinated, but also visited by bees to a small extent. These trees differ from the birches ("Betula", another genus in the family) in that the female catkins are woody and do not disintegrate at maturity, opening to release the seeds in a similar manner to many conifer cones.  The largest species are red alder ("A. rubra") on the west coast of North America, and black alder ("A. glutinosa"), native to most of Europe and widely introduced elsewhere, both reaching over 30 m. By contrast, the widespread "Alnus alnobetula" (green alder) is rarely more than a 5-m-tall shrub.

Ecology.

Alders are commonly found near streams, rivers, and wetlands. Sometimes where the prevalence of alders is particularly prominent these are called alder carrs. In the Pacific Northwest of North America, the white alder (Alnus rhombifolia) unlike other northwest alders, has an affinity for warm, dry climates, where it grows along watercourses, such as along the lower Columbia River east of the Cascades and the Snake River, including Hells Canyon.  Alder leaves and sometimes catkins are used as food by numerous butterflies and moths.  "A. glutinosa" and "A. viridis" are classed as environmental weeds in New Zealand. Alder leaves and especially the roots are important to the ecosystem because they enrich the soil with nitrogen and other nutrients.

Nitrogen fixation.

Alder is particularly noted for its important symbiotic relationship with "Frankia alni", an actinomycete, filamentous, nitrogen-fixing bacterium. This bacterium is found in root nodules, which may be as large as a human fist, with many small lobes, and light brown in colour. The bacterium absorbs nitrogen from the air and makes it available to the tree. Alder, in turn, provides the bacterium with sugars, which it produces through photosynthesis. As a result of this mutually beneficial relationship, alder improves the fertility of the soil where it grows, and as a pioneer species, it helps provide additional nitrogen for the successional species which follow. Because of its abundance, red alder delivers large amounts of nitrogen to enrich forest soils. Red alder stands have been found to supply between 120 and 290 pounds of nitrogen per acre (130 to 320 kg per ha) annually to the soil. From Alaska to Oregon, "Alnus viridis" subsp. "sinuata" ("A. sinuata", Sitka Alder or Slide Alder), characteristically pioneer fresh, gravelly sites at the foot of retreating glaciers. Studies show that Sitka alder, a more shrubby variety of alder, adds nitrogen to the soil at an average of 55 pounds per acre (60 kg per ha) per year, helping convert the sterile glacial terrain to soil capable of supporting a conifer forest. Alders are common among the first species to colonize disturbed areas from floods, windstorms, fires, landslides, etc. Alder groves themselves often serve as natural firebreaks since these broad-leaved trees are much less flammable than conifers. Their foliage and leaf litter does not carry a fire well, and their thin bark is sufficiently resistant to protect them from light surface fires. In addition, the light weight of alder seeds (650,000 per pound, or 1.5 million per kg) allows for easy dispersal by the wind. Although it outgrows coastal Douglas-fir for the first 25 years, it is very shade intolerant and seldom lives more than 100 years. Red alder is the Pacific Northwest's largest alder and the most plentiful and commercially important broad-leaved tree in the coastal Northwest. Groves of red alder 10 to 20 inches (25 to 50 cm) in diameter intermingle with young Douglas-fir forests west of the Cascades, attaining a maximum height of 100 to 110 feet (30 to 33 m) in about sixty years and then lose vigor as heart rot sets in. Alders largely help create conditions favorable for giant conifers that replace them.

Parasites.

Alder roots are parasitized by northern groundcone.

Uses.

The catkins of some alder species have a degree of edibility, and may be rich in protein. Reported to have a bitter and unpleasant taste, they are more useful for survival purposes. The wood of certain alder species is often used to smoke various food items such as coffee, salmon and other seafood.  Most of the pilings that form the foundation of Venice were made from alder trees.  Alder bark contains the anti-inflammatory salicin, which is metabolized into salicylic acid in the body. Some Native American cultures use red alder bark ("Alnus rubra") to treat poison oak, insect bites, and skin irritations. Blackfeet Indians have traditionally used an infusion made from the bark of red alder to treat lymphatic disorders and tuberculosis. Recent clinical studies have verified that red alder contains betulin and lupeol, compounds shown to be effective against a variety of tumors.  The inner bark of the alder, as well as red osier dogwood, or chokecherry, is used by some Indigenous peoples of the Americas in smoking mixtures, known as "kinnikinnick", to improve the taste of the bearberry leaf.  Alder is illustrated in the coat of arms for the Austrian town of Grossarl.  Electric guitars, most notably those manufactured by the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, have been built with alder bodies since the 1950s. Alder is appreciated for its claimed tight and even balanced tone, especially when compared to mahogany, and has been adopted by many electric guitar manufacturers.  As a hardwood, alder is used in making furniture, cabinets, and other woodworking products. For example, in the television series "Northern Exposure" season 3 episode "Things Become Extinct" (1992), Native American Ira Wingfeather makes duck flutes out of alder tree branches while Ed Chigliak films.  Alder bark and wood (like oak and sweet chestnut) contain tannin and are traditionally used to tan leather.  A red dye can also be extracted from the outer bark, and a yellow dye from the inner bark.

Classification.

The genus is divided into three subgenera:  Subgenus "Alnus": Trees with stalked shoot buds, male and female catkins produced in autumn (fall) but stay closed over winter, pollinating in late winter or early spring, about 15–25 species, including:  Subgenus "Clethropsis". Trees or shrubs with stalked shoot buds, male and female catkins produced in autumn (fall) and expanding and pollinating then, three species:  Subgenus "Alnobetula". Shrubs with shoot buds not stalked, male and female catkins produced in late spring (after leaves appear) and expanding and pollinating then, one to four species:

Alder is the common name of a genus of flowering plants, Alnus, belonging to the birch family Betulaceae. The genus comprises about 35 species of monoecious trees and shrubs, a few reaching a large size, distributed throughout the north temperate zone with a few species extending into Central America, as well as the northern and southern Andes.


Description.

"Aesculus" species have stout shoots with resinous, often sticky, buds; opposite, palmately divided leaves, often very large—to across in the Japanese horse chestnut "Ae. turbinata". Species are deciduous or evergreen. Flowers are showy, insect- or bird-pollinated, with four or five petals fused into a lobed corolla tube, arranged in a panicle inflorescence. Flowering starts after 80–110 growing degree days. The fruit matures to a capsule, commonly known as a catjacket, diameter, usually globose, containing one to three seeds (often erroneously called a nut) per capsule. Capsules containing more than one seed result in flatness on one side of the seeds. The point of attachment of the seed in the capsule (hilum) shows as a large circular whitish scar. The capsule epidermis has "spines" (botanically: prickles) in some species, while other capsules are warty or smooth. At maturity, the capsule splits into three sections to release the seeds.  "Aesculus" seeds were traditionally eaten, after leaching, by the Jōmon people of Japan over about four millennia, until 300 AD.  All parts of the buckeye or horse chestnut tree are moderately toxic, including the nut-like seeds. The toxin affects the gastrointestinal system, causing gastrointestinal disturbances. The USDA notes that the toxicity is due to saponin aescin and glucoside aesculin, with alkaloids possibly contributing.  Native Americans used to crush the seeds and the resulting mash was thrown into still or sluggish waterbodies to stun or kill fish. They then boiled and drained (leached) the fish at least three times to dilute the toxin's effects. New shoots from the seeds also have been known to kill grazing cattle.  The genus was considered to be in the ditypic family Hippocastanaceae along with "Billia", but phylogenetic analysis of morphological and molecular data has more recently caused this family, along with the Aceraceae (maples and "Dipteronia"), to be included in the soapberry family (Sapindaceae).

Selected species.

The species of "Aesculus" include:

Cultivation.

The most familiar member of the genus worldwide is the common horse chestnut, "Aesculus hippocastanum". The yellow buckeye, "Aesculus flava" (syn. "A. octandra"), is also a valuable ornamental tree with yellow flowers, but is less widely planted. Among the smaller species is the bottlebrush buckeye, "Aesculus parviflora", a flowering shrub. Several other members of the genus are used as ornamentals, and several horticultural hybrids have also been developed, most notably the red horse chestnut "Aesculus" × "carnea", a hybrid between "A. hippocastanum" and "A. pavia".

In art.

Interpretations of the tree leaves can be seen in architectural details in the Reims Cathedral.

In history.

The leaf of Aesculus was the official symbol of Kiev (the 8th largest city in Europe) on its coat of arms used from 1969 to 1995. It remains an official symbol of Kiev to this day.  In the 1840 U.S. presidential campaign, candidate William Henry Harrison called himself the "log cabin and hard cider candidate", portraying himself sitting in a log cabin made of buckeye logs and drinking hard cider, causing Ohio to become known as "the Buckeye State".

The genus Aesculus ( or ), with varieties called buckeye and horse chestnut, comprises 13–19 species of flowering plants in the soapberry and lychee family, Sapindaceae. They are trees and shrubs native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere, with six species native to North America and seven to thirteen species native to Eurasia. Also, several hybrids occur. "Aesculus" exhibits a classical Arcto-Tertiary distribution.