Stroma is an uninhabited island in the Pentland Firth, between Orkney and the mainland of Scotland. It forms part of the civil parish of Canisbay in Caithness. The name comes from the Old Norse Straumey, meaning "island in the current".

Ancient stone structures testify to the presence of Stroma's earliest residents, while a Norse presence around 900–1,000 years ago is recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga. It has been politically united with Caithness since at least the 15th century. Although Stroma lies only a few miles off the Scottish coast, the savage weather and ferociously strong tides of the Pentland Firth meant that the island's inhabitants were very isolated, causing them to be largely self-sufficient, trading agricultural produce and fish with the mainlanders.

Most of the islanders were fishermen and crofters; some also worked as maritime pilots to guide vessels through the treacherous waters of the Pentland Firth. The tides and currents meant that shipwrecks were frequent—the most recent occurring in 1993—and salvage provided an additional though often illegal supplement to the islanders' incomes. A lighthouse was built on Stroma in 1890 and still operates under automation.

Stroma is now abandoned, with the houses of its former inhabitants unoccupied and falling into ruin. Its population fell gradually through the first half of the 20th century as inhabitants drifted away to seek opportunities elsewhere, as economic problems and Stroma's isolation made life on the island increasingly unsupportable. From an all-time peak of 375 people in 1901, the population fell to just 12 by 1961 and the last islanders left at the end of the following year. Stroma's final abandonment came in 1997 when the lighthouse keepers and their families departed. The island is now owned by one of its former inhabitants, who uses it to graze sheep.

Geography, geology, flora and fauna

Stroma is located in the Pentland Firth about  northwest of John o' Groats on the mainland. The island divides the firth into two channels, the Inner Sound to the south and the Outer Sound to the north. It is mostly low-lying and flat, covering an area of around  and rising to a height of  at Cairn Hill in the southeast. It is oriented in a north-south direction, measuring about  long by  wide.

The island is ringed by cliffs that vary in height from around  on the west coast to low cliffs with a narrow rocky foreshore elsewhere. The eastern side of the island slopes downward in an easterly or southeasterly direction, with the angle of the slope increasing from around 3 degrees in the centre of the island to about 30 degrees on the east coast. The bedrock of the island consists of flat layers of weathered Middle Old Red Sandstone, known as Rousay flags. A six-foot band of the fine-grained stone used to be quarried on a small scale for use on the mainland as roofing material. It is similar in composition to the Mey Beds on the mainland, though in some places on Stroma it is replaced by beds of angular and rounded masses of sandstone in a nodular matrix, similar to the Ackergill Beds in Caithness. Only fragmentary fossil remains have been found; these include specimens of the extinct Devonian fish Dipterus and Coccosteus.

Stroma is bisected by a fault which runs in a north-south direction through its centre, intersected by another fault running in an east-northeast direction across the north of the island. The soil on either side of the fault line is significantly different; the eastern and southern parts of Stroma are covered by fertile clay fed by bedrock minerals, while less fertile boggy ground predominates on the west side.

The heavily indented coastline has a circumference of about , punctuated by numerous geos or inlets created by the waves eroding the sea cliffs along fault lines. A partially collapsed sea cave called The Gloup is located in the northwest of the island. This feature is a deep rocky pit, filled with sea water. It is located at the junction of the two fault lines and is connected to the sea by a subterranean passage  long, created by erosion along the east-northeast fault. The passage is said to have been used for smuggling; the islanders reportedly concealed illegal distilling from HM Customs and Excise by hiding the stills and alcohol in a cave within The Gloup, called "the Malt Barn", which was only accessible at low tide.

The flora and fauna of Stroma are similar to those of the mainland. The island is treeless; its vegetation consists primarily of grasses, heather and small flowers. Seals are plentiful along its shores and are sometimes found inland during the breeding season. Both grey seals and harbour seals are present, with around 650 grey seal pups being born each year. Otters may also be present, as in other parts of mainland Caithness. The western cliffs are the site of colonies of terns, guillemots, fulmars and eider ducks. The cliffs are designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest within the North Caithness Cliffs Special Protection Area. The waters off Stroma support a number of cetacean species including minke whale, white-beaked dolphin and harbour porpoise.

Demographics
Two settlements existed on Stroma: Nethertown, in the north of the island, and Uppertown or Overtown, in the south. They originally belonged to the Freswick estate, which owned Nethertown, and the Mey estate, which owned Uppertown. Between the two was Mains of Stroma, the island's principal farm. A track runs the entire length of the island, connecting the lighthouse at the north tip with the two settlements and the harbour on the south coast.

The island is now uninhabited; the last resident islanders left in 1962 and the very last inhabitants, the keepers of the island lighthouse and their families, left in 1997 when the lighthouse was automated. The population reached a peak of 375 in 1901 but censuses conducted between 1841 and 1961 tell the story of the collapse of Stroma's population during the 20th century:

History

Prehistoric settlement and remains
Stroma was inhabited in prehistoric times, as demonstrated by the presence of a number of ancient stone structures around the island. A ruined chambered cairn is situated at the far north end of the island near the lighthouse. It has been partially excavated and measures some  in diameter by  high. The 18th century inhabitants of the island collected the prehistoric stone arrowheads that they found on the western side of the island, believing them to be "elf-shot", and regarded them as having been made by fairies. They believed that if they possessed an "elf-shot" they would be granted protection for themselves and their cattle from any harm caused by the fairies.

Structures similar to cists, which the islanders called "Picts' Beds", are also found on the island. Notable examples can be seen in the north near Nethertown. They are usually located near middens, out of which animal bones and shells are eroding. Little appears to be known about the purpose and origins of these structures. Although the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland attributes them to prehistory, it is also possible that they are Norse in origin. A kidney-shaped burnt mound located near Castle Geo in the south-east of Stroma can be more confidently ascribed to prehistory. It consists of an accumulation of cracked and scorched stones that were used to heat water in a communal cooking trough. Although the example on Stroma has not been dated, burnt mounds found elsewhere on Orkney and Shetland have been dated to the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age.

The remains of an earth-and-stone fort are situated on the promontory of Bught o' Camm on the west coast of Stroma, near the north end of the island, though its origins are unknown. A rampart standing  with an average spread of  encloses an area of some  and blocks off access to the promontory. There is no evidence of structures inside the fort's perimeter. It may possibly have been entered from the east end of the rampart, where a  gap exists, but this may alternatively have been produced by natural processes.

Medieval period

The first historical record of the island is found in the 12th century Orkneyinga Saga. It records that a man named Valthiof, the son of Olaf Rolfson, lived and farmed on Stroma. One Yule Eve, he set off in a ten-oar boat to Orphir on Mainland, Orkney at the invitation of the Earl of Orkney, Paul Haakonsson. However, the boat was lost with all hands, as the Saga puts it: "sad news as Valthiof was a most accomplished man". The Earl later granted Valthiof's farm to Thorkel Flettir. Later, a rowdy Viking named Sweyn Asleifsson fled to Stroma, pursued by Earl Harald Haakonsson. The two men were trapped on the island due to bad weather but were persuaded to make peace by a mutual friend named Asmundi, who insisted that Sweyn and Harald should share the same bed.

The Norse are also believed to have built a fortification, now called Castle Mestag, at Mell Head in the far south-west of Stroma. The structure (also known as "the Robber's Castle") is situated on the top of an isolated rock stack some  from the cliffs of the main island. The islanders believed that it had once been connected by a drawbridge or some other kind of artificial span, or alternatively it may once have been accessible via a rock arch that has since collapsed.

Due to its proximity to the Scottish mainland, Stroma has long been politically united with Caithness. An old story tells that possession of the island was once disputed between the Earls of Orkney and Caithness. To resolve the dispute, they relied on a legend that venomous animals would thrive in Caithness but die in Orkney. Some venomous snakes were duly imported to Stroma and survived there, "proving" that the island did belong to Caithness and not Orkney.

It is more reliably recorded that in 1455 the Bishop of Caithness, William Mudy, granted Stroma and other lands and castles to his brother Gilbert. It eventually passed into the hands of the Sinclair family, who have held the title of Earl of Caithness since 1455. In 1659 George Sinclair, the 6th Earl of Caithness, granted the wadset of Stroma to John Kennedy of Kermuck, who had fled to the far north after being outlawed following the fatal wounding of John Forbes of Watertown.

115 years later, the Rev. George Low recorded in his account of a tour of the island that he had seen "the remains of a pretty large house and gardens, once possessed by a gentleman, the proprietor of the island, who being forced to fly his native home on account of a duel, chose this for his retreat". The gardens were said to have been furnished with "plants that cured every disease". Nothing is now left of the house, but the gardens may have been located within a walled enclosure near the Nethertown pier.

Life on Stroma: 17th and 18th centuries

Life on the island was very isolated due to its inaccessibility. Until as late as 1894 it had no landing place, which meant that boats had to be landed directly on the beach and pulled up above the waterline. Particularly in winter, when storms raged through the Pentland Firth, Stroma could be cut off for weeks at a time. Such episodes posed serious risks to the islanders, as they had no doctor. The winter of 1937 illustrated the problems that the weather could pose; during January and February that year, the island was cut off for three weeks by violent gales which demolished houses along the seafront and washed boats 100 yards (90 m) inland. Stroma's isolation came at an especially bad time, as most of the population had caught influenza and supplies of food dwindled to the point that some items had to be rationed. Eventually two boats were able to reach the island, carrying supplies and a doctor from Caithness, along with three weeks' worth of mail.

Two chapels were established on Stroma at some point prior to the 17th century; they were known as the Kirk of Stara (from the Norse name for "big church") and the Kirk of Old Skoil (from Skali, possibly a name given to a farm). Their locations are now unknown, but the Kirk of Old Skoil may have been located in the far south-east of Stroma where the island's graveyard is now. They both fell into disuse by the mid-17th century and, lacking a church of their own, it was perhaps not surprising that the islanders were felt by mainlanders to be somewhat lacking in religious commitment. An inquiry by the Canisbay Kirk in the 17th century rebuked them for visiting "Popish" chapels on the mainland, profaning the Lord's Day, being "ale sellers and drinkers" and playing football and dancing on the Sabbath. The Presbytery decided that the inhabitants were spiritually neglected "by reason of the dangerous passage to that place, especially in winter." The minister of Canisbay was supposed to preach four times a year on Stroma but was reprimanded for only doing so twice yearly. The islanders were instructed to attend church at Canisbay and a kirk session ordained in 1654 that they should be given free passage and that any Stroma person with a boat who stayed away should be fined.

The island's population numbered a few dozen families throughout the 18th century, corresponding to a population of no more than a couple of hundred people; it was recorded as numbering 30 families in 1710, 47 in 1724, 40 in 1735 and 30 in 1760. They rented their land from two branches of the Sinclair family, the Sinclairs of Mey who owned Uppertown and the Sinclairs of Freswick who owned Nethertown. The latter acquired Nethertown in 1721 and eventually took possession of Uppertown as well by obtaining the wadset from the Kennedys, reportedly through skullduggery. According to the deathbed confession of one of the witnesses to the transaction, the laird, Sinclair of Freswick, obtained the "assent" of the deceased Kennedy holder of the wadset by placing a quill in the dead man's hand and moving it to make the corpse write its name on the document. The other witness committed suicide, perhaps out of guilt. The island was reasonably profitable for the Sinclairs; in 1724 the islanders paid an annual rent of 1,300 marks (equivalent to about £125 at 2011 prices), part of which was paid in surplus grain ferried by Stroma's boats to the Sinclair granaries at Staxigoe near Wick. They were self-sufficient in dairy produce and were known for the quality of their cheese-making; Daniel Defoe thought Stroma cheese was excellent.

19th and 20th centuries

By the early 19th century, around 30 families numbering 170 people lived on Stroma, farming land allocated on the traditional run rig system. The island was said to be "very productive in corn", though the inhabitants did not make use of ploughs; instead, they dug high beds or ridges, which produced greater yields than ploughing would have. George Low wrote in his 1774 account of the island that "the soil is good, black and deep, thrown up into high ridges by the spade, in a word the whole cultivated part of the Island is dressed like a garden and produces far greater crops than are common on plowed ground." Agricultural life on the island followed a fairly typical crofting pattern, with the average Stroma croft being about  in size. Families usually kept a few cows, sheep and hens, along with a single horse and pig. They grew a variety of crops such as oats, potatoes, hay and turnips, obtained water from wells and used horses to meet their transportation needs. As well as agricultural exports, they also exported flagstones from the island and imported peat to burn as fuel; they were dismissive of the practice in some of the Orkney Islands of using cow dung as fuel, referring to the northern island of Sanday as "the little island where the coos shit fire". Low observed the effect of the island's climate on the inhabitants: "The men are stout hardy spadesmen as was said before, the women while young are tolerably well looked, but as they advance in age grow very hard favoured, acquiring a peculiar ghastliness in their countenances contrary to what is observed of the women in Orkney."

The islanders also supported themselves through fishing, exploiting the high-quality catches that were to be made around the island's coasts. James Traill Calder wrote in his 1861 Sketch of the Civil and Traditional History of Caithness that "The finest cod in the north is to be got in the Pentland Firth ... Large and excellent lobsters are caught around the island [of Stroma]." It was said that the cod had "the firmest white flesh of any caught from British waters due to having to continuously swim in strong currents." As well as trapping lobsters, the islanders practised hand line cod fishing in the waters of the Firth. This involved towing lengths of line with heavy weights and a metal rod or sprool at one end, from which hung a short length of hemp and hook baited with limpets. To encourage the fish to bite, the boats had to be held still by their rowers, which required great skill in the Firth's unpredictable currents. The island was noted for its native type of boat, the Stroma yole, which was a direct descendant of the old Norse longship.

Many of the male islanders utilised their knowledge of the Firth's currents to hire themselves out to passing vessels as maritime pilots. Their expertise was the product of a lifetime's experience on the waters of the Firth; as it was said, they had been "dabbling in salt water from their childhood upwards". Indeed, the whole island was drenched in salt water thrown up by the powerful tides and storms to which it was subjected, particularly in the winter. The Statistical Account of Scotland noted that during a storm the sea level on the west of the island was more than  higher than on the east side, and that the spray was thrown so high that it washed over the cliff tops "and falls in such profusion as to run in rills to the opposite shore". The islanders took advantage of this phenomenon by capturing the water in a reservoir to power a watermill which ground their grain in the winter months. It is not now known exactly where the mill was or what happened to it. Although it is described in the Statistical Account, written in the 1790s, and a Robert Miller is listed in the 1851 census as its miller, by 1861 he had moved to farm a  croft and no further mention is made of the mill in contemporary accounts.

Stroma's violent storms occasionally wrought destruction on the island. In December 1862, a great storm broke over the island with such force that it swept right across the northern end of Stroma, leaving wreckage, rocks and seaweed on the top of the 100-foot-high cliffs and destroying the channels leading to the watermill. However, the sea's destructive power had one positive benefit for the islanders, if not for those caught out by the currents and shoals of the Pentland Firth. Over the last two hundred years, over sixty vessels ranging from fishing boats to large cargo vessels have been wrecked on the shores of Stroma, with many more vessels coming to grief on the reefs and shoals of the neighbouring mainland and Orkney coasts. Many vessels – at least 560 between 1830 and 1990 – have had to be refloated in the Pentland Firth after getting into difficulties. Shipwrecks were a valuable source of income, timber and goods for the islanders, who would salvage liberally – and often with little regard for legality – whenever a stranded ship was abandoned. The building of Stroma's first lighthouse in the late 19th century was initially opposed by some of the islanders who were more concerned with profiting from shipwrecks than preventing them.

The shipwrecks continued, nonetheless, with one of the most profitable of all being the 1931 wreck of the 6,000-ton Danish freighter Pennsylvania on the neighbouring island of Swona. The vessel was plundered by the inhabitants of Stroma, Swona and South Ronaldsay. Much of her cargo of slot machines, spark plugs, clothing, tobacco, watches and car parts was looted and concealed in haystacks, oatfields, lochs and caves. David Stogdon, a lifeboatman, recalled seeing what the islanders did with their illicit salvage: "Every house was stuffed with wreck [salvage] ... clocks, telescopes, binnacles ... I seem to remember enormous dining-room tables in small cottages. And then of course from time to time they'd have cargo parts of lorries or something like that which could be put together to make a lorry and taken ashore on two or three fishing boats in calm weather. They'd land it quietly somewhere, drive it along and sell it." Customs officers, policemen, coastguards and Receivers of Wreck were not generally welcome – the island had no police force – and the islanders let it be understood that unfortunate things could happen to the boats of unwanted visitors: "Police boats could go missing, develop an unexpected leak or spontaneously combust." The area still presents hazards to passing ships; in January 1993, the Danish coaster Bettina Danica ran aground off the southern end of Stroma. The wreck was broken apart by the action of the sea in 1997 and only her stern section is still visible.

Another way the islanders supported themselves was through the illicit brewing of spirits as a way of boosting their income – a common practice among the older people. An inspector who visited the island's school in 1824 described the inhabitants of Stroma as "all professed smugglers". The suppression of smuggling by the authorities led to a significant drop in the island's population the first half of the 19th century. The census of 1841 noted: "now smuggling being completely suppressed, several families have left the island and removed to the Orkneys to follow more lawful pursuits." While smuggling may have been tackled, illicit distilling continued for many years. One former inhabitant, Mrs. David Gunn, recalled in 1971 how her great-grandmother had managed to avoid the "excisemen" (customs officers) confiscating her illegally brewed alcohol:

Despite their physical isolation, the islanders maintained a lively community. A school had been established in 1723 by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), with sixty children on its initial attendance roll. The demands of island life conflicted to some extent with those of schooling. The SPCK's inspector found only eighteen out of seventy pupils present when he visited in 1824. He found that many of the children were fully occupied helping their families in summer and only attended school in winter. Two places of worship were built within a couple of years of each other, a Baptist chapel in 1877 and a Church of Scotland church in 1878 (at a cost of £900). Although they soon became focal elements of community life, there seems to have been some bad blood between the two congregations, perhaps due to a clash between the missionary zeal of local Baptists and the Calvinism of the Presbyterian Kirk.

The inhabitants of Stroma were highly self-sufficient, and many practiced additional trades such as carpentry or roof-laying in addition to their "day jobs" in fishing or crofting. They built their own houses and boats, produced most of their own food, maintained farm equipment, shod their own horses, and made their own clothes, boots and shoes. In the 1920s they built their own wind turbines to recharge the batteries of their radio sets. By the end of the 19th century the island had three shops including a grocery. Any additional needs were met by purchasing supplies from shops at Wick and Thurso on the mainland or by mail-order from catalogues. For a while, they were also able to use the services of a floating shop which came periodically from Orkney to Stroma. Customers were rowed out to buy groceries, flour, animal feed, paraffin and clothes in exchange for lobsters, wet salted fish and eggs.

Most of the houses on Stroma are single-storey stone-built structures with two main rooms (a "butt" and a "ben") plus a closet (a small bedroom) and a porch. The rooms were small and simply furnished, incorporating recessed box beds. These consisted of a series of wooden planks with a layer of straw on top, on which was placed a chaff-filled mattress. The butt was used as a living room and included an iron stove with an oven, and sometimes a water tank to enable hot water to be generated, while the ben was used for visitors and as a sitting-room.

One former islander, Jimmy Simpson, recalled that "we had about two hundred and fifty folks here when I was a boy. It never seemed a lonely place. There were always people going in and out of each other's houses, there were forty children at the school and there were two teachers. We had concerts; three concerts in the winter when you had to sing loud to get above the sound of the wind. The young people would meet at the shop in the long, long evenings in summer." The island had some distinctively eccentric characters: Donald Banks, the island's coffin-maker, was known for quarrelling with his neighbours (telling one family, "I'll no bury any more o' ye!") and combining poetry with coffin-making, as in the order he placed with a mainland supplier:

Dear Mr. Sutherland,
Would you be so good,
To send eight planks of coffin wood.
Half inch lining, (dear Mr. Sutherland,)
For those who are pining ...

Describing life on Stroma, Simpson commented:

Decline and abandonment

Stroma's population fell precipitously through the first half of the 20th century, leading eventually to the island's final abandonment at the end of the 1950s. There was no single cause that precipitated the collapse of Stroma's population. Living conditions on the island were always basic; there was no running water or electricity, and gas only arrived in the 1950s, which contrasted poorly with the improvements being made on the mainland. The fishing deteriorated after the First World War, and crofting became an increasingly difficult way to make a living. The island was relatively overpopulated; by 1901 the population was nearly twice that of sixty years previously, and there was little spare land left for farming. Families of six to eight children were common, but there was simply not enough work for all, so the eldest often left for the mainland or emigrated to Canada or the United States to find work. The lack of a proper harbour meant that the islanders could not make use of larger boats or develop a modern fishery. Young people started moving away to seek better-paying opportunities elsewhere, eventually followed by their parents.

Both of the World Wars had a major impact on Stroma, which was only  from the Royal Navy's chief base at Scapa Flow in Orkney. Six islanders died in each of the World Wars; the names of all twelve are inscribed on the island's war memorial, and during the Second World War as much as a quarter of the population was on war service. Adding to the island's economic problems, the introduction of the 11-plus exam in 1944 meant that all children over the age of 12 had to leave Stroma to complete their education at the secondary school in Wick. Because they could not commute between the island and Wick, they had to attend school as boarders, which incurred additional expenses for their parents.

Two other factors have often been cited in Stroma's depopulation: the building of the nuclear power station at nearby Dounreay in the 1950s, which created many new jobs on the mainland, and in the same decade the construction of a harbour on Stroma on which many islanders were employed. Although it has been claimed that this gave the islanders the incentive (and the means) to leave, local historian Donald A. Young points out that of islanders who left after 1945, only one went directly from Stroma to Dounreay. Most of the rest either continued fishing or carried on crofting on the mainland, while others found alternative jobs. Some ex-islanders eventually found jobs at Dounreay, but they had already moved to the mainland for work or education.

The Sinclairs of Mey sold their portion of the island to Colonel F. B. Imbert-Terry in 1929, who sold it in turn to John Hoyland, an umbrella manufacturer from Yorkshire, in 1947. Hoyland also acquired the remaining island estate of the Sinclairs of Freswick, uniting Stroma for a reported cost of £4,000. His tenure coincided with the final collapse of the island's population. As the tenants left, Hoyland put Stroma on the market but found no buyers. A Caithness councilman suggested various schemes for Stroma, including establishing a naturist resort and using it as a site for a crematorium, but the council rejected suggestions that it should take on responsibility for the island. As the population left, the local economy disintegrated; there were no longer enough able-bodied men to man the fishing boats, and the remaining facilities on the island were closed down for lack of custom. The last store on the island, the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society shop, closed in 1956. Only three families, numbering 16 people in total, were left by 1957; that year, the island's school closed, by which time it only had two pupils. The Post Office closed in 1958 when the family which operated it left for the mainland.

In the summer of 1958, Hoyland prompted controversy by offering the island to the American TV quiz show Bid 'n' Buy as a prize. After an outcry on both sides of the Atlantic, the show's producers settled for offering a car instead. In December 1960, he sold Stroma to Jimmy Simpson, an islander whose family had moved to farm on the mainland near the Castle of Mey in 1943. Simpson had not originally intended to buy the island but happened to be talking about it with a lawyer: "I said, 'I see Stroma was sold last week, and it's not sold this week. Is it on the market?' 'Yes,' he said, 'Stroma's for sale.' I said, "What kind of money?" So he told me what kind of money, and there and then, the lawyer wrote that I, James Simpson, offered to buy the island of Stroma at a certain figure, and I signed my name at the end of it." His wife was not enthusiastic about the purchase: "Lena nearly flew at me for being so stupid. She says, 'Stroma? What on earth are you going to do with an island?'". He was successful in his bid and used the island to graze his animals, repopulating it with around 200 sheep and 30 cattle. It is still used by the Simpson family for sheep grazing.

By this time, the five-member Manson family had become the last native inhabitants of Stroma, "Now liv[ing] in a silent community of empty houses, an empty church and an empty school." Although the head of the family, Andrew Manson, called the island "a paradise in summer" and a place where he was "free of outside distractions and watching my sons growing from boyhood to manhood – teaching them to live like men, to be dependent on no one," it was a bleak life for the women, who had applied for a council house at Scrabster, near Thurso. The Mansons finally left Stroma on 6 December 1962, bringing to an end thousands of years of permanent habitation on the island.

Island of ruins

Stroma is now entirely deserted by humans; its only permanent inhabitants are the seals, birds and sheep that live on the island. The church, school and old croft houses stand derelict, with many having fallen into ruin. The writer Bella Bathurst, visiting the island in the early 2010s, described the scene:

Inside some of the houses, Bathurst writes, everyday objects still remain where they were left decades ago; "the bed and the limed matchboard ceiling are intact, untouched even by the damp. The kitchen table still stands in the parlour and a framed and fading photograph gazes out from the top of the mantelpiece." In another house seen 20 years earlier by Leslie Thomas, "was a rank of family photographs, shades in Victorian dress staring out forever into a room now desolate and holed, but which had once held the life of a warm family."

Elsewhere, the books remain "dusty but tidy" in the abandoned school, and the church still contains its pulpit, "dumb and hung with ragged red tassles" with prayer books "left to be trampled upon by heathen sheep and nibbled by rabbits and rats." In the former post office, forms and licence applications and a bottle of dried ink still stand on the counter, while in a back room stands "a nice dresser, upon which [stands] a teapot and a jug and some sheet music: 'Red Sails in the Sunset', 'The General's Fast Asleep' and 'You Can't Do That There 'Ere.' Nobody on Stroma will ever sing those songs now."

Bathurst and Thomas express contrasting views on the significance of Stroma's abandonment. Thomas regards it as a tragedy: "Of all the out-of-the-way places I have known, this was the saddest. It seemed as though its life had been ended in a fit of pique." To Bathurst, however, "it is tempting to see Stroma's abandonment as the result of some appalling trauma. Abandonment is always taken as a sign of failure, a collective death ... But Stroma does not feel sad. True, there is sorrow in seeing the once meticulous vegetable patches turned over to weeds, or wondering how many more winters the box beds will stand before they start to rot. But that isn't the whole story. What is interesting about Stroma is not the fact of its abandonment, but the tale of its past."

MeyGen Ltd installed four giant tidal turbines on the ocean floor near the island of Stroma, and produced 25 GWh of electrical energy in 2019, enough to supply the electric needs of 4,000 homes.

Communications

Stroma lacked a regular connection to the mainland until 1879, when the Post Office subsidised a weekly boat service from Huna on the mainland and established a post office on the island. However, the volume of mail from Stroma proved so small that the service was grossly uneconomical. By the 1950s, the Post Office was spending 1s. 2d. for each letter worth 2½d. in postage.

For many years, the islanders had no means of contacting the mainland in emergencies other than signalling with hand lamps and hoping that someone would see them. A radio telephone was installed in 1935, and in 1953 a telephone cable was laid. A red telephone box was installed in the centre of the island, symbolic of the 6 millionth phone box installation in the UK. It is still there today, though no longer in use.

It was not until 1894 that Stroma gained its first artificial landing point, a pier built from Portland cement near Nethertown at a cost of £800. In 1955, Caithness County Council constructed a new harbour on the south coast of the island at the then great cost of £28,500. Although it was intended to help stem the exodus of people from the island, Stroma was abandoned only a few years after the harbour's completion.

In the late 1930s Highland Airways looked into the possibility of including Stroma in the hospital ambulance plane service that was then in operation. On 19 August 1937, Captain E. E. Fresson of Highland Airways landed a small aircraft in farmland adjoining the Mains of Stroma, and the following spring the islanders cleared an area of moorland on the west side of the island to create an airstrip. The first official flight landed in June 1938. However, the Second World War prevented any further developments and a regular service was not established. After the war, Highland Airways was taken over by British European Airways, which abandoned any interest in serving the island.

Today, Stroma has no regular communications with the mainland. The island's owner ran occasional boat trips there on weekends for visitors, including Prince Charles, who painted watercolours of the abandoned houses.

Notable buildings

Lighthouse

In 1890, a lighthouse was built at Stroma's northern tip, Langaton Point. It was only operational for six years before being replaced, and very little is now known about the structure. The unmanned lighthouse originally housed a Trotter-Lindberg lamp which burned petroleum spirit or lythene. The fuel supply was stored in cisterns near the lantern, which was regularly recharged at least fortnightly by the local fishermen or crofters. It was one of the first lighthouses in Scotland to use this type of "scintillating" light.

It was replaced in 1896, possibly on the same site, by a new lighthouse built to a design by David Stevenson as part of a major programme of construction works around northern Scotland. A fog warning system was installed the following year. Stevenson's lighthouse consists of a circular white-painted stone tower standing  high at an elevation of  above Mean High Water with a number of buildings nearby to house generators and the lighthouse keepers. The light was converted to a paraffin lamp when the former lythene lamp was found to be unsuitable. An oil store was installed in the lighthouse tower, ending the need for a separate building to hold the fuel. The lighthouse was subjected to a machine-gun attack by a German aircraft on 22 February 1941. It caused little damage and no injuries, and the keepers were soon able to make repairs.

Until 1961 the lighthouse was administered as a shore station, and subsequently (after the resident population of Stroma had left) as a rock station. An electric lamp with a maximum power of 1.1 million cp was installed in 1972, utilising a sealed beam optic mounted on a gearless revolving pedestal. By this time the keepers and their families were the only people living on Stroma. A helicopter pad was installed to enable supplies and personnel to be flown in. In 1997 the station was converted to automatic operation, utilising a 250-watt metal halide lamp which rotates on a gearless pedestal. A lens system from Sule Skerry lighthouse was refitted in the Stroma lighthouse. The old air-driven fog horn was removed and replaced by an electric fog signal which is installed on the balcony of the lighthouse. The lighthouse station's power, which was formerly obtained from generators, is now provided by batteries which are charged at regular intervals. The current light flashes white every 20 seconds and can be seen from a nominal range of .

Kennedy mausoleum and the mummies of Stroma
One curious side-effect of the constant spray of sea-water over Stroma – apart from making the drinking water brackish and giving the air a constant salt taste – was that it mummified the corpses of some of the island's inhabitants. They were housed in a mausoleum in the south-east corner of Stroma, built by the Kennedy family in 1677. The building still stands, although it is now unroofed. It comprises a two-storey structure which incorporates a burial vault and a dovecote. The building was constructed from grey flagstones and pink sandstone quoins. It measures  by  externally and standing  high. The lintel of the door bears the inscription "I.K." (Ioannes [i.e. John] Kennedy) and the date 1677.

The mummies of Stroma were something of a tourist attraction in the 18th century. The Welsh naturalist and traveller Thomas Pennant described the mummies as "entire and uncorrupted bodies of persons who had been dead sixty years. I was informed that they were very light, had a flexibility in their limbs and were of a dusky color."  However, their popularity proved their undoing. In 1762 Bishop of Ross and Caithness Robert Forbes recorded in his journal that Murdoch Kennedy

By 1786 the mummies had been destroyed by cattle and careless visitors as, according to Walker's Hibernian Magazine, "curiosity to see the mummies had brought many idle people to Stroma, [and] that some, out of wantonness had shattered the door, and others the bodies; and the door not being repaired, sheep and cattle entered the vault, and trampled them to pieces." There is now no trace of the original burials in the vault.

See also

 List of islands of Scotland
 List of outlying islands of Scotland
 Mingulay
 St Kilda

Footnotes

References
Notes

Sources

External links

 Caithness Community Website – Stroma

Uninhabited islands of Highland (council area)
Former populated places in Scotland
Lighthouses in Scotland

Island of Stroma


In music a glissando is a slide up or down the notes of a scale.  The plural is "glissandi".  In written music the instruction to the player is often shortened to "gliss".  The word comes from the French "glisser" = "to slide".

With the singing voice, or with an instrument such as the trombone or a string instrument a glissando is a smooth slide in which the pitch gradually changes, becoming higher and higher.  The trombonist can make a glissando by blowing whilst pushing out or pulling in the slide.  The violinist can make a glissando by sliding a finger up or down the fingerboard.

With instruments such as the piano, xylophone or harp a glissando is a quick slide in which we hear one note after another because the pitches between the notes cannot be played.  On the piano there are two ways to play a glissando: either on the white notes or on the black notes.  At the end of the piano piece called Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit by Maurice Ravel both these types of glissando can be heard.  The pianist has to play a glissando with tips of the fingers or the finger nails.  It can be quite painful to practise them a lot.   Harpists are very fond of playing glissandi.  By changing the position of the harp pedals a harpist can change the scale which will sound when the glissando is played.

Many modern timpani have pedals which tighten or slacken the drum head.  These can be used to make a glissando.  The Hungarian composer  Béla Bartók often used this effect.

Some jazz clarinettists manage to play a glissando on the clarinet.  They do this by gradually changing the way they blow whilst at the same time gradually lifting all the fingers off the keys.  George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue starts with a glissando on the solo clarinet.

When  composers write a glissando they write the first and the last note, and then put a long, straight line between the notes, and write the word "glissando" or "gliss".

Related pages
Portamento

Musical performance techniques
Musical terminology

Glissando


Measles is an infectious disease, caused by a virus. People catch measles from other people. It is passed on in tiny drops of water when people breathe. People with measles have a sore throat, a fever, a cough, red eyes and a runny nose. They also have a bumpy red rash all over their body. These rashes will cause a high irritation of itching.

Measles is very infectious, which means it is easy to catch. If someone in a house has measles, it is very likely that other people in the house will also get it. In developed countries, lots of children have a vaccination (injection) to stop them from getting measles. Often they are given the MMR vaccine, to stop them getting measles, mumps and rubella. The three vaccinations are all in one injection.

Measles is sometimes also called rubeola, but it is not the same as rubella (German measles). The German Measles (rubella) was discovered by German scientists.

There is no specific cure for measles. People with measles may rest and take medicines to make them feel better, to stop pain and make fevers go away. Most people that have measles recover, but some people die from it. In the 19th century measles epidemics killed many Polynesian people.

References
 Health: Measles , BBC

Diseases caused by viruses

Measles


General Leopold Okulicki (noms de guerre Kobra, Niedźwiadek; 1898 – 1946) was a general of the Polish Army and the last commander of the anti-Nazi underground Home Army during World War II. He was arrested after the war by the Soviet NKVD and died while imprisoned at Butyrka prison in Moscow.

Life

Okulicki was born in November 1898 in Bratucice, Bochnia County in the Austrian section of partitioned Poland ("Galicia"). His exact date of birth is unknown as the birth record was not preserved in Polish archives and Okulicki himself used two dates: 11 November and 13 November. In 1910 he joined a local gymnasium, and after 1913 he was also an active member of the Związek Strzelecki. The following year, at the age of 16, after finishing basic military training, Okulicki passed his NCO exams. After the outbreak of World War I, in October 1915, he left school and volunteered for the Polish Legions, where he served with distinction in the 3rd Legions Infantry Regiment.

He remained in the Polish Army and fought in various units both during the Great War and the following Polish–Bolshevik War (1919–1921), decorated with the highest Polish military Order of Virtuti Militari. In the interwar period he remained in the army and in 1925 graduated from the prestigious Warsaw Military Academy. Afterwards Okulicki took a post in Grodno local corps headquarters. Until the late 1930s he taught at the Infantry Training Centre in Rembertów, and became commanding officer of Polish 13th Infantry Division.

Nazi occupation
In 1939 he was made commander of one of the departments of the Polish Commander-in-Chief's Headquarters. After Edward Rydz-Śmigły evacuated his staff from Warsaw, Okulicki remained in the Polish capital and served in various posts during the Siege of Warsaw. After the capitulation of the Polish troops defending the capital, Okulicki evaded capture by the Germans and joined Służba Zwycięstwu Polski, one of the first underground resistance organizations formed in Nazi- and Soviet-occupied Poland. In January 1940 he moved to Łódź, where he assumed the post of commander of the local area of that organization. After a brief stint at Headquarters, he was transferred to Soviet-occupied Lwów and became head of that area.

Soviet period

Arrested by the NKVD in January 1941, he was imprisoned and tortured in various Soviet prisons. Released after the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement of 1941, he joined the Polish Army re-created in the USSR, where he assumed the post of the chief of staff. After a brief period as the commanding officer of the Polish 7th Infantry Division he was moved to London for training in the Cichociemni training camp and then transported to occupied Poland. In July 1944, during Operation Tempest, he became the commander of the 2nd Echelon of the Home Army. General Bór-Komorowski, predicting his own arrest by the Soviets after the Warsaw Uprising named him his deputy and successor. Okulicki fought in the Uprising, among other posts as the chief of staff of the Home Army. After the capitulation of the Uprising, he managed to evade being captured by the Germans and moved to Kraków, from where he started to reorganize the Home Army. On 3 October 1944 he became the commander of the entire organization. On 19 January 1945, after the Soviet takeover of Poland, he ordered the disbandment of the Home Army, fearing that future existence of an Allied force in Poland would only lead to more people being murdered or arrested by the Soviets. Following an NKVD provocation, he was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow.
According to him, "In comparison with the NKVD, the Gestapo methods are child's play."
Sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in the staged Trial of the Sixteen, he died on 24 December 1946 at Butyrka prison. A cenotaph commemorating his death was built in the Powązki Military Cemetery, Warsaw.

Decorations
Order of the White Eagle, posthumously on 11 November 1995
Order Virtuti Militari Golden Cross
Order Virtuti Militari Silver Cross
Cross of Independence
Cross of Valour, 4 times
Cross of Merit with Swords Golden Cross
Legion of Merit, posthumously (USA)

References

External links
Gen. Leopold Okulicki Deposition for NKVD During the Trial of the Sixteen

1898 births
1946 deaths
People from Bochnia County
Military personnel from the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria
Polish generals
Home Army members
Warsaw Uprising insurgents
Recipients of the Gold Cross of the Virtuti Militari
Recipients of the Cross of Independence
Recipients of the Cross of Valour (Poland)
Recipients of the Cross of Merit with Swords (Poland)
Foreign recipients of the Legion of Merit
Polish legionnaires (World War I)
Polish people of the Polish–Soviet War
Polish deportees to Soviet Union
Polish people who died in Soviet detention
Polish people detained by the NKVD
Recipients of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland)
People from wartime administrations in Poland (1939–1947)

Leopold Okulicki


The WWE Championship is a professional wrestling world championship in WWE. It is the first world title of WWE. The title is said to be the biggest prize in professional wrestling and millions of people around the world watch matches for it.

History

Beginning

The WWE World Championship was created in 1963, and Buddy Rogers became the first world champion on April 29. It may have been created because of things that happened in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) which is a wrestling company (or promotion) that had many "territories" in North America and some around the world. In the 1950s, Capitol Wrestling Corporation (CWC) was an NWA territory, and in 1963, people in CWC had a lot of control over the rest of the NWA. During this time, Buddy Rogers held the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, the world title of the NWA, until Lou Thesz defeated Rogers for the championship on January 24, 1963. After an argument over who should have won, CWC left the NWA and created a new promotion called the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF). The new company then made up a story for its new title, and said that the WWWF World Heavyweight Championship was separated from the NWA World Championship, and there was a tournament in Rio de Janeiro to decide a new champion. They said that Buddy Rogers won this tournament, by beating Antonino Rocca in the finals. (The tournament actually did not happen.) The WWWF came back to the NWA once again, and the WWWF was renamed to World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in 1979. After WWF left the NWA forever in 1983 the championship was named the WWF World Heavyweight Championship and later  the WWF World Championship or WWF Championship in the 1990s.

Importance

In 1991, World Championship Wrestling (WCW), another NWA territory, created the WCW World Heavyweight Championship and it was just as important as the NWA world title. WCW then left the NWA and became a rival promotion to the WWF. Both promotions became popular, and fought the "Monday Night Wars". This was a fight to see who could get better ratings on TV. Near the end of the ratings war, WCW started to lose money, and the Monday Night Wars ended in March 2001 with WWF buying WCW. After that, WWF had all of WCW's videos, some of their wrestlers and championships, and other things. The group of wrestlers who were in WCW joining the WWF was called "The Invasion". After this, the WCW World Championship was made one with the WWF World Championship, at Vengeance 2001 in December. At the show, Chris Jericho beat The Rock to win the WCW World Championship, and Stone Cold Steve Austin to win the WWF World Championship. Because of this, Chris Jericho was the last WCW World Champion and the Undisputed WWF World Champion as there was no dispute over what the most important prize in professional wrestling was anymore.

Undisputed World Championship and going back to a normal world championship

By 2002, the number of wrestlers in WWE was twice as big because they now had wrestlers from WWF before the end of WCW, and wrestlers who came from WCW and ECW. As a result of the increase, the WWF split its wrestlers in halves with each half performing on one of WWE's two weekly TV shows - Raw and SmackDown!. Each show also had different championships and bosses. This was called the Brand Extension. In May 2002, the WWF was renamed to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and the championship was called the WWE Undisputed World Championship. After these changes, the WWE Undisputed Championship was not on Raw or SmackDown and wrestlers from both brands could challenge the WWE Undisputed World Champion. When Eric Bischoff became the General Manager of Raw and Stephanie McMahon became the General Manager of SmackDown, McMahon brought the WWE Undisputed World Champion at the time, Brock Lesnar to the SmackDown brand, and left the Raw brand without a world title. On September 2, after arguing about the brand that the Undisputed Championship should be on, Eric Bischoff announced the creation of the World Heavyweight Championship, separate from the Undisputed Championship. Then, the WWE Undisputed World Championship was called the WWE World Championship or just the WWE Championship. In 2011, There were two WWE Champions - John Cena and CM Punk. On the August 1 episode of Raw the Chief Operating Officer of WWE Triple H, announced a match to decide who will be the WWE Champion between Cena and Punk. At SummerSlam, Punk beat Cena to be the only WWE Champion, but that night Alberto Del Rio cashed in his Money in the Bank contract and became the new WWE Champion. The holder of the contract gets a WWE or World Heavyweight Championship match whenever they want. (They could also get an ECW Championship when that title was around)

On December 15, 2013, Randy Orton beat Cena for the World Heavyweight Championship at TLC: Tables, Ladders, & Chairs. He was already WWE Champion when he won the championship and made the World Heavyweight Championship one with the WWE Championship to make the "WWE World Heavyweight Championship". Wrestlers stopped fighting for the World Heavyweight Championship the next day. The title was renamed the WWE World Championship because the WWE Universal Championship is on Raw and the original title is on SmackDown Live. Soon after, it was changed back to the WWE Championship.

Brands

After the WWE Brand Extension, WWE started having drafts each year, where some wrestlers change brands. After three years on the SmackDown brand, the WWE Championship switched brands during the 2005 draft, when the WWE Champion John Cena was sent to Raw while the World Heavyweight Champion Batista was sent to SmackDown. On June 11, 2006, Rob Van Dam used his Money in the Bank contract at ECW One Night Stand for a WWE Championship match against Cena. Van Dam beat Cena to win the WWE Championship, moving the title to the ECW brand, a brand WWE created after buying the Extreme Championship Wrestling promotion. On July 3, Edge beat Cena and Van Dam in a Triple Threat Match to win the WWE Championship and with Edge on the Raw brand at the time, Edge brought the title back to Raw. After the 2008 WWE Draft, the WWE Champion Triple H was drafted to SmackDown, moving the WWE Championship to the SmackDown brand. The following year, the title returned to Raw after Triple H was drafted back to Raw during the 2009 WWE Draft, and the championship stayed there. When SmackDown's Batista won the title from Raw's John Cena at Elimination Chamber, it still stayed on Raw because Batista was sent there.

From August 2011 to July 2016, all WWE TV programming became "Supershows" that had wrestlers from both Raw and SmackDown. This meant that the WWE Championship matches could happen at any WWE event. The brand extension came back in 2016 and the WWE Champion at the time Dean Ambrose was drafted to SmackDown Live and the championship has been there ever since.

Custom belt designs
Special belts have been made to match the characters of some champions:

"Superstar" Billy Graham (red leather strap)
The Ultimate Warrior (white, blue, and purple leather straps)
Sgt. Slaughter (purple leather strap, changed to original black strap after beating The Ultimate Warrior)
"Stone Cold" Steve Austin ("Smoking Skull" belt)
John Cena (Spinner belt with a spinning WWE logo in the center)
Edge (Spinner belt with a "Rated-R Superstar" logo in the center)
The Miz (Spinner belt with WWE logo flipped upside down to look like the letter "M")
Daniel Bryan (Black leather strap replaced with wood and fabric)

A much bigger version of the belt was created for André the Giant before WrestleMania III, but he never wore it as champion. The belt Brahma Bull logo in the center that was made for the Rock was lost and was never on TV. Edge had created a special belt different from the "Rated R Spinner" one that he used for his second reign, but the plans were scrapped because of little time.

A special belt is being used by Daniel Bryan right now. His belt replaces the black leather strap of the normal belt with wood and fabric. This is to match his vegan character.

Related pages

 List of WWE Champions

References

Other websites
 WWE Championship Title History

World Wrestling Entertainment championships
WWE Raw
1963 establishments

WWE Championship


The Toronto Public Space Committee (TPSC) is a  volunteer-run, non-profit organization located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that defends the city's public space from corporate and private forces, including cars and outdoor advertising. The TPSC argues that public property, such as sidewalks, bike paths, parks, and squares, should be the independent and cultural "counterbalance" to the profit-driven private sector.

As a grassroots organization, the TPSC is financed almost entirely on donations, as well as various contributions in kind from its members, such as seeds and gardening tools.  The TPSC uses a model of consensus decision-making at its monthly open meetings.  The structure of the organization is currently undergoing a re-evaluation by its members.

In 2005, TPSC was called Toronto's Best Activist Group by the local Now magazine.

Campaigns
The TPSC is consistently involved in local Toronto City Council affairs affecting city space. In recent years, the committee has formed various campaigns that aim to educate and lobby citizens, bureaucrats and politicians on matters such as anti-postering bylaws,  tree protection, mobile (or truck) advertising, TTC subway video ads, and billboard advertising.

Other campaigns the TPSC spearheads are less political, but stay true to public-space advocacy.  The committee  hosts guerrilla gardening outings in the spring and summer; growing native plants and flowers in small crevices and decrepit planters in downtown streets. In 2005, the TPSC's Downtown De-Fence Project won a Clean and Beautiful City Appreciation Award.

Spacing

Spacing, a 3-times-yearly magazine focusing on issues affecting Toronto's public realm, was originally published by the TPSC in house until it was spun off as a wholly independent magazine after the first issue. The two organizations support each other on occasion.

See also
 Public space
 Billboards
 Culture jamming
 Critical Mass
 Guerrilla gardening
 Spacing (magazine)

References

External links
  Toronto Public Space Committee
 Space Cadets (eye weekly article)
  City Beautification Ensemble

Community-building organizations
Culture of Toronto
Organizations based in Toronto
Political advocacy groups in Canada

Toronto Public Space Committee


A zombie computer (often shortened as zombie) is a computer attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, a computer virus, or a trojan horse.

Generally, a compromised machine is only one of many in a botnet, and the hacker will make the computer do unwanted things from far away. Most owners of zombie computers do not know that their system is being used in this way. Because the owner tends to not know, these computers are compared to zombies.

Computing

Zombie (computing)


The Near North Side is one of 77 community areas of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is the northernmost of the three areas that constitute central Chicago, the others being the Loop and the Near South Side. The community area is located north and east of the Chicago River.

To its east is Lake Michigan, and its northern boundary is the early 19th-century city limit of Chicago, North Avenue. Of the downtown community areas, the Near North Side has the second largest total area, after the Near West Side, the highest number of skyscrapers, and the largest population.

With the exception of Goose Island and the remains of Cabrini-Green, to the west, the Near North Side is known for its rich neighborhoods, the Magnificent Mile, Washington Square Park, Gold Coast, Navy Pier, and its world-famous skyscrapers such as the John Hancock Center.

The Near North Side is the oldest part of Chicago.

References

Community areas of Chicago

Near North Side, Chicago


Europa Report is a 2013 American science fiction film directed by Sebastián Cordero and written by Philip Gelatt. It stars Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvist, Daniel Wu, Karolina Wydra, and Sharlto Copley. A found footage film, it recounts the fictional story of the first crewed mission to Europa, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. Despite a disastrous technical failure that causes the loss of all communications with Earth, and a series of further crises, the crew continues its mission to Europa and finds mounting evidence of life on this Galilean moon of Jupiter.

Plot
Dr. Samantha Unger, CEO of Europa Ventures, narrates the story of the Europa One mission. Six astronauts embark on a privately funded mission to Jupiter's moon Europa to find potential sources of life.  The crew members are commander William Xu, pilot Rosa Dasque, chief science officer Daniel Luxembourg, marine biology science officer Katya Petrovna, junior engineer James Corrigan, and chief engineer Andrei Blok.

After six months of mission time, a solar storm hits the ship, knocking out communication with mission control. Blok and Corrigan perform an extra-vehicular activity (EVA) to repair the system from outside, but an accident rips Blok's suit. While he is being guided back into the airlock, Blok notices that Corrigan's suit has been coated with hydrazine and he cannot enter the airlock or else he would contaminate the rest of the ship. Blok attempts to save Corrigan by taking him out of his suit, but he blacks out from a lack of oxygen. Knowing there is no hope for himself, Corrigan pushes Blok into the airlock, thus propelling himself away from the ship as it continues its journey to Europa. Stranded, he dies in space; the crew continue with the mission, demoralized by Corrigan's death.

After twenty months, the ship goes into orbit around Europa and its lunar lander lands safely on Europa, but misses its target zone. The crew drills through the ice and releases a probe into the underlying sea. Blok, who is sleep-deprived and eliciting concern in the rest of the crew, sees a light outside the ship but he is unable to record it or otherwise convince the crew of its occurrence. The probe is struck by an unknown lighted object and contact with it is lost.

Petrovna insists on collecting samples on Europa's surface; the crew votes and she is allowed to go. Analyzing the samples, Luxembourg discovers traces of a single-celled organism. Petrovna sees a blue light in the distance and decides to investigate it. As she approaches the light the ice below her breaks and she falls through. Her head-mounted camera continues to broadcast, displaying her last moments as the blue bioluminescence is reflected in her eyes, before cutting out.

The crew agrees to leave to report their discovery to Earth, but the engines malfunction. As the lander hurtles back to Europa's surface, Xu unbuckles from his seat to dump water shielding to reduce the impact speed. Remarkably, the ship crashes at the originally-targeted landing site. On impact, Xu is killed and the lander is damaged, leaking oxygen and losing heat. It begins to sink into the ice.

Blok and Luxembourg suit up to make repairs outside the ship. Luxembourg tries to descend but dies as he falls through the ice. Blok knows that there is no chance that he alone will be able to repair the lander before it sinks. Instead, he manages to fix the communication link to the orbiting mother ship, at the expense of turning off the life support systems, just before the same blue light Petrovna saw approaches and is killed as he falls through the ice as well.

Dasque re-establishes communication with Earth; all the collected images and data that have been saved since the solar storm are relayed to Earth via the mother ship, just as the ice cracks and the lander begins to sink. Alone and anticipating her death, Dasque opens the airlock to flood the lander in hopes of revealing the source of the light. As the water rises to the cockpit, she sees a tentacled, bioluminescent creature rising toward her before the camera cuts out.

In the epilogue, narrator Samantha Unger confirms that the crew of Europa had discovered life and exceeded every expectation, as the footage plays from an earlier scene of the crew posing in front of the camera.

Cast
 Anamaria Marinca as Rosa Dasque
 Michael Nyqvist as Andrei Blok
 Karolina Wydra as Katya Petrovna
 Daniel Wu as William Xu
 Sharlto Copley as James Corrigan
 Christian Camargo as Daniel Luxembourg
 Embeth Davidtz as Dr. Samantha Unger
 Dan Fogler as Dr. Nikita Solokov
 Isiah Whitlock, Jr. as Dr. Tarik Pamuk
 Neil deGrasse Tyson as himself (archive footage)

Production
Filming took place in Brooklyn, New York. The first image from the film was revealed on February 11, 2012. A viral website to promote the film was launched shortly afterward.

The screenplay was written by Philip Gelatt and the production design was done by Eugenio Caballero. It was scored by Bear McCreary. The movie is a found footage film and follows a nonlinear progression.

The crew used as inspiration real footage from the International Space Station and space walks from the Space Shuttle. The space ship was designed through computer graphics, giving high detail to the camera angles to be used in the film. Weightlessness was simulated with balance balls, suspension from wires was used for interior shots. The flooding ship was filmed on a one-third scale model.

The aspect of the moon Europa was based for accuracy on data from NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) maps of the moon's surface. The creature's design included bioluminescence from the initial concepts. The visual effects supervisor stated that the creature was based on a cross of an octopus and a squid, with early sketches resembling a jellyfish and a manta ray.

An online trailer was released on May 20, 2012. The film was released on Video on Demand, iTunes, and Google Play Movies & TV on June 27, 2013, and was released theatrically on August 2, 2013.

Reception
Europa Report has received generally positive reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 81% "Certified Fresh" rating based on 80 reviews, its summary reading, "Claustrophobic and stylish, Europa Report is a slow-burning thriller that puts the science back into science fiction."  Review aggregation website Metacritic gives a rating of 68 out of 100 based on reviews from 25 critics, which indicates "generally favorable" reviews.

The New York Times likes that the movie worked to stay realistic, and found the pairing of Caballero and Chediak (production design and director of photography) a match made in heaven.

Justin Chang, of Variety magazine, called the film "A reasonably plausible and impressively controlled achievement." while Space.com said the film was "One of the most thrilling and realistic depictions of space exploration since Moon or 2001: A Space Odyssey." Fearnet said the film was "One of the most sincere, suspenseful and fascinating science fiction films of the past few years."

The film was nominated for the Bradbury Award by the members of SFWA.

See also

List of films featuring extraterrestrials
Jupiter's moons in fiction

References

External links

2013 films
2013 science fiction films
Fiction set on Europa (moon)
Jupiter in film
2010s Russian-language films
American space adventure films
Found footage films
American nonlinear narrative films
Films about astronauts
Films directed by Sebastián Cordero
Films scored by Bear McCreary
Films shot in New York City
Hard science fiction films
2010s English-language films
Films about extraterrestrial life
2010s American films
Fiction set in extraterrestrial oceans

Europa Report


Américo Castro Quesada (May 4, 1885 – July 25, 1972) was a Spanish cultural historian, philologist, and literary critic who challenged some of the prevailing notions of Spanish identity, raising controversy with his conclusions that Spaniards did not become the distinct group that they are today until after the Islamic conquest of Hispania of 711, an event that turned them into an Iberian caste co-existing among Moors and Jews, and that the history of Spain and Portugal was adversely affected with the success in the 11th to the 15th centuries of the "Reconquista" or Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula and with the Spanish expulsion of the Jews (1492).

Life
Castro was born to Spanish parents on May 4, 1885, in Cantagalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1890, his parents returned with him to Spain. In 1904 he graduated from the University of Granada, going on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1905 to 1907. After returning to Spain he organized the Center for Historical Studies in Madrid in 1910 and headed its department of lexicography. In 1915, he became a professor at the University of Madrid.

Later, when the Spanish Republic was declared, Castro became its first ambassador to Germany in 1931. However, when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he moved to the United States, where he taught literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, at the University of Texas from 1939 to 1940 and at Princeton University from 1940 to 1953.

Among Castro's most notable scholarly works are The Life of Lope de Vega (1919); Language, Teaching, and Literature (1924); The Thought of Cervantes (1925); Ibero-America, Its Present and Its Past (1941); The Spaniards: an Introduction to their History (1948); The Structure of Spanish History (1954); and Out of the State of Conflict (1961).

References

Sources
 Castro, Americo. Edmund L. King, Tr. (1954). The Structure of Spanish History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
 "Castro, Americo." (2005). The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Retrieved January 21, 2006, from Info Please http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0810798.html
 "Castro, Américo." (2006). Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved January 21, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9020733
 José Luis Gómez Martínez, "Américo Castro y Sánchez-Albornoz: Dos posiciones ante el origen de los españoles."  Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 2l (1972): 30l-320.
 Martin, Marina. (2006). "J. Goytisolo's Vindication of Muslim Spain: Count Julian's Revenge" (description of scholarly paper). The Fourth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities. Retrieved January 19, 2006, from The Humanities Conference 06 website http://h06.cgpublisher.com/proposals/141/index_html
 Sicroff, Albert A. "Américo Castro and His Critics: Eugenio Asensio." Hispanic Review, Vol. 40, No, 1, 1972, pp. 1–30.

1885 births
1972 deaths
University of Paris alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
University of Texas at Austin faculty
Brazilian people of Spanish descent
Princeton University faculty
Hispanists
Ambassadors of Spain to Germany
Exiles of the Spanish Civil War in the United States
20th-century Spanish historians
Spanish expatriates in the United States
Spanish expatriates in France

Américo Castro


Borislav Pekić (, ; 4 February 1930 – 2 July 1992) was a Serbian and Yugoslav writer and political activist.

He was born in 1930, to a prominent family in Montenegro, at that time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. From 1945 until his emigration to London in 1971, he lived in Belgrade. He was also one of the founding members of the Democratic Party in Serbia. He is considered one of the most important Serbian literary figures of the 20th century.

Life and works

Early life and novels
Borislav Pekić spent his childhood in different cities of Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia. He graduated from high school in 1948 in Belgrade and shortly afterward was arrested with the accusation of belonging to the secret association "Yugoslav Democratic Youth" and sentenced to fifteen years of prison. During the time in prison, he conceived many of the ideas later developed in his major novels. He was released after five years and in 1953 began studying experimental psychology at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, although he never earned a degree.

In 1958 he married Ljiljana Glišić, the niece of Milan Stojadinović, Prime Minister of Yugoslavia (1935–1939) and a year later their daughter Aleksandra was born, who was later married to a German aristocrat, Baron Victor von Maltzahn. 1958 marked also the year when Pekić wrote his first of over twenty original film scripts for the major film studios in Yugoslavia, among which Dan četrnaesti ("The Fourteenth Day") represented Yugoslavia at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival.

For years Pekić had been working on several novels and when the first of them, Vreme čuda (1965), came out, it caught the attention of a wide reading audience as well as the critics. In 1976 it was published in English by Brace Harcourt in New York as The Time of Miracles. It was also translated into French in 1986, Polish in 1986, Romanian in 1987, Italian in 2004, and Greek in 2007. Pekić's first novel clearly announced two of the most important characteristics of his work: sharp anti-dogmatism and constant skepticism regarding any possible 'progress' mankind has achieved over the course of history.

During the 1968–1969 period, Pekić was one of the editors of Književne novine literary magazine. In 1970 his second novel, Hodočašće Arsenija Njegovana (The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan) was published, in which an echo of the students protests of 1968 in Yugoslavia can be found. Despite his ideological distance from the mainstream opposition movements, the new political climate further complicated his relationship with the authorities, who refused him a passport for some time. The novel, nevertheless, won the NIN award for the best Yugoslav novel of the year. An English translation The Houses of Belgrade appeared in 1978 and it was later published in Polish, Czech and Romanian.

Exile and further work

Following Pekić's emigration to London in 1971, the Yugoslav authorities still considered him persona non grata and for several years they prevented his books from being published in Yugoslavia. Finally, in 1975, Uspenje i sunovrat Ikara Gubelkijana ("The Rise and Fall of Icarus Gubelkian") appeared. It was later translated into Polish in 1980, Hungarian in 1982, Czech in 1985 and French in 1992.

In 1977 he sent the manuscript of Kako upokojiti Vampira ("How to Quiet a Vampire") to an anonymous literary competition. The Association of Yugoslav Publishers recognized it as the best novel of the year and promptly published it. Kako upokojiti Vampira was subsequently translated into Czech in 1980, Polish in 1985, and Italian in 1992, with an English translation finally appearing in 2005.  Based in part on Pekić's own prison experiences, this novel offers an insight into the methods, logic and psychology of a modern totalitarian regime.

Odbrana i poslednji dani ("The Defense and the Last Days", 1977) was published in Polish and Hungarian in 1982, Czech in 1983, French in 1989 and Swedish in 2003.  These three novels essentially dealt with contrasting types of collaboration in Yugoslavia at different levels during World War II.

In 1978, after more than two decades of preparation, investigation and study, the first volume of Zlatno runo ("The Golden Fleece", 1978–1986) was published, fully establishing Pekić as one of the most important Serbian authors.  In 1987 he received Montenegrin Njegoš award for this work, marking it as one of the most important contemporary prose writings in Yugoslavia.  The Golden Fleece prompted comparison by international critics to James Joyce's Ulysses and its narrative patterns of classical myths, to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and its long family history and evolution of pre-war society, and to Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point and its inner tensions created through a maze of conflicting perspectives; yet The Golden Fleece was also hailed as unique.  One of the novel's obvious distinctions is its enormous scope and thematic complexity. The Golden Fleece describes the wanderings of generations of the Njegovans, and through them explores the history of the Balkans.  The first, second and third volumes were published in French in 2002, 2003 and 2004. The fourth volume was published in 2008.

During the 1980s Pekić created something entirely new.  He had been collecting material for a book about the lost island of Atlantis, with the intention to give "a new, although poetical, explanation of the roots, development, and the end of our civilization". Despite the classical sources that inspired his anthropological interests, Pekić decided to project his new vision into the future and thus avoid the restrictions of the 'historical models', which he had inevitably had to confront in his earlier remakes of ancient myths.  The result was three novels: Besnilo ("Rabies", 1983), Atlantida ("Atlantis", 1988) and 1999 (1984).  The novel Rabies together with The Golden Fleece and The Years the Locusts Have Devoured, were selected by readers as the best novels in the years from 1982 to 1991.  All of them were reprinted numerous times in Serbia.  Rabies was published in Spanish in 1988, and Hungarian in 1994, and Atlantis in Czech in 1989.  For Atlantis Pekić won the 'Croatian Goran' award in 1988. At the end of 1984 Pekić's twelve volume Selected Works appeared, winning him an award from the Union of Serbian Writers.

Godine koje su pojeli skakavci ("The Years the Locusts Have Devoured", in three volumes) was published between 1987 and 1990.  Two parts of the 1st volume were translated into English and published in literary magazines.  These are Pekić's memoirs with an account of the post-war days and the life and persecutions of the bourgeoisie under the communist rule.  The account is not purely autobiographical in the classical sense, since Pekić also deals with life in general in Yugoslavia after the Second World War.  He depicts prison life as a unique civilization and the civilization of 'freedom' as a special kind of prison. This trilogy was selected as the best memoir and received the 'Miloš Crnjanski' award.

The gothic stories Novi Jerusalim ("The New Jerusalem") were published in 1989, and Pekić accepted the Majska Rukovanja award in Montenegro in 1990 for his literary and cultural achievements. Two stories from the book were published in French, English and Ukrainian in different anthologies. 'Covek koji je jeo smrt' ("The man who ate death") from Novi Jerusalim ("The New Jerusalem") was translated into French in 2005, and won the French "Book Of The Day" award the same year.

Film, theater and radio

Pekić distinguished himself in the 1970s as one of the best Serbian contemporary dramatists. He regularly wrote radio-plays for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, as well as Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Stuttgart.  Of the 27 plays written and performed in Serbia, 17 had their first production in Germany. Many of them were transformed into theatre and/or TV plays, and received a number of awards. Sixteen were published in his Odabrana dela (Selected works, 1984) and his play Generali ili srodstvo po oruzju (The Generals or Kinship-In-Arms, 1969) can be found in any anthology of Serbian contemporary drama.  Pekić's theatre plays were widely acclaimed and popular, the most famous being Korešpondencija (Correspondence 1979), which was based on the fourth volume of the Golden Fleece and ran for 280 performances and 23 years at the Atelje 212 Theatre in Belgrade.

Throughout his career, Pekić worked on numerous films, writing more than twenty original screenplays and adapting some of his novels to the screen. The Time of Miracles was selected to represent Yugoslavia at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991, where it won an award, and later at film festivals in Glasgow and Montreal.  The Devils Heaven (The Summer of White Roses) won an award at the film festival in Tokyo in 1989 and was selected the same year to represent Yugoslavia at film festivals in Montpellier (France), Pula (Croatia), San Sebastián (Spain), and Los Angeles and San Francisco (USA).

As a part-time commentator at the BBC World Service in London, (1986–1991) Pekić read his 'Letters from London' every week; these were subsequently printed in Yugoslavia as Pisma iz tuđine, Nova pisma iz tuđine, and Poslednja pisma iz tuđine (Letters From Abroad, 1, 2 &3, 1987–1991).  Each book was made up of 50 letters with witty and inventive observations about England and the English people.  The letters were also broadcast for listeners in Serbia, for whom Pekić particularly enjoyed making numerous humorous comparisons between the English and his fatherland's governments, country and people. For these books he received the Jaša Ignjatović award (Hungary) in 1991.  Pekić also ran a series on the same program at the BBC about the history of Great Britain, which was published posthumously - Sentimentalna povest Britanskog carstva (A Sentimental History Of The British Empire, 1992), for which he received the Yearly 'Bigz' award.  It was published several times enjoying a huge success.

End of life and posthumous texts

In 1989 he became one of the founding members of The Democratic Party in Serbia and in 1990 he became its vice president and one of the editors of the party's newspaper "Demokratija" ("Democracy"). Pekić was a member of the P. E. N. Association in London and Belgrade, and became Vice President of the Serbian P. E. N. Association between 1990 and 1992.  He was elected to The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1985, and was made a member of the Advisory Committee to The Royal Crown in 1992.

Active both as an author and a public figure until his last day, Pekić died of lung cancer at his home in London on 2 July 1992. He was laid to rest at the famous 'Alley of Distinguished Citizens' ('Aleja zaslužnih građana') in Belgrade together with other distinguished figures from the social, political and cultural echelons of society. Posthumously, in 1992, Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia awarded Pekić the Order of the White Eagle, being the highest honour bestowed by Yugoslavian Royal Family.

A large body of his work was, and continues to be, published posthumously: Vreme reči ("The Time of Words"), 1993; Odmor od istorije ("A Break from History"), 1993; Graditelji ("The Builders"), 1994; Rađanje Atlantide ("The Birth of Atlantis"), 1996; Skinuto sa trake ("Transferred from Tapes"), 1996; U traganju za Zlatnim runom ("In Search of the Golden Fleece"), 1997; Izabrana pisma iz tuđine ("Selected Letters from Abroad"), 2000; Političke sveske  ("Political Notebooks"), 2001; Filosofske sveske ("Philosophical Notebooks"), 2001; Korespondencija  kao  život, 1&2 ("Correspondence as a Life"), 2002–2003; Sabrana pisma iz tuđine ("Collection of letters from abroad"), 2004,  ("Robots and Wraiths", collection of unpublished plays), 2006, Izabrane drame ("Selected plays"), 2007, Izabrani eseji ("Selected essays"), 2007, Moral i demokratija ("Moral and democracy", a collection of interviews and essays), 2008,  (collected thoughts from published and unpublished work), 2008.

On 1 and 2 July 2000 the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade held a symposium with the theme: 'Literary work of Borislav Pekić on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of his birth'. The essays from that symposium were published in 2003. In 2006, his wife Ljiljana, credited with the abovementioned posthumously published work, started the Borislav Pekic blog where one can find published as well as yet unpublished works of Pekic. Pekić has left a vast corpus of high literary quality characterized by following traits: narrative structures of growing complexity that, in the case of The Golden Fleece cross the fuzzy bounds of the post-modern novel and can be best described by the author's sub-title "Phantasmagoria" (this mammoth work is more than 3,500 pages long); the presence of autobiographical thread one can detect in all major Pekić's works, but especially in his vivid and unsentimental memoirs on his years as a political prisoner and essayist books on life in Britain; obsession with the theme of personal freedom crushed by the impersonal mechanism of the totalitarian power.

Views
Pekić never took British citizenship during his life in exile in the United Kingdom. He considered himself a Serb and a Serbian writer and wanted to stay that way for the rest of his life, with which his wife and daughter showed solidarity.

In correspondence with friends, he stated that "no one wants him in Serbia", as well as that Serbs blamed him for not being a Serb enough in public appearances and that Montenegrins blamed him for "not standing up for their fictional nation".

Bibliography

Works available in English translation

In chronological order of translation:

 The Time of Miracles, translated by Lovett F. Edwards, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, .
 The Houses of Belgrade, translated by Bernard Johnson, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, .
 The Generals or Kinship-in-Arms, play, translated by Vidosava Janković, "Scena" 13 (1990), pp. 143–53.
 Megalo Mastoras and His Work 1347 A.D., translated by Stephen M. Dickey and Doc Roc in The Prince of Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Short Stories, edited by Radmila J. Gorup and Nadežda Obradović, Pittsburgh (PA): University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
 How to Quiet a Vampire, translated by Stephen M. Dickey and Bogdan Rakić, Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press, 2005,  and  (cloth text).

Bibliography in Serbian

In square brackets the title in Cyrillic and its literal translation.

Vreme čuda [Време чуда, "The Time of Miracles"], novel, Belgrade: Prosveta, 1965. Translated in English with the title The Time of Miracles.
Hodočašće Arsenija Njegovana [Ходочашће Арсенија Његована, "The Pilgrimage of Arsenij Njegovan"], novel, Belgrade: Prosveta, 1970. Translated as The Houses of Belgrade.
Uspenje i sunovrat Ikara Gubelkijana [Успење и суноврат Икара Губелкијана, "Rise and fall of Icarus Gubelkijan"], novel, Belgrade: Slovo Ljubve, 1975.
Kako upokojiti vampira, [Како упокојити вампира, "How to Quiet a Vampire"], Belgrade: BIGZ, Rad, Narodna knjiga, 1977. Translated as How to Quiet a Vampire.
Odbrana i poslednji dani, [Одбрана и последњи дани, "The Defense and the Last Days"], novel, Belgrade: Slovo Ljubve, 1977.
Zlatno runo [Златно руно, "The Golden Fleece"], novel in 7 volumes, Belgrade: Prosveta, 1978 (vol. I & II), 1980 (vol. III & IV), 1981 (vol. V), 1986 (vol. VI & VII).
Besnilo [Беснило, "Rabies"], novel, Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber, 1983.
1999, novel, Ljublijana, Zagreb: Cankarjeva založba and Belgrade: Književni glasnik, NIN, 1984.
Godine koje su pojeli skakavci ["The Years the Locusts have Devoured"], memories, Belgrade: BIGZ, 1987 (Vol. 1), 1989 (Vol.2), 1990 (Vol. 3).
Pisma iz tuđine ["Letters from abroad"], Zagreb: Znanje, 1987.
Novi Jerusalim [Нови Јерусалим, "The New Jerusalem"], short stories, London: Gotska hronika and Belgrade: Nolit, 1988.
Atlantida [Атлантида, "Atlantis"], novel, 2 Vol., Zagreb: Znanje, 1988.
Nova pisma iz tuđine ["New Letters from Abroad"], Zagreb: Mladost, 1989.
Poslednja pisma iz tuđine ["Last Letters from Abroad"], Belgrade: Dereta, 1991.
Sentimentalna povest britanskog carstva [Сентиментална повест британског царства, "Sentimental History of the British Empire"], essay, Belgrade: BIGZ, 1992.
Vreme reči ["The Time of Words"], edited by Božo Koprivica, Belgrade: BIGZ; Srpska književna zadruga, 1993.
Odmor od istorije ["A Pause in History"], edited by Radoslav Bratić, Belgrade: BIGZ, 1993.
Graditelji ["The Builders"], Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995.
Rađanje Atlantide ["The Birth of Atlantis"], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Belgrade: BIGZ, 1996.
Skinuto sa trake ["Transferred from Tape"], edited by Predrag Palavestra, Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1996.
U traganju za Zlatnim runom ["In Search of the Golden Fleece"], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Belgrade: BIGZ, 1997.
Političke sveske ["Political Notes"], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Novi Sad: Solaris and Stylos, 2001.
Filosofske sveske ["Philosophical Notes"], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Novi Sad: Stylos, 2001.
Korespondencija kao život ["Correspondence as a Life"], letters, edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Novi Sad: Solaris, 2002 (vol. I), 2003 (vol. II).
 ["Robots and Wraiths], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Novi Sad: Solaris, 2006.
Demokratija i nacija ["Democracy and the Nation"], 2006.
Izabrani eseji ["Selected Essays"], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Novi Sad; Solaris, 2007.
Izabrane drame ["Selected Plays"], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Novi Sad: Solaris, 2007.
Moral i demokratija ["Moral and Democracy"], 2008.
 ["Marginals and Morals]"], edited by Ljiljana Pekić, Novi Sad: Solaris, 2008.

References

Further reading
Jelena Milojković-Djurić, Borislav Pekić's Literary Oeuvre: A Legacy Upheld, "Serbian Studies" 15 (1), 3–7, 2001; (PDF).
Bogdan Rakić, Borislav Pekić: Sysiphus as Hero, "Serbian Studies" 15 (1), 9-23, 2001; (PDF).
Angela Richter, Biblical Myths in Borislav Pekić's Time of Miracles, "Serbian Studies" 15 (1), 25–34, 2001; (PDF).
Olga Nedeljković, Do Supernatural Elements Exist in Borislav Pekić's How to Quite a Vampire: The Poetics of a Magical Umbrella, "Serbian Studies" 15 (1), 35–49, 2001; (PDF).
Borislav Pekic, How to Quiet a Vampire (An Excerpt), Translated by Stephen M. Dickey and Bogdan Rakić; (PDF).
Jelena Milojković-Djurić, Voice from the Darkness: Borislav Pekić's The Years the Locusts Devoured, "Serbian Studies" 15 (1), 51–62, 2001; (PDF).
Nicolas Trifon (2005). Des Aroumains aux Tsintsares. Short commentary on Zlatno runo by Trifon.
Philippe Zard, « Avatars d'un héros sous la Terreur. L'homme qui mangeait la mort de Borislav Pekić, viaThermidor (Victorien Sardou) et Napoléon (Abel Gance) », in Vincent Ferré et Daniel Mortier (ed.), Littérature, Histoire et politique au 20e siècle : hommage à Jean-Pierre Morel, 2010, p. 147-160.

External links

  and blog

 Complete bibliography in Serbian

1930 births
1992 deaths
Serbian writers
Serbian non-fiction writers
Serbian dramatists and playwrights
Serbian science fiction writers
Yugoslav science fiction writers
Christian writers
Serbian novelists
Serbs of Montenegro
Yugoslav dissidents
Prisoners and detainees of Yugoslavia
Eastern Orthodox Christians from Serbia
Deaths from lung cancer
Democratic Party (Serbia) politicians
20th-century Serbian novelists
20th-century dramatists and playwrights
Burials at Belgrade New Cemetery
20th-century Serbian people
Writers from Podgorica
Yugoslav emigrants to the United Kingdom
20th-century non-fiction writers

Borislav Pekić


Inverness is a city in the northern part of Scotland. It is often called the capital of the Highlands. It is on the A9 road. Inverness Airport is an important way to get to the Scottish Highlands.

Notable people
Yvette Cooper, politician
Karen Gillan, actress
Charles Kennedy, politician

Inverness

Inverness


The Douglas C-74 Globemaster is a military transport aircraft. It was built in the United States. The maiden flight was in 1945. It was used by the United States Air Force between 1946 and 1956. It was a four-engine aircraft built in all-metal. Only fourteen were built. It was used for Korean War.

United States Air Force aircraft
C-74

Douglas C-74 Globemaster


William Richard Arthur Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley, 5th Earl of Mornington (7 October 1813 – 25 July 1863) was a British nobleman.

Long-Wellesley, the son of the notorious spendthrift William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley (later fourth Earl of Mornington) and Catherine Tylney-Long (daughter of Sir James Tylney-Long, 7th Baronet), was born on 7 October 1813 at Wanstead House, at that time in Essex, but within the London borough of Redbridge since 1965.

His father's spending wreaked havoc on the family estate, but upon his mother's death in 1825, he inherited the remaining estates at Wanstead; Athelhampton, Devon; and Draycot Cerne, Wiltshire. Bitter, protracted custody litigation followed — his mother's sisters with temporary custody succeeded in placing him under the guardianship of the Duke of Wellington, his great-uncle.

In 1836 he took his father to court, after his father had sold furniture and pictures belonging to Draycot House to cover a £3,000 debt. These were passed out of a window after the sales agent was refused admission to the house. William junior maintained that these items belonged to him as heirlooms by the will of Sir James Long, 2nd Baronet.

His father succeeded as Earl of Mornington in 1845, after which William was styled Viscount Wellesley. In 1848, despite opposition from his father, he sold Athelhampton which had been purchased by Sir Robert Long, 1st Baronet, in 1665. He succeeded his father as Earl of Mornington on 1 July 1857.

Mornington died unmarried in Paris on 25 July 1863 from cancer of the tongue, and is buried at Draycot Cerne in Wiltshire. Having originally made his will bequeathing all his estates to his only sister Lady Victoria (who died unmarried in 1897), he made another will three weeks before his death, leaving all his landed property to his father's cousin Earl Cowley, then ambassador at Paris. In dismay, Lady Victoria wrote to her cousin Walter Long of Rood Ashton House: 'my wish would have been that after our own immediate heirs, all Long property should have returned to your family as the elder branch'.

He was succeeded as sixth Earl of Mornington by his cousin, the second Duke of Wellington.

References

Sources
 Wiltshire Record Office, Cat. 947 Papers of Viscount Long
 Hand of Fate. The History of the Longs, Wellesleys and the Draycot Estate in Wiltshire. Tim Couzens 2001
 The Lady Victoria Tylney Long Wellesley - A Memoir, Octavia Barry 1899

1813 births
1863 deaths
William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley, 5th Earl of Mornington
Deaths from oral cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Earls of Mornington