milliarium aureum

Though far from pardoning all the hardships that the global fast-food franchise has brought on the neighbours that it’s saturated, we did enjoying hearing of how one restaurant incorporated some ancient ruins into its dining experience, conserving a bit of an archaeological excavation in the process.
The parent company invested an additional three hundred thousand euro to ensure that a stretch of Roman road was properly preserved and protected that was discovered during ground-breaking back in 2014, and now is on view thanks to a transparent floor in the restaurant. This compromise reminds me of the shopping mall in Mainz that’s host to a subterranean first century sanctuary of the goddess Isis and the Cybele discovered in 1999 when the mall’s proprietors were looking to expand underground parking.

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.

for the nonce

Thanks to our friends the OED, we learn that today, the Saint Day of Bartholomew the Apostle, patron of bookbinders, butchers and cheese-mongers, was traditional feted with a charter fair in London (chartered in the sense the market days were established to help raise fund for religious and municipal buildings, namely the priory of Saint Bartholomew) and marked the end of Summer. The evening’s repast for members of the printing guild (this day also marking the anniversary of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1456 in Mainz) was concluded with a special banquet given by a publishing house proprietor for the benefit of his apprentices.
After this break, called a wayzgoose, with the days waning shorter, scribes and later typesetters would now by working by candle-light. Although I much prefer the folk-etymology of “wase-goose”—that is a sheaf or wayward goose, for the way it sort of links the traditional dinner to customs attached to Saint Martin’s day in November, the goose being a creature that meanders aimless and betrayed the reluctant saint’s hiding spot, and in the sense of a sheaf of paper, the practise of paper-makers to use the last of the season’s pulp for making windows to be hung by Saint Martin’s Day (in commemoration to his selfless act of giving his cloak to a beggar to protect him from the element—however, it probably is a corruption of the Danish word for Weghuis—that is, an inn or guesthouse where these banquets were held. In modern parlance, the term occasionally appears when speaking of an annual outing or Organisational Day for a Fourth Estate institution. In any case, we all ought to celebrate with a little wayzgoose this evening.

clang, clang, clang went the trolley oder schülerlotse

The cities of Augsburg and Köln, with others soon to follow suit, has installed pedestrian traffic signals in the pavement (Bodenampeln) of intersections and where lanes cross street-car tracks in order to prevent inattentive individuals, fixated on their mobile devices, from stumbling into on-coming traffic. Other places have designated lanes for those who’d prefer their telepresence to negotiating their actual surroundings. What do you think? Maybe some clever person ought to invent a crossing-guard (Schülerlotse) app that warns one if he or she is about to amble blinding into the street.

biotop oder flyover

With nice weather and reckoned sufficient time, I (possibly impulsively) decided to meet a couple of colleagues for dinner in Mainz under my own power and set out crossing the Rhein on foot from the Hessen capital of Wiesbaden to the adjacent capital of Rheinland-Pfalz. It’s a funny and persistent syndrome that’s mostly not been a disservice, but trying to imagine distances in my head are without fail translated to something much smaller, a sandbox that one can just dart from one corner to another without any investment of time and energy.

It always ends well, in any case, and I was treated to vistas that one could not appreciate at higher speeds, certainly not from the passenger seat of a car, and the islands of industry and the contemplative lagoons at rest and the green verge that buffered the city from the shore. I knew the general direction but away from the clearly marked path, I had a clever application in my pocket that gave me a nudge if I was marching in the opposite directly but did not reign in my exploration overmuch. Truly away from the roads and taking the most direct routes, given my mode of transportation, I was astounded to find myself hiking through a really amazing and unexpected nature reserve just above the river’s floodplain—unseen but infinitely more interesting than some fallow-field of highway median.
I found myself in a landscape of sand dunes (der Mainzer Großer Sand), whose pronounced topography did not present a struggle but was distinctly not flat, the sort of geometry one grows unaccustomed to along more manicured trails.
This ancient environment was host to tall cypress trees and other flora that belonged in more Mediterranean climes, owing to the fact that although nutrient poor, sand was far better at holding heat.  Approaching the boroughs of Mombach and Gonsenheim, the dunes made the transition into a great forest, only gently interrupted with a few paths, that is the largest contiguous one in the region at seven square-kilometers, a wood of some eighteen-hundred acres. Despite being often turned around and stopping to marvel at the landscape, I still made it on time but with none to spare.

5x5

genealogy room: via Boing Boing, a service that maps the prevalence and distribution of one’s family name

the plot thickens: a 1919 screenwriters’ resource of ten million photoplay expositional combinations

die roboter: elementary school class in Mainz perform Kraftwerk

your brain on drugs: testing the web-spinning capabilities of spiders under the influence was an abortive forensics ploy for drug-testing

lowered-expectations: due to a profound lack of same-species mates, the coywolf is emerging

it happened on the way to the forum: epilogue oder mainzigartig

I had an opportunity to seek out and find those relics and sites of the late Roman Empire hidden in more or less plain sight in the ancient city of Mainz. Originally known Fortress Mogontiacum after a Celtic deity, the outpost founded by General Nero Claudus Drusus became the provincial capital of Germania Superior.
 Having learned of the existence of these places after being inspired by the podcast series, I was really surprised to discover how I had just breezed by them on more than one occasion. It was a real treat to have a comprehensive and circumspect view of Rome from its origin to the eventual collapse. First, I explored the archeological excavation of the Temple of Isis and Magna Mater (both being the matrons of the gods but from different traditions and both with a devoted following), beneath the subfloor of the appropriately named Römerpassage shopping centre.
The foundation is preserved and multiple artefacts are on display—as well as and video presentation. The fact that this miraculous ruin was discovered buried beneath a shopping centre makes me think about a very good novel from Portuguese writer José Saramago called The Cave—no spoilers but with a similar arrangement. Next, I cut a path to the Electoral Palace (Kurfürstliche Schloß) that brought me past a few other Roman remnants along the way. A wing of the palace houses the Roman collections of the archeological and historic institute called the Romano-Germanic Central Museum (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum).
 I had read about this venerable place but was completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the scope and reach, which is comparable to that of the Vatican’s holdings in terms of treasure and curation. Not only were riches and craftmanship on show to wonder at, there were unending galleries on different aspects of Roman culture and daily life, including tools and technology and all the trappings of government administration, time-keeping, trade and commerce, and communication.
There were geographically-orientated exhibitions on how the different peoples of the Empire practised and reinterpreted these donations and influenced the Romans in return.  I really liked this magic amulet with the head of a rooster and found it interesting to peer inside a sacrophagus and see it‘s furnished for the afterlife. There were countless other mundane and sacred objects to inspect.  The altar-pieces of the temple under the shopping centre can be seen behind the coffin  against the wall. Spanning from the early days of the Republic all the way to the aftermath when the Western portion fell and the Middle Ages began, there was simply too much to digest for one day’s visit—not that I even managed to cover all the ground with partner museums around the city, and H and I will have to return soon.

I spoke briefly with one of the caretakers who said that there was not even floor-space for half of the collection, which is often loaned out to other museums, and told me a little bit about the research and restoration functions of the institute. Though the majority of the relics were not uncovered locally, several findings did occur in Mainz—which saw nearly four-hundred years of Roman rule, and more and more items are being unearthed all the time during construction and urban expansion, like the temple under the shopping centre. Sadly, as time is money building-business, she said that she suspected that antiquity is often bulldozed over to avoid complications, with not everyone entirely sold on the prospect of hosting an archeological sensation instead of a park-deck but the institute is working for conservation and ways to mitigate such conflicts.

helau! helau! helau! oder elfter-elfter

By chance I found myself just across the Rhine in the city of Mainz, and was caught up in the thronging crowds and pushed towards Schillerplatz, where hundreds of spectators, many in costume, had gathered to watch the Lord Mayor usher in the so-called Fifth Season (fünfte Jahreszeit) of Fasching. The countdown started just seconds before the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, and singing and cheers followed before a series of speeches, mostly wishes for good health in this time of abundance and abandon that lasts until Ash Wednesday and references to the friendly rivalry with Wiesbaden on the other side of the river, delivered by the prominent personalities assembled on the balcony of the Osteiner Hof above.
It was fun to watch and shout with the merry-makers, some already using this get-together as a chance to plan and coordinate what they would do for the closing parade that would take place in early Spring on what is called Rosamontag, just a couple days before the onset of Lent, and sort of felt like the time I was in Times Square to see the ball drop. I did wonder though about the timing and placement of the whole opening ceremony, with it coinciding with Armistice Day, which is not generally commemorated in Germany but what with the so-called Schicktsalstag a couple of days prior left sacrosanct, but eleven (Elf) became associated with the Rhenish carnival traditions as a lucky number as it was also an initialism of the rallying cry of the French Revolution of egalité, liberté, fraternité, where the trappings of the season and festivities came from in the first place.

day-trip: good for the goose, good for the gander

Over the weekend, we had the chance to re-visit the millennium-old cathedral of Mainz (Mainzer Dom) and walk the aisles. The bishopric itself, never an independent suffragan and surrounded by other competitive dioceses, saw its elevation due to the industry of Johannes Gensfleisch (the Latin Gens transformed in the German Sippe, a clan, but to my ears, like the German word for goosebumps, Gansehaut) zur Laden Gutenberg and his printed-word, complementing the established craft of the city in linen and textile printing.
Coincidentally, we visited on the Feast Day of St. Martin, to whom the grand cathedral was dedicated, built in hopes of establishing itself as a Holy See. Saint Martin of Tours, one of the first famed contentious objectors and reluctant to be honoured for his stance, was betrayed by a gaggle of friendly geese, whom gave away his hiding spot to the fellow-priests who wanted him as their leader. Because of this, it is traditional to feast on a goose in Germany on St. Martin's Day.

jenseits or rhinegold II

Having the day free with finer weather but with H unable to join me, I didn't want to have too grand of an adventure or venture too far from my little apartment, so I decided to revisit some of the romantic scenery at the beginning of the Mittel-Rhine that we had seen together before, the plunging valleys with a mighty river coursing below and the ensemble of villages and castles cleaving to the ridges and flatter lands until overtaken by vineyards—just from a different angle. On the way to Bingen am Rhein, I stopped first to explore the village of Ingelheim, host to the ruins of an imperial palace of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (Karl der Große).

The emperor decided in the late eighth century to transform the existing, ancient manor of a Merovingian king into a stately palace—the village being kindred to our fair city, leagues away in Bavaria, but also commissioned by Charlemagne to include a few forts, a residence and a town wall that's heart-shaped for his wife (I still like that story even though probably no one thought to draw a heart like that or particularly associated the organ with love until much later).
Destroyed by the battles during the Thirty Years War and the wars of the Palatinate's succession, the palatial remains were fully incorporated into the architecture of the town and the extent of the ruins were really forgotten until they were rediscovered as architectural elements throughout the town by archeological studies and showcased, opening up the land that was the Aula Regina, beginning in the early 1990s.
Last summer, H and I had the chance to see the colossal statue Germania, the Niederwald Monument, from the opposing bank of the Rhein, taking a gondola ride from a station in Rüdesheim that clipped the vines as it flew up the hill to the park above and look down at the river from above.
The city of Bingen is directly across and I remember gazing at it from a distance back then and wondering what all there was to discover.
I trekked across the city and visited the Basilica of Saint Martin and former grounds of a once expansive nunnery that's provided a wealth of early medieval artefacts, including the first inscriptions ever found in German, the written testament to the language copying Roman tablets and I climbed to the top of the dominating tower of Burg Klopp—now the administrative offices of the local government but fully accessible to the curious and with some beautiful landscaping that highlights the fortress and ancient foundations, for a spectacular view, even though the skies turned a bit threatening.  

I went back down into the city next and crossed the park that ran along the waterway—there were a lot of cultural and historical installations to look at—and got progressively better views of Germania and the famed Mäuseturm, Mice Tower, on an island in the Rhein.

I got the tale mostly right about the greedy and cruel archbishop of Mainz who exacted such high tariffs on passing boats that the peasants could not afford grain and the bishop in his tower was besieged by an avenging army of mice that ate him, along with the grain he was hoarding, in retribution. I like this story too, even though it's more likely that the name derives from the Old German infinitive mûsen for spying or lying in wait, since the strategic location of the tower with the defensive fortresses around it allowed the rulers of this bend in the Rhein to control trade.  I was surprised how close one could get and how peaceful it seemed, no crowds and I had the view all to myself and could well imagine again how the romantics were inspired.  I rather like too the creative explanations and etymologies.

re-flagging or from blueberry hill to bath in the meadows

I was disappointed to learn that after years of digging in her heels, credulous with disbelief and subject to politics and planning that were not exactly rooted in reason that I missed the official ceremony that was the city of Heidelberg's final relenting—held literally just around the corner.

The transfer of authority signaled the end after some sixty eight years the hosting of the headquarters of the American Army in Europe passing on to the fair city of Wiesbaden. The colours for the historic V Corps, a tenant unit, were cased, and it was a bit like rethinking tradition and memory, however antiquated, same-otherwise and as a practical exercise. I have plenty of nice recollections from Heidelberg as well, as many others come forward. A lot could be be said regarding the decision, set in motion quite some time ago but without real momentum or the garnering of an abundance of enthusiasm—as with past rounds of base closures that seemed arbitrary and even counter-productive—including the choice for the location of the event.
The parade-grounds were not on the air field in Wiesbaden, were the headquarters are being built, but rather the venue chosen was the palatial gardens of Schloss Biebrich on the Rhine. I think that the decision for the setting was more than just aesthetic—with no viable location on base, due to on going construction and severe over-crowding and a sanctioned protest rally planned for the same day by the post's German neighbours to complain about the worsening noise from night-time training flights. I am sorry that I only found out about this occasion too late to see it in person and hope that there were not too many inauspicious omens for the exchange and we will see what the transformation brings in the next few years.

right-bank or borderlands

Although the borough of Kastel (née Mainz) is the most contested concession of the Palatinate to the State of Hessen, there are other communities, which I discovered taking a long stroll along the banks of the Rhein and into the industrial areas. Collectively, the annexed townships are referred to as the A.K.K. Konflikt—for Amöneburg, Kastel and Kostheim, and inter-bellum, the buffer between the People’s Republic of Hessen and the Prussian hold-out of Hessen-Nassau. The neighbourhood that I explored, Amöneburg, fronts the river with an array of chemical and cement factories, whose founding has its own history that is parallel but also independent of the zoning and redistricting.
 I know that Germany’s waterways are carefully placed powerhouses but there’s always quite an abrupt contrast, just down river from more palatial scenes. There’s a factory in my neighbourhood too—for bottling champagne (Sekt) which is consistently stinkier than these industrial plants.
Of course there’s more to this community than just the factories, which I want to discover, but it does cast an impressive skyline. One cement concern with a large footprint, complete with green spaces and several foundations for the good of the community, made an exact copy of a Mithra stone, a Roman mystery cult with Persian roots from late antiquity found in the area—namely in Neuenheim-Heidelberg.
 I wonder if the spread of such iconography was not intentional with this relic. Business is yet vibrant but I still do ask whether there is not some lazy, economic compunction towards making this activity, for the uninitiated, an exercise in out-sourcing.
What do you think?
 There is certainly the prevailing not-in-my-backyard mentality, coupled and in contrast with the hopes for local engagement. Are such monuments to production, however carefully negotiated and managed with respect for aesthetics and the environment, something flagging and out-moded? Enterprise, being what it is, is hardly a clean matter but the rust-belts and relics created once production is out-sourced, shifted elsewhere by enterprising minds hoping to realise greater profit and more flexibility, do not bespeak good governance nor agility either.

diet of Worms

PfRC is not going on sabbatical just yet, but soon H and I are going to take a short tour of the Moselle region and visit the two cities that have been vying for centuries for the title of the oldest in Germany, Roman Trier and Wagnerian Worms.  In the coming days, be sure to visit our companion, Our Little Travel blog, for regular updates and postcards from the edge.