Not enough facepalm in the entire world.

[faithinfire]

Slovak kids experimenting with cigarettes set 14th century castle on fire."BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Two Slovak children were suspected of burning down a large gothic castle in eastern Slovakia when their experimentation with smoking went wrong, police said on Sunday

Comments

[lepaggoth]

D:

Happened in my old homeplace, some kids had gone to practice smoking in barn that belonged to museum, but was used for storing recycled paper (until there would be big enough amount to take it to recycling center). Apparently the barn had been nearly full at the time they did it, and they managed to set whole barn on fire. Nearby museum was saved, but great part of the forest around it burned. Smoking is for dummies indeed...

[hellbound_heart]

The kids in Wales go through phases of doing this. Not setting fire to buildings, but burning the mountainsides. Once when I visited someone, it was so bad it was raining ash, FFS.

It's too bad stupidity isn't painful.

[oof_suits_you]

at least they used safety matches ¬.¬

[ironlord]

Stupid fuckwits, and they need to be shown the consequences of their actions very dramatically.

They're just lucky they weren't up to this mischief in the communist period, or they'd be spending the rest of their lives in a gulag. The commies weren't above such treatments even for minors.

[blackheart666]

I believe fire was a go-to if you were attacking a castle in medieval times...

[koilungfish]

Good point.

[faithinfire]

Well, what seems to have happened is that the kids set the grass on the side of the hill on fire, so by the time the flames reached the castle it was probably a lot more serious than it might sound at a glance.

And while I know what you mean, a fully intact medieval castle actually has a lot of wooden super- and infrastructure, and that will definitely burn. Historically speaking, as blackheart666 says, fire was used as a weapon in sieges (wikipedia here), and the defenders would have to hang wet hides along the battlements and dash about with buckets. So yeah, if a fire starts when nobody's paying attention, it can do plenty of damage...