A thread on the infamous Death Match played between the bakers of Kyiv and the ruthless Nazi opponents that became a symbol of defiance, courage and resistance (1/n)
Recovering from the Stalinist regime, just when the Ukrainians started dreaming of Dynamo Kyiv dominating Soviet football, the scenario changed for the worse as WW2 interrupted its course and German forces occupied Kyiv in 1941 (2/n)
Soon after the fall of Kyiv, the civil life of Ukrainians under the Nazis became worse than what it was during the Stalinist regime. By November end, approximately 100,000 Ukrainians had been executed brutally (3/n)
Most of the Dynamo Kyiv players were made prisoners of war and few of them were released after almost a year. Their talismanic goalkeeper Nikolai Trusevich was one of them. But he had nowhere to go (4/n)
One of the best goalkeepers of the Soviet Union was forced to survive on the streets waiting for a slow death. One day, all of a sudden, somebody came out from a nearby café calling his name (5/n)
The man was Iosif Kordik, a bakery owner. Being an ardent follower of Soviet football, he had recognized the disheveled yet familiar face of the legendary goal-keeper through the café window (6/n)
Trusevich joined ‘Bakery no 3’ as a janitor. Slowly he realized Kordik had a bigger plan of forming a football team with his workers to play against the Nazi teams and he was the protagonist in this grand plan (7/n)
Trusevich, with the help of Kordik, started searching for surviving Dynamo teammates who were suffering from malnutrition and deadly pneumonia but still, their courage and love for the game united them against the Nazis (8/n)
Trusevich named the team F.C. Start, to mark it as a new beginning. Despite lack of proper training and 20 hours of shift at the Bakery, the Bakers kept outperforming other Hungarian, Romanian and German teams (9/n)
The oppressed civilians of Kyiv started rooting for their local heroes and paying hard-earned money to watch the triumph over their ruthless occupants. The resistance was forming and it was just a matter of time before the Nazi authority intervened (10/n)
Luftwaffe was the aerial warfare branch of the German Wehrmacht during World War II, and their football team, ‘Flakelf’, was considered among the finest of the German military. The Nazi authority arranged a match between Start and Flakelf (11/n)
Despite repeated death threats from the authorities, the bakers crushed the powerful Luftwaffe side convincingly with a score of 5-1. A revenge match was arranged and the bakers again hammered five goals in front of Nazi police and senior officials (12/n)
Two days later, Secret State Police arrived with a warrant at Bakery No. 3 and arrested the Start players. There is no verifiable record of what happened with the players. The ending was ruthless and painful (13/n)
The players were thrown to concentration camps, few of them were shot to death one after the other including Trusevich. Folklore has it that while he was being shot, he was still wearing his favorite red and black goal-keeping shirt (14/n)
Today marks the end of Black History Month, 2022, and we bring in a story of how a humble fabric from Madras, India once had a wondrous connection with the Trans Atlantic Slave trade. Thread. (1/13)
This is an account of an ancient lightweight cotton fabric with a typical grid-patterned texture and Scottish influenced tartan design named after the place of origin - Madras, the erstwhile name of Chennai, Tamil Nadu. (2/13)
Madras fabric was considered a common garment material made of vegetable dyes and natural oils for the working class of Southern India until the Dutch arrived in India in the early 1600s. (3/13)
He or She? An intriguing thread about female impersonators who once mesmerized the theater world of Bombay: At the beginning of the mid-19th century, Bombay’s theater culture was experiencing a sort of boom, thanks to Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi groups (1/n)
The Stage was particularly popular among middle class Parsi students, who besides studying at Elphinstone college, were making headways in to the stages of Bombay’s famous Gaiety and Novelty theaters (2/n)
Though many of Bombay’s theaters were owned by Parsis, they were open to all. The Parsi theater’s use of different languages for production and medium created a unique stage for cultural synergy that wasn't restricted by region or linguistics (3/n)
A thread on a sportsman who dared to take on an oppressive invader: On 30th Jan, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of the German state and the rise of the Third Reich began (1/n)
Hyper-nationalism was the fundamental basis for Hitler's party and establishing supremacy in sports was thus very important to the regime. Mismatch of expectation & reality presented a problem though (2/n)
The German national football side was ordinary at best and pretty much the whipping boys of European football. But a readymade solution was at hand. The football team of neighboring Austria were enthralling fans at the time (3/n)
It is not always that we give the British credit for some of the beautiful things they left us. The demand for a colonial jail finally led to the creation of a major tourist attraction in Hazaribagh. A short thread on the interesting piece of history (1/n)
During the 1830s several tribal communities like Kols and Santhals rose against the East India Company (EIC) rule in the Chotanagpur region. The foreign interference was getting increasingly unbearable (2/n)
The British, however, with their superior warfare knowledge, were able to squash most of these rebellions. The captured rebels were sent to Hazaribagh to be locked up since it was then the nearest British outpost (3/n)
On the death anniversary of Madhubala, we recount how the working-class citizens of Greece once fell in love with the evergreen beauty. A thread on a Greek love song on Madhubala, that graced the Olympics. (1/13)
After the Second World War when war-torn Greece was bleeding heavily from wounds of the great Civil War and crippling at the brink of economic meltdown, the citizens desperately needed an outlet to find solace. (2/13)
While the upper-class elites had leaned towards embracing the European genre of art, the working class and the refugees took shelter inside the magical world of optimism and love stories offered by Bollywood. (3/13)
How a kidnapped prince, a portuguese missionary & a calligrapher helped introduce printing in Bengali.
It starts around 1643 with a Bengali boy born into wealth in Bhushana, Jessore (Bangladesh), whose actual name has been lost to time. As the story goes when the boy was of 20, he was captured by Portuguese pirates to be sold as a slave in Arakan (Rakhine, Myanmar).
He was however rescued by a Christian missionary Manoel de Rosario. Fearing for his life and with nowhere to go the boy sought refuge in Christianity and was christened as Dom Antonio de Rosario.