The bumps (England and Ireland)

If you happen to celebrate your birthday in the company of some English and Irish friends, don’t get surprised when the moment comes for them to take you by the hands and legs and “bump” you up into the air and back to the floor – and then again, and again until the number of “bumps” reaches the age you are turning.

Beating with belts (Poland)

Turning 18 is a big thing in Europe – you suddenly find yourself with a lot of exciting new opportunities, you don’t need mom and dad’s permission to do anything and you are no longer a child. And to welcome you to adulthood, Poles will slap you 18 times on the ass with a belt in front of all your guests in the middle of your birthday party. I am not quite sure how to comment on this, so let’s just leave it here and move a bit north to…

Decapitating the cake (Denmark)

…where the roles swap.  The birthday person is no longer being tortured but rather turns into the torturer – over their birthday cake. In Denmark it is common for the birthday cake (called Kagemand) to be shaped and decorated to look like a man (if it’s a boy’s birthday) or woman (if it’s a girl’s birthday). After the kid has finished blowing out the candles, they cut off the head of the cake-person while all the other kids around are screaming their own heads off.

A cute one to restore your faith in humanity (Ukraine)

We are finishing the list of bizarre birthday customs in Ukraine, with one that (thankfully) doesn’t hurt anyone. Ukrainians draw a circle on a piece of paper, which they cut into eight slices like pizza. On each of them they write something bad that happened in the last year and then burn that “slice”. When the bad things are all burned and buried in the past, the same “pizza” is made – this time with the positive changes in the past year of one’s life.

Ear pulling (Hungary, Italy, Brazil, Argentina…)

The idea of showing the birthday person that you are happy they were born and you wish them a happy and long life by actually causing them physical discomfort is not foreign to Hungarians or Italians either – they will pull your earlobes, once again the same number of times as the age you are turning. This practice is also common in Brazil and Argentina.

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Dwarfs are “in stories for children, creatures like little men with magical powers” (Cambridge Dictionary). But what are over 300 of these mystical creatures doing in the Polish city of Wroclaw?

History note

To better understand what these gnomes actually represent, we should go about 30 years back in history.

After WWII, an authoritarian regime was established in Poland under the stern eye of Soviet communists. In the 1980s, an opposition movement called Solidarity began to gather momentum. Part of this resistance was the so-called Orange Alternative, an underground movement that found a way to protest peacefully against the regime. They managed to do that with their intelligent humor and absurdity; they organized street gatherings and painted graffiti gnomes on the spots where other anti-government slogans had been painted over. The dwarf with the orange hat holding a flower became a symbol of the movement.

The last remaining Orange Alternative Dwarf in Warsaw/ Wikipedia

The commemoration

In 2001, to commemorate the Orange Alternative movement, a gnome statue was built to mark the place where the rebels used to meet. This figure, now known as Papa Dwarf, marked the beginning of what would become the most distinctive emblem of the city.

Papa Dwarf, or Papa Krasnal, standing on a toe in the city centre/ Wikipedia

The dwarfs today

Since then, more and more of these statues have started to appear in the city. Now they number more than 300 and are probably the most distinctive tourist attraction in Wroclaw. Some are used to advertise restaurants and hotels, others symbolize social or political statements, and others still are made by famous (or infamous) artists. They form a kind of mini-society: there are the builders, the prisoners, the scholars, the tourists, the chimney sweeps and many more.

How to find them

There is actually no need to search for these dwarfs, since they reveal themselves behind every corner. If, however, you want to go on a proper dwarf-hunt, you can get a dwarf map from the tourist information center or any souvenir shop in the city, you can download an app that helps you find them, or you can navigate through the following map:

Pin it just in case you ever want to explore a whole mini-society in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities:

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It’s strange: one day an iron is just an iron. Then you use it to iron your wedding suit and something happens. It’s still an everyday object, but suddenly it oozes sentimentality, not just steam. When that marriage breaks down and the iron is all you have left, it becomes the object around which you frame the entire story of your failed romance.

These tragic mementos are a dime a dozen in the unique Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia.

The idea

Humanity is built around stories — those we hear and those we tell. This museum is a collection of heartbreak stories shared by people all over the world, each accompanied by an object related to that story.

It all started when the founders — Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić — broke up after a four-year relationship. While they were trying to split up their furniture, they couldn’t decide what to do with all the small things that they didn’t really need but couldn’t throw away, because each of those items had sentimental value, or as they called it, ’emotional heritage’. They often joked that they should open a museum to display those items. Eventually, that’s what they did.

The ’emotional heritage’ of broken relationships

The concept of emotional heritage resonated with visitors. After all, we’ve all experienced loss in one way or another. That said, this museum is not a pity party, but as the founders themselves describe it: an “art concept which proceeds from the assumption that objects possess integrated fields — ‘holograms’ of memories and emotions — and intends with its layout to create a space of ‘secure memory’ or ‘protected remembrance’ in order to preserve the material and nonmaterial heritage of broken relationships”.

The most random objects reveal stories that can make you laugh, like the toaster a woman took when moving out from her boyfriend’s place to teach him a lesson: “That’ll show you. How are you going to toast anything now?”

Or the frisbee that a boy gave to his girlfriend as a second anniversary present.

There are also stories that will make you cry, like the chaplet left behind by a high school sweetheart who died in a car crash, or the little rubber piggy that symbolizes the impossible love between an Israeli girl and a Danish boy who met on an exchange program in the USA.

Then there are those emotionally ambiguous exhibits, like the axe a German woman used to chop up her ex’s furniture, or the stiletto shoe a prostitute gave to a client who turned out to be her long-lost childhood love.

After all the stories have been read and felt, visitors can share their own tale in the museum’s book of confessions.

You can probably guess only by this view which one is our most popular exhibit 😉 . . . #Brokenships #musuemofbrokenrelationships #permanentdisplay #museum #axe #breakupstories #zagreb #croatia #exhibition

A post shared by Museum of Broken Relationships (@brokenships) on Nov 16, 2017 at 9:43am PST

Helpful info

The museum’s address is Ćirilometodska 2 in the Upper Town in Zagreb, Croatia.

In the summer months (June 1st  September 30th) it is open every day from 9 am to 10:30 pm.

In the winter (October 1st — May 31st) every day from 9 am to 9 pm.

Tickets cost 30 HRK (around 5 USD) for adults and 20 HRK (around 3 USD) for students, seniors and people with disabilities.

In the museum, you’ll also find a cozy cafe with a beautiful summer terrace and a souvenir shop with some unique presents to take back home.

In 2006, a second museum of broken relationships opened at 6751 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Pin it for later, when you feel like sharing your break-up stories:

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#1 The construction of the Sagrada Familia started in 1882 and is expected to be finished by 2026 (144 years), which means it will have taken five times as long as it took to build the Egyptian pyramids or the Taj Mahal.

#2 Gaudi believed that a human’s work should never exceed the work of God, which is why the Sagrada Familia is projected to be a foot shorter than the highest natural point in Barcelona.

#3 It was built entirely on donations. And that’s the reason why Gaudi wanted it built one part at a time, so that people could actually see how it would look and be inspired to give more donations.

Sagrada Familia stained glass – Jim McDougall/ flickr

#4 The Sagrada Familia currently has eight towers. However, by the time it is finished, it will have 18 – the tallest one representing Jesus, another one for the Virgin Mary, four for the evangelists and 12 for the apostles.

#5 Gaudi’s work was largely inspired by nature. Evidence of this can be found in the columns inside the Sagrada Familia, which are built to look like trees with twisting branches. At the base of one of them there is a turtle, and on another one a tortoise, which symbolizes the balance between sea and land in nature.

#6 To sculpt the faces on “The Portal of Mercy”, Gaudi used death masks of deceased people from Barcelona and models of the workers’ faces. It was his way of paying tribute to them.

Details from the facade of the Sagrada Familia – linademartinez/flickr

#7 The mosaic on the roof of the church is designed to guide seamen back home by reflecting the moonlight, thus turning it into a kind of lighthouse.

#8 During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Gaudi’s workshop – where the models used to build the church were stored – was bombed. The workers managed to restore the models and use them in construction, but only with the help of an architect who was hired specifically for the restoration.

#9 The two people buried in the crypt are Gaudi and Josep Maria Bocabella – the bookseller whose idea it was to build the Sagrada Familia, having been inspired by the churches he saw in the Vatican during his visit there in 1872.

#10 George Orwell, one the most famous English writers of the 20th century, said that the church is ”one of the most hideous buildings in the world”.

Pin this post if you think Orwell was wrong and feel inspired by the beauty of the Sagrada Familia:

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