History is so special: it hides interesting, bizarre, often funny moments. The Curiosities series tries to organize these into volumes in a thematic form, in a light style, in order to provide great entertainment for the reader.

The first part of the series Curiosum presents fifty bizarre death cases in chronological order from the past two and a half millennia of humanity. Some of the historical figures listed here could - in their time - even have applied for today's Darwin Award. Here we can meet a Chinese poet who wants to hug the reflection of the moon while boating, a Swedish king who stuffs himself to death with sweets, an Italian scientist who kills himself in order to make his own prediction come true, a French monarch who tries to attend a sports event, but smashes his forehead into the wood of a door, or his wife from his own house on a cold evening. with a composer excluded and frozen to death.

Of course, someone's death, even if it happened centuries ago, is always tragic. We would like to record that we ourselves are aware of this, and we did not want to offend anyone's sensibilities by compiling this volume. At the same time, the cases collected and now published are part of our history, and - although what is described sometimes strays strongly into the realm of morbid humor - they often contain useful information and even carry lessons in traces.

With our book, we also want to encourage the Dear Reader to live his life carefully, lest in a few centuries he find his own story on the pages of a similar volume. You can basically avoid this in two ways: on the one hand, protect yourself wisely from the possibility of a bizarre death, and on the other hand, do not become a famous statesman, artist, or scientist whose life or death may be of interest to the wider community.