STRANGE CONTINENT
ULRICH MAGIN rounds up the latest weirdness from Europe, including hospital ghosts and mystery runes
HERMIT GIVES UP
Sometimes, adventures are right on your doorstep – as in the story of the modern Robinson Crusoe who lived on a deserted Italian island. In 1989, Mauro Morandi set sail from Italy in a catamaran to live in the Pacific Ocean, but his journey brought him only as far as Budelli, an island famous for its pink beaches, part of the Maddalena archipelago in the northeast of Sardinia. He decided to stay there, explaining: “I never was a Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe wanted to return to civilisation; I just wanted to stay away from it.” He got a job as the caretaker of the island, but soon ran into trouble with local authorities as he kept enlarging his house without permission. Now, after 32 years, the 82-year-old, originally from the northern Italian city of Modena, has decided to quit his self-imposed solitude. He will return to a small flat in Modena, where his children live, and the tiny island will be turned into a research centre. Die Rheinpfalz, 29 Apr 2021.
WEIRD WEATHER
In May, a meteorological tsunami – a tsunami caused by the sudden release of high air pressure on a marine or lake surface which results in the whole water being seesawed into waves – flooded the port of Bonifacio in Corsica. The wave was some 5ft (1.5m) high and left the promenade under water and restaurants and cafés in the harbour flooded. Such meteorological tsunamis are not rare (I once witnessed a very violent one in Turkey), but rarely make the press because no one wants to scare away tourists. wetter.de, 25 May 2021.
The Böblingen area of Germany reported a “rain of frogs” on 21 June. Thousands of tiny frogs, each just the size of a thumbnail, were seen hopping across the road between Weissach-Flacht and Perouse. It was not the archetypal fortean event, just the typical movement of freshly born common toads and common frogs. “The whole ground seems alive,” said environmentalist Roland Krebs. “This phenomenon is also known as a rain of frogs.” Of course, Krebs is wrong: such mass movements have often been used to explain rains of frogs but, a rain of frogs means amphibians falling from above, and not just a mass movement from a pond. Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 22 June 2021.
ANTI-MOB JUDGE BLESSED
In what has to be regarded as a major change in ecclestial policy, Pope Francis, in the Cathedral of Agrigento, in Sicily, officially proclaimed as “blessed” the anti-Mafia judge Rosario Angelo Livatino on 9 May. Livatino, a very pious man, was the first to dare impose harsh sentences for Cosa Nostra-related crimes and was assassinated on 21 September 1990, aged just 37, by a mob hit squad. Pope Francis called the judge a martyr who was killed “in hatred of the faith”.
On the very same day he created a working team for the excommunication of the Mafia. In Sicily, local priests are said to support the Mafia, even devoting masses to the health of bosses. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 13 May 2021.
BELGIUM GROWS
A Belgian farmer removed a border stone which got in the way of his ploughing and threw it into a forest at the border between the Belgian town of Erquelinnes and Bousigniessur-Roc in France, thus changing the frontier after 200 years. “He enlarged Belgium and made France smaller,” said Erquelinnes mayor David Lavaux. “I was happy initially, as my town grew in size.” Yet Bousignies mayor Aurélie Welonek said she could not accept the unilateral border change. Jokingly, she said: “I hope we will be able to avoid a war over the border.” The Belgian authoritries have asked the farmer to return the stone to its original location – otherwise the Franco-Belgian border commission, which has lain dormant since 1930, might have to spring into action again! Die Rheinpfalz, 6 May 2021.
VANISHING CATS
Almost annually, in some part of Europe, there is a panic that cats are being stolen.
In the last decade, I heard that either the Romanians or the French caught cats in specially equipped lorries to sell them to the Chinese for the production of anti-rheumatic blankets; before that, Chinese restaurants were regarded as the culprits.
Now, new fears have emerged. Animal protection activists from Bernkastel-Wittlich, on the banks of the Moselle, Germany, have warned pet owners that animal thieves are harvesting moggies. In a social media post that was soon shared over 2,300 times, it was claimed that criminals collected European Shorthairs and other pedigree cats. The theory was that cats were selected, caught, and then sold on the Internet black market. The animal protectors asked owners to keep their cats in the house and said that a large number of missing cats had been reported to them – sometimes as many as three cases a day. However, Bernkastel-Kues police said they had not received any complaints, and no other animal organisations in the region had received a single report of a missing cat Wochenspiegel Bernkastel, 14 May 2021.
CREATURES ON THE LOOSE
While the number of anomalous big cats seen on the continent this summer has so far amounted to zero, other strange animals have filled the gap.
For a start, an “object shaped like a bird” and glowing red and orange was observed by a witness smoking a cigarette on his balcony, at Hörstel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, at 11.45pm on 1 May. The thing was faster than a jet airplane and completely noiseless, The
observer also spotted “soft blue points of light” around it. Personal communication.
Two days earlier, two lamas escaped from an agricultral farm at Waghäusel, Germany. One was quickly caught, but the other ran away and blocked the Mannheim to Stuttgart railway line, halting all traffic on this major route while police tried to capture the animal. It took several hours until the animal was apprehended and returned to its owner. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 30 Apr; RNZonline, 29 Apr 2021.
Also in Germany, in early May two Macaque monkeys escaped from an animal park in Friesoythe, Friesland, and made their way away across the rooftops of nearby homes. The electricity had failed in the fence surrounding the animals’s enclosure, and they took advantage of the opportunity. Alerted by phone calls from the public, police and fire fighters rushed to the scene to capture the missing monkeys. They soon found them on the roof of a house and in a tree, but were unsure how to handle the novel situation and catch the agile fugatives. They soon decided not to use a tranquilliser gun, but closed the road instead. When there were no longer any people to scare them ayway, the monkeys came down by themselves to get food, and were returned to captivity. t-online.de, 3 May; Die Rheinpfalz, 4 May 2021.
RUNE AWAKENING
The discovery of a sixth century runic inscription in a clearly Slavic context has archæologists puzzled and nationalists shocked. The runes were discovered at Breclav, in the Czech Republic, near the Austrian border. The letters, carved awkwardly into a cattle bone as if by an untrained hand, are of the Elder Futhark series (as the runic “alphabet” is called), and read “t, b, e, m, d, o”. Taken singly, that would symbolise heaven and the god of war, birch twig or birch tree, horse, human, day and property. Neither Germanic nor early Slav languages know the word “tbemdo”, but it appears to be a corruption of the eight last letters of the letter row with two characters missing. Scientists are undecided whether the inscription was written by an incompetent Germanic carver or by a Slav who had appropriated the foreign script. What is clear from the find, though, is either that early Slavs used Teutonic runes before the introduction of Cyrillic letters, or else Teutonic and Slavic peoples mixed in the border region of South Moravia. Before the find, it had been assumed that the Germanic tribe of the Lombards had vanished from the area some time before the Slavic tribes entered it.
Linguist Robert Nedoma, who studied the inscription and is co-author of a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science, thinks the author may have been a Lombard who did not join the migration of his own tribe to Italy. “But it cannot be ruled out that the runes were scratched by a Slav who learned the script through cultural contact from the Lombards,” he said. He (or she) would have learned to write for “reasons of prestige”.
This, naturally, has Czech nationalists hopping mad, as they want their ancient people as neatly separated ethno-linguistic groups so that they can claim their own prehistory. German right-wing alternative archæologists will not be happy, either, to find that the Slavs learned writing at practically the same time as the Teutons, even if they did so from contact with them, as it contradicts their dogma of Slavic inferiority. And for the rest of us, the case is still a huge mystery: this is one of the most eastern finds of Elder Futhark runes in a region where none had been expected by conventional wisdom. Tagesspiegel, 24 May 2021.
HAUNTED HOSPITAL
In 2018, after 104 years, the desolate remains of the Lilienfelder Kinderspital children’s hospital inVienna, Austria, were removed by diggers. Just before the demolition, a group of local ghost hunters visited the empty buildings after hearing the site was haunted. People had reported moving shadows, felt watched by an invisible presence, heard voices, or saw objects moving on their own.
“Vienna Ghosthunters” came to investigate. “In particular, on the first floor one could repeatedly observe shadows going round a corner, clearly, and not, as we are used to, out of the corner of the eye,” says Wilhelm Gabler, spokesperson for the ghost hunters. “We didn’t hear any footsteps, but picked out voices clearly. They varied between typical male voices and children’s voices. We managed to tape some of them.” One member of the team felt something he perceived as child-like pulling at his coat. “We found one moment especially frightening. We were about to leave the building when we heard a muffled thud and saw an old child’s shoe falling down in front of us out of the blue.”
While the events took place in 2018, they have only now been reported in the press in a series of articles on the mysteries of Austria. meinbezirk.at, 10 June 2021.