So we finally got to Schleswig, and saw some nice things, indeed on the train ride home we counted five things that we couldn't have seen anywhere else in the world.
First, some geographical orientation. Schleswig is way up the neck of the Jutland peninsula whose upper part is Denmark. Here's the zoomed-out view.
This has always been an important crossroads for trade, because if you have goods or a market over there on the right, around the coast of the Baltic (the Ostsee, "oast-zay" in German), and you want to do business with anybody on the left, around the coast of the North Sea or the Atlantic, you have two choices. You can ship your goods wayyyy north around the top of Denmark—exposing your stuff to stormy seas and Norwegian and Swedish pirates—or you can somehow schlep your stuff across the 100 kilometers of flat farmland at the narrow base where Jutland joins Germany.
Today there's a sea-level canal, the Kiel canal, that lets you steam right across from Kiel diagonally down to the mouth of the Elbe; it is the most heavily-used artificial waterway in the world, more traffic than the Panama Canal.
The Rendsburg Loop
We didn't know about this when we set out. But an hour out of Hamburg, we noticed that the train was rising up over flat terrain, house roof-tops were below us. And we passed over a very high bridge, looking down on the town of Rendsburg from a height that rivalled the 75 meters of the Nikolai church tower. And then the train continued around in a loop and passed under the same bridge!
The bridge was the Rendsburg High Bridge, which clears that Kiel Canal by 50 meters. (Click for a picture by somebody else.) When the canal was built the only way to get the railroad up on a bridge of the necessary clearance, and then down to the existing station, was to go in a full circle. So that's pretty unique (although in the Canadian Rockies we've seen a train do a full loop with a tunnel).
The Bordesholme Altar
So we arrived at the Schleswig bahnhof and went outside and found a bus and had the driver sell us tageskarten. (At that point we thought we would use the bus more often than we did; in the end we only used it twice and would have saved a couple euros by paying per ride.) Anyway, got downtown and, guided by Earl, went to the Dom to see a carved wooden altarpiece.
Dom. (da dom dom)
The altar was a stunning piece of craftsmanship, carved by one man, Hans Brüggeman in 1521.
It was also a very difficult photo subject when lacking a tripod. Numerous well-composed shots were discarded due to motion blur. A few that more or less came out:
Adam.
Eve.
Click through to appreciate delicate filigree work.
Also in the same church was a large and very attractive wooden statue of St. Christopher by Brüggeman.
Viking Museum
Schleswig was at one time a Viking colony. Around 800, they established the town of Haithabu from which they controlled access to that easy passage across the neck of Jutland. There was no canal of course, but Schleswig is at the innermost end of a long skinny arm of the Baltic. From here it was a relatively short land portage to the head of the river Eider, on which you could float to the North Sea.
Haithabu on the south bank of the lake was abandoned around 1100 and the town of Schleswig built on the north bank, leaving the old Viking town site open fields. A lot of archeology has been done on it, thousands of bits and pieces picked out of the muck, and there's a Viking museum to display it all.
We had a firm deadline of a 6:34 train home, and lots to see, so we got a taxi to take us the 5km around the lake to see the museum. Some of it was quite interesting; there was a book of English translations of the placards we could refer to. The Haithabu people were busy traders and craftsmen; goods were found here from all over the continent.
The museum's best exhibit is parts of a Viking ship that was found buried.
Partial planking, ribs.
Related to recontructed front half.
A kilometer from the museum following a footpath along the original perimeter earthworks of the town, volunteers have built a group of houses using the same materials and construction methods found by the excavators.
Old village, modern wind turbine.
Viking chicken run.
Viking ventilator.
Bed/kitchen/living room.
Next up, to Schloss Gottorf. Yes, another schloss, but we had to pretty much ignore the schloss itself because of what's to be seen another half-mile walk beyond it in the garden, a building housing the reconstructed Gottorf Globe. This was a project of the Duke in 1664 to display the best geographical and astronomical knowledge of the time. Seen from afar the globe doesn't look like much.
The globe in the modern reconstruction of its original building.
It was getting late and we were tired, so didn't get any pic of the surroundings. Here's the globe up close.
Still doesn't look like so much.
This is a reconstruction. The original (as the Wikipedia link above says) is in St. Petersburg, where it was sent as a gift to the Tsar, and where it burned and has been reconstructed also. The outside was painted with geographical info of the time (1650s), but the artist filled in any gaps with imagination. Especially interesting to us was the representation of California,
Was this ignorance or ... a prediction!
But the big deal with the globe is, you can get inside it.
It's roomier than it looks.
The inside is painted with zodiac and other mythological figures of the sky, quite amusing and pretty, and also has over a thousand little gold stars placed accurately according to the positions collated and published by the contemporary astronomer, Johannes Kepler, pupil of a local boy, Dane Tycho Brahe.
This is less than 50 years after the invention of the telescope.
Leaving the schloss we took a quick look at its prize exhibit, the Nydam Boat, a Viking longboat dug out of a bog in 1850.
It is much more complete than the one in the Viking museum, above.
It is older, too: the planks are stitched to the ribs with rope, not riveted.
With that it was time to head for the bahnhof to catch that 18:34 train back to Hamburg. As it was we didn't get to the hotel until after 8pm. But we had ridden the Rendsburg loop, seen the Brüggeman altarpiece, visited reconstructed viking houses, sat inside the Gottorf Globe, and looked at the Nydam ship, all things that could only be done in Schleswig.
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