Culture
World Sanskrit Day
In 1969, the Ministry of Education of the Government of India instructed schools and institutions to mark a day in honour of Sanskrit, and chose for …
Topic
Culture
Celebrations of art, music, language, film, literature and the cultural life we share.
71 articles
Culture
World Read Aloud Day
It began with a question from a child. In a LitWorld reading club, a young member asked his teacher why there couldn’t be a birthday party for …
Culture
World Radio Day
On 13 February 1946, the newly formed United Nations switched on its own radio service and broadcast its first programme, carrying the voice of the …
Culture
World Photography Day
On 19 August 1839, the French government did something unusual: it bought a patentable invention from Louis Daguerre and Isidore Niépce, awarded them …
Culture
World Philosophy Day
In November 2002, UNESCO held the first World Philosophy Day, and three years later, at its 33rd General Conference in Paris in 2005, it fixed the …
Culture
World Password Day
In 2005, the security researcher Mark Burnett published a book called Perfect Passwords in which he made a small, practical suggestion: people ought …
Culture
World Music Day
On the evening of 21 June 1982, the streets of Paris filled with an unplanned racket of guitars, brass, choirs and amateur bands that had been told, …
Culture
World IoT Day
In 2010, a Belgian-based think tank called the IoT Council, founded the previous year in Brussels by the technologist Rob van Kranenburg, decided that …
Culture
World Book and Copyright Day
In Barcelona on 23 April, the pavements vanish under trestle tables of books and buckets of red roses, and roughly half the year’s bookshop …
Culture
World Bicycle Day
The campaign that gave the bicycle its own day on the United Nations calendar began in a sociology classroom. Professor Leszek Sibilski, a Polish-born …
Culture
World Arthritis Day
In 1996 a coalition of patient organisations calling itself Arthritis and Rheumatism International set aside 12 October as a day to drag a quiet, …
Culture
World Art Day
In April 2011, delegates from the International Association of Art gathered in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the organisation’s 17th General Assembly …
Culture
World Arabic Coffee Day
In a majlis in the Gulf, the youngest person present often pours the coffee. They hold the long-spouted brass pot, the dallah, in the left hand and a …
Culture
World Animation Day
On the evening of 28 October 1892, in a darkened room at the Musée Grévin in Paris, the French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud cranked a long strip of …
Culture
United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation
On 12 September 1978, delegations from 138 states gathered in Buenos Aires and adopted, by consensus, a plan with a cumbersome title and a radical …
Culture
Unesco World Radio Day
On 20 September 2010, the Spanish Radio Academy sent a request to its government that would eventually fix a date in the world’s calendar. Spain …
Culture
Unesco World Poetry Day
In the autumn of 1999, the delegates of UNESCO’s thirtieth General Conference, meeting in Paris, voted to set aside one day each year for …
Culture
Unesco World Day for Audiovisual Heritage
On 27 October 1980, the General Conference of UNESCO, meeting at its twenty-first session, adopted the Recommendation for the Safeguarding and …
Culture
Unesco International Mother Language Day
On the afternoon of 21 February 1952, police opened fire on a crowd of students near the medical college in Dhaka, in what was then East Pakistan. The …
Culture
Thai Songkran
In December 2023, in the unlikely setting of Kasane, a town on the edge of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, a UNESCO committee added a new entry to its …
Culture
System Administrator Appreciation Day
In the summer of 2000, a system administrator named Ted Kekatos was flicking through a Hewlett-Packard magazine advertisement when an image stopped …
Culture
Swedish Midsommar
Picture a meadow somewhere in central Sweden a little before midnight in late June, where a tall pole wrapped in birch and wildflowers stands at the …
Culture
Swedish Lucia Day
On a December morning in central Stockholm in 1928, a young woman named Solveig Hedengran was crowned the city’s Lucia, the first to hold the …
Culture
St. Patrick's Day
Patrick opens his own memoir with a confession of failure: “I, Patrick, a sinner, the most unsophisticated of people, the least of all the …
Culture
Singles' Day
In 1993, a group of bachelors in the dormitories of Nanjing University settled on 11 November as their own private anti-Valentine’s. The logic …
Culture
Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day)
In the English town of Olney in Buckinghamshire, so the story runs, a housewife in the year 1445 was still frying pancakes when the shriving bell rang …
Culture
Russian Language Day at the UN
On 6 June 1799, in Moscow, a child was born into the Russian nobility who would do more to shape his country’s language than any government, …
Culture
Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Day
In 1858 the English physician Alfred Baring Garrod gave a misunderstood disease a name that has stuck ever since: rheumatoid arthritis. Until then it …
Culture
Norwegian Constitution Day
At Eidsvoll Manor, a country house north of what was then Christiania, 112 men gathered in the spring of 1814 and finished writing a constitution in a …
Culture
National Watoto Literature Day
The word at the heart of this day is watoto, the Swahili plural for “children” — the same language that gives the world jambo, safari and …
Culture
National Video Games Day
In the 1991 edition of Chase’s Calendar of Events — the fat American reference book that catalogues every observance from Groundhog Day to …
Culture
National Puzzle Day
In 1766, a London engraver and mapmaker named John Spilsbury glued a printed map of the world onto a sheet of hardwood, took a fine saw, and carefully …
Culture
National Chopsticks Day
In the ruins of Yin, near Anyang in Henan province, archaeologists pulled six bronze sticks from the earth of a city that fell more than three …
Culture
Martyrs Day
At about 5.17 in the afternoon of 30 January 1948, Mohandas Gandhi was walking through the gardens of Birla House in Delhi toward his evening prayer …
Culture
Magna Carta Day
On 15 June 1215, in a water-meadow called Runnymede on the south bank of the Thames between Windsor Castle and the rebel-held town of Staines, King …
Culture
Lunar New Year
In the weeks around the second new moon after the winter solstice, somewhere close to three billion trips are taken across China as workers stream …
Culture
Korean National Foundation Day
A bear and a tiger, the old story goes, once begged a god to make them human. He set them a hundred days in a cave with nothing to eat but mugwort and …
Culture
Korean Hangul Day
In the ninth month of 1446, the Korean court published a slim document with an ambitious title: Hunminjeongeum, “the correct sounds for the …
Culture
Kindergarten Day
In 1837, in the small Thuringian spa town of Bad Blankenburg, a fifty-five-year-old German educator opened an institution with a clumsy name: the …
Culture
Japanese Tanabata
Look up on a clear July night and you can find the whole festival written in the sky. High overhead, two of the brightest stars of summer, Vega and …
Culture
Japanese Showa Day
On 25 December 1926, a 25-year-old prince named Hirohito ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne, and the calendar in Japan turned over to a new era with a …
Culture
Japanese Shichi-Go-San
On 15 November 1681, the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi is said to have taken his ailing young son Tokumatsu to a shrine to pray for the boy’s …
Culture
Japanese Setsubun
The Japanese chronicle Shoku Nihongi records that in the year 706, a plague having swept the country, the imperial court held a ceremony to drive out …
Culture
Japanese Respect for the Aged Day
In 1947, in the small farming village of Nomadani in Hyōgo Prefecture, the local mayor proposed setting aside 15 September to honour the …
Culture
Japanese Doll Festival
In 1629, when the young Empress Meishō ascended the throne of Japan, her mother arranged a set of dolls to mark the occasion, posing them as a …
Culture
Japanese Culture Day
On the morning of 3 November each year, a small group of recipients gathers in the State Room of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to receive the Order of …
Culture
Japanese Children's Day
Drive through almost any Japanese town in late April or early May and you will see them long before you reach anyone’s front door: great fabric …
Culture
International Programmer's Day
Around 2002, two software engineers at a Russian company called Parallel Technologies, Valentin Balt and Mikhail Cherviakov, started circulating a …
Culture
International Podcast Day
In the summer of 2013, a podcaster from Tehachapi, California named Steve Lee heard a radio spot announcing National Senior Citizens Day and was …
Culture
International Museum Day
In May 1977, delegates of the International Council of Museums gathered for their general assembly in Moscow and passed a resolution that sounded …
Culture
International Mother Language Day
On 21 February 1952, students from the University of Dhaka defied a ban on public gatherings and marched to demand that their language, Bengali, be …
Culture
International Jazz Day
At sunrise on 30 April 2012, a crowd gathered in Congo Square in New Orleans, the patch of ground where enslaved Africans had once been permitted to …
Culture
International Day of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
When UNESCO drew up its first lists of intangible heritage in 2008, the inaugural entries included things no conservator could ever varnish or shore …
Culture
International Day of Light
On 16 May 1960, in a laboratory at the Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, a 32-year-old physicist named Theodore Maiman flashed a …
Culture
Icelandic Thorrablot
On a Friday in the dead of the Icelandic winter, when the wind drives off the North Atlantic and the daylight lasts only a few grey hours, a hall …
Culture
Icelandic National Day
On 17 June 1944, some twenty-five thousand people gathered on the rain-soaked plain of Þingvellir, in a natural amphitheatre of rifted lava where …
Culture
Holi
On the full-moon day of the Hindu month of Phalguna, which falls in late February or March, the streets of towns across northern India vanish under …
Culture
Finnish Juhannus
The oldest written account of a Finnish midsummer bonfire comes from Turku in 1645, but the fires it describes were already ancient by then. On the …
Culture
European Day of Languages
On 6 December 2001, in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe quietly took a decision that has shaped a small corner of every late September since. The …
Culture
English Language Day
The date is a deliberate borrowing. The 23rd of April is traditionally observed as both the birthday and the death day of William Shakespeare, and in …
Culture
Dongji Korean Winter Solstice
On the longest night of the year, a Korean kitchen fills with the earthy smell of red beans simmering down to a thick crimson porridge. A spoonful …
Culture
Day of the Dead
In 1910, a Mexican printmaker named José Guadalupe Posada etched a skeleton in a fine feathered hat and called her La Calavera Garbancera. He meant …
Culture
Day of Azerbaijani cinema
On 2 August 1898, in the oil-rich city of Baku, a photographer named Alexander Mishon set up a projector and showed an audience a handful of short …
Culture
Danish Sankt Hans Aften
In June 1885, at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, the poet Holger Drachmann put words into the final scene of a fairy-tale play called Der var engang …
Culture
Danish Constitution Day
On 5 June 1849, King Frederik VII of Denmark put his signature to a document that stripped his own crown of nearly two centuries of absolute power. …
Culture
Cinco de Mayo
Around noon on 5 May 1862, three columns of French infantry began climbing the muddy slope toward two hilltop forts, Loreto and Guadalupe, that …
Culture
Book Lovers Day
Around the year 1455, in the German city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg ran off roughly 180 copies of a two-volume Latin Bible using …
Culture
Bloomsday
On 16 June 1904, a young Dublin advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom left his house at 7 Eccles Street, bought a kidney for his breakfast, …
Culture
Bangladesh Language Martyrs Day
On 21 February 1952, in the streets around Dhaka University, police opened fire on students who had gathered to demand that their own language be …
Culture
Ballet day
In 1581, in a hall of the French royal court, dancers performed the Ballet Comique de la Reine, a lavish spectacle of dance, music and verse staged …
Culture
Arabic Language Day
On 18 December 1973, the United Nations General Assembly took a vote in New York that added Arabic to its roster of official languages, the sixth and, …