I may as well reshare it myself 😇

My kid had a pirate week in the Kindergarten, learned about pirates. Why? MILLENIA-OLD TRADITION!!! (🧵👇) ~3000 ya apotropaic rituals develop around spring equinox 2600 ya: they get codified as an origin story 2000 ya: a prophetic preacher follows them, conflicts with authorities, gets executed 1/4

Oksana Mas is a contemporary Ukrainian artist who makes ginormous mosaics out of traditional Ukrainian Easter eggs (aka "pisanka")

Btw, all this while, Isfahan, beautiful and incomparable Isfahan, keeps on getting pounded every day and night. That city is like an open air museum. Like Venice. Every inch of it is historical. I cannot even imagine what has already been destroyed and pummeled.

An interesting update: if whipping your beloved's posterior with a twig is no longer fun enough, you can also use a sausage for the same purpose! (The brand can be roughly translated as "Easter-timed butt-whipping salami")

I absolutely love these tiny chapels coz they achieve the impossible: you get a church in your village without having to invest into building a church in your village! (Or having to attend a church in your village too often) They minimax sanctity, in a way!

A small bite-sized chapel in the village of Oparno, near Velemin, Czechia

Yes! Let the ancient source be exactly as weird as it is!

That's a well known position, and I attended semi-schismatic services in modern russian once, as well as orthodox services in modern English for years, and I'm not sure I agree. For three reasons:

multilingual Psalter, 12th-14th century, monastery of saint macarius, wadi al-Natrun, Egypt Ethiopic/Ge’ez, followed by Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and ending with Armenian. www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/historical...

Very excited to see a new volume on Slavic Native Faith by Kaarina Aitamurto and Scott Simpson published in @universitypress.cambridge.org's Elements in New Religious Movements series - currently free to download! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

A fine fellow in my Insta comments told me about the Devil Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, home to over 3000 demonic items. It's going on The List. Particularly fond of the accordion guy...

Inspired by a discussion of Tolkien and making medieval fantasy more “realistic,” Liz Bourke (@hawkwinglb.bsky.social) tackles the question of what Aragorn's tax policy would look like—and why such a thing wouldn't really be possible in a place like Middle-earth. reactormag.com/aragorns-tax...

Fascinating thread! tldr: in the middle of WWII she got popular by barfing swallowed toilet paper, shaping dolls or of it, then ventriloquating which military ship will sink and which one won't. The authorities struggled to stop her, but realized an anti witchcraft law from 18th C was never repealed

Erster is coming, and so Czech supermarkets sell Easter Whips: a special tool for men to whip young women on the butt (I kid you not!) to promote fertility. $3 for a longer whip, $2 for a shorter one. Check out Wikipedia to see that I'm not making it up! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_...

Chapel of the Holy Trinity (Kaple Nejsvětější Trojice) in Skalice, Czechia, late 18th century

NEW Analysis of ash residue from incense burners preserved at #Pompeii reveals the substances burnt as offerings to the gods in Roman households and the long-distance trade undertaken to acquire them. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

horse redesign

Case in point. I'm again in the land where fortunately all local texts are Always given with a helpful translation. You can't read Czech? No problem at all, don't you worry, here's the same thing in Slovak!!

Imagine serving for 26 years, and when you finally retire, of all places in the Empire where you could settle, you choose this quiet, luxurious small town between the sea and this curiously cone shaped-mountain....

I love words "shrine" and "chapel" as they can mean two almost opposite things. Let's start with a shrine. The building on the left is a Shinto shrine. But the small roadside hokora on the right is a shrine as well! One can be entered, the other can't. One is a space, the other is an object? Well 1/

til German music was not always boring: the current state of DE folk music (Schlager, accordion) was a deliberate post-war project, where rural Bavarian happy dances were used to erase the memory of sad Northern music. As it was loved by the Nazis. So Norway remained sad, Germany went Oompah-Oompah.

🧪🏺🦣 New study of fauna at Lehringen spear site, known since 1948 and always talked about with caveats [❓but maybe the spear is a co-incidence❓], finds it's "the most convincing #Neanderthal site with evidence of a successful elephant hunt with a thrusting spear..." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No other ancient document holds my interest and affection quite like this one papyrus, written in Egypt in the Armenian alphabet. It's a goldmine of linguistic evidence not for the Egyptian or Armenian language, but for Greek! Here's my enthusiastic introduction to it: dannybate.com/2026/03/24/t...

For your world-building reference, here's what happens to a (non-magic) sword if it spends two thousand years on a bottom of a lake

St Andrew's in Lviv is one of the great churches of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the site of the shrine of St John of Dukla, built and beautified in thanksgiving for 17th-century victories over the Muscovites who are now trying to destroy it

In the US, I converted to descriptionist maximalism: every person is a dialect, every dialect is a language. But in Germany there's an accepted difference between a dialect and an accent!! Ppl live in a situation of diglossia, switching between, say, Bavarian and accented Standard German. 1/

In some dialects, "the Lena" would use feminine "the" for distant / foreign Lenas, but neuter "the" for known / close ones

This makes writing (culture) a bit akin to biology. Writing was independently invented 5 times. Of these inventions, 3 have direct descendants (two of them through hybridization). One more system was continent-level popular, but then got destroyed. The last one never left a tiny isolated island.

A map of Turkiic languages by sub-administrative region. The case of Crimean Tatar is fun. It has three major dialects: Nogai (northern), close to Kazakh, low-prestige. Tat (central) close to Balkar, high prestige. Yalıboylu (southern) was so affected by Turkish, it belongs to a different branch!

Something that I didn't realize until recently is that both linguistically and genetically, the closest relatives of Northern Crimean Tatars (Nogais) are the Karachay and Balkar people of the Northern Caucasus (and Caspian Nogays). Their Khanate was originally centered on Don.

Til pigeons make atlases grow spiky leg-hair

#StainedGlassSunday Two years ago, I went on a terrific tour of City of London stained glass, organised by the Stained Glass Museum at Ely. Amidst the dazzling cavalcade of creatures that I saw, I picked these three sheep as among my favourites, the tiny seated ram not being the least of them!

The Roos Carr figures just wanted to wish you a happy spring equinox, or else. Obey and be happy, or they might be popping round later. They know where you live. East Yorkshire, c. 600-500BC. Yew & quartzite, Hull & East Riding Museum. #FindsFriday

Saved by the Rain One of the most remarkable medieval Doom paintings in England survives at St Peter, Wenhaston (Suffolk). It is painted on boards and dates from c.1480. Originally set beneath the chancel arch, it was whitewashed over at the Reformation and forgotten.

These elephants were made in #Japan at the Kakiemon Kiln, Kyushu, c. 1655-1670 specifically for the European market (British Museum)

Dongba symbols are a system of pictographic glyphs used by the Bon priests of the Naxi people in southern China. Dongba is largely a mnemonic system, and cannot by itself represent the Naxi language; different authors may use the same glyphs with different meanings en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_...

Imagine this painted (it was probably painted, wasn't it?)

Relief depicting three spirits that probably formed part of a family shrine. It was found in a building that formed part of the vicus at Housesteads Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. Now on display in the site museum. 📸 My own. #ReliefWednesday #RomanBritain

Hokora (祠) are small shrines found by roadsides, in villages, on mountains, at field edges, or within larger shrine and temple grounds, dedicated to local kami, guardian deities, or nature spirits for protection and veneration. Their charm lies in bringing the sacred into everyday life.

Photos of Ani, an ancient Armenian City on the Turkish armenia Border. Very breath of the wild. I’m posting A lot of Eastern Turkey stuff over on my photography instagram if anybody is interested www.instagram.com/kellan_outsi...

unironically retvrn! :)

Oscar Bluemner (1867 – 1938): one of the relatively few American modernist painters. Born in Prenzlau, Prussia; architect by trade, switched to painting full-time only around age 45. I feel that compared to how freaking awesome and also uniquely American his works are, he's unfairly unknown.

Koplytstulpis is a type of a roadside / column / wayside pillar shrine from Lithuania. Typically made of a wooden log with a small chapel-like space on top, and a roof. I love how archaic (?) and magical they look! Note that Koplytstulpis is a recognizable word: a direct cognate of "Chapel-Stele"

I sketched these fairies. As you can see Long Badger is like a badger but longer.

George Ault, Bright Light at Russell’s Corners, 1946, oil on canvas 19 5/8 x 25 in.

Southern Shaolin Monastery in Putain, Fujian Province, 2019.

Revelation (The watch) https://botfrens.com/collections/69/contents/19446

Fragment of an anthropomorphic brazier. Aztec (c. 1300)

I spent 4 months trying to answer a simple question: has this book been translated into my language? Turns out no one tracks this. Not ISBN registries. Not Amazon. Not Google. Not libraries. So I built a tool that crosses four databases to piece it together. zenodot.app