The 1979 balloon escape is a reminder that human ingenuity, given enough patience and stubbornness, can outmanoeuvre even the most repressive machinery. And the Honorius case illustrates how institutional questions, once opened, tend to stay open for an uncomfortably long time.
Imagine you want to leave your country. The border is mined, watched, and actively lethal. Your options are limited. Unless, of course, you happen to own a sewing machine.
The Balloon That Beat the Iron Curtain
On 16 September 1979, two families from Pössneck in East Germany did something that would have seemed preposterous if it hadn’t actually worked. The Strelzyks and the Wetzels built a 28-metre hot air balloon from taffeta and cotton, sourced carefully so as not to arouse suspicion, sewed it at home, and then flew eight people, including four children, across one of the most heavily militarised borders in modern history.
The flight lasted 28 minutes. They landed in Bavaria. They were free.
This was not their first attempt. A failed try in 1978 had taught them enough to go back, improve the design, and try again, which is, depending on your disposition, either inspiring or quietly terrifying. The Stasi were reportedly furious. The escape was later made into a Disney film in 1982, which feels both fitting and faintly surreal.
The Pope Who Was Excommunicated After He Died
Also on this date in 681, the Sixth Ecumenical Council excommunicated Pope Honorius I. The detail worth sitting with is that Honorius had been dead for 42 years. His letters during the Monothelite controversy had been judged too sympathetic to heresy, and the council saw no reason to let death get in the way of a formal rebuke.
The posthumous condemnation became a central problem in debates about papal infallibility, one that was not fully resolved until the First Vatican Council in 1870. Some arguments, it turns out, are remarkably patient.
Campo Maior, 1732
On the same date in 1732, lightning struck the armoury in Campo Maior, Portugal. The stored gunpowder ignited. The explosion killed around 800 people, roughly two-thirds of the town’s entire population. The town was rebuilt, and today it hosts the Festa do Povo, a flower festival that fills its streets with colour. History is, among other things, very good at complicated endings.
Three stories, one date. Today’s episode covers all of them in ten minutes, and Clara ties them together around a single question: what do people do when they hit a wall, literal or otherwise? The answers range from quietly brilliant to thoroughly posthumous. It is worth a listen.