{"id":10545,"date":"2011-08-07T17:13:36","date_gmt":"2011-08-07T21:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10545"},"modified":"2020-07-04T09:58:46","modified_gmt":"2020-07-04T13:58:46","slug":"when-i-used-to-do-this-i-broke-my-hand-14-times-and-im-a-banjo-player","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/08\/07\/when-i-used-to-do-this-i-broke-my-hand-14-times-and-im-a-banjo-player\/","title":{"rendered":"“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poland’s answer to the Society for Creative Anachronism, Knights’ Brotherhoods<\/a> stage their own form of medieval recreation:<\/p>\n

\n

Compering and judging the hand-to-hand combat is Krzysztof Ptasinski, the son of a Polish diplomat who learnt English from an American teacher in Addis Ababa and insists I call him “Redneck Chris”.<\/p>\n

His hooded robe and summer gear make him look like a monk in flip-flops.<\/p>\n

“Whoa dude! Ouch! In your face!” he hollers as two knights wearing full body-plate armour weighing 35kg (77lb) lay into each other with double-handed swords.<\/p>\n

To progress, a knight has to reach five points, each earned by laying a clean blow on an opponent above the knee.<\/p>\n

The swords are blunt, of course, but that does not mean it is completely harmless.<\/p>\n

“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player,” he says.<\/p>\n

“I’ve got two screws in this finger. I had a cracked skull.<\/p>\n

“When we were fighting the Belarusian guys, I had my kidney displaced.”<\/p>\n

I ask him what the appeal is.<\/p>\n

“Whenever you get hit in the helmet you almost lose consciousness because it’s so loud. It’s a thrill,” he says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I used to work with a guy from St. Petersburg who told me all about the replica medieval armour and weapons he had to leave behind when he came to Canada. It sounds like this is a similar group.<\/p>\n

From this description, the group doesn’t have quite the same concerns about participant safety that the SCA and other North American re-creationist\/re-enactor groups have generally adopted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poland’s answer to the Society for Creative Anachronism, Knights’ Brotherhoods stage their own form of medieval recreation: Compering and judging the hand-to-hand combat is Krzysztof Ptasinski, the son of a Polish diplomat who learnt English from an American teacher in Addis Ababa and insists I call him “Redneck Chris”. His hooded robe and summer gear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,1119],"tags":[1379,228,874,568],"class_list":["post-10545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-russia","tag-armour","tag-poland","tag-re-enacting","tag-sca"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2K5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10545"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58375,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545\/revisions\/58375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}