Local Oddities

Some of Europe's strangest stories barely register at the national level because everyone involved considers them completely normal. A village in Finland hosts a world championship in wife carrying. In Castrillo de Murcia, Spain, men dressed as the devil jump over babies laid out on mattresses in the street. In England, people chase a wheel of cheese down a hill steep enough to send some of them to the hospital. Local Oddities collects the customs, municipal rules, tiny institutions, and very specific traditions that survived in one corner of the continent. A town doesn’t need its own constitution to qualify, although that certainly helps.