Mary Stuart's Football; 16th Century

Mary Stuart's Football; 16th Century

Probably the world's oldest surviving football - discovered behind wall panels in the royal apartments at Stirling Castle in Scotland.

Dating back to the 1540s, it probably belonged to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots - who was crowned at the castle in 1543 and subsequently visited it on numerous occasions. The queen was known to be keen on football, golf, horse riding and other sports; her diaries contain entries of games of football in the courtyards and on the lawns of the castle, in which she and other aristocrats, as well as commoners, took an active part.

Why the queen left (or forgot) this ball behind a wall panel in her apartments will probably forever remain a mystery.

The first edition of "The Lord of the Rings" in the USSR. 1966, translated by Zinaida Bobyr

Marie Sklodowska-Curie was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize, the first person to receive the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in two different sciences.

Grand Duchesses Anastasia, Maria, Tatiana, Olga with their father Nicholas II, 1913.

Fanny Kaplan, a participant in the revolutionary movement and Socialist Revolutionary, shot at V. Lenin and seriously wounded him after a rally at the Mikhelson plant in Moscow on August 30, 1918.

Soviet anti-war poster.

translation: not to fight! but to trade