Der Georgiritt, riding with St. George

 An annual blessing of the horses takes place every Easter Monday in a little town to the east of Erlangen. This year we had great weather, so the onlookers were numerous, and we were too late for Knieküchla, literally "little knee cakes," named because they look like the dough was stretched over the baker's knee before being fried and dredged in sugar. But we saw the parade of horses.  It starts out with a procession out of the church led by the local priest and the altar boys carrying a statue of St. George, who is the patron saint of horses and riders.

wooden statue of St. George

Then the local priest blesses the horses, and a parade begins.

It's led by the mayor 

the mayor

and then the local priest

the local priest

Next are the drums. The rest of the band must wait back a distance behind the horses. Horses are easily spooked.

drums don't spook the horses?

 

A wagon carrying people in traditional costumes (Tracht, pronounced "traht") comes next. Notice the young unmarried women with the crowns. The woman who graciously let us take her picture with Richard wore Tracht that she inherited from her grandmother. Most of her clothing was 100 years old.

 

people in tracht

 

maidens' crowns

 

100-year old Tracht

Next come the beautiful horses. 

 

 

 

Even the humble come to be blessed. 

a humble donkey

 

 

The parade ends up back at the church. The church was built at the end of the 1400s as a Wehrkirche, which means a fortified church.

the Wehrkirche in Effeltrich

 

 The entrance to the fortress has statues of St. Lawrence and others above the gate.

entrance gate on left-hand side of fortress wall

The area between the fortress and the church is a graveyard.

inside the fortress wall

view of church entrance from entrance gate

 Inside the church are the baroque decorations.

inside the church

Across the street from the church is the "Thousand-Year Linde", a linden tree that is probably about 800 years old.

 

1000-year Linde

The village used to hold dances in its branches.

See our previous blogs at 2007 (skip down to the heading "Easter Monday Excursion")  and   2015  (Osterbrunnen: decorated town fountains with evergreen and colored eggs before Easter)

 

 

 

 

A good summer for beer gardens

With the pandemic starting to ease up a little bit, we were able to visit some beer gardens this summer. They were ideal for being outside (indoor restaurants were still closed) and being in a social setting again.

Beer garden in Abensberg

At the end of July we were in Abensberg, just 20 miles upstream of Regensburg on a tributary of the Danube, where the Kuchlbauer brewery is. The brewery has a biergarten with a special attraction: a tower designed by the artist and environmentalist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000, he changed his name from Friedrich Stowasser to "peaceful kingdom hundred waters"). Those of you who have been with us in Vienna will remember the Hundertwasser House and museum in Vienna, where we saw Hundertwasser's art and saw an example of a apartment building where people could live the way he thought people should (closer to nature). He was obsessed with nature and organic forms. He thought a straight line was the devil's work, and he thought trees should have the right to live in the apartments too. 

 

Hundertwasser's tower

You see this sentiment in his tower in the biergarten in Abensberg. There are trees growing out of the windows, and there is a large variety of materials in the construction: some painted surfaces, some tiles, some mirrored pieces, and so on.

 

 

visitor's center

Next door to the brewery is a visitor's center, which is also designed like a Hundertwasser building. The exhibit has some of Hundertwasser's art and sketches, but I was impressed by the amount of information on his environmental viewpoints. 

humus toilet

 

 

 

 

He was a proponent of  humus toilets, which require no water. An example of one was staged inside the left-hand door in the photo. 

visitor's center

 

 

 

 

We watched a contemplative movie of Hundertwasser's life and travels, including his appearance on an Austrian TV show that showcased models of his buildings for living in harmony with the environment.

 

Did I mention the beer is great too?

Weissbier at the Kuchlbauer brewery

On July 18th we went to Ebermannstadt, which is on the edge of the Fraenkische Schweiz near Forchheim and only 45 minutes away by train. We had been to Ebermannstadt before, but we had never

Ebermannstadt biergarten

visited the beer garden. It is very relaxing, on the bank of the  small Wiesent river. The beer garden has great beer, too. 

The Wiesent runs through town, and at one point there is a charming water wheel. The wheel has buckets on it that bring water up out of the river and tip into a trough. The trough then leads away into the town.

water wheel with buckets and trough

Easter fountains and wells

Easter in the hills of Frankonian Switzerland (just north-east of here) is celebrated by decorating the fountains and wells. The sandstone that makes up the mountains doesn't hold water, and wells are sometimes 100 yards deep. In the winter they go dry, but when the winter snow melts in the spring, the wells fill up again, and it is time to celebrate. Traditionally, when the wells and fountains are cleaned out, the rubbish that collected is allowed to dry (for the bonfire that takes place on the night before Easter). While the women cleaned, the girls painted eggs (the symbol of fertility and spring) and decorated the wells with pine boughs and ribbons. During the Romantic period in Germany (the early 1800s), these old traditions became important again, and since then they have become more popular. Today, there are about 300 Easter fountains in Frankonian Switzerland.

In Bieberbach, at the intersection of two of only a handful of streets that make up the town, tourist buses unload people to see the worlds biggest Easter fountain. At least, that's what the Guinness Book of World Records says. More than 11 thousand eggs from chicken, ducks and geese were used.

In Birkenreuth, they still have the old well that they have enclosed in a nice shelter decorated with Easter eggs. Inside, the opening to the well is covered with decorations. Even the rope going into the well has pine boughs twisted around it so that more Easter eggs can be attached.  

The Trachtenverein (Association of traditional costumes) in Muggendorf decorates the fountain in the center of town. They posted some information on making the easter egss. Between one and two hours are needed to make each egg. The steps, as usual, are 1) blow out the egg, 2) paint the background color, 3) paint the decoration,  4) apply a laquer to protect the decoration so the egg can be used in subsequent years, and 5) string the eggs with thread and pearls to separate them. 

  We made it to Muggendorf in time for lunch. We saw the waitress at the Golden Star opening up the beer garden behind the fountain, so we checked in the restaurant for an Easter meal. We were both in the mood for lamb, and two dishes were on the menu, so we each had one. They were both delicious.

After lunch we went to Waischenfeld, where the Heimat- und Verschönerungsverein (Home-town and Beautification Association) decorates the fountain with 2600 Easter eggs. Waischenfeld is on a small river, so the center of town didn't have a fountain. But on the edge of town there is a nice fountain made out of a large piece of the sandstone that makes up the mountains here. 

Our final stop was in Heiligenstadt, where a brass band was playing music as we walked into the town square.  

Wolfram's Eschenbach and Abenberg

By Richard

Back on the second weekend in August I went with some friends on a day-trip to the little towns south-west of Nuremberg.  We visited several beautiful little towns with their medieval walls still intact and lots of half-timbered houses. A couple of the towns have connections to my favorite medieval troubadour, Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote the Arthurian romance "Parzival" sometime between the year 1200 and 1210. One town, called Abenberg, has a statue of him that I had to have a picture of.


 That's me with Wolfram, who is playing his lute while reciting the 25,000 rhyming couplets that make up "Parzival". The story is of a
boy, Parzival, who is secluded in a forest dwelling by his mother in order to prevent him from learning the ways of knighthood and to keep him entirely ignorant of chivalry and the ways of men. His seclusion is shattered by three knights passing who tell him of King Arthur's court at Camelot. His inner nature drives him to go join Arthur's court. His mother is heartbroken at the news of his decision but allows him to depart, dressing him in fool's garments in the hopes that the knights will refuse to take him in. Soon after his departure she dies, utterly heart-broken.
At court, Parzival fights and kills Ither, the Red Knight. Putting on the knight's red armor, he rides away from the court and meets Gurnemanz, who teaches him the duties of  knighthood, especially self-control and moderation and to avoid asking unnecessary questions.
Parzival rides out to seek adventure, and he eventually arrives at the castle of the Holy Grail. His host, Anfortas, the Fisher King, is terribly wounded, but Parzival remembers Gurnemanz's training and does not ask about the mysterious wound. His failure to show compassion results in his failure to obtain the Grail and relieve the Fisher King's misery. The Grail and the Fisher King and everyone in the castle disappear.  The rest of the story is about Parzival's struggle to find the castle again so that he can ask the important question.


We went to the town of Wolframs-Eschenbach. There is no direct evidence that this is the birthplace of Wolfram, because there are no historical documents which mention him. But his works provide evidence for the town's claim, such as the dialect of his works (which is East Franconian) and a number of geographical references.

We came into town through the western city gate, and were met by the view in the photo. A lot of the half-timbered buildings are almost as old as Wolfram, but only a few date back to Wolfram's day. Still, the layout of the town and the atmosphere must be close to what Wolfram knew.  There is a nice little museum at the very center of town, across from the central fountain. The museum has information on Wolfram's poetry, especially the symbols in Parzival and his other Arthurian romances such as Titurel and Willehalm, and on aspects of the Medieval Ages such as the roles of men and women and the life of knights.







After we left Wolframs-Eschenbach, we visited a couple more little towns. The last town that we visited was Abenberg. The town is mentioned in the Parzival story in connection with a jousting tournament. The tournament field is still there just outside of the walls of Abenberg Castle, and a bit of it can be seen in the extreme lower-right corner of the photo. Inside the castle is the House of Frankish History, which has a permanent collection called "Travel through Time in Frankonia" which describes life in a medieval castle, explains why Frankonia territories were split up the way they are, and how the Reformation, the Farmer's War, and the 30-Year War affected Frankonia and its people.

Also in the castle is the School of Bobbin Lace. (Here is a picture from Wikipedia of bobbin lace being made) When we were in Brugge, Belgium, we visited the school there, and we saw some beautiful lace. Afterwards I wondered where you could learn the craft in Germany. I never guessed it would be so close.  But then again, I never guessed that the hometown of my favorite medieval poet would be so close either.

Trewin News April 2007

More on Hiking in Germany

A friend, in response to our last newsletter, sent us a clip of the Happy Wanderer, written shortly after WWII by a German, but which has since been translated into and sung in many languages. I know why that wanderer is happy. It's because of the Beer Gardens found in almost every town along the hiking trail. Hiking in Germany is very different from hiking in the Adirondacks. Hiking in Germany is more accurately described by the German verb "wandern." "Wandern" actually means "to hike," but sounds more like what you actually do, which is wander on well-maintained paths through forests and farm fields and orchards from one Beer Garden to the next; the towns are never more than 5 km apart. It's more like a pub crawl, but with beautiful scenery.


The best hikes go through the forests.
This time of the year the forests shimmer with young green leaves. The deer chase each other through the woods. It's no wonder that Germans have a mystical connection with the woods. Cold water springs well out and pipes conduct clear water into troughs or primitive basins where it returns to its underground path. Everywhere the hand of man is seen, from freshly felled trees to well-maintained paths. Germans can't leave the woods alone. Only in the Alps is nature allowed more freedom to go wild. But even there, there are mountain huts maintained by one of the Alpenverein - Alp Clubs. The picture of Richard by the spring was taken on a forest trail just outside of a small town with a Beer Garden.

The trees themselves are treasured. Many a centuries-old tree is lovingly maintained and protected, like the Tausendjaehrige Tanzlinde you saw in our last newsletter/post. A particularly spectacular old dame presides over the collection of barns and farmyards that is the village of Kasberg. She even has misteltoe growing on her gnarly limbs.

Called the Kunigundelinde after the 11th century Queen Kunigunde, who is regarded as a saint, this linden could be that old. An upright teenaged companion stands next to her, intensifying the impression of the bent dowager next to her.



Coincidentally, one of the public TV stations here just broadcast "Germany's Oldest Trees." The oldest linden in Germany, 1200 years old, once had a circumference of 17.9 meters (58.7 feet). It's trunk is currently in 4 separate pieces, but when it blooms it still draws the bees. Another old linden has a dance floor built on top of the horizontally-trained branches, as did the Tanzlinde in Effeltrich we featured in our Easter newsletter. Once a year, steps are built up to the dance floor, and people wearing traditional costume (Tracht) whirl in festive color and stamp to old-fashioned music amidst the branches.

On another hike with some friends of ours, we went through a region known for its fossils of snail-like animals, ammonites. The fossils can be seen incorporated into buildings. The picture of Pia and Richard was taken next to a well named the "Mussel Spring," after the appearance of the ammonites. We also visited a castle ruin.



















This area is known for its caves, filled with water-crafted mineral formations. Special brands of cave beer brewed in the nearby towns and stored in the caves, are sold at the entrance kiosks near the larger cave entrances. If a German can't get a beer everywhere he goes, it's a scandal! Here in Bavaria, beer is a food group!





Next it's off to Dresden, called "Florence on the Elbe." Stay tuned!