Central India The Restaurant Putting India's Disappearing Tribal Cuisine Back on the MenuAtlas Obscura - Reina Gattuso When Aruna Tirkey, a member of Central India’s Oraon indigenous community, walked into her small town’s glossy new department store almost a decade …
London, UK Londoners Once Thought Feral Hogs Roamed Victorian-Era SewersAtlas Obscura - Jessica Leigh Hester For the most part, sewers are designed to be invisible and easy to ignore—assuming that nothing goes wrong. There is some comfort in believing that …
Pyrenees 20 Beautiful Carousels That Aren't Horsing AroundAtlas Obscura - Eric Grundhauser Carousels are the gold standard of vintage and retro amusement rides. What they might lack in thrills they make up for in design, charm, and ornate …
Cookbooks A New Cookbook Traces the Surprising Histories of Famous DishesAtlas Obscura - Anne Ewbank Walk into any Applebee’s or Chili’s and the menu will likely include a chocolate lava cake: spongy cake with a molten center that flows freely when …
Whaling Drone-Piloting Scientists 'Weighed' Whales From 130 Feet in the AirAtlas Obscura - Jessica Leigh Hester If you’ve ever seen a humpback whale spouting in the distance, or a blue whale replica swooping over a museum gallery, or you’ve peered into a …
How Profit and Prejudice Built a Family's Human Skull CollectionAtlas Obscura - Peter Leman On April 15, 1841, the day before his execution, Peter Robinson welcomed an artist to his New Jersey prison cell. A possible inspiration for Poe’s …
Babies Found: Milk Residue That Proves Ancient Europeans Used Cute-as-Heck Baby BottlesAtlas Obscura - Reina Gattuso For decades, archaeologists excavating ancient children’s graves in Germany and Austria were puzzled by a set of artifacts: small, rounded vessels, …
Aquaculture Found: 588 Carp Teeth From China's Oldest-Known Fish FarmAtlas Obscura - Sabrina Imbler In the 1960s, an excavation of Chinese tombs from the Eastern Han Dynasty, in what’s now Shanxi Province, unearthed a clay model of a rice paddy that …
Culture Found: An Elaborate Viking Graveyard at the End of a FjordAtlas Obscura - Isaac Schultz Norway is rife with fjords—deep, canyon-like inlets carved by glaciers that add some 10,000 miles to the country’s convoluted coastline—and at one …
Greenland In Greenland, Thai Restaurants Serve Whale Skin Sushi and Reindeer Pad KrapowAtlas Obscura - Katie Lockhart The scent of chili, holy basil, and lemongrass is familiar. So is the obligatory framed photo of the King of Thailand adorning the spacious dining …
Personal Identity Atlas Obscura's Border/LandsAtlas Obscura Borders don't really exist until we call them into the world. Then signs and pillars and fences go up, landscapes change, and people are drawn in for …
Germany The Green CurtainAtlas Obscura - Andrew Curry For most of its length in Germany, the Iron Curtain was actually a steel fence, and Kai Frobel could see it from his childhood bedroom in the West …
Malta A New CrusadeAtlas Obscura - Ariel Sophia Bardi In a dimly lit room in northern Lebanon, a metal twin bed frame sat pushed against a window. Ghadire Abdelrahman, propped up by a heap of pillows, …
Lebanon This Grand Mosque and Its Migrant Community Were Witness to Venezuela's Rise and FallAtlas Obscura - Megan Janetsky It’s 3:20 in the afternoon when the adhan echoes across Maicao, Colombia. The Arabic call to prayer flows through the sun-baked streets, lined with …
Culture In West Africa, the Inexorable Progress of a Newly Defined BorderAtlas Obscura - Jen Banbury They talked about Ishmaelia. “No one knows if it’s got any minerals because no-one’s been to see. The map’s a complete joke,” Bannister explained. …
Culture The Man Who Went to War With CanadaAtlas Obscura - Cara Giaimo In 1940, when he was 25 years old, Barna Norton went to a shipwrights’ shop in his hometown of Jonesport, Maine, and ordered a boat. It needn’t be …
The Park that Straddles the United States-Mexico BorderAtlas Obscura Every weekend, people gather here for a brief chance to see their loved ones on the other side of the United States–Mexico border. On most days, San …
10 Unusual Border Feuds Around the WorldAtlas Obscura For something often invisible and more or less arbitrary, geographic borders have an enormous impact. In the history of the global geopolitical …
Cou Cou and Flying FishAtlas Obscura When half of Barbados’s national dish migrated across maritime borders, drama ensued. Since 2004, Barbados, the self-proclaimed “Land of the Flying …
Borders of Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-HertogAtlas Obscura A maze of crosses marks the jumbled divide between the Netherlands and Belgium. Many places have jagged borders, but few are as convoluted as the …
Rights & Freedoms 7 Places Worth Trying to See on a Visit to the Korean DMZAtlas Obscura One of the world’s most historically contentious borders is peppered with intriguing attractions. One of the world’s most historically contentious …
Pheasant IslandAtlas Obscura This tiny river island switches sovereignty every six months as part of a rare, centuries-old agreement. Wedged within the border between France and …
How a Border Village Keeps the Memories of Divided Families AliveAtlas Obscura Between 1947 and 1971, the border village of Hundarman Broq was located in Pakistan. But when the dust settled after the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, …
Moroccan Western Sahara WallAtlas Obscura This fortified sand barrier dividing a contested territory is the longest minefield in the world. Barbed wire, electric fences, thousands of armed …
The True Origin of The Gambia's Bizarre BordersAtlas Obscura - Sarah Laskow The Gambia, the tiniest country on the African mainland, is shaped unlike any other nation in the world. It is long and skinny, just 30 miles across …
The Border Market on the Strip of Neutral Ground Between Tajikistan and AfghanistanAtlas Obscura A strip of neutral ground where the people of Tajikistan and Afghanistan come together to trade. Crossing the border from Tajikistan to Afghanistan is …
Rovaniemi's Arctic Circle BorderAtlas Obscura If you visit Santa's village, you can get your passport stamped to show you crossed into the Arctic Circle. There are many places in the world where …
Cyprus Buffer ZoneAtlas Obscura This no man's land slicing through the island is strewn with abandoned relics of another time. A Buffer Zone controlled by the United Nations cuts …
Birds The Gaelic World’s Last Great Bird HuntAtlas Obscura - Luke Fater “It’s not all that tasty,” admits Murdanie Macleod, a merchant marine who lives just outside Ness, Scotland. “If it were available year round, I’d …
Mammoths This Terrible Mammoth Drawing Was a Giant Help to 19th-Century NaturalistsAtlas Obscura - Sabrina Imbler In 1799, a reindeer farmer named Ossip Shumachov began a strange yearly ritual. He was the leader of a community of Evenki, an indigenous group from …
