A Sixteenth Century Pope Buried His Pet Elephant Under the Vatican | Hacker News Reader

A Sixteenth Century Pope Buried His Pet Elephant Under the Vatican

atlasobscura.com

35 pointsdiodorus17 comments

Jose Saramago, a Nobel Prize winner for fiction, wrote a brilliant and surreal book based around this elephant and mahout. I highly recommend it: http://www.amazon.com/The-Elephants-Journey-Jos%C3%A9-Sarama...

I'll add this to my reading list next to Saramago's The Double, the source material for 2013 film Enemy.

The Double (2013) and Enemy (2013). One starring Eisenberg, one Gylenahsiadjkl.

>He wasn't such a large elephant (his shoulder reached about four feet tall)

If I am not mistaken, that's 1.3m in the SI world. Isn't that a bit small for an elephant? That's nearly what a very large dog reaches.

Perhaps the elephant was still a juvenile or it had the equivalent of dwarfism in humans, but for elephants.

Either that, or they bred elephants back then until they became very small not unlike ponies. Less likely perhaps.

>they bred elephants back then until they became very small not unlike ponies.

Unlikely, considering the images of the elephant with a guy sitting on its back. Looks like a honest-to-god Indian elephant.

Most likely, the size got lost in translation between whatever measuring system they had in the 16th century, SI and those measuring units from the colonies.

It must have been something to live in an age like that where wonders still existed. (Yah, yah, I know there were drawbacks as well.)

Today it's just so hard to get excited about things, since anything you want to see or know is available in an instant.

For the sake of your own sense of wonder, you might want to reflect on the possibility that what you just described a perception problem on your side.

I still feel like there's plenty of wonder in the world if you go to the right places. Lots of stuff still isn't on the internet.

But that being said, I also sort of agree and feel like the modern world pacifies me with instant information, I think I'm less adventurous as a result.

Before: "I need to find out about a specific topic, time to take a walk to the library! Who knows what real life things might happen along the way."

Now: "Meh, it's a 5 second google search while I'm on the couch."

And so on.

Agreed. I could be traveling around the world, or alternatively I can just load up MapCrunch and look up some random street views (albeit that they always include a street).

As someone who went to an elephant sanctuary in Africa. Trust me, seeing something on a screen is very different than experiencing it in person.

Which is exactly what one should expect from a 16th century pope.

Still beaten by his predecessors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

I came here to post that, but will instead have to mention Pope VIII, who drank the blood of 3 ten-year-old boys to try and stay alive...

amusing read, thanks

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_IX :

> Aged approximately 20 at his first election, he is one of the youngest popes in history. He is the only man to have been Pope on more than one occasion and the only man ever to have sold the papacy.

Just so. What's a bored, super rich megalomaniac to do?

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