In the wee hours of April 26, 1792, at the very height of the Great French Revolution, Claude Joseph-Rouget de Lisle, formerly an engineer who has gone down in history as “the one night genius” was inspired to compose the “Marche pour les armees du Rhin”, which was later renamed La Marseillaise to become the anthem of the French Republic.  

On April 26, 1986, one of the four reactors at the Ukrainian nuclear plant near Chernobyl went out of control and sent millions of cubic meters of radioactive gases, many times more than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, into the air that drifted all over Europe reaching as afar as Norway and Finland in the north. Over 100,000 people were evacuated from areas 30 kilometers around ground zero, which still remain off limits to humans.  The Chernobyl catastrophe, the most terrible man-made disaster of the 20th century, nearly put “paid” on the entire nuclear power generation industry.

April 27…

Prominent Russian military commander and a hero of the 1812 Patriotic War against Napoleon, Lieutenant-General Nikolai Tuchkov, was born on this day in 1765. During the Battle of Borodino his corps defended the left flank of the Russian army denying the advancing French access to a strategic strongpoint.  At a critical point in the battle, General Tuchkov led a Russian counterattack but, seriously wounded, died shortly after.

Heinrich Himmler ordered the construction of the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland on this day in 1940. Auschwitz became the first such camp intended for mass annihilation of people and an estimated 1 million to 4 million inmates were killed there. 

April 28…

France’s 14-year-old King Philippe II August married Isabelle von Hennegau, the niece of Count of Flanders on this day in 1180. The marriage helped the monarch to get rid of the unasked-for cares of his many relatives and obtain the northern Artois province as part of his wife’s dowry.  The April 28 wedding signaled the start of King Philippe’s effort to consolidate France into one royal domain.  

The Wembley stadium was inaugurated in London on this day in 1923 to host the Football Association Cup Finals between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United. An estimated 200,000 packed into the ground that afternoon, way more than the stadium could accommodate and at first it seemed the match could be canceled. Suddenly Police Commissioner George Scorey and his white horse “Billie” slowly pushed the masses back to the sides of the field of play for the game to eventually begin. 

Resistance fighters captured former Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini on this day in 1945.  They killed him the next day hanging his body, along with that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, up for display in a Milan service station. Shortly afterwards the two bodies were buried in a faraway section of the local cemetery normally reserved for the poor. 

On this day in 1947, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl and five others set out on a balsa woodcraft known as Kon Tiki to prove that Peruvian Indians could have settled in Polynesia. The trip took 101 days logging a staggering 5,000 nautical miles... 

We are now moving to April 29…

Born on this day in 1686 was Vasily Tatishchev, the prominent Russian scholar and statesman. The author of Russia’s first scientifically substantiated written history and the first encyclopedic dictionary, Tatishchev founded the Urals’ unofficial capital, Yekaterinburg. 

Acts of Union were passed in this day in 1707 in the Scottish and British parliaments creating the Kingdom of Great Britain, dissolving both legislatures and replacing them with a new Parliament of the Kingdom of Great Britain. 

On April 29, 1945 in the bunker in the Red Army-besieged Berlin, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun, just the day before he took both their lives.

Russian cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev and US Astronaut Jerry Linenger became the first Russian-US team to perform a joint space walk on this day in 1997.

April 30…

One of the world’s tallest buildings, New York City’s 102-story skyscraper, the Empire State Building, opened its doors to the public on this day in 1931. 

Europe’s tallest man-made structure, the Ostankino television tower in Moscow was commissioned on that same day in 1967. 

And on April 30 of 1993 in Hamburg, Germany, tennis player Monica Seles was stabbed in back by a male assailant and a fan of another tennis supreme Steffi Graf. She spent the remainder of that year and the whole of next year recovering but never managed to regain her previous form. 

Our next stop is May 1, which is celebrated globally as the international working class holiday. It all began with May 1 of 1886 when trade unions in Chicago launched a historic action demanding an eight-hour workday.  The May 1 workers’ solidarity day is now marked in 66 countries.

On May 1 of the year 305 AD Roman Emperor Diocletian, wearied by his twenty years “in office” abdicated retiring to his posh palace at Split on the Croatian coast where he spent his days planting cabbages. Implementing a series of major reforms, Diocletian had fortified the Empire’s borders and, towards the end of his reign, cracked down hard on Christians. His anti-Christian purges fell through though: Christianity is still there, unlike the Roman Empire, which is not…

The world’s first adhesive postage stamp was issued in Britain on this day in 1840 - a black one-pence and a blue two-pence stamps with Empress Victoria’s profile pictured on the face. The idea to use stamps as payment for postal services belongs to Rowland Hill who was later knighted for his invention.

Exactly 10 years ago, on May 1 of 1994 Formula One lost the great Brazilian auto racer Ayrton Senna in a high-speed crash at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. 

And we finally arrive at May 2.

On which day in 1999 they found the remains of the famous British mountain climber George Leigh Mallory who perished amid a snowstorm on Mt. Everest along with his fellow climber Andrew Irvine, in 1924. The body’s position indicated with a high degree of accuracy that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine did manage after all, to scale the world’s tallest mountain…