1. The name Atatürk, meaning Father of the Turks was added to his original name of Mustafa Kemal by the Turkish parliament in 1934. 2. Atatürk’s leadership led to the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. 3. Before the First World War it had been part of the […]
10 Facts
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1. When the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975-79, around two million people were killed. 2. The country is still trying to rid itself of an estimated four million land-mines. 3. Ninety-five per cent of Cambodians are Buddhists. Women may not touch the monks. 4. Until June 2016, there was […]
1. Babies are born without bony kneecaps which only appear when the child is two to six years old. 2. The knobbles on our knees are all different and it has been suggested they could replace fingerprints. 3. Butlins holiday camps began knobbly knees contests in the 1930s. Laurel and […]
1. She was born in Warsaw, Poland and named Maria Sklodowska. She changed her first name to Marie after moving to France in 1891. 2. In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Henri Becquerel and her husband Pierre Curie for their work on radioactivity. 3. Originally her […]
1. The tarantula, a large wolf-spider from Southern Europe, takes its name from Taranto, a town in Apulia, Italy. 2. The hysterical illness known as tarantism was wrongly thought to be caused by a tarantula’s bite. 3. The popular South Italian dance known as the tarantella was thought to be […]
1. Edward V was only 12 years old when his father Edward IV died and he became king. 2. He shared a November 2 birthday with his sister Anne of York who was born five years after him. 3. Edward and his brother Richard were the “Princes in the Tower”, […]
1. The Anglo-Saxons called November Wind monath because of the windy weather, or Blod monath because it was time to kill cattle. 2. The Feast of All Saints has been celebrated on November 1 since AD 835 by decree of Pope Gregory IV. 3. “November always seemed to me the […]
1. The capital of Turkmenistan is Ashgabat, which means “City of Love” or “City of Devotion”. 2. The only country whose one-word common name in English is longer than that of Turkmenistan is Liechtenstein. 3. Turkmenistan has the world’s fourth largest natural gas reserves, behind Russia, Iran and Qatar. 4. […]