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Exhibition Machines Torture – Pumpkin. The Family Life

From 19 July to 26 October you can visit the exhibition Machines Torture Customs Building in Oporto. The program is aimed at the whole family.

The international exhibition of torture equipment, reports the period of the Inquisition, which includes over 50 original parts, restorations and replicas of instruments of torture that were used from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, during the time of the Inquisition. The show has gone through more than 10 countries and was seen by over a million people.

Exposure Machine Torture, aims to pass the public, as historical memory, the extent of institutionalized cruelty and raise awareness against torture and in favor of freedom of thought.

The Inquisition was an ecclesiastical institution created in the Middle Ages (séc.XIII) by the Catholic Church. It was a system of social control through an organized policing, especially created to search and punish those individuals considered threats doctrines and dogmas of the Catholic institution through a speci fi co tribunal (Holy Office). Also prevented the diffusion of new ideas within the scientific and cultural co fi, and was used as an instrument of annihilation of political opponents.

In countries such as Portugal, France, Italy and Spain the inquisitorial repression was much tougher compared to other European countries. The suspects were persecuted, tortured and cruelly sentenced to various penalties, from temporary, perpetual, and in extreme cases imprisonment with decapitation and death in bonfires built on public squares

The exhibition went through countries like Russia, Germany, Spain, Poland and Buenos Aires, and now in Portugal, also addresses important historical figures such as Joan of Arc, persecuted and killed in 1431, Nicolaus Copernicus, censored by presenting the heliocentric theory and Galileo Galilei, sentenced to prison and forced to refer for sustaining the same theory of Copernicus.

The “Virgin of Nuremberg” or “Iron Maiden”, the bank stretch, the crusher head and inquisitorial chair are some of the devices created for the purpose of torture, humiliate and get confessions from those considered heretics by the Inquisition and who will be Customs Building in Oporto.