We decided to go easy on ourselves and explore the bus system at the same time. We got on the #12 bus at exactly 11:04 (we are in Germany, after all) and went to the Bahnhof/train station. Along the way, this interesting vehicle pulled up beside us. Bright yellow big motorcycle, pulling the back half of a Volkswagen! Don't know if the VW was used for storage or passengers, but it looked like a fun ride.
The Haus Heu Port is our favorite restaurant so far--good beer, good salads. It's the one right across from St Peter's at which I downloaded the German dictionary to my Kindle. The building is around 500 years old, for pete's sake. It started as a patrician's palace in Regensburg's heyday as a diplomatic city. After the decline of the city, which in large part had to do with patricians not paying taxes, at some point the palace became a hay market, hence "heu". I took the picture because old palaces like this are everywhere, and they are kept up well. Look at the wonderful windows! And it's as beautiful inside as it is outside.
The first day we were in Regensburg, we went to the Visitors Center, just a few feet away from the Old Stone Bridge. It was a nicely-organized center, with very helpful people staffing it. There we heard about an archaeological exhibit under one of the churches. Today we finally able to take the tour. It was fascinating! As I wrote about the Porta Praetoria, the current city is considerably higher than the original Roman camp. This exhibit demonstrates that.
In the 1960's, work started to put a heating system into the Niedermunster (lower church}, which is just behind and slightly downhill from St Peter's. In the course of digging up the floor of the church, they found other foundations and passages beneath it. So the renovation also became an excavation. The church is still extant--the wonderful ceiling I posted previously is in that church--but they also give guided tours of the archaeological excavation. The tour is all in German, but there are signs in English, and we pieced together enough German to get a decent idea of the basics. The finer details eluded us, but it was absolutely fascinating nonetheless.
The current church was built on top of the previous church, which burned. That church had been built over the remains of a Roman building, which burned. That building had been built on top of part of the Roman camp--which had also burned. You can see the various layers in the pictures. The herringbone pattern of rocks is the third layer, and the layer on top of that is Medieval. The layer below the herringbone pattern was Roman, and the lowest layer is the level of the original Roman camp. The floor of the Niedermunster is, by my estimate, around 20' above the original ground level.
It was very cool to be able to be down there in the original foundations. I've seen the same thing in Bath and in Seattle--newer layers built on the detritus of the old. For that matter, I don't think we want to know what builders throw under the foundations of our houses, or under our lawns before the grass/dirt layer is added!
When we rejoined the modern world, it was beautiful outside and I couldn't resist this picture of branches against the blue sky and red roofs. Regensburg is a city of color and pattern and texture. Just lovely.
St. Peter's, also familiarly called the Dom, is always festooned with people. There are tourists and churchgoers at all time. In the afternoon, students mass on the ledges on the south side, which is in the sun for a good part of the day. After the hordes had left, I took my turn, though not in the sun.
We wandered a bit, went to the market, then started back to the hotel, slowly. Light rain/mist was falling, but we were prepared for it. We took a different way back, and went by the Schottenportal, or Scot's Portal. . It's at the west end of the Medieval part of the city, attached to St. Jacob's Church, the mother church of all the Scottish monks in Bavaria and Austria. One of the abbots was father confessor to Mary Stuart. It's a very strange edifice, and apparently the figures on it have never been entirely explained by experts. I would swear some of them look like early portraits of American Indians.
Tomorrow if the weather's good, we're likely going to take a boat trip up the Danube--to a wine-growing region!
No comments:
Post a Comment