Mihai Țurcaș

Mihai Ţurcaş (born November 18, 1942) is a Romanian sprint canoer who competed from the mid to late 1960s. Competing in two Summer Olympics, he won two medals in the K-4 1000 m event with a silver in 1968 and a bronze in 1964.

Ţurcaş also won a gold medal in the K-4 1000 m event at the 1966 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships in East Berlin.

References

Urca

Urca is a traditional and wealthy residential neighborhood with nearly 7,000 inhabitants (2000 census) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Although most of the neighborhood dates from the 1920s, parts of it are much older. What is now called the Forte São João, a military base at the foot of the Sugarloaf Mountain, is where the first Portuguese settlement in Rio was founded by Estácio de Sá on March 1, 1565. The French had arrived 12 years earlier and founded a settlement, called France Antarctique, close to what is now Flamengo and Gloria districts, in downtown Rio. The French, riven by internal disputes between Catholics and Protestants, were massacred by the Portuguese and their Indian allies in attacks organised from here, expelling them from the nearby Villegagnon Island (named after the French commander Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon). The street now called Rua São Sebastião, in Urca, which leads from behind the fort to the Urca cassino, was originally a trail from the Portuguese fort skirting the edge of the sea to the mainland along the peninsula that houses the Sugar Loaf and a smaller hill, the Morro da Urca. Rua São Sebastião thus has some claim to be the oldest street in Rio.

Hulk (medieval ship type)

A hulk (or "holk") was a type of medieval sea craft, a technological predecessor of the carrack and caravel. The hulk appears to have remained a relatively minor type of ship apparently peculiar to the low countries of Europe where it was probably used primarily as a river or canal boat, with limited potential for coastal cruising.

History

The name hulk may come from the Greek word holkas, meaning a towed boat, which would be consistent with the use of the hulk as a river barge. The word hulk also has a medieval meaning of "hollowed-out" or "husk-like" which is also apposite for the shape of the basic hulk. In the fourteenth century the hulk began to develop until it was able to rival the cog as a major load carrier in the medieval economy. Whether this was a consequence of a perception of the cog's shortcomings or a result of a shift in the economic geography of Northern Europe towards the Dutch low countries is not easy to discern. By the 15th century, the hulk was replaced by the caravel.