Facts

1818: Franz Josef Gruber composes the song “Silent Night”. It was released to audiences the following day and remains one of the iconic Christmas songs to this day.

1843: A Christmas tree is erected for the first time in a Greek home. It is the home of Ioannis Paparrigopoulos from Naxos, Consul General of Russia in Athens.

1914: Armistice for the celebration of Christmas between the wars on the Western Front (World War I).

1960: Mikis Theodorakis composes “Axion Esti” by Odysseus Elytis.

1963: Intercommunal conflicts are spreading throughout Cyprus. Armistice in Larnaca, after a large number of victims among the Turkish Cypriots. In the afternoon, the Greek Cypriots make a general counterattack and recapture most of Nicosia, while besieging Omorfita. The Turkish president, Cemal Gursel, states that Turkey will intervene unilaterally, if the guarantor powers do not intervene.

1989: Members of the “November 17” organization secretly enter the Sykouri camp in Larissa and remove dozens of anti-tank rockets.

Births

1167: John Actimon, king of England. A year before his death he had been obliged to grant his subjects the Magna Carta, the first Constitution in Europe. (D. 19/10/1216)

1818:James Prescott Joule, British physicist, who formulated the feronymous law of the evolution of heat during the passage of an electric current through a conductor, determined the mechanical equivalent of heat (1842) and contributed with W. Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to the development of refrigeration methods . In his honor, the unit of energy in the International System of Units (SI) was named the Joule. (D. 11/10/1889)

1845: George I, Danish prince and later king of the Greeks. (D. 5/3/1913)

Deaths

1524: Vasco Da Gama, Portuguese explorer, who made the first sea voyage from Europe to India. (Gen. 1460)

1938: Karl Miele, German industrialist. (Miele) (Born 25/7/1869)

2008: Samuel Huntington, American political scientist. He gained worldwide fame in the early 1990s with his book The Clash of Civilizations, in which he attempted to explain the post-Cold War world in cultural terms. (Born 18/4/1927)