Explore 27 October

Michael Servetus.

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Christian Fritzsch · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Michael Servetus is burned at Geneva

Michael Servetus was burned at the stake at Champel, outside Geneva, on 27 October 1553, condemned as a heretic. A Spanish physician and theologian, he had denied the doctrine of the Trinity in print — in De Trinitatis erroribus in 1531 and again in Christianismi restitutio, published in the year of his death.

He was arrested in Geneva, where John Calvin took a leading part in his trial. The execution divided Protestants and became one of the first arguments in Europe about whether the state should kill people for their beliefs; it fed directly into the emergence of Unitarianism.

The same book that condemned him contains the first accurate European description of the circulation of the blood through the lungs.

A 1 train leaving the 125th Street station in New York.

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Mtattrain · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

New York opens its subway

The first line of the New York City Subway opened on 27 October 1904, running twenty-two miles from City Hall up to 145th Street and Lenox Avenue. It was built and run by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company; the City Hall station, with its vaulted tilework, was the showpiece.

Mayor George B. McClellan was given the controls of the first train as a ceremony, enjoyed himself, and refused to hand them over — driving it as far as 103rd Street in Harlem.

The system now carries millions of passengers a day and runs all night, one of very few in the world that does.

A Lockheed U-2, the type Major Anderson was flying.

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United States Department of the Air Force · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

The most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Saturday 27 October 1962 was the worst day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down an American U-2 over Cuba, killing its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson — the only person to die in combat in the whole crisis.

Kennedy’s advisers read the shooting-down as deliberate escalation by Moscow. The Joint Chiefs wanted to strike the missile site and then invade; the president held back. Elsewhere that day a Soviet submarine under depth-charge harassment came close to using a nuclear torpedo.

Anderson was posthumously awarded the first Air Force Cross. The following morning Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles.

Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s first president.

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Danny Gys · CC BY 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

Turkmenistan becomes independent

Turkmenistan declared its independence on 27 October 1991, as the Soviet Union came apart. It had been the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic since 1925, and the Russian conquest of the Turkmen lands had been completed in the 1880s.

Saparmurat Niyazov, the republic’s Communist Party leader, became the new state’s first president and ruled until his death in 2006. A new constitution followed in May 1992. The country holds some of the world’s largest natural gas reserves.