burgen und bunker

Having decamped early, H and I packed and headed along the Moselle first to the well-preserved village of Beilstein, whose untouched charm is sometimes compared with Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and is dominated by the ruin of Castle Metternich, one of the holdings of the noble house of prince-electors and also the namesakes of the sparkling white wine (Sekt) Fürst von Metternich.
Later on, we continued to the town of Cochem, settled since ancient times by the Celts and Romans and with its first documented mention in 886.

Towered over by an imperial castle (Reichsburg Cochem) whose immediacy was already confirmed by the mid-twelfth century, the residence was sacked by French forces during the War of the Palatine Succession (der Plälzischer Erbfolgekrieg) in 1688. The compound lay in centuries in a state of disrepair until purchased by a Berlin businessman in the late 1860s and rehabilitated in the Gothic Revival style of the day, though true to the original form.
Not a day to spend in an underground bunker even if tours had been available, but maybe something to see next time—there lies in an unassuming neighbourhood a formerly secret safe—der Bundesbankbunker, disguised by two houses above it that contained a reserve of fifteen billion mark banknotes that the West German government could put into circulation in case of economic disruption from the Eastern bloc. The money never needed to be used.

entlang die mosel

Underway for a local excursion for a few days, we headed to our first overnight destination, secure but still cautious that the camping set and those who run campgrounds are among the most conscientious about hygiene, shared spaces and consideration for one’s neighbour—and indeed everyone was adhering to the rules set forth and all activity was chiefly in wide open spaces with ample distance apart, other than this manky swan that was keen on showing off his ballet moves, and managers, as ever, were studious about taking the information of the guests in case of the need to do contact tracing.
En route, we stopped at Burg Thurant overlooking the village of Alken on what’s referred to as the Terrassenmosel (the terraced Moselle).
The double castle of slate and stone dates from the thirteenth century and was a condominium with lands claimed by the archbishoprics of both Trier and Köln—with a line running through the structure to designate each side, and to this day is still a private joint residence of two families.
After getting encamped on an island in the river outside of the town of Hatzenport, which looked at first to be more crowded than it turned out to be with the outward facing shore lined with trailers and awnings set up for longer term occupants but were still vacant—these Potemkin villages were common at all the sites who were seeing as expected a lot less business—we visited the ancient town of Münstermaifeld, dominated by a massive minster (from the corresponding Latin for monastery), the Franks having arrived in the area centuries after the Romans vacated and built the church around the ruin of a Roman fort.
Our last site for the day was a hike to see Burg Eltz (previously) from a distance and marvel at the well conserved castle, one of the few on the left bank of the parallel Rhein river and still owned and lived in by members of the same family—the thirty-third generation since its construction in the 1100s, with some of the wings (there are several branches that own the castle jointly, an arrangement called a Ganerbenburg where no single line is responsible for the upkeep alone, and also a tactic by an overlord to prevent vassals from becoming too powerful ) open to the public with treasure and art on display.

burgruine henneberg

Taking advantage of the nice weather, H and I ventured to the nearby village of Henneberg, named for the castle ruins above and in turn the ancestral seat of the eponymous royal house (see previously here and here).

The late eleventh century compound was within the next generations built up to its height by Count Poppo (see also here) with palace, belfry (Bergfried), residential suite with cabinet (Kemenate), defensive walls and cisterns and was abandoned as official residence in the late eighteenth century, the last of the male line having died off without heirs roughly a century beforehand.
One bit of rather gruesome legend associated with Henneberg involves the Countess Margarete and her three-hundred and sixty-five children—a Dutch noble woman, daughter of Florens IV of Holland and Zealand and Mathilde of Brabant whom entered into a political union in 1249 with Count Hermann (Poppo’s son), in hopes of securing his elevation to Holy Roman emperor of the Germans, a ploy which despite the landed connections ultimately failed. Margarete died in childbirth—which was not an uncommon occurrence—but reportedly was cursed to bear as many children as there are days in the year after insulting the mother of twins with words of incredulity and accusing her of adultery out of envy of her own childless condition. Returned to her parents in Loosduinen, a district of the Hague—not anywhere near here (though the caretakers of the ruin and club of local medieval enthusiasts and reenactors call themselves that)—Margarete gave birth to this impossible brood, varying described as mice or crabs, before all dying.
Neglected and falling into disrepair by the 1830s, the ducal court of Saxe-Meiningen wanted to raise the foundations and build a pleasure palace but those plans were overcome by other events. From the end of World War II to 1989, the castle was part of the inter-German border’s restricted zone (Sperrgebiet) until 1989 due to its commanding view of the surrounding region and into West Germany.

burg stolpen or under the rainbow

H and I decided we would let our vacation be at the mercy of the weather and it started raining without pause from midnight Monday onward, so after decamping, soggy, we started on our way back, making a detour to see Burg Stolpen, the town and a thirteenth century castle at the foot of a mountain of the same name and hewn out of basalt columns.
The mineral was first classified and described at this particularly rich quarry by local natural philosopher Georgius Agricola in a 1556 treatise.
The pictures are of the residence and prison of lady-in-waiting and mistress of Augustus II the Strong (der Starke) Anna Constantian von Brockdorff—eventually styled Countess of Cosel (Reichsgräfin von Cosel, *1680 - †1765)—who eventually earned the displeasure of her lover, imperial elector and king of Poland by her advocacy for the rights of Polish subjects.
Anna was banished from court and placed under house arrest in the tower for just under fifty years.
Adaptations of her biography in the 1980s rehabilitated her image and revived interest in the life and times of this defiant and inconvenient woman.
We couldn’t find any historic marker in the town but Stolpen was also the birthplace, we learned, of an arguably more famous—at least in contemporary terms in the West—quartet of siblings: the Doll family.
Born with the surname Schneider at the turn of the century up to the outbreak of World War I and first adopting and performing under the name Earle—after their manager and agent that brought them to America, Gracie, Harry, Daisy and Tiny were a formidable force as a sideshow and then as a screen act—always working together and insisting that they all have roles.
Terrors of Tiny Town and Tod Browning’s Freaks, all four were also Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz, with Harry (*1902 – †1985) performing as a representative of the Lollipop Guild.
Commercial fortunate allowed them to retire comfortably and purchase an estate in Sarasota, Florida—including a compound called the Doll House were all lived together, complete with custom furniture build to their scale.  Something strikes me in common about their stories—one a very vocal inmate of the town and others sent away without regard because of their difference.  What do you think?

post-dated post script: sirmione

Having learned rather late that Manerba did indeed have a port sufficiently deep enough to permit ferries to dock and connect it to the other towns and villages along Lake Garda, we crossed towards Dusano and boarded the ferry to take another look at the ancient town and strategic port fortifications at the head of the promontory that divides the southern part of the lake.
Helpfully there was a chart of Lidl di Garda in the passenger ferry that we had mostly to ourselves to aid with orientation. A popular retreat from Verona and Venice for Roman administrators for millennia, one of the early house-proud famous residents of the resort town was the poet Catullus—versifier of love, invectives and works of condolence (opera singer Maria Callas was a later one), whom also lent his name to a grotto containing one the best-preserved examples of a private home of the first century and one of the town’s chief sites.
The other landmark of Sirmione is the bastion in the harbour, the Scaliger (nobles of Verona) castle compound built in the late eleventh century.
Surrounded by a system of moats and drawbridges that are navigable by nimbler boats still to this day afforded a protected place for the fleet—becoming an outpost of the thalassocracy of Venice and later part of the Austro-Hungarian holdings—to be launched and serviced in safety and shielded from enemy scouts trying to assess their opponents’ strength.

burg sonnenberg

H and I are in Wiesbaden (the main boulevard that runs past the storied State Opera, wellness spa and casino usually is lined with international flags but the banners have been replaced for this month with pride flags) this weekend while he chairs a few seminars and I had the chance to take a long hike through the city via the Kurpark and Garten (previously).
Walking along a short segment of the Höhenrhein trail following the Rambach valley to the district of Sonnenberg, I was rather deep in a an urban woodland until arriving at the foothills of the Taunus and dominated by the ruins of Burg Sonnenberg hewn into a mountainous spur.
Although much of the thirteenth fortification has crumbed and was cannibalised as a quarry when the settlement below was devastated by a fire during the Thirty Years War one can still see the intact tower of the Bergfried and extensive defensive walls and imagine the castle protecting the Count of Nassau’s domain from raids of the Dukes of Eppstein.
The two neighbouring and competing houses  never settled a border dispute amongst themselves owing to overlapping jurisdictions that arose out of Wiesbaden’s imperial immediacy, a distinction that the city fought to keep for over a thousand years since the time of Charlemagne. Now the area is a venue for a series of open-air events and quite the staging arena especially in the summertime.

(rainy) day-trip: büdingen

The weather in Wetterau is not always cooperative and most days like these would see cancelled excursions, but on my way back to my work-week apartment, I took a detour to try to see the fortified and well-preserved medieval town of Büdingen. I recall having visited before—when it was still host to a US Army housing detachment—but that was ages ago and probably one of the wind-shield tours I was taking at the time and having tried to visit again once before during a trip to Burg Ronneburg but was overcome (incredulously) for lack of parking, so despite the dodgy skies, I marched up and down the still charming but be-puddled streets of town.

Described variously as the Rothenburg of Hessen and with other superlatives, the heavy stone defensive walls were formidable and impressive and all the streets of the historic core were awash with the idiosyncratic geometry of fine half-timbered (Fachwerk) structures—angular unto itself, rays emanating off in all directions—and there was a stately church and castle. The town in the centre of a marshy valley and the fortress and Altstadt are resting on millennia old matrix of oak planks and beech poles. Whereas a lot of German town have papier-mâché cows or lions to celebrate local craft and heritage, Büdingen uniquely has a collection of frogs, its unofficial mascot.
The rain, however, didn’t relent, and while I knew that every place is unique and embraces their stories of pogrom and plague, witch-trials and religious tribulations—and perhaps it was the combination of the rain and vague spatial memories, I was feeling rather disoriented and it was hard to take in the scenery, echoes of other places resonating strongly to the point I could recall the town’s name when relating it to H afterwards.
I suppose those discomforts are indicative of why sensible people (unless on holiday abroad when one has no other choice than to go out and enjoy the grey and drizzle) wouldn’t choose this battle for a rewarding tourist-experience. H and I will have to choose the opportunity to return and give Büdingen the attention and intention that it deserves.

parforce

Recently H and I had a chance to visit a pair of monumental hunting lodges whose architecture and ceremonial follies illustrated how the occupation become leisurely pursuit of the powerful of the hunt was a way of reinforcing fealty and was a metric of noble means beginning in the Middle Ages (parforce hunting) and articulated as a social arena for centuries thereafter.
The great wooded area around the village of Wermsdorf was a royal park for many generations and there was an ancient though modest lodge there already—but as existing accommodations were proving inadequate to impress visiting dignitaries, August II. der Starke (called the Strong for his physical strength that could apparently break horseshoes bare-handed and won him prizes in the prince-elector bracket of competitive fox-tossing—literally and as cruel as it sounds) commissioned the construction of the Hubertusburg (announced on the feast day of Saint Hubertus—3 November—who is the patron of hunters and the vision that led to his conversion is popularised in the Jägermeister logo) to showcase his family’s power.

The prince-bishops were not only instrumental in choosing the emperor, the leader of reformationist Saxony was also the king of Poland and the grand duke of Lithuania through martial unions that honoured the traditions of those brought into the fold—exemplified in the Catholic court chapel that was rather unique in the region and is the only room to have escaped plunder and destruction.
Lavish, choreographed hunts continued at the Hubertusburg, whose grounds and layout was favourably compared to Versailles—the quarry of choice being deer—up until the outbreak of that first global conflict, the Seven Years’ War, in 1755—whose own chambers saw the peace treaty that brought its end as well as the French-Indian War.
The residential palace never wholly its former glory and was at times used as a sanitarium and prison and even a porcelain factory. Presently, the trappings of the hunt are re-enacted by skilled equestrians and enthusiasts who dress up in period costumes, but mercifully the hounds are put on to the scent of human decoys to pursue through the forest—harming no one in the end.
The other hunting lodge we visited was Schloss Moritzburg, an earlier Baroque example also set in the midst of a favoured game preserve not far from the royal capital of Dresden. Constructed on an artificial island, the quatrefoil design reminds me of the Seehof of Memmelsdorf by Bamberg, it served a similar function with protocol and entertaining dignitaries.
A showroom of course for hunting trophies, the collections quickly expanded to display pieces side by side to compare Japanese and Chinese ceramics with Meißen faience. Later an ensemble of other buildings were added to the parkgrounds, including a Rococo pavilion called the Little Pheasant Castle (Fasanenschlösschen) that’s meant to invoke an Oriental style and despite Saxony’s landlocked state, it’s one and only lighthouse—for when the occasional mock naval battles were conducted in the lakes that bordered the gardens.

churfrankenland

We had heard of the Kurhesse region or even Churmainz previously (referring to the principalities’ electoral passing influence) but never before the term Churfranken, which was adopted not too long ago by a consortium of towns, villages and singular destinations along the River Main between the Spessart and Odenwald mountain ranges to promote themselves. We took advantage of the extended weekend to take a drive through this area and saw a few of the sites.
First, we toured the grounds of Schloss Mespelbrunn, an early Renaissance moated castle and keep still owned by the same noble family, governor of the Archbishop of Mainz six centuries on. We had the briefest of tours before being inundated with the crowds from a tour bus that had just arrived, but we were able to navigate through the trophy room ourselves and marvel at the authentic state of the elements and embellishments.
We clung to the river’s banks, crisscrossing several bridges and saw quite a lot along the way before stopping in historic Miltenberg. Here too, we unexpectedly found ourselves overwhelmed with crowds—there was a huge festival going on, but had a nice walk through the town nonetheless. Established as Roman fortress because of its strategic and defensible location, the town prospered throughout the Middle Ages because of its deposits of red sandstone, a distinctive building material much valued all over Europe.
The market, town gates and scores of half-timbered (Fachwerk) houses were absolutely charming and well-preserved. Among the main sites is the inn Zum Riesen (the Giant), whose registration documents dating back to the early 1400s make it one of the oldest, continuously running hotels in the world, with its guests including Holy Roman emperors, kings, generals, Napoléon, chancellors and Elvis Presley. We’ll have to return here soon and explore more.

carry on, constable

There’s something remarkably indulgent about having the campus of well looked after ruins to oneself, imagining how history marched on and then by an inaccessible accord, time stopped and there was a general agreement to stave off both progress and decay. On our trip across England, we experienced this many times over, and the Restormel Castle outside of Lostwithel in Cornwall really typified the romance. This circular fortress was built in the times just after the Norman Conquest and bastions like these transformed and solidified the occupation and displacement and civilised the art of warfare, turning unsheltered carnage and plunder into something more strategic and potentially less violent.
Exchanged several times between the high sheriff of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort (of Crusade fame and infamy), eventually it was ceded to the crown, under Henry III, the residence boasted plumbing (some innovation eight hundred years ago—reaching back to Roman times) and profited off of the local tin trade. Another sight was the Old Sherborne Castle in Dorset (an intact castle is just up the road).
Queen Elizabeth I relinquished this twelfth century estate to Sir Walter Raleigh after the courtier, poet, historian and explorer became enamoured with it, whilst returning from an expedition to the New World and landing at nearby Portsmouth. Raleigh, between searching for El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold, was instrumental in the English colonising of North America and popularised tobacco and potatoes in the Old World. An unsanctioned marriage and political intrigues, which may have beckoned the Spanish Armada (over incursions into lands claimed by that crown), led to Raleigh’s unfortunate beheading.
His faithful wife and accomplice, according to some, kept her husband’s head in a velvet bag for nearly thirty years before expiring herself, both unable to retire to the castle that had become a rather frustrated property.

once and future

We’ve been posting these instalments a bit out of chronological order, but do hope you out there in TV Land are enjoying following along on our adventures. Solidified—but not without dispute—by the writings, commissioned in part for political propaganda by new minted king of a unified England Henry II, of Geoffrey of Monmouth as the birthplace and boyhood haunt of legendary King Arthur, Tintagel Castle was a masterfully enchanting place to visit.
According to the Matter of Britain, the wizard Merlin transformed Uther Pendragon’s appearance to the guise of his enemy Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall headquartered at Tintagel, so that he might sire Arthur through the vessel of his combatant’s wife, Lady Igraine, and thus over a generation, fulfilling a destiny himself to free the country from the Saxon yoke and unite England under one ruler.
Incidentally, among Gorlois’ legitimate issue was the enchantress and foil to Merlin, Morgan le Fay. Not that the beautiful scenery and archeologically troves needed the extra embellishment, this connection to Camelot had only one canonical mention and further associations have to be conjured by the imagination, which these wilds certainly do entertain. Some locals belief romancing the myth presently cheapens the experience by pandering to Arthurian legends, but Monmouth’s history was received quite uncritically until fairly recent times.
We hiked along the headlands with sweeping panoramic views to the ruined fortifications and took a stroll among the Norman walls and foundations of a medieval village, cured by the wind and surf, where one’s fantasy could run rampant.