L’Escalade is the annual event in Geneva that celebrates the defeat of the Duke of Savoy’s troops in 1602. It is celebrated on the weekend closest to December 11 & 12 with costumed participants in the hundreds roaming the Old Town re-enacting parts of the attempted surprise attack and the resulting victory. The woman in this photo in the black cape is one such participant and when we turned a corner to see her alone in this scene - @mumhad1ofthose, @monicasuma and I started taking pictures at rapid fire speed. The scene seemed to firmly place us into the past even as the modern sound of our cameras kept us grounded to the present, wondering where @neumarc was as this all happened. . Later we learned that the name for the festival comes from the French “escalade” which translates the English “scale” or “climb” because the Duke’s troops attempted to scale the city’s fortified walls but legend has it that they were thwarted by a woman named Catherine who poured a large cauldron of steamin...