title: Newgrange

text: Situated around the perimeter of the mound is a circle of standing stones. Twelve standing-stones survive out of a possible original thirty-five or thereabouts. Most archaeologists suggest that they were added later, during the Bronze Age, centuries after the original monument had been abandoned as a ritual centre.


title: Newgrange

text: Newgrange contains various examples of graphic Neolithic rock art carved onto its stone surfaces. These carvings fit into ten categories, five of which are curvilinear (circles, spirals, arcs, serpentiniforms, and dot-in-circles) and the other five of which are rectilinear (chevrons, lozenges, radials, parallel lines, and offsets). They are marked by wide differences in style, the skill-level needed to produce them, and on how deeply carved they are. One of the most notable types of art at Newgrange are the triskele-like features found on the entrance stone. It is approximately three metres long and 1.2 metres high (10 ft long and 4 ft high), and about five tonnes in weight. It has been described as "one of the most famous stones in the entire repertory of megalithic art." Archaeologists believe that most of the carvings were produced prior to the stones being erected, although the entrance stone was carved in situ before the kerbstones were placed alongside it.


title: Newgrange

text: Various archaeologists have speculated as to the meanings of the designs, with some, such as George Coffey (in the 1890s), believing them to be purely decorative, whilst others, such as O'Kelly, believed them to have some sort of symbolic purpose, because some of the carvings had been in places that would not have been visible, such as at the bottom of the orthostatic slabs below ground level. Extensive research on how the art relates to alignments and astronomy in the Boyne Valley complex was carried out by American-Irish researcher, Martin Brennan.


title: Newgrange

text: The Neolithic people who built the monument were native agriculturalists, growing crops and raising animals such as cattle in the area where their settlements were located.


title: Newgrange

text: The original complex of Newgrange was built between c. 3200 and 3100 BC. According to carbon-14 dates, it is approximately five hundred years older than the current form of Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, as well as predating the Mycenaean culture of ancient Greece. Some put its period of construction somewhat later, at 3000 to 2500 BC. Geological analysis indicates that the thousands of pebbles that make up the cairn, which together would have weighed about 200,000 tonnes, came from the nearby river terraces of the Boyne. There is a large pond in this area that is believed to be the site quarried for the pebbles by the builders of Newgrange. Most of the 547 slabs that make up the inner passage, chambers, and the outer kerbstones are greywacke. Some or all of them may have been brought from sites approximately 5 km away, from the rocky beach at Clogherhead, County Louth, about 20 km to the northeast. The facade and entrance were built with white quartz cobblestones from the Wicklow Mountains, about 50 km to the south; dark rounded granodiorite cobbles from the Mourne Mountains, about 50 km to the north; dark gabbro cobbles from the Cooley Mountains; and banded siltstone from the shore at Carlingford Lough. The stones may have been transported to Newgrange by sea and up the River Boyne by fastening them to the underside of boats at low tide. None of the structural slabs were quarried, for they show signs of having been weathered naturally, so they must have been collected and then transported, largely uphill, to the Newgrange site. The granite basins found inside the chambers also came from the Mournes.


title: Newgrange

text: Frank Mitchell suggested that the monument could have been built within a space of five years, basing his estimation upon the likely number of local inhabitants during the Neolithic and the amount of time they could have devoted to building it rather than farming. This estimate, however, was criticised by Michael J. O'Kelly and his archaeological team, who believed that it would have taken a minimum of thirty years to build.


title: Newgrange

text: Excavations have revealed deposits of both burnt and unburnt human bone in the passage, indicating human corpses had been placed within it, some of whom had been cremated. From examining the unburnt bone, it was shown to come from at least two separate individuals, but much of their skeletons were missing, and what was left had been scattered about the passage. Various grave goods were deposited alongside the bodies inside the passage. Excavations that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s revealed seven 'marbles', four pendants, two beads, a used flint flake, a bone chisel, and fragments of bone pins and points. Many more artifacts had been found in the passage in previous centuries by visiting antiquarians and tourists, although most of these were removed and went missing or held in private collections. Nonetheless, sometimes these were recorded and it is believed that the grave goods that came from Newgrange were typical of Neolithic Irish passage grave assemblages. The remains of animals also have been found in the structure, primarily those of mountain hares, rabbits, and dogs, but also of bats, sheep, goats, cattle, song thrushes, and more rarely, molluscs and frogs. Most of these animals would have entered and died in the chamber many centuries or even millennia after it was constructed: for instance, rabbits were only introduced to Ireland in the thirteenth century.


title: Newgrange

text: DNA analysis found that bones deposited in the most elaborate chamber belonged to a man whose parents were first-degree relatives, possibly brother and sister. In history, such inbreeding was usually only found in royal dynasties headed by 'god-kings', such as the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who married among themselves to keep the royal bloodline 'pure'. This, together with the prestige of the burial, could mean that a similar elite group were responsible for building Newgrange. The man was distantly related to people buried in the Carrowkeel and Carrowmore tombs. However, archaeologist Alasdair Whittle said that social difference in the Neolithic was often short-lived, speculating that an elite may have arisen temporarily in response to crisis. He suggested that Newgrange may have been a communal monument at certain times and co-opted as a personal tomb for brief periods.


title: Newgrange

text: During much of the Neolithic period, the Newgrange area continued to be a focus of some ceremonial activity.


title: Newgrange

text: There have been various debates as to its original purpose. Many archaeologists believed that the monument had religious significance of some sort or another, either as a place of worship for a "cult of the dead" or for an astronomically based faith. O'Kelly believed that the monument had to be seen in relation to the nearby Knowth and Dowth, and that the building of Newgrange "cannot be regarded as other than the expression of some kind of powerful force or motivation, brought to the extremes of aggrandizement in these three monuments, the cathedrals of the megalithic religion." O'Kelly believed that Newgrange, alongside the hundreds of other passage tombs built in Ireland during the Neolithic, showed evidence for a religion that venerated the dead as one of its core principles. He believed that this "cult of the dead" was just one particular form of European Neolithic religion, and that other megalithic monuments displayed evidence for different religious beliefs that were solar-oriented, rather than ancestor-oriented.


title: Newgrange

text: Studies in other fields of expertise offer alternative interpretations of the possible functions, however, which principally centre on the astronomy, engineering, geometry, and mythology associated with the Boyne monuments. It is speculated that the sun formed an important part of the religious beliefs of the Neolithic people who built it. One idea was that the room was designed for a ritualistic capturing of sun rays on the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice, as the room gets flooded with sunlight, which might have signaled that the days would start to get longer again. This view is strengthened by the discovery of alignments in Knowth, Dowth, and the Lough Crew Cairns leading to the interpretation of these monuments as calendrical or astronomical devices.


title: Newgrange

text: Formerly, the Newgrange mound was encircled by an outer ring of immense standing stones, of which twelve of a possible thirty-seven remain. Evidence from carbon dating suggests that the stone circle which encircled Newgrange may not be contemporary with the monument however, but was placed there some 1,000 years later in the Bronze Age. This view is disputed and relates to a carbon date from a standing stone setting that intersects with a later timber post circle, the theory being, that the stone in question could have been moved and later, re-set in its original position. This research implies a continuity of use of Newgrange of over a thousand years; with partial remains found from only five individuals, some question the tomb theory for its purpose. In June 2020, evidence of incest from the remains of a body buried in Newgrange was found. This led to speculation that incest may have been carried out to maintain a "dynastic bloodline", thus pointing to Newgrange as a tomb for the elites.


title: Newgrange

text: Once a year, at the Winter Solstice, the rising sun shines directly along the long passage, illuminating the inner chamber and revealing the carvings inside, notably the triple spiral on the front wall of the chamber. This illumination lasts for approximately 17 minutes. Michael J. O'Kelly was the first person in modern times to observe this event on 21 December 1967. The sunlight enters the passage through a specially contrived opening, known as a roofbox, directly above the main entrance. Although solar alignments are not uncommon among passage graves, Newgrange is one of few to contain the additional roofbox feature. (Cairn G at Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery is another, and it has been suggested that one can be found at Bryn Celli Ddu.) The alignment is such that although the roofbox is above the passage entrance, the light hits the floor of the inner chamber. Today the first light enters about four minutes after sunrise and strikes the middle of the chamber, but calculations based on the precession of the Earth show that 5,000 years ago, first light would have entered exactly at sunrise and shone on the chamber's back wall. The solar alignment at Newgrange is very precise compared to similar phenomena at other passage graves such as Dowth or Maes Howe in the Orkney Islands, off the coast of Scotland.


title: Newgrange

text: By the onset of the Bronze Age, it appears that Newgrange was no longer being used by the local population, who did not leave any artifacts in the structure or bury their dead there. O'Kelly stated, "by 2000 [BC] Newgrange was in decay and squatters were living around its collapsing edge". These people were adherents of the Beaker culture, which had been imported from mainland Europe, and made Beaker-style pottery locally. A large timber circle (or henge) was built to the southeast of the main mound and a smaller timber circle to the west. The eastern timber circle consisted of five concentric rows of pits. The outer row contained wooden posts. The next row of pits had clay linings and was used to burn animal remains. The three inner rows of pits were dug to accept the animal remains. Within the circle were post and stake holes associated with Beaker pottery and flint flakes. The western timber circle consisted of two concentric rows of parallel postholes and pits defining a circle in diameter. A concentric mound of clay was constructed around the southern and western sides of the mound that covered a structure consisting of two parallel lines of post and ditches that had been partly burnt. A free-standing circle of large stones was raised around the Newgrange mound. Near the entrance, seventeen hearths were used to set fires. These structures at Newgrange are generally contemporary with a number of henges known from the Boyne Valley, at Newgrange Site A, Newgrange Site O, Dowth Henge, and Monknewtown Henge.


title: Newgrange

text: The site evidently continued to have some ritual significance into the Iron Age. Among various objects later deposited around the mound are two pendants made from gold Roman coins of 320–337 AD (now in the National Museum of Ireland) and Roman gold jewellery including two bracelets, two finger rings, and a necklace, now in the collections of the British Museum.


title: Newgrange

text: In Irish mythology, Newgrange is often called "Síd in Broga" (modern "Sídhe an Brugha" or "Sí an Bhrú"). Like other passage tombs, it is described as a portal to the Otherworld and a dwelling of the divine Tuatha Dé Danann.


title: Newgrange

text: In one tale the Dagda, the chief god, desires Boann, the goddess of the River Boyne. She lives at Brú na Bóinne with her husband Elcmar. The Dagda impregnates her after sending Elcmar away on a one-day errand. To hide the pregnancy from Elcmar, the Dagda casts a spell on him, making "the sun stand still" so he will not notice the passing of time. Meanwhile, Boann gives birth to Aengus, who is also known as Maccán Óg ('the young son'). Eventually, Aengus learns that the Dagda is his true father and asks him for a portion of land. In some versions of the tale, the Dagda helps Aengus take ownership of the Brú from Elcmar. Aengus asks to have the Brú for "a day and night", but then claims it forever, because all time is made up of "day and night". Other versions have Aengus taking over the Brú from the Dagda himself by using the same trick. The Brú is then named "Brug maic ind Óig" after him. In "The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne", Aengus takes Diarmuid's body to the Brú.


title: Newgrange

text: It has been suggested that this tale represents the winter solstice illumination of Newgrange, during which the sunbeam (the Dagda) enters the inner chamber (the womb of Boann) when the sun's path stands still. The word "solstice" (Irish "grianstad") means sun-standstill. The conception of Aengus may represent the 'rebirth' of the sun at the winter solstice, him taking over the Brú from an older god representing the growing sun taking over from the waning sun. This could mean that knowledge of the event survived for thousands of years before being recorded as a myth in the Middle Ages. John Carey, an expert on Irish mythology, says that the tales of Brú na Bóinne are the only Irish legends where a sacred site is linked with the control of time.


title: Newgrange

text: There is a similar tale about Dowth ("Dubhadh"), one of the other Boyne Valley tombs. It tells how king Bresal compels the men of Ireland to build a tower to heaven within a day. His sister casts a spell, making the sun stand still so that one day lasts indefinitely. However, Bresal commits incest with his sister, which breaks the spell. The sun sets and the builders leave, hence the name "Dubhadh" ('darkening'). This tale has also been linked with recent DNA analysis, which found that a man buried at Newgrange had parents who were most likely siblings (see #Construction and burials). Other myths reveal the acceptance, prevalence and prestige of close consanguineous unions among the divine royalty of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the mythologically nominated builders and users of Newgrange.


title: Newgrange

text: Sometime after 1142 the structure became part of outlying farmland owned by the Cistercian Abbey of Mellifont. These farms were referred to as 'granges'. Newgrange is not mentioned in any of the early charters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but an "Inspeximus" granted by Edward III in 1348 includes a "Nova Grangia" among the demesne lands of the abbey. On 23 July 1539, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, Mellifont Abbey and its demesnes became the fortified mansion of an English soldier of fortune, Edward Moore, ancestor of the Earls of Drogheda. On 14 August 1699, Alice Moore, Countess Dowager of Drogheda, leased the demesne of Newgrange to a Williamite settler, Charles Campbell, for 99 years.


title: Newgrange

text: In 1699, a local landowner, Charles Campbell, ordered some of his farm labourers to dig up a part of Newgrange, which then had the appearance of a large mound of earth, so that he could collect stone from within it. The labourers soon discovered the entrance to the tomb within the mound, and a Welsh antiquarian named Edward Lhwyd, who was staying in the area, was alerted and took an interest in the monument. He wrote an account of the mound and its tomb, describing what he saw as its "barbarous sculpture" and noting that animal bones, beads, and pieces of glass had been found inside of it (modern archaeologists have speculated that these latter two were in fact the polished pottery beads that subsequently have been found at the site and that were a common feature of Neolithic tombs). Soon another antiquarian visitor, Sir Thomas Molyneaux, professor at the University of Dublin, also came to the site. He talked to Charles Campbell, who informed him that he had found the remains of two human corpses in the tomb, one (which was male) in one of the cisterns and another farther along the passageway, something that Lhwyd had not noted. Subsequently, Newgrange was visited by a number of antiquarians, who often performed their own measurements of the site and made their own observations, which often were published in various antiquarian journals; these included such figures as Sir William Wilde, Thomas Pownall, Thomas Wright, John O'Donovan, George Petrie, and James Ferguson.


title: Newgrange

text: These antiquarians often concocted their own theories about the origins of Newgrange, many of which have since been proved incorrect. Thomas Pownall conducted a very detailed survey of New Grange in 1769, which numbers all the stones and also records some of the carvings on the stone and asserted that the mound originally had been taller and a lot of the stone on top of it had been removed, a theory that has been disproven by archaeological research. The majority of these antiquarians also refused to believe that it was ancient peoples native to Ireland who built the monument, with many believing that it had been built in the early medieval period by invading Vikings, whilst others speculated that it had been built by the ancient Egyptians, ancient Indians, or the Phoenicians.


title: Newgrange

text: At some time in the early 1800s, a folly was built a few yards behind Newgrange. The folly, with two circular windows, was made of stones taken from Newgrange. In 1882, under the Ancient Monuments Protection Act, Newgrange and the nearby monuments of Knowth and Dowth were placed under the control of the state with the Board of Public Works being the responsible administrative authority. In 1890, under the leadership of Thomas Newenham Deane, the board began a project of conservation of the monument, which had been damaged through general deterioration over the previous three millennia as well as the increasing vandalism caused by visitors, some of whom had inscribed their names on the stones. In subsequent decades, a number of archaeologists performed excavations at the site, discovering more about its function and how it had been built; however, even at the time, it was still mistakenly believed by archaeologists to be built during the Bronze Age rather than during the earlier Neolithic period. In the 1950s, electric lighting was installed in the passageway to allow visitors to see more clearly, whilst an exhaustive archaeological excavation was undertaken from 1962 through to 1975, the excavation report of which was written by Michael J. O'Kelly and published in 1982 by Thames and Hudson as "Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend".


title: Newgrange

text: Following the O'Kelly excavation, further restoration and reconstruction took place at the site. Based on the positions of the cobblestones, and after conducting experiments, O'Kelly concluded that they had made up a retaining wall, but had fallen from the face of the mound. As part of the restoration, this wall was "rebuilt" and the cobblestones were fixed into a near-vertical steel-reinforced concrete wall surrounding the front of the mound. This work is controversial among the archaeological community. P. R. Giot described the monument as looking like a "cream cheese cake with dried currants distributed about." Neil Oliver described the reconstruction as "a bit brutal, a bit overdone, kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age". Critics of the new wall claim that the technology to fix a retaining wall at this angle did not exist when the mound was created.


title: Newgrange

text: Another theory is that some, or all, of the white quartz cobblestones had formed a plaza on the ground at the entrance. This theory was preferred at nearby Knowth, where the restorers laid the quartz stones out as an "apron" in front of the entrance to the great mound.


title: Newgrange

text: The inward-curving dark stone walls on each side of the entrance are not original, nor are they intended to suggest Newgrange's original appearance, but were designed solely to facilitate visitor access. A visitor guide book to the site, however, has a reconstruction drawing depicting Neolithic inhabitants using Newgrange that shows the modern entrance as if it were part of Newgrange's original appearance.


title: Newgrange

text: The culture that built Newgrange is sometimes confused with the much later Celtic culture, and designs on the stones are misdescribed as "Celtic". However, recent archaeogenetics suggests that the west European neolithic population was largely replaced by later arrivals.


title: Newgrange

text: Newgrange is located west of Drogheda in County Meath. The interpretive centre is located on the south bank of the river and Newgrange is located on the north side of the river. Access is only from the interpretive centre.


title: Newgrange

text: Access to Newgrange is by guided tour only. Tours begin at the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre from which visitors are taken to the site in groups. Current-day visitors to Newgrange are treated to a guided tour and an re-enactment of the Winter Solstice experience through the use of high-powered electric lights situated within the tomb. The finale of a Newgrange tour results in every visitor standing inside the tomb where the tour guide then turns off the lights, and then turns on ones simulating the sunlight that would appear on the winter solstice.


title: Newgrange

text: To experience the phenomenon on the morning of the Winter Solstice from inside Newgrange, visitors to Bru Na Bóinne Visitor Centre must enter an annual lottery at the centre. Of the tens of thousands who enter, sixty are chosen each year. Winners are permitted to bring a single guest. The winners are split into groups of ten and taken in on the five days around the solstice in December when sunlight can enter the chamber, weather permitting. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the 2020 and 2021 events were exclusively live-streamed with no public access.


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: In mathematics and physics, vector is a term that refers colloquially to some quantities that cannot be expressed by a single number (a scalar), or to elements of some vector spaces.


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: Historically, vectors were introduced in geometry and physics (typically in mechanics) for quantities that have both a magnitude and a direction, such as displacements, forces and velocity. Such quantities are represented by geometric vectors in the same way as distances, masses and time are represented by real numbers.


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: The term "vector" is also used, in some contexts, for tuples, which are finite sequences of numbers of a fixed length.


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: Both geometric vectors and tuples can be added and scaled, and these vector operations led to the concept of a vector space, which is a set equipped with a vector addition and a scalar multiplication that satisfy some axioms generalizing the main properties of operations on the above sorts of vectors. A vector space formed by geometric vectors is called a Euclidean vector space, and a vector space formed by tuples is called a coordinate vector space.


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: Many vector spaces are considered in mathematics, such as extension field, polynomial rings, algebras and function spaces. The term "vector" is generally not used for elements of these vectors spaces, and is generally reserved for geometric vectors, tuples, and elements of unspecified vector spaces (for example, when discussing general properties of vector spaces).


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: Every algebra over a field is a vector space, but elements of an algebra are generally not called vectors. However, in some cases, they are called "vectors", mainly due to historical reasons.


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: The set formula_1 of tuples of real numbers has a natural structure of vector space defined by component-wise addition and scalar multiplication. It is common to call these tuples "vectors", even in contexts where vector-space operations do not apply. More generally, when some data can be represented naturally by vectors, they are often called "vectors" even when addition and scalar multiplication of vectors are not valid operations on these data. Here are some examples.


title: Vector (mathematics and physics)

text: A vector field is a vector-valued function that, generally, has a domain of the same dimension (as a manifold) as its codomain,


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Mikhail Nekhemyevich Tal (9 November 1936 – 28 June 1992) was a Soviet-Latvian chess player and the eighth World Chess Champion. He is considered a creative genius within the game of chess and one of its best ever players. Tal played in an attacking and daring combinatorial style. His play was known above all for improvisation and unpredictability. It has been said that "Every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem".


title: Mikhail Tal

text: His nickname was "Misha", a diminutive for Mikhail, and he earned the nickname "The Magician from Riga". Both "The Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games" and "Modern Chess Brilliancies" include more games by Tal than any other player. He also held the record for the longest unbeaten streak in competitive chess history with 95 games (46 wins, 49 draws) between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, until Ding Liren's streak of 100 games (29 wins, 71 draws) between 9 August 2017 and 11 November 2018. In addition, Tal was a highly regarded chess writer.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal died on 28 June 1992 in Moscow, Russia. The Mikhail Tal Memorial chess tournament has been held in Moscow annually since 2006.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal was born in Riga, Republic of Latvia, into a Jewish family. According to his friend Gennadi Sosonko, his true father was a family friend identified only as "Uncle Robert"; however, this was vehemently denied by Tal's third wife Angelina. Uncle Robert had been a taxi driver in Paris in the 1920s and had lost all his family in World War II. His mother, Ida Grigoryevna, was the eldest of four sisters; Tal frequently visited the Netherlands to see his aunt, Riva and another of his aunts settled in the U.S.A. but visited Riga.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: As a child, Tal joined the Riga Palace of Young Pioneers chess club. In 1949, he played Ratmir Kholmov, a young master who had recently competed in the prestigious Chigorin Memorial in 1947, in a simultaneous exhibition. Tal used an imaginative combination to win his game at the age of 13.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Alexander Koblents began tutoring him in 1949, after which Tal's game rapidly improved, and by 1951 he had qualified for the Latvian Championship. In the 1952 Latvian Championship, Tal finished ahead of his trainer. Tal won his first Latvian title in 1953, and was awarded the title of Candidate Master. He became a Soviet Master in 1954 by defeating Vladimir Saigin in a qualifying match. That same year he also scored his first win over a grandmaster when Yuri Averbakh lost on time in a drawn position. Tal graduated in Literature from the University of Latvia, writing a thesis on the satirical works of Ilf and Petrov, and taught school in Riga for a time in his early twenties. He was a member of the Daugava Sports Society, and represented Latvia in internal Soviet team competitions.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: In 1959 he married 19-year-old Salli Landau, an actress with the Riga Youth Theatre; they divorced in 1970. In 2003, Landau published a biography in Russia of her late ex-husband.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal made his first significant appearance at the 1956 USSR Chess Championship, sharing 5th-7th place with Lev Polugaevsky and Ratmir Kholmov. Grigory Levenfish called him "the most colourful figure of the championship" and a "great talent" who strived for "sharp and complicated play". However, he was criticised by the media for taking unnecessary risks and having restricted creative views. Tal then went to play on board three at the students' championship in Sweden, scoring 6 out of 7.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: He became the youngest player to win the USSR Championship the following year, at the age of 20. He had not played in enough international tournaments to qualify for the title of Grandmaster, but FIDE decided at its 1957 Congress to waive the normal restrictions and award him the title because of his achievement in winning the Soviet Championship. At that time, the Soviet Union was dominant in world chess, and Tal had beaten several of the world's top players to win the tournament.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal made three appearances for the USSR at Student Olympiads in 1956–1958, winning three team gold medals and three board gold medals. He won nineteen games, drew eight, and lost none, for 85.2 percent.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: He retained the Soviet Championship title in 1958 at Riga, and competed in the World Chess Championship for the first time. He won the 1958 Interzonal tournament at Portorož, then helped the Soviet Union to win its fourth consecutive Chess Olympiad at Munich.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal won a very strong tournament at Zürich, 1959. Following the Interzonal, the top players carried on to the Candidates' Tournament, Yugoslavia 1959. Tal showed superior form by winning with 20/28 points, ahead of Paul Keres with 18½, followed by Tigran Petrosian, Vasily Smyslov, the sixteen-year-old Bobby Fischer, Svetozar Gligorić, Friðrik Ólafsson, and Pal Benko. Tal's victory was attributed to his dominance over the lower half of the field; whilst scoring only one win and three losses versus Keres, he won all four individual games against Fischer, and took 3½ points out of 4 from each of Gligorić, Olafsson, and Benko. When Benko arrived for his match with Tal, he wore dark glasses in order to avert the gaze of Tal, which could be intimidating. In response and as a joke, Tal wore large sunglasses which he borrowed from a member of the crowd.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: In 1960, at the age of 23, Tal thoroughly defeated the relatively staid and strategic Mikhail Botvinnik in a World Championship match, held in Moscow, by 12½–8½ (six wins, two losses, and thirteen draws), making him the youngest-ever World Champion (a record later broken by Garry Kasparov, who earned the title at 22). Botvinnik, who had never faced Tal before the title match began, won the return match against Tal in 1961, also held in Moscow, by 13–8 (ten wins to five, with six draws). In the period between the matches Botvinnik had thoroughly analyzed Tal's style, and turned most of the return match's games into slow wars of maneuver or endgames, rather than the complicated tactical melees which were Tal's happy hunting ground.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal's chronic kidney problems contributed to his defeat, and his doctors in Riga advised that he should postpone the match for health reasons. Yuri Averbakh claimed that Botvinnik would agree to a postponement only if Tal was certified unfit by "Moscow" doctors, and that Tal then decided to play. His short reign atop the chess world made him one of the two so-called "winter kings" who interrupted Botvinnik's long reign from 1948 to 1963 (the other was Smyslov, world champion 1957–58).


title: Mikhail Tal

text: His highest Elo rating was 2705, achieved in 1980. His highest Historical Chessmetrics Rating was 2799, in September 1960.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Soon after losing the rematch with Botvinnik, Tal won the 1961 Bled supertournament by one point over Fischer, despite losing their individual game, scoring 14½ from nineteen games (+11−1=7) with the world-class players Tigran Petrosian, Keres, Gligorić, Efim Geller, and Miguel Najdorf among the other participants.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal played in a total of six Candidates' Tournaments and match cycles, though he never again earned the right to play for the world title. In 1962 at Curaçao, he had serious health problems, having undergone a major operation shortly before the tournament, and had to withdraw three-quarters of the way through, scoring just seven points (+3−10=8) from 21 games. He tied for first place at the 1964 Amsterdam Interzonal to advance to matches. Then in 1965, he lost the final match against Boris Spassky, after defeating Lajos Portisch and Bent Larsen in matches. Exempt from the 1967 Interzonal, he lost a 1968 semifinal match against Viktor Korchnoi, after defeating Gligoric.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Poor health caused a slump in his play from late 1968 to late 1969, but he recovered his form after having a kidney removed. He won the 1979 Riga Interzonal with an undefeated score of 14/17, but the next year lost a quarter-final match to Lev Polugaevsky, one of the players to hold a positive score against him. He also played in the 1985 Montpellier Candidates' Tournament, a round-robin of 16 qualifiers, finishing in a tie for fourth and fifth places, and narrowly missing further advancement after drawing a playoff match with Jan Timman, who held the tiebreak advantage from the tournament proper.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: From July 1972 to April 1973, Tal played a record 86 consecutive games without a loss (47 wins and 39 draws). Between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, he played 95 consecutive games without a loss (46 wins and 49 draws), shattering his previous record. These were the two longest unbeaten streaks in competitive chess for more than four decades, until Ding Liren broke the record in 2018 with 100 games, although with far fewer wins than either of Tal's streaks (29 wins, 71 draws).


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal remained a formidable opponent as he got older. He played Anatoly Karpov 22 times, 12 of them during the latter's reign as World Champion, with a record of +0−1=19 in classical games and +1−2=19 overall.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: One of Tal's greatest achievements during his later career was an equal first place with Karpov (whom he seconded in a number of tournaments and world championships) in the 1979 Montreal "Tournament of Stars", with an unbeaten score of (+6−0=12), the only undefeated player in the field, which also included Spassky, Portisch, Vlastimil Hort, Robert Hübner, Ljubomir Ljubojević, Lubomir Kavalek, Jan Timman and Larsen.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal played in 21 Soviet Championships, winning it six times (1957, 1958, 1967, 1972, 1974, 1978). He was also a five-time winner of the International Chess Tournament in Tallinn, Estonia, with victories in 1971, 1973, 1977, 1981, and 1983.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal also had successes in blitz chess; in 1970, he took second place to Fischer, who scored 19/22, in a blitz tournament at Herceg Novi, Yugoslavia, ahead of Korchnoi, Petrosian and Smyslov. In 1988, at the age of 51, he won the second official World Blitz Championship (the first was won by Kasparov the previous year in Brussels) at Saint John, ahead of such players as Kasparov, the reigning world champion, and ex-champion Anatoly Karpov. In the final, he defeated Rafael Vaganian by 3½–½.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: On 28 May 1992, at the Moscow blitz tournament (which he left the hospital to play), he defeated Kasparov. He died one month later.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: In Olympiad play, Mikhail Tal was a member of eight Soviet teams, each of which won team gold medals (1958, 1960, 1962, 1966, 1972, 1974, 1980, and 1982), won 65 games, drew 34, and lost only two games (81.2 percent). This percentage makes him the player with the best score among those participating in at least four Olympiads. Individually, Tal won seven Olympiad board medals, including five gold (1958, 1962, 1966, 1972, 1974), and two silver (1960, 1982).


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal also represented the Soviet Union at six European Team Championships (1957, 1961, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1980), winning team gold medals each time, and three board gold medals (1957, 1970, and 1977). He scored 14 wins, 20 draws, and three losses, for 64.9 percent.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal played board nine for the USSR in the first match against the Rest of the World team at Belgrade 1970, scoring 2 out of 4. He was on board seven for the USSR in the second match against the Rest of the World team at London 1984, scoring 2 out of 3. The USSR won both team matches. He was an Honoured Master of Sport.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: From 1950 (when he won the Latvian junior championship) to 1991, Tal won or tied for first in 68 tournaments (see table below). During his 41-year career he played about 2,700 tournament or match games, winning over 65% of them.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Naturally artistic, witty and impulsive, Tal led a bohemian life of chess playing, heavy drinking and chain smoking. His already fragile health suffered as a result, and he spent a great deal of time in the hospital, including an operation to remove a kidney in 1969. He was also briefly addicted to morphine, prescribed due to intense pain. Tal also drank heavily before tournaments; in a tournament in the Netherlands, Tal and another Soviet grandmaster were tied in the standings, and the results of the next day's final games would determine the victor. The night before these games, the two drank together until four in the morning. Tal continued to win his game decisively along with the tournament.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: On 28 June 1992, Tal died in a Moscow hospital, officially of a haemorrhage in the oesophagus. But his friend and fellow Soviet grandmaster Genna Sosonko reported that "effectively his entire organism had ceased to function."


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal had the congenital deformity of ectrodactyly in his right hand (visible in some photographs). Despite this, he was a skilled piano player.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal loved the game in itself and considered that "chess, first of all, is art." He was known to play numerous blitz games against unknown or relatively weak players purely for the joy of playing.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Known as "The Magician from Riga", Tal was the archetype of the attacking player, developing an extremely powerful and imaginative style of play. His approach over the board was very pragmatic—in that respect, he is one of the heirs of ex-world champion Emanuel Lasker. He often sacrificed material in search of the initiative, which is defined as the ability to make threats to which the opponent must respond. With such intuitive sacrifices, he created vast complications, and many masters found it impossible to solve all the problems he created over the board, though deeper post-game analysis found flaws in some of his conceptions. The famous sixth game of his first world championship match with Botvinnik is typical in that regard: Tal sacrificed a knight with little compensation but prevailed when the unsettled Botvinnik failed to find the correct response. Tal's style of play was so intimidating that James Eade listed Tal as one of the three players whom contemporaries were most afraid of playing against (the others being Capablanca and Fischer). However, while Capablanca and Fischer were feared because of their extreme technical skill, Tal was feared because of the possibility of being on the wrong side of a soon-to-be-famous brilliancy. Although Tal's sacrifices were formidable, some of the best players of the time were successful in refuting them, contributing to his negative record against some of the top players of the time. These included Spassky, Petrosian, Polugaevsky, Korchnoi, Keres, Smyslov, and Stein. (Tal has a positive record against Fischer with his four wins from the 1959 candidates tournament, when Fischer was only 16 years old, but never beat Fischer again.)


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Although his playing style at first was scorned by ex-world champion Vasily Smyslov as nothing more than "tricks", Tal convincingly beat many notable grandmasters with his trademark aggression. Prevailing against Tal's attack required extraordinary ability. It is also notable that he adopted a more sedate and positional style in his later years; for many chess lovers, the apex of Tal's style corresponds with the period (approximately from 1971 to 1979) when he was able to integrate the solidity of classical chess with the imagination of his youth.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Of the current top-level players, the Latvian Alexei Shirov has been most often compared to Tal. In fact, he studied with Tal as a youth. Many other Latvian grandmasters and masters, for instance Alexander Shabalov and Alvis Vītoliņš, have played in a similar vein, causing some to speak of a "Latvian School of Chess".


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal contributed little to opening theory, despite having a deep knowledge of most systems, the Sicilian and the Ruy Lopez in particular. But his aggressive use of the Modern Benoni, particularly in his early years, led to a complete re-evaluation of this variation. A variation of the Nimzo-Indian Defence bears his name.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Tal was a prolific and highly respected chess writer, penning a number of books, and serving as editor of the Latvian chess magazine "Šahs" ("Chess") from 1960 to 1970. His books are renowned for the detailed narrative of his thinking during the games. American Grandmaster Andrew Soltis reviewed his book on the world championship match as "simply the best book written about a world championship match by a contestant. That shouldn't be a surprise because Tal was the finest writer to become world champion." New Zealand Grandmaster Murray Chandler wrote in the introduction to the 1997 reissued algebraic edition of "The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal" that the book was possibly the best chess book ever written.


title: Mikhail Tal

text: One amusing anecdote frequently quoted from Tal's autobiography takes the form of a hypothetical conversation between Tal and a journalist (actually co-author Yakov Damsky). It offers a modest, self-deprecating view of his reputation for unerring calculation at the board:


title: Mikhail Tal

text: Only official tournament or match games have been taken into account. '+' corresponds to Tal's wins, '−' to his losses and '=' to draws. Winning records in bold.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish or Judeo-Spanish (autonym , Hebrew script: , Cyrillic: ), also known as Ladino, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in Spain, and then after the Edict of Expulsion spreading through the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, Western Asia, and North Africa) as well as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco, and England, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, France, and Turkey. In 2017, it was formally recognised by the Royal Spanish Academy.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The core vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is Old Spanish, and it has numerous elements from the other old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Old Aragonese, Astur-Leonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Mozarabic. The language has been further enriched by Ottoman Turkish and Semitic vocabulary, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic—especially in the domains of religion, law, and spirituality—and most of the vocabulary for new and modern concepts has been adopted through French and Italian. Furthermore, the language is influenced to a lesser degree by other local languages of the Balkans, such as Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Historically, the Rashi script and its cursive form Solitreo have been the main orthographies for writing Judaeo-Spanish. However, today it is mainly written with the Latin alphabet, though some other alphabets such as Hebrew and Cyrillic are still in use. Judaeo-Spanish has been known also by other names, such as: (), () or (), (), () or (in North Africa). In Turkey, and formerly in the Ottoman Empire, it has been traditionally called in Turkish, meaning the "Jewish language." In Israel, Hebrew speakers usually call the language , , and only in recent years .


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish, once the Jewish trade language of the Adriatic Sea, the Balkans, and the Middle-East, and renowned for its rich literature, especially in Salonika, today is under serious threat of extinction. Most native speakers are elderly, and the language is not transmitted to their children or grandchildren for various reasons; consequently, all Judeo-Spanish-speaking communities are undergoing a language shift. In some expatriate communities in Spain, Latin America, and elsewhere, there is a threat of assimilation by modern Spanish. It is experiencing, however, a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The scholar Joseph Nehama, author of the comprehensive Judeo-Spanish–French dictionary, referred to the language as .


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The language is also called "Judeo-Espanyol", "Judeoespañol", "Sefardí", "Judío", and "Espanyol" or "Español sefardita"; "Haquetía" (from the Arabic "ħaka" , "tell") refers to the dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. Judeo-Spanish has also been referred to as "Judesmo" (also "Judezmo, Djudesmo" or "Djudezmo"). However, in limited parts of Macedonia, its former use in the past as a low-register designation in informal speech by unschooled people has been documented. The dialect of the Oran area of Algeria was called "Tetuani", after the Moroccan city of Tétouan since many Orani Jews came from there. In Hebrew, the language is called ().


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: An entry in "Ethnologue" claims, "The name 'Judesmo' is used by Jewish linguists and Turkish Jews and American Jews; 'Judeo-Spanish' by Romance philologists; 'Ladino' by laymen, initially in Israel; 'Haketia' by Moroccan Jews; 'Spanyol' by some others." That does not reflect the historical usage.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: In the Judaeo-Spanish press of the 19th and 20th centuries the native authors referred to the language almost exclusively as -, which was also the name that its native speakers spontaneously gave to it for as long as it was their primary spoken language. More rarely, the bookish "Judeo-Espanyol" has also been used since the late 19th century.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: In recent decades in Israel, followed by the United States and Spain, the language has come to be referred to as "Ladino" (), literally meaning "Latin". This name for the language was promoted by a body called the , although speakers of the language in Israel referred to their mother tongue as or . Native speakers of the language consider the name "Ladino" to be incorrect, reserving the term for the "semi-sacred" language used in word-by-word translations from the Bible, which is distinct from the spoken vernacular. According to the website of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, the cultural center of Sephardic Judaism after the expulsion from Spain,


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: "Ladino is not spoken, rather, it is the product of a word-for-word translation of Hebrew or Aramaic biblical or liturgical texts made by rabbis in the Jewish schools of Spain. In these translations, a specific Hebrew or Aramaic word always corresponded to the same Spanish word, as long as no exegetical considerations prevented this. In short, Ladino is only Hebrew clothed in Spanish, or Spanish with Hebrew syntax. The famous Ladino translation of the Bible, the Biblia de Ferrara (1553), provided inspiration for the translation of numerous Spanish Christian Bibles."


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The derivation of the name "Ladino" is complicated. Before the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the word meant literary Spanish, as opposed to other dialects or Romance in general, as distinct from Arabic. (The first European language grammar and dictionary, of Spanish, referred to it as "ladino" or "ladina". In the Middle Ages, the word "Latin" was frequently used to mean simply "language", particularly one understood: a "latiner" or "latimer" meant a translator.) Following the Expulsion, Jews spoke of "the Ladino" to mean the word-for-word translation of the Bible into Old Spanish. By extension, it came to mean that style of Spanish generally in the same way that (among Kurdish Jews) "Targum" has come to mean Judeo-Aramaic and (among Jews of Arabic-speaking background) "sharħ" has come to mean Judeo-Arabic.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: That Judaeo-Spanish "ladino" should not be confused with the "ladino or Ladin language", spoken in part of Northeastern Italy and which has nothing to do with Jews or with Spanish beyond being a Romance language, a property that they share with French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: At the time of the expulsion from Spain, the day-to-day language of the Jews of different regions of the peninsula was hardly, if at all, different from that of their Christian neighbours, but there may have been some dialect mixing to form a sort of Jewish lingua franca. There was, however, a special style of Spanish used for purposes of study or translation, featuring a more archaic dialect, a large number of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and a tendency to render Hebrew word order literally ("ha-laylah ha-zeh", meaning "this night", was rendered "la noche la esta" instead of the normal Spanish "esta noche"). As mentioned above, authorities confine the term "Ladino" to that style.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Following the Expulsion, the process of dialect mixing continued, but Castilian Spanish remained by far the largest contributor. The daily language was increasingly influenced both by the language of study and by the local non-Jewish vernaculars, such as Greek and Turkish. It came to be known as "Judesmo" and, in that respect, the development is parallel to that of Yiddish. However, many speakers, especially among the community leaders, also had command of a more formal style, "castellano", which was nearer to the Spanish at the time of the Expulsion.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The grammar, the phonology, and about 60% of the vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is essentially Spanish but, in some respects, it resembles the dialects in southern Spain and South America, rather than the dialects of Central Spain. For example, it has yeísmo ("she" is '/' (Judaeo-Spanish), instead of "") as well as seseo.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: In many respects, it reproduces the Spanish of the time of the Expulsion, rather than the modern variety, as it retains some archaic features such as the following:


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: However, the phonology of both the consonants and part of the lexicon is, in some respects, closer to Galician-Portuguese and Catalan than to modern Spanish. That is explained by direct influence but also because all three languages retained some of the characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance languages that Spanish later lost.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Contrast Judaeo-Spanish ' ("still") with Portuguese ' (Galician ', Asturian ' or ') and Spanish ' or the initial consonants in Judaeo-Spanish ', ' ("daughter," "speech"), Portuguese ', ' (Galician ', ', Asturian ', ', Aragonese ', ', Catalan '), Spanish ', '. It sometimes varied with dialect, as in Judaeo-Spanish popular songs, both ' and "" ("son") are found.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The Judaeo-Spanish pronunciation of "s" as "" before a "k" sound or at the end of certain words (such as "", pronounced , for six) is shared with Portuguese (as spoken in Portugal, most of Lusophone Asia and Africa, and in a plurality of Brazilian dialects and registers with either partial or total forms of coda |S| palatalization) but not with Spanish.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Like other Jewish vernaculars, Judaeo-Spanish incorporates many Hebrew and Aramaic words, mostly for religious concepts and institutions. Examples are "haham/ḥaḥam" (rabbi, from Hebrew "ḥakham") and "kal, kahal"/"cal, cahal" (synagogue, from Hebrew "qahal").


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish has absorbed some words from the local languages but sometimes Hispanicised their form: "bilbilico" (nightingale), from Persian (via Turkish) "bülbül". It may be compared to the Slavic elements in Yiddish. Because of the large number of Arabic words in Spanish generally, it is not always clear whether some of these words were introduced before the Expulsion or adopted later; modern Spanish replaced some of these loans with Latinisms after the Reconquista, where Judaeo-Spanish speakers had no motivation to do so.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: As exemplified in the Sources section above, much of the phonology of Judaeo-Spanish is similar to that of standard modern Spanish. Here are some exceptions:


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish is distinguished from other Spanish dialects by the presence of the following features:


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish follows Spanish for most of its syntax. (That is not true of the written calque language involving word-for-word translations from Hebrew, which scholars refer to as "Ladino", as described above.) Like Spanish, it generally follows a subject–verb–object word order, has a nominative-accusative alignment, and is considered a fusional or inflected language.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: "Aki Yerushalayim" magazine, owned by Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino, promotes the following orthography:


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish is traditionally written in a Hebrew-based script, specially in Rashi script and its Solitreo cursive variant. The Hebrew orthography is not regulated, but sounds are generally represented by the following letters:


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: In the medieval Iberian peninsula, now Spain and Portugal, Jews spoke a variety of Romance dialects. Following the 1490s expulsion from Spain and Portugal, most of the Iberian Jews resettled in the Ottoman Empire. Jews in the Ottoman Balkans, Western Asia (especially Turkey), and North Africa (especially Morocco) developed their own Romance dialects, with some influence from Hebrew and other languages, which became what is now known as Judaeo-Spanish. Later on, many Portuguese Jews also escaped to France, Italy, the Netherlands and England, establishing small groups in those nations as well, but these spoke early modern Spanish or Portuguese rather than Judaeo-Spanish.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Jews in the Middle Ages were instrumental in the development of Spanish into a prestige language. Erudite Jews translated Arabic and Hebrew works, often translated earlier from Greek, into Spanish. Christians translated them again into Latin for transmission to Europe.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Until recent times, the language was widely spoken throughout the Balkans, Turkey/Western Asia and North Africa, as Judaeo-Spanish had been brought there by the Jewish refugees.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The contact among Jews of different regions and languages, including Catalan, Leonese and Portuguese developed a unified dialect, differing in some aspects from the Spanish norm that was forming simultaneously in Spain, but some of the mixing may have already occurred in exile rather than in the Iberian Peninsula. The language was known as "Yahudice" (Jewish language) in the Ottoman Empire. In the late 18th century, Ottoman poet Enderunlu Fazıl (Fazyl bin Tahir Enderuni) wrote in his "Zenanname": "Castilians speak the Jewish language but they are not Jews."


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The closeness and mutual comprehensibility between Judaeo-Spanish and Spanish favoured trade among Sephardim, often relatives, from the Ottoman Empire to the Netherlands and the "conversos" of the Iberian Peninsula.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Over time, a corpus of literature, both liturgical and secular, developed. Early literature was limited to translations from Hebrew. At the end of the 17th century, Hebrew was disappearing as the vehicle for rabbinic instruction. Thus, a literature appeared in the 18th century, such as Me'am Lo'ez and poetry collections. By the end of the 19th century, the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire studied in schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. French became the language for foreign relations, as it did for Maronites, and Judaeo-Spanish drew from French for neologisms. New secular genres appeared, with more than 300 journals, history, theatre, and biographies.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Given the relative isolation of many communities, a number of regional dialects of Judaeo-Spanish appeared, many with only limited mutual comprehensibility, largely because of the adoption of large numbers of loanwords from the surrounding populations, including, depending on the location of the community, from Greek, Turkish, Arabic and, in the Balkans, Slavic languages, especially Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. The borrowing in many Judaeo-Spanish dialects is so heavy that up to 30% of their vocabulary is of non-Spanish origin. Some words also passed from Judaeo-Spanish into neighbouring languages. For example, the word "palavra" "word" (Vulgar Latin = "parabola"; Greek = "parabole"), passed into Turkish, Greek and Romanian with the meaning "bunk, hokum, humbug, bullshit" in Turkish and Romanian and "big talk, boastful talk" in Greek (compare the English word "palaver").


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish was the common language of Salonika during the Ottoman period. The city became part of Greece in 1912 and was subsequently renamed Thessaloniki. Despite the Great Fire of Thessaloniki and mass settlement of Christian refugees, the language remained widely spoken in Salonika until the deportation of 50,000 Salonikan Jews in the Holocaust during the Second World War. According to the 1928 census, the language had 62,999 native speakers in Greece. The figure drops down to 53,094 native speakers in 1940, but 21,094 citizens "usually" spoke the language.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish was also a language used in "Donmeh" rites ("Dönme" being a Turkish word for "convert" to refer to adepts of Sabbatai Tsevi converting to Islam in the Ottoman Empire). An example is "Sabbatai Tsevi esperamos a ti". Today, the religious practices and the ritual use of Judaeo-Spanish seems confined to elderly generations.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The Castilian colonisation of Northern Africa favoured the role of polyglot Sephards, who bridged between Spanish -colonizers and Arab and Berber speakers.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: From the 17th to the 19th centuries, Judaeo-Spanish was the predominant Jewish language in the Holy Land, but its dialect was different in some respects from the one in Greece and Turkey. Some families have lived in Jerusalem for centuries and preserve Judaeo-Spanish for cultural and folklore purposes although they now use Hebrew in everyday life.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: An often-told Sephardic anecdote from Bosnia-Herzegovina has it that as a Spanish consulate was opened in Sarajevo in the interwar period, two Sephardic women passed by. Upon hearing a Catholic priest who was speaking Spanish, they thought that his language meant that he was Jewish.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: In the 20th century, the number of speakers declined sharply: entire communities were murdered in the Holocaust, and the remaining speakers, many of whom emigrated to Israel, adopted Hebrew. The governments of the new nation-states encouraged instruction in the official languages. At the same time, Judaeo-Spanish aroused the interest of philologists, as it conserved language and literature from before the standardisation of Spanish.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Judaeo-Spanish is in a serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly "olim" (immigrants to Israel), who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. Nevertheless, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music. In addition, Sephardic communities in several Latin American countries still use Judaeo-Spanish. There, the language is exposed to the different danger of assimilation to modern Spanish.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Kol Yisrael and Radio Nacional de España hold regular radio broadcasts in Judaeo-Spanish. "" showed an episode, titled "A Murderer Among Us", with references to the language. Films partially or totally in Judaeo-Spanish include Mexican film "Novia que te vea" (directed by Guita Schyfter), The House on Chelouche Street, and "Every Time We Say Goodbye".


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Efforts have been made to gather and publish modern Judaeo-Spanish fables and folktales. In 2001, the Jewish Publication Society published the first English translation of Judaeo-Spanish folktales, collected by Matilda Koen-Sarano, "Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster: The Misadventures of the Guileful Sephardic Prankster." A survivor of Auschwitz, Moshe Ha-Elion, issued his translation into Judeo-Spanish of the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey in 2012, in his 87th year, and he is now translating the sister epic, the Iliad, into his mother tongue.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The language was initially spoken by the Sephardic Jewish community in India, but was later replaced with Judeo-Malayalam.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The first printed Ladino book was "Me-'am lo'ez" in 1730. It was a commentary on the Bible in the Ladino language. Most Jews in the Ottoman Empire knew the Hebrew alphabet but did not speak Hebrew. The printing of "Me-'am lo'ez" marked the emergence of large scale printing activity in Ladino in the western Ottoman Empire and in Istanbul in particular. The earliest Judaeo-Spanish books were religious in nature, mostly created to maintain religious knowledge for exiles who could not read Hebrew; the first of the known texts is "Dinim de shehitah i bedikah (The Rules of Ritual Slaughter and Inspection of Animals;" Istanbul, 1510). Texts continued to be focussed on philosophical and religious themes, including a large body of rabbinic writings, until the first half of the 19th century. The largest output of secular Judaeo-Spanish literature occurred during the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries in the Ottoman Empire. The earliest and most abundant form of secular text was the periodical press: between 1845 and 1939, Ottoman Sephardim published around 300 individual periodical titles. The proliferation of periodicals gave rise to serialised novels: many of them were rewrites of existing foreign novels into Judaeo-Spanish. Unlike the previous scholarly literature, they were intended for a broader audience of educated men and less-educated women alike. They covered a wider range of less weighty content, at times censored to be appropriate for family readings. Popular literature expanded to include love stories and adventure stories, both of which had been absent from Judaeo-Spanish literary canon. The literary corpus meanwhile also expanded to include theatrical plays, poems and other minor genres.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Multiple documents made by the Ottoman government were translated into Judaeo-Spanish; usually translators used terms from Ottoman Turkish.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The Jewish communities of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Belgrade, Serbia, still chant part of the Sabbath Prayers ("Mizmor David") in Judaeo-Spanish. The Sephardic Synagogue Ezra Bessaroth in Seattle, Washington, United States, was formed by Jews from Turkey and the Greek island of Rhodes, and it uses the language in some portions of its Shabbat services. The Siddur is called Zehut Yosef and was written by Hazzan Isaac Azose.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: At Congregation Etz Ahaim of Highland Park, New Jersey, a congregation founded by Sephardic Jews from Salonika, a reader chants the Aramaic prayer "B'rikh Shemay" in Judaeo-Spanish before he takes out the Torah on Shabbat. That is known as "Bendichu su Nombre" in Judaeo-Spanish. Additionally, at the end of Shabbat services, the entire congregation sings the well-known Hebrew hymn "Ein Keloheinu," which is "Non Como Muestro Dio" in Judaeo-Spanish.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: "Non Como Muestro Dio" is also included, alongside "Ein Keloheinu", in "Mishkan T'filah", the 2007 Reform prayerbook.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: "El Dio Alto (El Dyo Alto)" is a Sephardic hymn often sung during the Havdalah service, its currently popular tune arranged by Judy Frankel. Hazzan Isaac Azose, cantor emeritus of Synagogue Ezra Bessaroth and second-generation Turkish immigrant, has performed an alternative Ottoman tune.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan translated some scholarly religious texts, including "Me'am Loez" into Hebrew, English or both.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Izmir's grand rabbis Haim Palachi, Abraham Palacci, and Rahamim Nissim Palacci all wrote in the language and in Hebrew.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: As with Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish is seeing a minor resurgence in educational interest in colleges across the United States and in Israel. Almost all American Jews are Ashkenazi, with a tradition based on Yiddish, rather than Judaeo-Spanish, and so institutions that offer Yiddish are more common. the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts University offered Judaeo-Spanish courses among colleges in the United States. In Israel, Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is leading the way in education (language and literature courses, Community oriented activities) and research (a yearly scientific journal, international congresses and conferences etc.). Hebrew University also offers courses. The Complutense University of Madrid also used to have courses. Prof. David Bunis taught Judaeo-Spanish at the University of Washington, in Seattle during the 2013–14 academic year. Bunis returned to the University of Washington for the Summer 2020 quarter.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: In Spain, the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) in 2017 announced plans to create a Judaeo-Spanish branch in Israel in addition to 23 existing academies, in various Spanish-speaking countries, that are associated in the Association of Spanish Language Academies. Its stated purpose is to preserve Judaeo-Spanish. The move was seen as another step to make up for the Expulsion, following the offer of Spanish citizenship to Sephardim who had some connection with Spain.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Melis Alphan wrote in "Hürriyet" in 2017 that the Judaeo-Spanish language in Turkey was heading to extinction.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Folklorists have been collecting "romances" and other folk songs, some dating from before the expulsion. Many religious songs in Judeo-Spanish are translations of Hebrew, usually with a different tune. For example, here is "Ein Keloheinu" in Judeo-Spanish:


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Anachronistically, Abraham—who in the Bible is an Aramean and the very first Hebrew and the ancestor of all who followed, hence his appellation "Avinu" (Our Father)—is in the Judeo-Spanish song born already in the "djudería" (modern Spanish: ), the Jewish quarter. This makes Terach and his wife into Hebrews, as are the parents of other babies killed by Nimrod. In essence, unlike its Biblical model, the song is about a Hebrew community persecuted by a cruel king and witnessing the birth of a miraculous saviour—a subject of obvious interest and attraction to the Jewish people who composed and sang it in Medieval Spain.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The song attributes to Abraham elements that are from the story of Moses's birth, the cruel king killing innocent babies, with the midwives ordered to kill them, the 'holy light' in the Jewish area, as well as from the careers of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who emerged unscathed from the fiery furnace, and Jesus of Nazareth. Nimrod is thus made to conflate the role and attributes of three archetypal cruel and persecuting kings:Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh and Herod


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Jennifer Charles and Oren Bloedow from the New York-based band Elysian Fields released a CD in 2001 called "La Mar Enfortuna," which featured modern versions of traditional Sephardic songs, many sung by Charles in Judeo-Spanish. The American singer Tanja Solnik has released several award-winning albums that feature songs in the languages: "From Generation to Generation: A Legacy of Lullabies" and "Lullabies and Love Songs". There are a number of groups in Turkey that sing in Judeo-Spanish, notably "Janet – Jak Esim Ensemble", "Sefarad", "Los Pasharos Sefaradis" and the children's chorus "Las Estreyikas d'Estambol". There is a Brazilian-born singer of Sephardic origins, Fortuna, who researches and plays Judeo-Spanish music.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Israeli folk-duo Esther & Abi Ofarim recorded the song 'Yo M'enamori d'un Aire' for their 1968 album "Up To Date". Esther Ofarim recorded several Judaeo-Spanish songs as a solo artist. These included 'Povereta Muchachica', 'Noches Noches', El Rey Nimrod', 'Adio Querida' & 'Pampaparapam'.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The Jewish Bosnian-American musician Flory Jagoda recorded two CDs of music taught to her by her grandmother, a Sephardic folk singer, among a larger discography.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The cantor Dr. Ramón Tasat, who learned Judeo-Spanish at his grandmother's knee in Buenos Aires, has recorded many songs in the language, with three of his CDs focusing primarily on that music.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The Israeli singer Yasmin Levy has also brought a new interpretation to the traditional songs by incorporating more "modern" sounds of Andalusian Flamenco. Her work revitalising Sephardic music has earned Levy the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation Award for promoting cross-cultural dialogue between musicians from three cultures: In Yasmin Levy's own words:


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: "I am proud to combine the two cultures of Ladino and flamenco, while mixing in Middle Eastern influences. I am embarking on a 500 years old musical journey, taking Ladino to Andalusia and mixing it with flamenco, the style that still bears the musical memories of the old Moorish and Jewish-Spanish world with the sound of the Arab world. In a way it is a 'musical reconciliation' of history."


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Notable music groups performing in Judeo-Spanish include Voice of the Turtle, Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles' "La Mar Enfortuna" and Vanya Green, who was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for her research and performance of this music. She was recently selected as one of the top ten world music artists by the We are Listening International World of Music Awards for her interpretations of the music.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: Robin Greenstein, a New York-based musician, received a federal CETA grant in the 1980s to collect and perform Sephardic Music under the guidance of the American Jewish Congress. Her mentor was Joe Elias, noted Sephardic singer from Brooklyn. She recorded residents of the Sephardic Home for the Aged, a nursing home in Coney Island, New York, singing songs from their childhood. The voices recorded included Victoria Hazan, a well known Sephardic singer who recorded many 78's in Judaeo-Spanish and Turkish from the 1930s and 1940s. Two Judaeo-Spanish songs can be found on her "Songs of the Season" holiday CD, released in 2010 on Windy Records.


title: Judaeo-Spanish

text: The Israeli Mediterranean folk band Baladino has released two albums that have songs with lyrics in Judaeo-Spanish.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: María Concepción Alonso Bustillo (born June 29, 1957), better known as María Conchita Alonso, is a singer, actress and former beauty queen.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: She has participated in film and television productions, and was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award as Best Leading Actress in 1996 for her role in "Caught". As a singer, she has received several gold and platinum records, and has been nominated for three Grammy Awards.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso was the first Latin American actress not born in the United States to star in a musical on Broadway. The musical was "Kiss of the Spider Woman" at the Broadhurst Theater in 1995.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: María Conchita Alonso was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, on June 29, 1957, to Ricardo Alonso and Conchita Bustillo. Her family moved to Venezuela when she was five years old, in 1962, after the Cuban Revolution. She had her first experience in show business when she was crowned Miss Teenager World in 1971. She was Miss World/Venezuela in 1975, and became sixth runner-up in the Miss World pageant, won by Puerto Rico's Wilnelia Merced.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso's first gold album and number one song on the charts was "Love Maniac", released in 1979 under the name Ámbar. After that followed her second number-one "The Witch" and soon after "Dangerous Rhythm". For what is considered her best known song, she was asked by Giorgio Moroder to write the lyrics in Spanish and sing "Vamos a Bailar" which he had written for the soundtrack of the film "Scarface". The song instantly became a classic among Spanish speakers, despite failing to garner major attention outside of Cuba where it was recorded. Her two albums with Ámbar and her solo debut were recorded in English. Her second album, "María Conchita", in 1984, made her an international singing star in the Spanish-speaking market, and garnered her first of three Grammy Award nominations (1985, 1988, 1994).


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso made her Hollywood film debut in "Moscow on the Hudson" (1984) with Robin Williams, and also starred in "Touch and Go" (1986) "Extreme Prejudice" (1987), "The Running Man" (1987), "Colors" (1988), "Vampire's Kiss" (1989), "Predator 2" (1990) and "The House of the Spirits" (1993).


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: In 1995, she became the first Latin-born actresses to star in a Broadway show, playing Aurora in "Kiss of the Spider Woman". She later acted in the romantic comedies "Chasing Papi" (2003) and "The Last Guy on Earth" (2006).


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso was cast to play Lucía, the mother of Gabrielle Solis, on the ABC series "Desperate Housewives". The episode aired on February 19, 2006. She was in the Latin version, "Amas de Casa Desesperadas", for Univision Network. She was a guest star in the live-action film of the comic book "El Muerto" and appeared in the film "Material Girls" (2006).


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso hosted VH1's "¡Viva Hollywood!" on April 13, 2008, with Carlos Ponce. She portrayed Sam in the werewolf horror film "Wolf Moon", directed by Dana Mennie.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso appeared in Rob Zombie's "The Lords of Salem," released in 2013. Her latest film, a fantasy short titled "The Secret of Joy", features her alongside fellow Venezuelan actor Carlos Antonio León, Spanish actress Laura Bayonas, and Brazilian actress Ana Carolina Da Fonseca in a story that aims to bring awareness about pediatric cancer.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso has often spoken in support of LGBT rights and in appreciation of her LGBT fans, stating, "I was very much supported by the community when I first came out with my music". In a 2004 article, she compared herself to Cher in terms of her connection to LGBT culture.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso was an outspoken critic of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whom she described as a "dictator"-like "Hitler" and whose voters and supporters she described as "terrorists." She appeared on Sean Hannity's "Hannity's America" on May 6, 2007, "Hannity & Colmes" on June 1, 2007 and Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor" on August 13, 2007, and March 11, 2009.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: Alonso issued an "Open Letter to Sean Penn" online on March 29, 2010 regarding his support of Hugo Chávez. She used a point-by-point refrain of "WHY" in her letter questioning various issues occurring in Venezuela. In December 2011, she got into a heated exchange with Penn at a Los Angeles airport during which Penn called her a pig and she responded by calling Penn a communist (the two had played lovers in the 1988 movie "Colors").


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: In the fall of 2008, Alonso endorsed the presidential campaign of Republican nominee John McCain, writing:


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: In an August 2012 Spreecast interview, Alonso stated her opposition to Obama's re-election, saying that if reelected, he would take steps to make the United States become more like Venezuela under the Chávez government.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: In January 2014, Alonso resigned from a San Francisco production of "The Vagina Monologues" after appearing in an advertisement for Republican candidate for Governor Tim Donnelly.


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: On September 17, 2014, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro asked Interior Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres to pursue legal actions to revoke Alonso's Venezuelan citizenship. The reason was her public request on a radio interview for a military intervention against Venezuela: "In my opinion, (the US) must intervene, because the Cubans already invaded without firing a single bullet because they gave it (Venezuela) for free. So I would like that the US would invade using bullets to get all those communists out of Venezuela".


title: María Conchita Alonso

text: In mid-2016, Alonso stated that she supported neither Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump nor Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the U.S. election, viewing both of them as unacceptable. She ended up supporting Gary Johnson in the general election.


title: Alexisonfire

text: Alexisonfire (pronounced "Alexis on Fire") is a Canadian post-hardcore band formed in St. Catharines, Ontario in 2001. The band's members are George Pettit (vocals), Dallas Green (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Wade MacNeil (guitar, vocals), Chris Steele (bass) and Jordan Hastings (drums, percussion). The band has won numerous awards, and in Canada their albums have all been certified either gold or platinum.


title: Alexisonfire

text: Alexisonfire was formed in late 2001 in the aftermath of a three-band break up. Pettit was playing guitar in a metal band called Condemning Salem, Green was lead singer and guitar player in Helicon Blue, and MacNeil and Steele played in a punk band called Plan 9. These bands broke up at the same time, and Pettit, Steele, MacNeil and Green recruited drummer Jesse Ingelevics, and formed Alexisonfire. The band's name was derived from Alexis Fire. When Fire discovered that they were using her website name as their band name, she threatened to sue, but it was discovered that the moniker was not registered, and no further action took place.


title: Alexisonfire

text: In 2002, the band released its first EP, "Math Sheets Demo", so named because the CD was wrapped in Jesse Ingelevics' math homework. This caught the attention of recording engineer Greg Below and Montreal journalist Mitch Joel, who were setting up the record label Distort Entertainment and were looking for artists. Below was also working with EMI, which allowed the band to record at the company's in-house studio, and land a co-publishing and distribution deal.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On October 31, 2002, "Alexisonfire" was released. Although there was a distribution deal with EMI, the album's success was mostly attributed to word-of-mouth. They had already been playing dates in Ontario and New York with bands like GWAR, Juliana Theory and Glassjaw; 2003 saw them touring in support of the album, crossing Canada twice, playing with Spitalfield and Billy Talent, appearing at Hellfest, and touring Europe with Rise Against.


title: Alexisonfire

text: In October 2005, "Alexisonfire" was certified gold in Canada, marking over 50,000 sales. (In 2014, Dine Alone Records released a remastered version of the album.)


title: Alexisonfire

text: At the 2004 Canadian Independent Music Awards, the video for the album's song "Pulmonary Archery" won Best Video. They were named Favourite Indie Band at the CASBY Awards, and the video for the song "Counterparts and Number Them" was nominated for Best Independent Video at the MuchMusic Video Awards.


title: Alexisonfire

text: Alexisonfire recorded their second album with Julius Butty at his Silo Studios near Hamilton, Ontario, "Watch Out!" and was released on June 29, 2004. It was released worldwide, mainly through Distort but through Equal Vision Records in the USA, and Sorepoint Records in the UK. It debuted at No. 6 on the Nielsen Soundscan Top 200, sold 6,000 copies in its first week, received gold certification in Canada in twelve weeks, and certified platinum in 2007. The critical reception came from the fact that the band was more focused from the eighteen months of touring, helping them harness more aggression, release more emotion, and fine-tune all the tracks. The album was noted as a real departure from their debut album, and was a critical success.


title: Alexisonfire

text: As soon as the album was released, the band went on tour, playing the Vans Warped Tour on several US dates, and then heading to the UK, playing the Reading and Leeds Festivals and other British gigs. (While playing Glasgow with Johnny Truant and The Blood Roses in, the members of all three bands had the word "Yeti" tattooed on themselves. On an episode of the MuchMusic program "The New Music", Pettit and Green said that the idea for the tattoos came from the 1988 Gary Oldman film "The Firm".) The band spent all of 2005 on the road, touring the UK, US, Canada and Europe. They also played the Summer Sonic Festival in Japan.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On June 14, 2005 Alexisonfire posted a statement on their website stating that founding drummer Jesse Ingelevics had left the band. He was replaced by Jordan Hastings, late of the band Jersey.


title: Alexisonfire

text: At the MuchMusic Video Awards, the video for the song "Accidents" won Best Independent Video, and the band was nominated for the Peoples' Choice Award – Favourite Canadian Group. At the Juno Awards of 2005, Alexisonfire won the award for New Group of the Year.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On August 22, 2006 the band released their third studio album, "Crisis", which received rave reviews and continues to be deemed 'important'.


title: Alexisonfire

text: The album's release was marked with a party on a boat on the River Thames in London, England. This also launched a 10-month world tour that took them through the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. They were now playing to crowds of up to 80,000 people, at the Reading and Leeds Festivals, Festival d'été de Québec, and they headlined at the Brixton Academy in London. They played the Warped Tour, the Taste of Chaos tour, the Saints & Sinners Festival and Australia's Soundwave festival. At this point, they were one of the most popular bands in Canada.


title: Alexisonfire

text: The band toured with Anti-Flag, Saosin, The Bled, Norma Jean, Every Time I Die, Cancer Bats, Attack in Black, Moneen, Envy on the Coast, A Change of Pace, The Ghost of a Thousand and The Dear & Departed, among others.


title: Alexisonfire

text: The tour produced three live albums: "Live At Brixton Academy" (London, 11/13/07), "Live At Manchester Academy" (11/14/07), and "Live At Birmingham Academy" (now O2 Academy Birmingham) (11/16/07).


title: Alexisonfire

text: At this time, Pettit told a reporter: "The next record, I think, is us pretty much wanting to put the knife in screamo. I don't want to be the band that saves it, I want to be the band that kills it." Pettit later regretted making the statement.


title: Alexisonfire

text: At the 2006 CASBY Awards, "Crisis" won Favorite New Indie Release. At the 2007 MuchMusic Video Awards, the video for "This Could Be Anywhere in the World" won the award for Best Cinematography and was nominated for Best Rock Video. The band was also nominated for the Peoples' Choice Award – Favourite Canadian Group. At the Juno Awards of 2007, "Crisis" garnered a nomination for CD/DVD Artwork Design of the Year, Julius Butty received a Producer of the Year nomination for "This Could Be Anywhere in the World", and Alexisonfire was nominated for Group of the Year.


title: Alexisonfire

text: In 2008, MacNeil told a "Bombshell Zine" interviewer: "Alexis hasn't broken up, but we'll see what happens. We are at a crossroads now." As a result, by 2009, rumours that Alexisonfire was about to break up abounded, but the band announced the name of their new album on February 1st. They began recording "Old Crows/Young Cardinals" on the same day. By March 1st, the recording process was near completion and two songs were announced--"Midnight Regulations" and "Emerald St." On March 31, 2009, it was confirmed that Alexisonfire had signed to Dine Alone Records, whose founder, Joel Carriere, had once been the band's manager.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On April 20, Alexisonfire released the song "Young Cardinals" for radio airplay. The music video premiered on MuchOnDemand on May 15, 2009; the album was released on June 23, 2009 and was very well received.


title: Alexisonfire

text: The band then went on a 300-date tour through Europe, the US and Canada, which lasted through December 2010.


title: Alexisonfire

text: In 2008, Dallas Green told Canoe.ca that he had sketched out new songs that he hoped would take the band into "new, weird territories". These songs would become the four-track EP "Dogs Blood", which was released in 2010. The band announced the release of "Dogs Blood" at the 2009 Verge Awards, hosted by The Verge (XM), where "Old Crows/Young Cardinals" was nominated for Album of the Year and the band was nominated as Artist of the Year. At the Juno Awards of 2010, "Old Crows/Young Cardinals" was nominated as Rock Album of the Year.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On February 16, 2010, the band was set to play a free all-ages show at the 2010 Winter Olympics venue Live City Yaletown when, seconds into the show, the rush of the audience broke a barrier and people were trampled; 20 were slightly injured. Alexisonfire returned to Vancouver later that year as headliners at the PNE Forum.


title: Alexisonfire

text: Also in 2010, the band released a collection of six songs available exclusively through iTunes as a digital download. The EP, "iTunes Originals", contained previously-recorded material from the group's discography, versions of some of their previously released songs performed slightly differently, and interviews with the band. On November 22, 2010, a digital version of their "Aussie Tour 7"" was released on iTunes. It contains two cover songs, originally by Midnight Oil and The Saints.


title: Alexisonfire

text: In 2005, Dallas Green had launched a solo folk/rock side project called City and Colour. The project had become very successful and between that and his commitments to Alexisonfire, he said that he suffered a nervous breakdown and that being in Alexisonfire was killing him. At the end of the "Old Crows/Young Cardinals" tour, Green told the band that he was leaving Alexisonfire, but that he would not announce his departure until the rest of the band decided on their future plans.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On February 14, 2011, Alexisonfire tweeted that they had been writing new music for their fifth studio album, describing it as "so heavy it's going to make "Dog's Blood" look like a ska record". Despite these statements, the album did not materialize and on August 5, 2011, Alexisonfire announced their break-up. In the statement, George Pettit cited the departures of both Green and MacNeil (who left to become the vocalist for Gallows), and personal issues among the remaining members as reasons for breaking up. Pettit also described the break-up as not being "amicable". Alexisonfire planned on celebrating their tenth anniversary with one last headlining Canadian tour and "a series of releases", although Green had specifically said that, for him, their Dec 19, 2010 show in their hometown was their last concert.


title: Alexisonfire

text: In July 2012, Green stated he had been in contact with other ex-Alexisonfire members, and that he and MacNeil had been "starting to talk about doing some final [Alexisonfire] shows, because when we did play our last show nobody knew it was our last show." In December 2012, Alexisonfire embarked on their farewell tour. It was initially nine dates, but it expanded to 30, with stops in Canada, the UK, Australia and Brazil. In December, the EP "Death Letter" was released, featuring new interpretations of songs spanning the band's previous four albums.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On December 25, 2013, the band released a limited-edition vinyl box set containing all the four albums as well as EPs, LPs, B-sides etc. One thousand copies were produced; they were sold out in 30 minutes. In August 2014, they released a slightly smaller second edition of the boxed set.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On March 9, 2015, the band announced a reunion tour, their first since their farewell tour in 2012, including dates at Reading and Leeds festivals, Sonic Boom, Heavy Montréal, X-Fest and Riot Fest. On September 19, 2015, at Riot Fest in Toronto, Wade MacNeil announced on stage that the band was officially back. The band later clarified this statement, reaffirming they had "no immediate plans" regarding new music or tours together, however they've played 100 concerts since 2015.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On February 12, 2016, the band released "Live at Copps", a recording of their performance on December 30, 2012, at the Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, which was the last show of their 2012 farewell tour. The album was released for download through iTunes, as well as in a special 4-record set, and as a Blu-ray video.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On June 22, 2016, Alexisonfire was announced as the main headliner for the 2017 Unify Gathering in Victoria, Australia, and announced a tour with The Dirty Nil, Behind Crimson Eyes and The Getaway Plan through Australia and New Zealand. The band was then announced as a headliner at the annual Quebec festival Montebello Rock and, on February 27, 2017, the band made a surprise three-song appearance at the Toronto stop of Billy Talent's Afraid of Heights Tour. They played Toronto's Danforth Music Hall in December 2017, and spent the following June touring Germany and the UK before heading back to Canada to play the Festival d'été de Québec.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On February 1, 2019, the band posted a black image on their Facebook page. Later in the day, the band posted a teaser video featuring a building with a green neon light spelling out the words "Familiar Drugs". Later, on February 12, 2019, the band posted 3 illusive black pictures on their Instagram page. Fans soon figured out that by changing the brightness and contrast on these black pictures, it revealed the numbers 2,15 and 19. On February 15, 2019, the band released a new song called "Familiar Drugs", their first new material in nearly nine years. On April 16, 2019, the band released the music video for "Familiar Drugs," which was shot completely on VHS and cellphones.


title: Alexisonfire

text: On May 24, 2019 the band released another standalone single called "Complicit", followed by "Season of the Flood", on January 13, 2020.


title: Alexisonfire

text: Alexisonfire went out on a short tour in 2019, playing shows in London, New York City, Los Angeles and Toronto as well as a show at Ottawa Bluesfest. This was followed by 2020 performances in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Seattle.


title: Alexisonfire

text: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the band hosting a special one-time watch party on YouTube, showing a filmed performance of the final show on their farewell tour in December 2012 in Hamilton, Canada. Starting before the livestream was the premiere of their music video for their song, "Season of the Flood", which is made up of footage shot exclusively by AOF concertgoers in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver during the tour in January.


title: Alexisonfire

text: In an interview with the "Toronto Star" in 2019, George Pettit revealed that, in 2015, he had become a professional firefighter and that, even though the band had reunited, that new career would be his priority. He also remains the lead singer in his side project, Dead Tired.


title: Alexisonfire

text: Wade MacNeil continues as the lead singer for Black Lungs and Gallows. On May 21, 2021, MacNeil presented his latest project, Doom’s Children with his first single and video, "Flower Moon".


title: Alexisonfire

text: In a June 2021 interview, Green stated that Alexisonfire was "trying to get all these new songs together for the first time in like ten years" implying that more new music was in the works. On March 10, 2022, the band announced their fifth studio album "Otherness", their first album of new studio recordings in thirteen years. It was released on June 24, 2022.


title: Alexisonfire

text: The band describes their music as "the sound of two Catholic high-school girls in mid-knife-fight"; in 2004, then-drummer Jesse Ingelevics described their sound as "Mogwai meets Sunny Day Real Estate". Others have described their music as post-hardcore, emo, melodic hardcore, and screamo. The band members originally bonded over the myriad punk rock styles that their hometown scene consisted of, including moshcore, screamo, youth crew, crust punk and emo. Their music is unique for its use of three main vocalists: one clean (Green), one unclean (Pettit) and one serving as a combination of the two (MacNeil). Their 2009 album "Old Crows / Young Cardinals" saw a more prominent overall use of clean vocals, with Pettit also providing further clean vocals, having occasionally done so on "Crisis". The band's first two albums include occasional spoken word vocals, also performed by Pettit.


title: Alexisonfire

text: Alexisonfire has been cited as an influence by bands such as Cancer Bats, Silverstein, Four Year Strong and 36 Crazyfists. "Revolver" Magazine additionally cited them as influencing the majority of the mid-2000s post-hardcore scene. Liam Cormier, lead vocalist of Cancer Bats, stated "everyone will always remember Alexisonfire and Billy Talent as the two bands that brought heavy music to the forefront and broke that scene wide open in this country." The band has also been well-regarded for their live performances throughout the years. Ex-frontman of Grade, Kyle Bishop, credited them for this in an interview with "The Grid TO". "Previous to them, Canadian content was pretty lame, palatable stuff," he said. "Then you had Alexis come in, George shredding his larynx and smashing his face against the wall. They destroyed everything. And a lot of people gravitated to that, and I've never seen that happen in Canada before. They opened up the door for a lot of bands to be appreciated, and brought a whole new group of people into punk rock." In an article for "Exclaim!", Ian Gormely praised the band for "opening doors for like-minded artists steeped in Southern Ontario's potent punk and metal scenes," and as having an "enduring influence in Canadian rock, and aggressive music in general".


title: Stargate Universe

text: Stargate Universe (often abbreviated as SGU) is a military science fiction television series and part of MGM's "Stargate" franchise. It follows the adventures of a present-day, multinational exploration team traveling on the Ancient spaceship "Destiny" several billion light years distant from the Milky Way Galaxy. They are now trying to figure out a way to return to Earth, while simultaneously trying to explore and to survive in their unknown area of the universe. The series, created by Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper, premiered in the United States on Syfy on October 2, 2009. The series featured an ensemble cast and was primarily filmed in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. A second season of 20 episodes was announced by Syfy in December 2009.


title: Stargate Universe

text: The first 10 episodes of the second season were aired in the United States beginning on September 28, 2010, and the final 10 were shown beginning on March 7, 2011. Syfy announced on December 16, 2010, that it would not be picking up "Stargate Universe" for a third season. The second season of "SGU" ended as a semi-cliffhanger.


title: Stargate Universe

text: There is an ongoing comic book series set after the end of season two, but the original creators and writers are not involved.