The 23rd of April
we celebrated the World Book Day.
We celebrate this day because on the same day in 1616 Cervantes,
Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega passed away. There were also lots of
other excellent writers just like Maurice Druon, K. Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov,
Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo, who were born or died on the 23rd
of April. That’s also the reason that this date, which has a symbolic
signification for literature, was chosen by the General Conference of the
UNESCO for honoring books and their writers and for encouraging everyone,
especially the youngsters, to discover the pleasure of reading. The idea of
this celebration was born in Cataluña (Spain), where on this day they
traditionally give a rose to the buyer of a book.
There are also some other events on that day, that have actually nothing
to do with books:
The day of the Community in
Castilla León, because on the 23rd of April in 1521 the Battle
of Villalar in the countryside of Valladolid was set free. They confronted the
members of the Castilian community, which was a little army that was mostly made
up by farmers, with the imperial forces of the new king Carlos I. Carlos I entered
a little while before from Flandes with barely knowing a word of Castilian and
was the most powerful European king of the moment. The comuneros were massacred
and the battle, of which they knew it would be a bloodbath, for the freedom and
for the rejection imposed from the outside, was recorded in the history forever.
Another event that took place on April 23 of the year 303 was the one on
where San Jorge, leader of Aragón
and Cataluña (and other countries and territories, just like England), was
tortured and executed for defending his religious liberty and for not giving up
his Christianity when his ceasar, Diocleciano, told him to follow and to seek
after the Christians of the empire. After that the legend of San Jorge and the
Dragon came up. The legend tells that San Jorge went to a dragon, who demanded
human sacrifices in exchange for water of a well, and killed it. He actually
confronted the dragon after he heard that the next sacrifice would be a
princess. With this legend a new kind of literature was introduced: the one of
swords, dragons and witchery. In Cataluña they remember San Jorge (San Jordi
there) giving a red rose, which is the symbol of love and passion, with the
book that is always accompanying it to the loved ones.
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