22 Sep: Exploring Bamberg

According to The Plan, today was a "down day" with nothing scheduled except to "look around Bamberg." So we took it easy, right?

Riiiiiiiiight.

The hole in the plan was, we had an "Earl" writeup on Bamberg. It directed the reader through every major attraction. We left the house at 9am and started following Earl's route. We called it a day after doing 3/4 of it, and got home at 5:30. Of course, we had stopped twice for coffee and once for lunch, so it wasn't the full eight hours on our feet, walking, looking and shooting pics. Maybe only six hours.

Not complaining, mind you! Bamberg is a compact university town, with much of its core preserved from the middle ages. The streets are crowded with tourists and locals and there are lots of interesting shops, and lots of picturesque views.

Bamberg is cut by two waterways, the river Regnitz and a parallel canal. It suffered almost no damage in WWII, except that the retreating German army blew up all the bridges over both waterways to slow the Allied invasion. Ursula, our hostess, was a girl then and remembers it. This came up because we asked her why the Kettenbrücke, the bridge from our street to town center, was being rebuilt. They are having to rebuild all their bridges, she said, because the ones they put up in a hurry, post-war, are falling apart. The new bridges are very handsome, and all different.

Der Alte Rathaus

Rathaus, pronounced "rot-howse," is German for "city hall." (Nothing to do with rats, folks.) Bamberg's treasure is the Alte (old) Rathaus, built in the 1400s on a tiny island in the middle of the river. There are different stories for the odd choice of site, but it had something to do with the power struggle between the Bishop, whose cathedral and palace are on one bank, and the secular town merchants who lived on the other.

It was rebuilt in the 1700s and its walls decorated in the Lüftmalerei style popular in Bavaria to the south.

Click through to see the painting detail.

Lüftmalerei aims for a three-dimensional effect. The artist had some fun with this, depicting himself as a cherub whose scroll and leg are so realistic they actually are in 3-D.

At some point they needed more space and tacked on a half-timbered addition that hangs out over the river.

In the picture above you can see how a street is bridged right through the building.

Had the first coffee-stop of the day at the cafe on the left.

Fishermen's Houses

Just down the river from the Alt Rathaus is a row of houses said to have been built by fishermen.

Der Dom

The Dom ("dome") or Cathedral was the seat of the Bishops of Bamberg, once only less powerful than the Bishops of Mainz and Wurzburg. These Bishops had the poor taste to site their cathedral where you can't get a decent overview photo of it, and it never has good light. OK, their loss.

Medieval Bishops: no consideration for shutterbugs.

One of the sights inside the Dom is the sepulcher of Holy Roman Emporer St. Henry II (973-1024) and his wife, St. Kunigunda of Luxembourg (975-1040). (Kunigunda means Empress.) Their lifelike images were carved in the 1400s by Reimenschneider, whose work we will see again on this trip.

Click through to see the images well.

In the Cathedral museum (no photos allowed) we saw two ceremonial robes said to have been worn by Kunigunda, as well as a couple worn by her husband. They were just amazing pieces of needlework, elaborate, almost microscopic, stitching in gold and silver thread on beautiful fabrics.

Another strange image is the Rider:

Who is he? Nobody knows!

Nobody knows who the Rider of the Bamberg Dom is supposed to be, and nobody knows the name of the sculptor. Very likely the same unknown artist made the seriously bizarre depiction of the Last Judgement over the main door:

The Saved on the left, Damned on the right

Michaelskirche

Up a hill behind the Dom is St. Michael's, once a Benedictine abbey church.

We went there to see the ceiling, which is decorated only with depictions of some 600 medicinal herbs.

The simplicity of the ceiling contrasted oddly with the Baroque decorations below it.

By now we'd had pretty much of a day and headed downhill, across the bridge through the Rathaus, through the market platz, and to our garden apartment.