Lampsacus

The Greek city on the Hellespont where Anaxagoras settled after Athens convicted him of impiety, and where the citizens let the schoolchildren take a holiday in his memory.

Lampsacus sat on the Asian shore of the straits and grew rich on the traffic through them. Anaxagoras came here around 450 BCE after being prosecuted in Athens for saying the sun was a red-hot stone rather than a god. The city treated him well. Asked at the end what honour he wanted, he said that the children should be given a holiday each year in the month he died, and the story is that they kept it up for centuries.