26 May: what is celebrated today

World Dracula Day

There are characters who do not age because they feed on our imagination, and Dracula is the most stubborn of them all. Every 26 May, tribute is paid to that impossible count who turned the night into a stage and fear into an aesthetic pleasure: that of the well-told story. The curious thing is that the celebration does not arise from a whim, but from a specific literary date: on that very day in 1897, Bram Stoker published Dracula and planted a seed that cinema, television and popular culture have never stopped watering.

The novel drew on historical shadows —the echo of Vlad III of Wallachia, a figure associated with cruelty and legend—, but its power lies elsewhere: in metaphor. Dracula is the past that returns, the desire that unsettles, the threat that disguises itself as charm. Perhaps that is why he is still alive: because he changes face with every era and always finds a mirror in which to reflect our obsessions.

Celebrating this day, more than invoking fangs, is recognising the power of myths. Returning to Stoker —or to any of his countless reinterpretations— is a way of remembering that horror can also be culture: a language for speaking of good and evil, of the body and temptation, of what we prefer not to name when the lights go out.

European Week Against Cancer

While myth plays with immortality, real life demands care and knowledge. In the last week of May, Europe sets aside a shared space for a conversation that no one chooses, but that far too many people go through: cancer. European Week Against Cancer was created to insist on what is essential —reliable information, prevention, early diagnosis— and to remember something that is sometimes forgotten in grandiloquent speeches: every case has a face, a story, a different way of enduring.

There is also a civic dimension to this week. Talking about treatments and advances matters, but it matters just as much to demand that access to care should not depend on luck, postcode or one’s wallet. Science saves lives; public policies do too. And in the midst of it all, the community —family, friends, support networks— acts as that invisible “circulatory system” that sustains us when the body falters.

The week does not promise miracles or sell easy heroism: it proposes accompanying people better, looking straight ahead, learning in time. Because, unlike in Gothic stories, here darkness is not fought with symbols, but with resources, empathy and continuity.

International Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of Non-Self-Governing Territories

There is another form of fear, less cinematic and more silent: that of living without full self-government, without being able to decide one’s own course completely. In the last week of May, the UN remembers the peoples of non-self-governing territories and places at the centre a word that is often pronounced too lightly: solidarity. Here it means responsibility: protecting rights, guaranteeing wellbeing and preventing the resources of a place from becoming spoils at the disposal of others.

Behind the expression “non-self-governing” lie stories of colonisation, of inherited administrations, of identities that endure. And there are, above all, people who should not be treated as a footnote on a map. This week insists that self-determination is not a political whim, but a condition of everyday dignity: being able to participate in decisions, to have control over the future, to live without permanent guardianship.

Perhaps this is the secret lesson of 26 May: what is monstrous does not always wear a cape. Sometimes it is more discreet —a system that perpetuates itself, an inequality that becomes normalised— and for that very reason it demands more clear-sighted attention. Today, solidarity is measured less by what is declared and more by what is guaranteed.