Germany June 30-July 16

On June 30 I started a two-week stay in Germany. After arriving in Frankfurt, I went to Bamberg for the night. The next day I traveled to the University of Mainz to meet with Johannes Pahlitzsch, the newly appointed professor of Byzantine studies there whom I had first met in Jerusalem years ago. I first attended an evening lecture at the university by Barbara Roggema on the End of Islam in Syriac and Christian Arabic texts, followed by dinner. The next day I returned to the University of Mainz to discuss with Johannes Pahlitzsch options for my coming to the university, perhaps in 2011, to work on a research project about early Christianity in Jordan.

That evening, July 2, I attended a public lecture by Robert Hillenbrand at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt about Islamic inscriptions. That was the opening event in the annual meeting of the Ernst Herzfeld Society for Islamic Art. I had given a presentation the 2007 conference in Vienna and the 2008 conference in Bamberg, but I did not think that I had anything to contribute to this year’s theme of Ornament in Islamic Art. The next day, July 3, I attended the day-long sessions of the conference at the University of Frankfurt and went out to dinner with the conference participants. The conference continued the next day, July 4, at the new campus of the university in the former head office building for the I.G Farben company built between 1928 and 1930, at the time the largest office building in Europe. That evening I traveled back to Bamberg.

The main entrance of the A.G. Farben office building, now part of the University of Frankfurt

Another of the former A.G. Farben buildings

The following ten days I spent in Bamberg. I stayed in a room at the Collegium Oecumenicum student housing, where I had stayed during previous short stays in Bamberg in 2006 and 2008. It is a nice place to stay, but rather too far from the city center to be convenient.

The view from my room at the Collegium Oecumenicum showing the spires of various historic churches in the far distance.

I had come to Bamberg principally to make arrangements for my return to the University of Bamberg in the fall for the winter semester from October through February 2010 in order to continue work on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project that had brought me to Bamberg in 2007. I met my colleague Klaus Bieberstein, who was exceptionally busy with official university events connected with the closing of the Faculty of Catholic Theology, of which he is the dean; I attended one evening event and reception.

I also met Lorenz Korn, the professor for Islamic Art and Archaeology at the university, and I had lunch one day with Anja Heidenreich and Ilse Sturkenboom, the two Bamberg participants in my April-May Humayma excavation.

But the main task I faced was to find an apartment for my upcoming stay. There is a good website for apartment rentals in Germany: wg-gesucht.de, where I found a number of appropriate listings. After seeing four apartments, I found an inexpensive one-room apartment available from September through March in a nice area near the cathedral, sublet by a student who will be away for the semester.

The old city center of Bamberg is a UNESCO world heritage site, and there are a lot of cultural events going on, especially in the summer. One evening event I attended, on an infrequent occasion when it was sunny, was an open-air wind-instrument concert.

The concert at the Heinrichskirche

On Thursday July 16 I traveled to Frankfurt for my evening flight back to Jordan.