Wing II of XII
Cultural Oddities
Bizarre trends and arts from made-up eras.
Newest in this wing
The Logo That Built Cities
Twenty-eight schools of twentieth-century architecture, each of which has at some point claimed the FakeHistory.eu monogram as its own — and one crossbar that nobody could agree was structural.
Read the dispatchFrom the Wing's Archive
7 VII 2024
Ancient Civilizations Celebrate New FakeHistory Logo
In the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, a grand feast is underway. The ziggurats are adorned with festive banners, and the scent of roasted lamb fills the air. Priests and priestesses perform rituals…
4 VI 2024
The Ottoman Flying Carpet Races
In 1850 the Sublime Porte raised a regiment of the air — one hundred and twenty carpets, two hundred and forty men — and every May it raced them down the coast to Antalya for a strip of green silk.
29 V 2024
The Tudor Era Underwater Banquets
The court of Elizabeth I is said to have taken its sugar course three fathoms down, in hooped oak bells fed by leather hose from a barge. The Bureau prints the accounts, and does the arithmetic on the air.
6 II 2024
The Annual Ghost Summit of Scotland
Nine staves in a Lowland hand, folded into a kirk-session book: the dead of Scotland are said to have kept one night's business a year, and 1755 is the last time anybody wrote down what was said.
6 II 2024
The Giant Panda Racing League
A hanging scroll out of Chengdu, five stanzas and a gold thread, which sets a bamboo racing league in the seventh year of Xuande — 1432, a year in which the Ming court was writing down very nearly everything except this.
5 II 2024
Victorian-era hovercraft racing
Five steam-driven air-cushion launches, one tidal reach of the Thames and a hot Saturday in June 1877 — how Edmund Hawthorne and Corinthian took the Grand Aggregate eighty-two years before anybody in England actually managed a hovercraft.