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There is something off about the weight. Muscle is only slightly more dense than water. So 20 pounds would be about 9 litres of tissue by volume.

This looks like maybe 3 litres at the most including the enclosure and liquid it's submerged in.

Edit: ok, so other articles say that the whole urn is 20 pounds. Makes a lot more sense https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3189818/emp...

Yeah 20 pounds sounds like an elephant’s heart.
Because Brazilian fascists are pro-monarchy. Go figure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> the 20-pound heart seems to be in good shape for its age. Still, there’s something about it—its pale color and gigantic proportions—that make it seem unreal. According to Da Silva, this dilation was probably caused by tuberculosis, which can cause the swelling of some organs.

Apparently a normal human heart weights 10 ounces[0]. That means Dom Pedro's heart is 32x the weight of a normal heart! Can all that extra weight truly be caused by tuberculosis alone?

[0]: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/21704-heart#:~:te....

I guess they included the Formaldehyde weight in the total.
Pedro I was a fascinating individual. Liberal despite a poor education, he was the first Emperor of Brazil (while his father was King of Portugal), very briefly the King of Portugal and in the last few years of his life neither while traveling Europe advocating for his daughter and "borrowing" a ductal title from her.
poor education?
As a child he was unruly and did not enjoy being taught, he had the ability to dismiss his instructors at will. In other words, like any child but with a lot of power and a father who didn't intervene.

He was painfully aware of his poor education, so much so that he wrote about it and others also commented on it. One of his naval Commander's wrote:

"his good qualities were his own; his bad owing to want of education; and no man was more sensible of that defect than himself."

>Though unusual today, heart burial was once an accepted practice. In the Middle Ages, the hearts of saints were worshiped separately from their bodies, and the hearts of dead Crusaders were occasionally the only part sent back home,

Quite true. And this practice pre-dates the person to whom it belonged by hundreds of years. For example, when Richard I of England died, this happened

>Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou.[133] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_England

When David Livingstone died in 1873 in what is now Zambia his attendants removed his heart and buried it under a tree. They then carried his body over 1000 miles to the coast near Dar es Salaam, where his remains were returned by ship to Britain and interned in Westminster Abbey. But Livingstone's heart belonged to Africa.
Relics were an early form of mass tourism. Every European city wanted in on the lucrative pilgrimage industry so they cut up the bodies of saints. The Catholic church has a lot of Saints that nobody even knows about anymore.
Hmm but what about the early 1100s? I don't think there was a middle class at the time, there was the upper class the King or the queenn, their lords, ministers, nobles and knights. Then there was the worker class like peasants, smiths etc.
Some historical context about Brazilian independence (1822).

In 1807, United Kingdom prohibited slave trade in their colonies and pressed Portugal (that had very close relationship with UK) to do the same.

But Brazilian economy depended on slave labor. And land owners weren't having it.

Dom Pedro I declared the independence to calm down the the elite while keeping the country under Portugal influence -- the newly independent country was a monarchy with an imperator from the Portuguese Royal family.

Thanks to him and his son, Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery.

But hey, at least the country didn't break into many small nations. And avoided wars. So in the end it was good I guess \s.

> Thanks to him and his son, Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery.

Nope, there were dozens of countries that abolished slavery later than Brazil. The most recent was Mauritania, in 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

I believe Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, but far from the last country in the world as a whole to do so.

To be precise. Brazil was the last country from the West to abolish slavery.

Almost 40% of slaves traded over the Atlantic went to Brazil.

The US still permits slavery (as punishment for a crime):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

Only counting slaves traded over the Atlantic is already a cop out.
One will say that communism, fascism and socialism enslave, and other will say that capitalism does. What was the difference between a concentration camp, gulag or a plantation? How far they are from the modern slavery from Bolivians in Brazil? Food for thoughts
> Thanks to him and his son, Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery.

Dom Pedro I tried to abolish the slavery in the very beginning of our independence. What stop him? The Congress. And he respected the congress because he wasn’t a dictator. The same thing happened with Dom Pedro II, who spent his life trying to end slavery.

People think that a monarch can do whatever he wants, but this is not true. Only dictators can do whatever they want.

Words are cheap, aren't they, and even then there weren't that many words. In practical terms, what remains is basically no action against slavery, apart from some externally-pressured laws just to keep up appearances. It literally is the origin of the expression "pra inglês ver" (for the English to see)
It was a different time. It’s easy to misjudge the past without fully understanding the context of that time.
> In 1807, United Kingdom prohibited slave trade in their colonies and pressed Portugal (that had very close relationship with UK) to do the same.

... and at the same time replaced them with "indentured labour", who just so happened to be poor Indians famished by savagery of the British taxes and the famines they unleashed, and had little choice or say in pretty much anything.

Kind of like how Indian-labour is now treated in Middle-East and elsewhere and the Indian-state exploits them for its own foreign policy.

Extraordinary tactic to kill your competition.

Yeah. It always all about economy.

Not long after slavery was abolish; loitering became a crime. See "Vagrancy Act 1824".

Ending slavery is overrated. In Suriname the black slaves were replaced with workers from India who amusingly were treated even worse. Plantation economy was what made life terrible in South America but people always get hung up on the slavery part.
I remember reading that the Portuguese authorities were not sure the heart was in condition for travel. There were significant diplomatic efforts to have it moved to Brazil. As a Portuguese I am glad it happened and that it is even touring the country.

Like the sword of Bolivar that recently was brought to Colombia, I wonder if this is a general push for state identity consolidation.(on the sword topic there was controversy where the king of Spain did not get up to pay homage to it when presented in the ceremony).

I think he did well as did the Colombian president in not picking up the incident)

I was surprised to find out that Portugal cared.

It is election year in Brazil. The opposition has been portraying this as an example of bad taste of the president (by the way, he has has been insinuating there will be a coup on the independence day -- and it wont be shocking if he try).

On the other hand, Brazil is now so polarized that it's just not possible to not see this event in the same lens. Unfortunately.
Portugal cares because there are a significant amount of Portuguese business interests in Brasil. The remainders of the Portuguese financial system are there and the destruction of Portugal Telecom(the state owned telecom) happened because of bad deals in Brazil. Portugal telecom was the main technological champion in Portugal and it is my theory that it set back Portugal’s ability to grow its tech sector maybe for decades(not that it was a strong one). This because it provided employment to engineering positions and without it the economy of the country was/is too simple to have demand for those positions. That means that most of the newly minted engineers just leave to never return.
Just a note that Portugal Telecom wasn't state owned anymore when those deals happened.

The privately-owned PT was looking for places where to invest the money they got from selling their previous position in brazilian Vivo to Telefonica (a sale they tried to avoid once before but couldn't avoid the second time around due to the amount involved) and were then pressured by the government to reinvest also in Brazil, which they did by buying the heavily-indebted Oi.

Great tidbit!

It was not state owned but from my point of view there is a consensus that decisions were made through state channels, namely dealings with Banco Espirito Santo(BES) by the ex-PM.

Those issues are now the subject of a long dragging criminal proceedings to the then prime minister as well as ex-BES leader. Corruption and shady dealing at the highest level. Also note that BES collapsed under likely criminal activities. BES was the biggest, portuguese-owned bank at the time, with an outsize influence on the portuguese speaking finance world.

As can be seen Portugal suffered severe setbacks on it's influence in the 2008 crisis. It lost tech capabilities, financial capabilities and in my opinion will have a long way in the desert, if it ever comes out. Dreadful demographics and one of the lowest population education levels in EU or OECD mean that relationships with Brasil and other under-developed Portuguese speaking countries are one of the few possible lifelines left. Amazingly Portugal's diplomacy is still (ostensively) effective, with Portuguese nationals occupying relevant positions: current UN secretary general, and Durão Barroso as an ex- EU Commission President.

Jair Bolsonaro is a type of politician that would be completely shunned by the political establishment. That does not stop the portuguese president from saying platitudes about him. Therefore if Bolsonaro asks for the heart of a dead king for nationalistic purposes, we oblige and make a nice ceremony about it. Kissing hand and ambivalence on values are our core values.

Up until the first attempt from Telefonica to buy PT’s share in Vivo, the government did have direct influence via a “golden share” left over from privatization. IIRC they (threatened to) use it to help PT’s management block the deal against the wishes of some shareholders (BES was one, I think). The golden share was already under scrutiny by EU regulators and was forfeited afterwards.

(There was a similar conflict some time before, when Sonae tried to buy PT outright, and I may be mixing up some of the details.)

The BES group bankruptcy is related to the later woes, but only incidentally. The charges against the ex-PM are, AFAIK, unrelated to any of this.

PT loaned 900M€ to BES Group which subsequently went bankrupt. PT had yearly profits of 700M€ so this wouldn’t be fatal. But they had to get a loan from its subsidiary Oi to meet cash flow and that shifted the balance of power. Suddenly, the tables had turned Oi owned PT.

Given Oi’s massive debt (15B€ IIRC), they proceeded to sell PT to Altice for 7B€, they raged through the company like a bull in a china shop, and the rest is history.

I've been practicing voluntary ignorance about Brazilian politics, and I'm a little proud I hadn't heard about this whole heart thing at all.
This is just bizarre and makes no sense in the 21st century. We're long over the monarchy (although we haven't changed the flag, few people know what it stands for).

It's just some made-up symbolism from this brain dead reactionary government.