Speaker 1: Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
Speaker 1: of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Sometimes we need a career change. Doing the
Speaker 1: same job, working for the same boss every day for
Speaker 1: a number of years can get tiresome, especially if that
Speaker 1: boss doesn't have our best interests at heart. We get
Speaker 1: burned out, and the job we've loved all that time
Speaker 1: no longer fulfills us the way it used to. Except
Speaker 1: Belgium's sisters of the Order of Poor Claire did love
Speaker 1: their job. They were nuns living simple, sheltered lives, full
Speaker 1: of prayer and joy. But when one of their own
Speaker 1: put that simple life in jeopardy, they jumped into action
Speaker 1: in a way nobody ever expected. The Poor Claires, as
Speaker 1: they were sometimes called, were formed in twelve twelve by
Speaker 1: Claire of Assisi. She had been born in Italy to
Speaker 1: a wealthy family, but gave it all up when she
Speaker 1: was seventeen to follow St. Francis and his teachings. She
Speaker 1: became a nun and swore herself to a life of
Speaker 1: extreme poverty. Claire was eventually joined by her mother and
Speaker 1: two sisters, along with several other rich women from Florence.
Speaker 1: Soon Claire had her own order, and she put down
Speaker 1: some pretty strict rules for everyone to follow. They weren't
Speaker 1: allowed to own any property, nor could they have much money.
Speaker 1: Anything they owned was to be given to them by
Speaker 1: the people in their community. Now, over the years, the
Speaker 1: poor Claires grew in number and spread out across Europe
Speaker 1: and the America's including Belgium. There in the city of
Speaker 1: Bruge there was a six year old convent that had
Speaker 1: been home to a group of Claires. They loved it
Speaker 1: there and kept mostly to themselves, not interacting much with
Speaker 1: the people on the outside, at least not until Ronnie
Speaker 1: Crabs showed up on their doorstep. Crab came to them
Speaker 1: in ninety five, working as a groundskeeper and a jack
Speaker 1: of all trades around the convent. If the nuns needed
Speaker 1: to be driven somewhere, they called on Ronnie. Something broken
Speaker 1: needed fixed. There was Ronnie. Grass had to be cut.
Speaker 1: You guessed it, Ronnie. Now, although he wasn't a woman,
Speaker 1: a nun, or a devout member of their order. The
Speaker 1: Claires took a liking to Crab. He started giving them
Speaker 1: small tastes of the outside world, and in return, they
Speaker 1: put him in charge of their financial holdings. Things ran
Speaker 1: smoothly for the next three years until they overheard some
Speaker 1: unsettling news. They were going to lose their convent. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't Ronnie's fault. It was the bishops. You see.
Speaker 1: The bishop wanted to separate the Claires, placing each of
Speaker 1: them in different churches while he sold off the art
Speaker 1: and artifacts within the convent. We're talking about hundreds of
Speaker 1: years worth of holy relics. As for the building itself,
Speaker 1: it would also be sold off and probably demolished so
Speaker 1: that private buyers could use the land. So, not wanting
Speaker 1: to lose their home and their bond, the sisters took
Speaker 1: matters into their own hands. They found out that they
Speaker 1: actually had more rights than they known about. The existing
Speaker 1: by laws allowed them to change the rules of ownership
Speaker 1: without the diocese's involvement, so the nuns quickly took over
Speaker 1: complete ownership of the convent. They also amended the by
Speaker 1: laws stating that their assets would go to the church
Speaker 1: when they died. Now their families would be compensated instead.
Speaker 1: From there, the Claires, with Ronnie Crabbe's help, started selling
Speaker 1: off whatever they could, including art and holy relics. The
Speaker 1: bishop found out what the sisters were doing and he
Speaker 1: met with the mother superior sister Anna. He wanted to
Speaker 1: salvage the situation and keep them from selling the convent
Speaker 1: to The Bishop promised her that the church would take
Speaker 1: care of all of them and give them everything they
Speaker 1: needed for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately for him,
Speaker 1: though he'd already missed the boat, the sisters had already
Speaker 1: sold the convent to a series of textile companies for
Speaker 1: nearly one point five million dollars. The bishop flipped. He
Speaker 1: called the authorities and tried to have the Claires arrested
Speaker 1: for stealing from the church, except they hadn't stolen from
Speaker 1: the church. They had done their due diligence and had
Speaker 1: every right to sell their own convent. The Claires used
Speaker 1: the money to buy a fixer upper of a castle
Speaker 1: in the south of France, and those old timey rules
Speaker 1: of extreme poverty and no possessions that they've been following, well,
Speaker 1: those went out the window too. The poor Claires bought
Speaker 1: a Cadillac, half a dozen Mercedes sedans, and a fully
Speaker 1: stocked limousine with the sticker price of over a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. They also chartered an ambulance to bring Sister Agnes,
Speaker 1: the oldest of their order, up to their new home.
Speaker 1: Once they reached the castle, the sisters dropped some more
Speaker 1: cash on eleven race horses and lived out the next
Speaker 1: several weeks in the lap of luxury, well sort of,
Speaker 1: you see. The castle didn't have heat or running water,
Speaker 1: and Ronnie Crabb turned out to be not such a
Speaker 1: great friend after all, while the sisters had been selling
Speaker 1: off church property, he was pocketing millions of dollars for himself.
Speaker 1: Crab was eventually arrested, spending over a month in prison
Speaker 1: as he awaited his trial until he was mysteriously released.
Speaker 1: The charges, you see, had been dropped. The sale of
Speaker 1: the convent was also avoided, and the church regained control
Speaker 1: of everything. And as for the Claires, they were rewarded
Speaker 1: with a permanent stay in a retirement home for the
Speaker 1: rest of their lives. Things might not have ended the
Speaker 1: way they'd hoped, but the poor Claires did pull off
Speaker 1: in Ocean's eleven style heist of their own convent from
Speaker 1: right under the bishop's nose, at least for a while.
Speaker 1: And through it all they've done what any sister would
Speaker 1: have done. They kept the faith. It seems like there's
Speaker 1: a medicine for everything these days. Dealing with about of
Speaker 1: indigestion got a weird rash, There are treatments for those.
Speaker 1: There's even a medicine to help people with Catard's delusion,
Speaker 1: a disorder that makes those afflicted think that they are
Speaker 1: dead and rotting. But before there was a pill or
Speaker 1: a cream or an injection for every little ailment, there
Speaker 1: was silphium. Silphium was a miracle drug. Among its many applications,
Speaker 1: it was used to season meals fed to livestock, to
Speaker 1: plumping them up, to increase one's libido. It was even
Speaker 1: used as a contraceptive. But perhaps most commonly, sylfium was
Speaker 1: deemed a cure all, a wonder drug that was taken
Speaker 1: to alleviate everything from the sniffles and headaches to hernia's
Speaker 1: and tumors. Anytime someone asked, does this look infected, the
Speaker 1: answer would inevitably be, just take some sylvium. It was
Speaker 1: also relied on to jump start menstruation, just stirred up
Speaker 1: with a little pepper, a dashamer and some wine. Now
Speaker 1: miracle products that promised to cure everything under the sun
Speaker 1: became commonplace throughout the eighteen hundreds. They were branded as
Speaker 1: snake oil solutions and were mostly chock full of addictive
Speaker 1: drugs like cocaine and opium, but not sylfium. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a snake oil, at least not to the likes of
Speaker 1: Julius Caesar, who depended on it so much he kept
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred pounds of it in his treasury. You see,
Speaker 1: sylfium was nothing more than a plant, and a popular
Speaker 1: one at that. According to legend, sylfium started popping up
Speaker 1: after a black rain had fallen over the city of
Speaker 1: Syrene on Libya's northern coast more than two thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: It was identified by its dense, blackened roots covered in bark,
Speaker 1: as well as its yellow green leaves on top. Its
Speaker 1: stock was hollow, and it was covered in tiny yellow flowers.
Speaker 1: When it wasn't being mashed up into medicinal paste or
Speaker 1: sprinkled like salt over a dish, it was being enjoyed
Speaker 1: as a meal unto itself. The stocks were often cooked
Speaker 1: either were a flame or in a pot of boiling
Speaker 1: water before being crunched on. Every part of the sylphium
Speaker 1: plant was utilized for something, from its roots, which could
Speaker 1: be dipped in vinegar and eaten raw, to its flowers,
Speaker 1: which were turned into aromatic perfumes. Looking to spice up
Speaker 1: your salad, just sprinkle on a dried form of its
Speaker 1: sap to boost its flavor. Greece and Rome came to
Speaker 1: use so much of the plant that it puts syrene
Speaker 1: on the map. Sylphium became one of their main exports
Speaker 1: and started appearing on the city's currency. It was literally
Speaker 1: worth its weight in gold. But of course, when someone
Speaker 1: in power gets a taste of something good, they want
Speaker 1: to control it for themselves, folks like Emperor Augustus of Rome.
Speaker 1: He ordered that every last plant, seed and by product
Speaker 1: to be sent to him as tributes. But still its
Speaker 1: use continued to spread. Writers and singers wax poetic about it,
Speaker 1: and its name appeared in various written works. Pliny of
Speaker 1: the Elder wrote about it a lot in his ten
Speaker 1: volume naturalist history Area. So what happened to all that sylfium. Well,
Speaker 1: the long story short is it's extinct. But the reasons
Speaker 1: why are numerous. For one, it was used for everything.
Speaker 1: The fact that we don't have it today is primarily
Speaker 1: because all of it was eaten, ground up, shredded, and
Speaker 1: ingested thousands of years ago. It was also believed that
Speaker 1: farmers would let their cattle and sheep graze on it freely,
Speaker 1: but never planted more, which brings us to the other
Speaker 1: problem with sylfium. It was almost impossible to cultivate manually,
Speaker 1: as the ancient Greeks discovered when they tried to grow
Speaker 1: it on their own land and failed. Whatever the reason,
Speaker 1: sylfium is no more, but the image of it still
Speaker 1: exists today throughout culture. And just take a look at
Speaker 1: any greeting card or decoration on Valentine's Day. The sylphium seed,
Speaker 1: as depicted on coins from ancient Syrene, was shown as
Speaker 1: a scalloped V shape that came to a point at
Speaker 1: its base. Given sylphium's use and love making, either before
Speaker 1: or after, depending on the knee, it became a symbol
Speaker 1: of love and lust. The ancients saw it as just
Speaker 1: a seed, but we know it today as a way
Speaker 1: to tell someone how we feel that symbol the heart.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
Speaker 1: and you can learn all about it over at the
Speaker 1: World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.