★ Daily Strange History ★
You're about to discover something weird from history.
In 230 AD, Pope Pontian was elected as the eighteenth pope of the Catholic Church, but his papacy ended when Roman Emperor Maximinus Thrax had him exiled to work in the brutal silver mines of Sardinia - a sentence so harsh it was considered a death sentence. Pontian became the first pope in history to officially resign his office, reportedly doing so to ensure the Church could elect a functioning leader.
The idea of a pope formally resigning so he could go die more efficiently in a Roman slave mine is one of the most grimly bizarre administrative decisions in the entire history of the papacy.
In 1973, Israeli Mossad agents traveled to Lillehammer, Norway, on a mission to assassinate Ali Hassan Salameh - a key planner of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. They shot and killed the wrong man entirely: Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter who was out for a casual evening with his pregnant wife.
One of the world's most elite intelligence agencies, on a high-stakes revenge mission, mistook a completely innocent waiter at a leisure pool for a top terrorist, turning a covert operation into an international scandal and a criminal trial in Norway.
In 1919, the dirigible Wingfoot Air Express caught fire mid-flight over downtown Chicago and crashed directly into the Illinois Trust and Savings Building, sending a flaming engine crashing through the glass skylight roof into a crowded banking hall below. Twelve people were killed, most of them bank employees who never saw it coming.
Of all the places a burning blimp could possibly crash in a major city, it chose to plunge through the ceiling of a busy bank - making it one of the most surreal and improbable disaster scenes in aviation history.
In 1645, Qing dynasty regent Dorgon issued a mandatory edict requiring all Han Chinese men to shave their foreheads and braid the rest of their hair into a queue hairstyle identical to that of their Manchu conquerors. Refusal to comply was punishable by death, summarized in the brutal slogan: 'Lose your hair or lose your head.'
A hairstyle was literally enforced under penalty of execution, making it one of history's most extreme fashion mandates - turning a personal grooming choice into a life-or-death political act of submission.
On this day in 356 BC, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus - one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - was deliberately burned to the ground by an arsonist. The man responsible, Herostratus, confessed that he committed the act solely so his name would be remembered forever.
The arson was motivated entirely by a desire for fame, making it perhaps history's first documented act of 'infamy-seeking,' and ancient authorities responded by legally banning anyone from ever speaking his name - a ban that obviously failed spectacularly.