The word itself is derived from Neo-Latindefenestratio; with dē meaning "out" + fenestra meaning "window" + -atio as a suffix indicating an action or process.
Around the 9th century BC, Queen Jezebel was defenestrated by her own eunuch servants, at the urging of Jehu, according to the Hebrew Bible. (2 Kings 9:33)
It has been suggested by several chronicles (notably the Annals of Westhide Abbey) that
Arthur of Brittany, by defenestration from the castle at Rouen, France
, in 1203.
In 1378, the crafts and their leader Wouter van der Leyden occupied the
. Seeking revenge, the crafts handed over the patrician to a furious crowd. The crowd stormed the city hall and defenestrated the patricians. At least 15 patricians were killed during this defenestration of Leuven.
The Bishop of Lisbon D. Martinho de Zamora is thrown by the revolted populace from the cathedral's bell tower, as depicted by Roque Gameiro, in 1904.
In 1383, to celebrate the acclamation of King John I, it was ordered for all churches of the realm to ring their bells. However, upon the lack of any ringing coming from the capital's cathedral the populace of Lisbon revolted and rammed their way inside the building. Bishop Dom Martinho of Zamora was accused of treason by the populace for being Castilian and schismatic and was, therefore, defenestrated from one of the bells towers. His corpse was assaulted and dragged to Rossio Square, where it was left to rot and be eaten by dogs, until the populace had enough of its smell and buried it in the square.[8]
In 1483, Prague's Old-Town portreeve and the bodies of seven murdered New-Town aldermen were defenestrated.
Giorgio Vasari's impression of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacreOn May 16, 1562, Adham Khan, Akbar's general and foster brother, was defenestrated twice for murdering a rival general, Ataga Khan, who had been recently promoted by Akbar. Akbar was woken up in the tumult after the murder. He struck Adham Khan down personally with his fist and immediately ordered his defenestration by royal order. The first time, his legs were broken as a result of the 12-metre (40-foot) fall from the ramparts of Agra Fort but he remained alive. Akbar, in a rare act of cruelty probably exacerbated by his anger at the loss of his favorite general, ordered his defenestration a second time, killing him. Adham Khan had wrongly counted on the influence of his mother and Akbar's wet nurse, Maham Anga, to save him as she was almost an unofficial regent in the days of Akbar's youth. Akbar personally informed Maham Anga of her son's death, to which she famously commented, "You have done well." She died 40 days later of acute depression.[9]
On June 11, 1903, a group of Serbian army officers murdered and defenestrated King Alexander and Queen Draga.
In 1922, Italian politician and writer
Gabriele d'Annunzio was temporarily crippled after falling from a window, possibly pushed by a follower of Benito Mussolini.[10]
In March to April 1932, Ivanovo region of Soviet Union, due to ration cuts and labor intensification measures, strikes and spontaneous assemblies broke out. Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings with slogans like "Toss the Communists . . . out the window."[11]
On March 10, 1948, the Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs
On May 29, 1960, the Turkish physician and politician Namık Gedik who served as the minister of interior during the mid-1950s, committed suicide throwing himself out of a window in Ankara when he was in custody.[14][15][16] Gedik was arrested on 27 May 1960 immediately following the military coup along with his colleagues. Some witnesses suggest he was beaten unconscious by a small group of young military officers and subsequently defenestrated.
In 1962,
premises of the Dirección General de Seguridad in Madrid suffering fractures to the wrists and serious skull injuries,[17]
prior to his execution in 1963.
On April 15, 1966, two suspects in the so-called
Bathroom Coup in Sri Lanka, Corporal Tilekawardene and L. V. Podiappuhamy (otherwise known as Dodampe Mudalali), were said by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to have jumped to their deaths from the fourth floor of the CID building in the Fort. At the inquest, following receipt of new evidence, the magistrate altered the verdict of suicide to one of culpable homicide.[18]
In 1969, Italian AnarchistGiuseppe Pinelli was seen falling to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station after being arrested because of claims of his involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing, of which he was later cleared.[19]
In 1970,
Ertuğrul Dursun Önkuzu was defenestrated from the third floor of a school by a group of left-wing students in Ankara.[20]
In 1977, as a result of political backlash against her son Fela Kuti's album Zombie, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was thrown from a second-story window during a military raid by one thousand Nigerian soldiers on Kuti's compound, the Kalakuta Republic. The injuries sustained from the fall led Ransome-Kuti to lapse into a coma; she would remain in a coma for more than a year, and eventually succumb to her injuries on 13 April 1978.[21][22] Ransome-Kuti's death would be commemorated in her son's protest song "Coffin for Head of State".[23]
The 2000 Ramallah lynching included throwing the (already-dead) body of either Vadim Nurzhitz or Yossi Avrahami out of a second-floor window, after those two Israeli soldiers had been lynched.
On March 2, 2007, Russian
investigative journalist Ivan Safronov, who was researching the Kremlin's covert arms deals, fell to his death from a fifth floor window. Friends and colleagues discounted suicide as a reason, and an investigation was opened looking into possible "incitement to suicide".[24]
In 2007 in Gaza, gunmen allegedly affiliated with Hamas killed a Fatah supporter by defenestration, an act repeated the next day when a Hamas supporter was defenestrated by alleged supporters of Fatah.[25]
In 2017, retired French physician and teacher Sarah Halimi
Islamist terrorism and antisemitism. Her assailant was ruled to be not criminally responsible due to having committed the act in a psychotic episode brought on by his heavy use of cannabis
.
On September 1, 2022,
invasion of Ukraine, died after falling from a window of a hospital in Moscow on the same day the hospital was visited by Russian President Vladimir Putin.[26] Some people who knew Maganov well said his death was unlikely to have been a suicide, and some media hypothesized a connection with various other suspicious deaths of Russian businesspeople occurring around the same time.[27]
Notable autodefenestrations
For the suicide method of jumping from height, out of a window, see
Autodefenestration
.
A stuntman diving out a window
Autodefenestration (or self-defenestration) is the term used for the act of jumping, propelling oneself, or causing oneself to fall, out of a window.
In the
Apostle Paul was travelling to Jerusalem and had stopped for seven days in Troas. While Paul was preaching in a third-story room late on a Sunday night to the local assembly of Christian believers, Eutychus drifted off to sleep and fell out of the window in which he was sitting. The text indicates that Eutychus did not survive but was brought back to life after Paul embraced him. (Acts 20:6–12
)
In December 1840, Abraham Lincoln and four other Illinois legislators jumped out of a window in a political maneuver designed to prevent a quorum on a vote that would have eliminated the Illinois State Bank.[28]
During the
Revolutions of 1848, an agitated crowd forced their way into the town hall in Cologne and two city councilors panicked and jumped out of the window; one of them broke both his legs. The event went down in the city's history as the "Cologne Defenestration".[29]
In 1961, while being arrested by communist secret service Polish activist Henryk Holland jumped out of window, what led to his death. This event was then widely discussed by dissidents and theories of a possible murder were popular.[30]
In 1991, British informer
Twinbrook
flat where he was taken for interrogation following his abduction, and survived the fall.
On July 9, 1993, the prominent
Darwin Award and has been re-enacted in several films and television shows.[31][32][33]
In 1995, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped from his Paris apartment to his death.[34]
In 1999, popular German Schlager singer Rex Gildo committed suicide by jumping out of the window of his apartment building.[35]
In his poem Defenestration, R. P. Lister wrote with amusement about the creation of so exalted a word for so basic a concept. The poem narrates the thoughts of a philosopher undergoing defenestration. As he falls, the philosopher considers why there should be a particular word for the experience, when many equally simple concepts do not have specific names. In an evidently ironic commentary on the word, Lister has the philosopher summarize his thoughts with, "I concluded that the incidence of logodaedaly was purely adventitious."[36][37]
There is a range of hacker witticisms referring to "defenestration". For example, the term is sometimes used humorously among Linux users to describe the act of removing Microsoft Windows from a computer.[38]
In the anime
Detective Conan
, specifically episode 972, "The Target is the Metropolitan Police Traffic Department (Part Two)", a serial killer, targeting members of the metropolitan traffic police department, stuns then throws a victim from an apartment tower in broad daylight, leaving her to die from her wounds on the street.
^Mikkelson, Barbara; Mikkelson, David P. (1996). "1996 Darwin Awards: Lawyer Aloft". Darwin Awards. Archived from the original on September 3, 2011. Retrieved September 5, 2011.
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The dictionary definition of defenestration at Wiktionary