July 13 is Fisherman’s Day in Ukraine, the World Day of the Year, International Rock Day and International Puzzle Day. The history of July 13 is replete with events that became turning points for politics, sports, culture and technology, leaving a mark in the global and local memory of humanity.
Fisherman’s Day in Ukraine
Every year on the second Sunday of July in Ukraine, this holiday is celebrated, which was officially introduced back in Soviet times, in 1968, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. After gaining independence, Ukraine preserved this tradition, and for more than 30 years the holiday remains relevant not only for workers in the fishing industry, but also for millions of fishing enthusiasts. Despite the fact that the holiday is not a public holiday, it is celebrated in many coastal villages, towns and fishing communities.
Officially, Fisherman’s Day concerns workers in the fishing industry – commercial fishermen, fish farm workers, aquaculture specialists, fish inspection workers, specialists in growing, processing and selling fish. But in Ukraine, where fishing is a hobby for more than two million people, the holiday also has a domestic, folk character. Amateur fishermen with fishing rods are a common sight on the Dnieper, on the ponds, and on the sea coast.
The Ukrainian fishing industry includes industrial fishing in inland water bodies (lakes, rivers, reservoirs), aquaculture (artificial fish breeding), fish processing industry and trade. Industrial catch is reduced every year due to environmental problems, regulation of rivers, disruption of natural water exchange, as well as due to the war, which has limited access to some water bodies and destroyed infrastructure in the frontline regions.
Instead, aquaculture is growing. About 80% of all Ukrainian fish consumed by the population is fish grown in artificial conditions. Leaders in the industry are farms breeding crucian carp, carp, white carp, as well as trout and sturgeon.
During the war, the fishing industry of Ukraine faced critical challenges. The destruction of the Kakhovskaya HPP in 2023 caused an ecological disaster — the death of millions of fish, the disappearance of spawning grounds, and the loss of reservoirs that fed fish farms. Hundreds of enterprises in the South were left without a source of livelihood. Fishing grounds were also lost or mined, fish farms and hatcheries were destroyed.
An additional problem is poaching — according to the State Agency for Reclamation and Fisheries, it remains a massive phenomenon that significantly reduces the species and number of fish.
Interesting facts
In 2025, the volume of industrial fish catch in Ukraine amounted to more than 18,000 tons. The main part of the catch falls on internal reservoirs, in particular the Dnipro reservoirs, where 907 tons were caught.
The largest freshwater fish officially caught in Ukraine is a beluga weighing more than 170 kg, caught in the Danube in the 1990s. After that, beluga fishing was banned.
According to biologists, more than half of sturgeon fry, which used to return to the Dnipro to spawn, no longer have access to it after the construction of the HPP cascade.
Ukraine has the potential for growing red fish, in particular trout, but due to weak state support, aquaculture concentrates on cheaper species – carp and carp.
In 2017, a Ukrainian amateur fisherman set an unofficial record — he caught a pike weighing 19.1 kg in Zhytomyr Oblast. Released her back into the pond.
Despite the loss of Crimea, Ukraine still considers a 12-mile strip in the Black Sea near the peninsula part of its economic zone, but fishermen do not have access to it.
According to the latest polls, every tenth Ukrainian periodically engages in fishing — that’s about 3.5 million people.
World day of the year
This day does not have an official status in the international calendar, but is considered the World Day of the year. The date is timed to the large-scale charity concert Live Aid, which took place on July 13, 1985 simultaneously in London and Philadelphia. The concert was a response to the famine in Ethiopia and raised more than $125 million in aid.
The main names in rock music of the time took part in the event, and it was this concert that demonstrated that rock can be not only music of protest or self-expression, but also a means of real influence. The broadcast of the concert reached more than a billion people around the world.
Subsequently, it was July 13 that fans of rock music began to unofficially consider as a symbolic day of the unity of the rock community. This day commemorates the power of music as a tool of help, solidarity and compassion. The commemoration of this day does not have a single format, formal ceremonies or institutional attachment, but lives on thanks to the memory of an event that combined sound and action.
Interesting facts
Queen performed for only 20 minutes at Live Aid, but the performance is considered the best live set in rock history.
In 1989, the first major rock concert by a Western group was allowed in the USSR — it was a performance by the Scorpions in Leningrad. Soviet audiences heard “Wind of Change” live for the first time, a song that later became a symbol of the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The loudest concert in the history of rock music was held by the band Manowar in 2008: the sound level exceeded 139 decibels, which is equivalent to a jet engine. This is a record entered in the Guinness Book of Records.
The rock band Deep Purple recorded the loudest performance in 1972, which caused complaints from neighbors… 6 km from the venue.
Queen recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975, using over 180 separate vocal tracks. It was a technically challenging task for an analog studio at the time, and the song was refused radio play due to its excessive length of over 6 minutes.
Led Zeppelin never released a single in the UK during their time. They believed that music should be listened to as a whole – in albums.
In 1969, a Rolling Stones concert at a free festival in Altamont was guarded not by the police, but by the Hell’s Angels biker club, which led to the murder of an audience member right under the stage. This became the symbolic end of the “hippie era”.
In 1977, Pink Floyd played a concert in Montreal, after which Roger Waters wrote the album “The Wall” because he was disappointed with the reaction of the public: people were screaming, getting drunk and not listening to the music. This is one of the rare cases when aggression towards the audience became the basis of a cult album.
In the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Kurt Cobain specifically kept the unintelligible vocals because he believed that the lyrics should not be too direct. During his life, he never once explained the meaning of the lines of this song.
The shortest rock concert in history was held by The Who — it lasted 40 seconds. Guitarist Pete Townsend broke his neck, the drummer broke his drums, and everyone left the stage. It became the stuff of legend, and the tickets became collector’s items.
The oldest active rock band is Golden Earring from the Netherlands. They played without changes in the composition from 1970 to 2021 – more than 50 years.
International Rock Day
This is an unofficial, little-known holiday that originated in the English-speaking world and gradually became part of the popular science calendar to popularize knowledge about geology, minerals and the evolution of the Earth. It does not have a direct relationship to mountain ranges or mountaineering, but refers to solid geological formations – rocks, which are the basis of the earth’s crust.
It is a day when scientific institutions, geological museums and natural communities pay attention to the role of rocks in our lives – not only as materials for construction or industry, but as an archive of the geological history of the planet. In many countries, this day is used to familiarize schoolchildren and students with the basics of geology, mineralogy and petrography.
The holiday is not officially recognized by the UN or UNESCO. It wasn’t mandated by government, but it exists in popular culture, similar to Pi Day or International Meteorite Day. In Ukraine, this date remains little known, although the country has powerful geological regions — in particular, the Ukrainian Shield, the Kryvyi Rih Iron Ore Basin, the Transcarpathian Volcanic Belt, as well as numerous deposits of granite, sandstone, basalt, and limestone.
Interesting facts
The oldest rocks on Earth were found in Canada (Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt, Quebec province): their age is more than 4.3 billion years. They are almost as old as the planet itself.
Granite, from which many monuments and government buildings are built, is formed at a depth of tens of kilometers, but becomes visible on the surface only after millions of years of erosion.
Basalt is the most common volcanic rock on Earth. Most of the seabed consists of it.
In the Sahara, fragments of rocks were discovered, which in terms of mineral composition do not correspond to any terrestrial processes. There is a hypothesis that these are the remains of the collision of the Earth with a large comet or meteorite.
Ukrainian basalt pillars in the Rivne region are a natural formation that resembles the famous “Giant Pillars” in Ireland. It is the result of slow cooling of the lava over 50 million years ago.
Rocks store information about climatic catastrophes, volcanic eruptions, falling asteroids and movement of tectonic plates. It is an archive that can be read like a book, but only with geological knowledge.
The word “rock” in geology does not mean “stone” in the narrow sense. This is a generalized concept for any mass of minerals that have a common origin. For example, a coal seam is also a rock, although it is not as hard as granite.
International Puzzle Day
International Puzzle Day, also known as Rubik’s Day, is celebrated every year on July 13, the birthday of Ernand Rubik. This is an unofficial date that has gained popularity in the communities of fans of puzzles, logical thinking and mental gymnastics. The central figure of the day is the Rubik’s Cube, a three-dimensional mechanical puzzle created in 1974 by the Hungarian architect and teacher Erno Rubik. Initially, it was not intended to create a toy – it was an educational tool for explaining the principles of spatial geometry to students of the Faculty of Architecture.
The puzzle turned out to be so fascinating that it quickly spread beyond the educational environment. In the 1980s, the Rubik’s Cube became a global phenomenon, despite the fact that at first no Western company believed in its success. Sales exceeded 350 million copies, making it the most popular mechanical puzzle game in history. Today it is recognized even by those who have never held it in their hands.
This day is not limited to honoring the cube itself. It is about a larger idea: intellectual challenge, creative thinking, logic and patience. This is what unites all puzzles – from classic mechanical structures to digital problems, Japanese Sudoku or chess sketches. The idea is not speed, but the process of solving, the satisfaction of overcoming complexity.
International Puzzle Day has no official recognition, but is celebrated by educational institutions, fan communities, speedcubing clubs and online puzzle solving communities. It has become a cultural symbol of love for mental activity in an age where attention is often distracted by superficial impressions.
Interesting facts
The Rubik’s Cube has exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations, but each of them can be solved in a maximum of 20 moves—this was proved mathematically in 2010.
Erno Rubik was initially unable to solve his puzzle and spent over a month learning how to reset it.
In China, there are schools where speedcubing — solving a speed cube — is part of the logic olympiad preparation program.
The youngest world champion in solving the cube was 7 years old. He set a record of 1.9 seconds using a special robot.
The Rubik’s Cube was used by NASA during astronaut training — as an exercise in spatial thinking in microgravity.
At some US universities, puzzles are required in engineering thinking programs—students are required to create their own mechanical puzzles from scratch.
There is a special language for describing the movements of the Rubik’s cube – Singma notation. For example, R’ means counterclockwise rotation of the right face.
The most expensive Rubik’s cube in the world was made of gold, sapphires, emeralds and rubies, and its value is more than 2 million dollars. It is fully functional.
The famous Ukrainian mathematician Volodymyr Drinfeld (Fields Prize laureate) noted that puzzles similar to the Rubik’s cube train not only the mind, but also intuition.
Historical events on this day
1908 — IV Olympic Games opened in London, which for the first time included the participation of women in its program. Despite the fact that this only applied to some sports, the fact that women participated on an equal footing with male athletes became an important milestone in the fight for gender equality in sports.
1920 — The Red Cross Society was founded in Ukraine. It appeared in the conditions of a major humanitarian crisis and was aimed at organizing aid to the wounded, refugees and the civilian population. Later, this organization became an important component in the system of medical and social support in the conditions of disasters and wars.
1923 — The Parliament of Great Britain passed a law prohibiting the sale of alcohol to persons under the age of 18. The initiator was Lady Astor, the first female deputy in the British Parliament. This regulatory act became a landmark example of the protection of teenagers in a society that, until recently, even denied the right of women to participate in politics.
1930 — The world’s first World Cup in football has started in Uruguay. Its organization was a great achievement for FIFA at that time and a significant stage in the transformation of football into a global phenomenon. Only 13 national teams took part, but the interest in the event was huge.
1938 — The first television theater opened in Boston, a prototype of modern television. Spectators, who paid 25 cents, sat in the auditorium one floor below and watched a broadcast of the play taking place above them. It was an experiment in the field of live image transmission, combining theater and television long before the appearance of home screens.
1944 — Operation “Overlord”, the largest amphibious operation of the Allies in the Second World War, has ended. Its culmination was the landing in Normandy, which opened the Western Front and enabled the liberation of France from Nazi occupation.
1947 — An international meeting was held in Paris, at which European countries agreed to participate in the “Marshall Plan” proposed by the USA, a large-scale program for the economic recovery of post-war Europe. Countries under the control of the USSR and Finland did not participate, but the offer remained open.
1949 — Pope Pius XII announced the automatic excommunication of all Catholics who join or support communist parties. This decision cemented a deep chasm between the Catholic Church and communist ideology during the Cold War.
1951 — In London, Queen Elizabeth II laid the foundation stone of the future National Theatre. This step was the beginning of the creation of one of the main centers of British drama, which later became an important cultural center of Europe.
1956 — In the Israeli city of Haifa, the foundation of the first subway in the Middle East – the so-called “Carmelita” – was laid. The unusual format is not an underground city with several lines, but a short tunnel with several stations on the slope of Mount Carmel, but it is considered the shortest subway in the world.
1977 — The Ogaden war between Ethiopia and Somalia began. The war lasted several months and became an example of a conflict in which superpowers intervened — the USSR and Cuba supported Ethiopia, and China and partly the United States supported Somalia.
1985 — In Paris, Serhiy Bubka for the first time in the history of pole vaulting overcame a height of 6 meters. This achievement changed the perception of the limits of human capabilities in athletics and opened a new era in this sport. Bubka later surpassed this record many more times, setting dozens of world achievements.
