Today in History — 2026-08-11

Kraków

Kraków, officially the Royal Capital City of Kraków, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city has a population of 816,614 (2025), with 1,428,363 people living in the Kraków metropolitan area. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 and has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish economic, academic, cultural, and artistic life. Its Old Town was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, one of the world's first sites granted the status.

More on this day

  • 2023: Luna 25 Luna 25, also known as the Luna-Glob lander, was a failed Russian lunar lander mission operated by Roscosmos. It was the first lunar mission undertaken by Russia since the Soviet-era Luna 24 in 1976, and was intended to be the first spacecraft ever to land near the lunar south pole. The spacecraft was manufactured by NPO Lavochkin and carried 30 kg (66 lb) of scientific instruments, including instruments for analyzing lunar regolith and measuring plasma in the exosphere.
  • -2492: Bel (mythology) Bêl is a title signifying 'lord' or 'master' applied to various gods in the Mesopotamian religion of Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia. The feminine form is Bêlit in Akkadian. Bel is represented in Greek as Belos and in Latin as Belus. Belit appears in Greek form as Beltis (Βελτις). Linguistically, Bel is an East Semitic form cognate with the Northwest Semitic Baal with the same meaning.
  • 1991: Nickelodeon Nickelodeon is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of the Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Skydance. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first cable channel for children, it is primarily aimed at children and adolescents aged 2 to 17, along with a broader family audience through its programming blocks.
  • 1969: Apollo 11 Apollo 11 was the American spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon, and the fifth crewed mission of NASA's Apollo program. The mission was crewed by Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, all of whom were on their second and final spaceflight.
  • 1962: Vostok 3 and 4 Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 were Soviet space program flights in August 1962, intended to determine the ability of the human body to function in conditions of weightlessness, test the ground control capability to launch and manage two separate, concurrent flights, and test the endurance of the Vostok 3KA spacecraft over longer flights. Cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev orbited the Earth 64 times in Vostok 3 over nearly four days in space, August 11–15, 1962, a feat which would not be matched by NASA until the Gemini program (1965–1966). Pavel Popovich was launched on Vostok 4 on August 12, and made 48 Earth orbits. The two capsules were launched on trajectories that brought the spacecraft within approximately 6.5 km (4.0 mi) of each another.
  • 1961: India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's seventh-largest country by area and the largest by population. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is near Sri Lanka and the Maldives.