Jāņi

Jāņi ([jɑːɲi]) is a Latvian anniversary festival, which celebrates the summer solstice, the day when it has the shortest night and the longest day. Although the shortest night is usually on 21st or 22 June, the public holiday - Līgo Day and Jāņi Day is on 23rd and 24 June. The day before Jāņi was formerly known as Zāļu diena, which is now known as Līgo Day.

On Jāņi Eve people went to gather flowers, from which women made wreaths and put on their heads. Men's wreaths are usually made of oak leaves. Līgo songs are associated with fertility and disaster prevention.

Title

The name "Līgosvētki" was first used and introduced in 1900 in his Jāņi songs collection by Emilis Melngailis, who back in 1928 wrote in the newspaper "Jaunākās Ziņas":

Traditions

Picking Herbs of Jāņi, house and fence decoration

Almost all herbaceous plants belonged to Herbs of Jāņi, but in particular people collected bedstraw, cow wheat, vetchling, clover, etc. They embellished rooms, courtyards, yards, they also were wreathed into wreaths. Among trees, the most used decorations were birch boughs and oak branches. Houses were never decorated with aspen and alder branches: they were considered to be evil trees. Some Herbs of Jāņi were reaped on noon, others on Jāņi Eve, or on Jāņi morning when it had dew. In 1627, P. Einhorn wrote:

LIGO

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory to detect gravitational waves. Cofounded in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. Scientists involved in the project and the analysis of the data for gravitational-wave astronomy are organised by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration which includes more than 900 scientists worldwide, as well as 44,000 active Einstein@Home users. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with important contributions from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Max Planck Society of Germany, and the Australian Research Council. By mid-September 2015 "the world's largest gravitational-wave facility" completed a 5-year US$200-million overhaul at a total cost of $620 million. LIGO is the largest and most ambitious project ever funded by the NSF.