787: The 7th Ecumenical Council in Nicaea condemns the iconoclasts and the icon worshippers.
1138: A powerful earthquake destroys the city of Aleppo in Syria.
1822: Manto Mavrogenous, leading the inhabitants of Mykonos, repels an attack by Algerian pirates.
1889: James Prescott Joule, the English physicist, dies. His name was given to the unit of measurement of energy.
1899: The Boer War begins in West Africa between the British colonists and the Dutch of the Transvaal and Orange Free State provinces, who were called Afrikaners or Boers.
1912: During the First Balkan War, the Greek army liberates Kozani.
1922: Greece and Turkey sign a ceasefire agreement one month after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Under the Armistice of Mudanya, the Greek army abandons Eastern Thrace and withdraws beyond the western bank of the Evros.
1931: One hundred thousand people gather in the streets of London to demonstrate their opposition to the government’s measures on wage cuts.
1944: The retreating Germans bomb and destroy the port of Piraeus.
1963: The famous French writer, poet, actor, director and painter Jean Cocteau dies at the age of 74.
1963: Édith Piaf, the stage name of Édith Giovanna Gassion, the leading French singer, dies.
1968: The United States sends the first crewed spacecraft into space, Apollo 7.
1973: The death toll in Chile reaches 2,000, one month after the junta of Augusto Pinochet seized power.
1986: Gorbachev and Reagan meet and hold talks at the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland.
1991: The State Council of the USSR decides to dissolve the KGB and replace it with other services.
1993: Norwegian publisher William Nygaard is shot and seriously wounded in Oslo. His publishing house translated and published Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in Norway.
2003: Conjoined twin girls from Thessaloniki are successfully separated in Rome in an operation lasting many hours. As soon as the five-month-old girls wake from the anaesthetic, they immediately look for each other. On the same day in Dallas, Texas, another separation operation on two-year-old conjoined twin boys from Egypt is also completed successfully.
