1. Place de la Concorde, Paris
famous for: During the French Revolution, the square, temporarily renamed Place de la Révolution, housed the guillotine that killed more than a thousand people.
what you didn’t know: While Louis xvi and Marie Antoinette would meet their ends there, the square was the scene of violence long before the blade began to fall. As the masses gathered for Louis and Marie’s wedding in 1770, “a numerous banditti, from Normandy, broke in upon the vast assemblage of spectators” and sawed through the supports of the scaffolding that held up much of the crowd, notes John Carr, Esq., in The Stranger in France (1803). “The disorder became dreadful, and universal; many were crushed to death, and some hundreds of the people, whilst endeavoring to make their escape, were stabbed, and robbed.” By way of apology, the future king and queen had the victims buried in the new cemetery at l’Église de la Madeleine — the same cemetery where, two decades later, many of the Place’s revolutionary casualties “were thrown, amid heaps of headless victims, into promiscuous graves of unslacked lime! How inscrutable are the ways of destiny!” JB
2. Independence Square, Kiev
famous for: Independence Square was the scene of 2004’s so-called Orange Revolution, which delivered Ukraine’s presidency to pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko over the pro-establishment Viktor Yanukovich.
what you didn’t know: Just four years earlier, the Ukraine Without Kuchma campaign, provoked by evidence that then president Leonid Kuchma had conspired in the murder of independent journalist Georgiy Gongadze, pitched a tent city in the square. Not pleased with the protest but reluctant to resort to the heavy-handed tactics of their Communist predecessors, authorities conceived a solution that would appeal to the surging patriotism and consumerism of the populace: Kiev’s mayor announced that the square would receive a facelift to mark the tenth anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union and that a giant underground shopping mall would be built beneath it. Construction hoarding went up around the site, and protestors were forced into the side streets, where the campaign eventually petered out; Kuchma survived the crisis. At the reopening ceremony, he called the new Independence Column, which now dominated the square, a symbol of liberty, faith, beauty, and respect for human intelligence and toil. When the Orange Revolution began a few years later, Yanukovich must have wondered if the square couldn’t use another statue or two. CT
3. Durbar Square, Kathmandu
famous for: As a frequent site of rallies and protests, Durbar Square has been central to the power struggle that has beset the Nepali capital since Crown Prince Dipendra’s suicide and mass murder of the royal family in 2001.
what you didn’t know: During a much earlier period of political strife, the ambitious and ruthless Jung Bahadur used the square in his plot to skip a few rungs on the ladder of power. After the 1846 assassination of a military commander favoured by the monarchy, the queen summoned scores of government officials to the armoury’s courtyard, part of Durbar Square’s sprawling network of buildings and connecting spaces. While the mandarins believed they’d been gathered to help uncover the killer, things quickly turned bloody: Bahadur and his troops began systematically attacking them with knives, swords, and guns. (The queen, likely in cahoots with Bahadur, survived.) In a profile of Bahadur written some years later, adventurer and mystic Laurence Oliphant noted that by the time they were finished, all that remained were “the corpses of the highest nobles of the land, shrouded by the [rifles’] dense smoke still hanging.” The next morning, the newly minted Prime Minister Bahadur gathered his soldiers in the square, pointed to “a ghastly heap” of their dead commanders, and assured the army “that it would find in him all that it had ever found in them.” JB
4. Plaza De Mayo, Buenos Aires
famous for: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo gathered in the square every week for three decades beginning in 1977 in memory of their children, taken during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War.
what you didn’t know: The site of countless popular movements over the years, including the May 1810 revolution that paved the way for Argentina’s independence, the Plaza de Mayo has long been a symbol of the people — so much so that on June 16, 1955, the square itself became a target. Navyaircraft overflying the plaza ostensibly to show support for embattled president Juan Perón instead bombed and strafed it in an ill-conceived coup attempt. While the pilots’ plan to assassinate Perón by bombing the abutting Presidential Palace failed, they managed to kill more than 300 of his supporters gathered in the plaza and wound another 600. The newspaper La Nación recounted what happened when a bomb hit an approaching trolley bus: “The vehicle keeled over on its left side, its doors opened, and a horrible cargo of dead and wounded people fell out onto the street . . . One could hear the cries of dozens of wounded over the abrupt sound of a thousand batting pigeon wings.” Even worse, coup organizers had neglected to confirm the support of the armyand the air force, and an hour later a white flag was raised over the navy building. (Three months later, a better-coordinated coup succeeded in ousting Perón.) Today you can still see bullet holes in the buildings surrounding the plaza, a reminder of the only time the city has ever been attacked from the air. CT
5. Tiananmen Square, Beijing
famous for: In 1989, students, activists, and intellectuals rallied against the Chinese Communist Party in the square. The government sent in the army and massacred the demonstrators.
what you didn’t know: When Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China here in 1949, the space was big enough to fit 70,000 people — not big enough for Mao, who ordered that it be expanded to “hold an assembly of one billion.” As an official architect explained, “The Chairman’s mind, broad as the ocean, flies beyond the confines of old walls and corridors and penetrates into the future.” Ten years later, the square had grown from 54,000 to 400,000 square metres, and today it is even larger, its area equivalent to more than fifty soccer fields. The revolution needed the space: the square hosts the country’s National Day parades, which, at the peak of Chinese Communism’s ideological fervour, became rigidly organized, hierarchical affairs mirroring Mao’s idea of socialist paradise. In the 1952 version, the three branches of the military were followed by 1,000 railroad workers, 1,500 drummers, 15,000 children, 90,000 industrial workers, 20,000 farmers, an assortment of bureaucrats, merchants, and Beijing residents, and finally the 3,000 members of the Grand Athletic Army and the 5,000-strong Grand Artistic Army. For the benefit of the paraders, each flagstone in the square is numbered to make sure everyone knows their place. CT
6. Temple Square, Salt Lake City
FAMOUS FOR: The historical headquarters of the Mormon Church, Temple Square welcomes millions of visitors each year, who come to see its postcard-perfect granite temple.
WHAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Had the Church’s second president, Brigham Young, been in charge of the laws of nature as well as the Latter-day Saints, Temple Square might look quite different. Though he admitted “not being a practical chemist, but only a chemist in theory,” Young resisted calls to build the square’s structures in stone, instead nominating adobe—clay mixed with straw. Adobe, he reckoned, gets stronger and stronger over time until, after 5000 years, “it comes to its highest perfection.” The original adobe Old Tabernacle, built in 1852, didn’t make it quite that long: it was torn down twenty-five years after construction to make room for a sturdier stone structure. (The square’s perimeter wall has also suffered thanks to Young’s predilection for adobe, but, perhaps out of deference, the church has retained its original appearance in all reconstruction efforts.) Fortunately, harder heads prevailed when it came to the temple itself—in 1880, Elder Wilford Woodruff revealed he’d always doubted Young’s choice for the temple, “because I had seen it in my dream built of some other material.” JB
