2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Spanish historians, during the restoration of a wooden statue of Jesus Christ, made in the 18th century, found an empty space in the buttocks of the statue, and in it - a kind of time capsule. Written in 1777 by Joaquín Mínguez, the chaplain of the cathedral in the city of Burgo de Osma, the letter described the economic, political and cultural characteristics of the time, according to the EFE news agency.
The sculpture of the crucified Jesus, which is called the "Suffering Christ" (Cristo del Miserere), is located in the Church of Saint Agatha in the town of Sotillo de la Ribera in northern Spain. According to the historian Efrén Arroyo, the initiator of the restoration work, this is a single find. “Although many of the statues are hollow, handwritten documents are rarely found in them,” says Aroyo. In his opinion, the author of the message believed that the document would be kept in a cache for hundreds of years.
The Time Capsule is two pages in which Mignez named the cereals grown in the region and described the good wine harvest in the years leading up to the record. He also mentioned the diseases of that time - malaria and typhoid, listed the forms of leisure - playing cards and a ball, balls and "other stupid games." The author of the sculpture, Manuel Bal, who, in addition to the "Suffering Christ" statue, also carved statues of five saints, received a special mention.
The restorers are going to donate the original document to the archives of the Archdiocese of Burgos, and put a copy back in the statue, as a sign of respect for the intentions of Chaplain Mignez.
More or less massive laying of time capsules began at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States. One of the first was a time capsule in Detroit, a copper box with photographs and documents that described the state of affairs in the city. It was laid down on December 31, 1900, and the box was opened on December 31, 2000 at a ceremony presided over by the Mayor of Detroit. Time capsules have been found on the plinth of the Confederate memorial in Orlando and in a lion statue on the Old Government House in Boston.
Time capsules were also laid in the USSR. In 2000, during the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Artek pioneer camp, a capsule with a message from the pioneers of the 1960s was opened. They believed that in 2000 people live under communism, fly to the moon every day, and Artek has its own cosmodrome. In 1967-1968, on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, capsules with a message to descendants were laid in many cities of the country. In November of this year, they began to be opened en masse.
At the end of the last century, the International Time Capsule Society was created in the United States, which tracks and registers capsule bookmarks around the world.
