Dubuque October 24-November 3

I next traveled to Dubuque, Iowa for a family visit; I had last been in Dubuque a year ago. I took the 6:10 am Burlington Trailways bus from Chicago that arrived in Dubuque at 11:00. On this trip I stayed with my parents in the Luther Manor retirement home.  I slept on the fold-out couch in the living room, which made things a bit crowded, but it was cheaper than a hotel room. I had most meals with the other Luther Manor residents.

One task during my stay was to sort through my stuff that I have stored in my parents’ garage. I managed to reduce the amount by two large cardboard boxes, by donating some books to the public library, throwing some papers away and taking an additional suitcase full of stuff back to Jordan, but there is still a lot of stuff from my years up through grad school that I have no use for, but cannot yet just discard. I also had dental appointments and a physical exam scheduled during my stay.

I went to Luther Seminary a couple of times to do some work on my Humayma reports in the library there.

 

Luther in a Halloween costume

I also started to watch a series of lectures about India, and especially early Buddhism, that were posted on the internet as video podcasts by the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Rani Sarma, my colleague in India, sent me the latest draft chapter of her book about early Buddhism in India, which I edited for her.

Sunday October 30 was family reunion day. My sister Linda and her friend Dennis came up from Iowa City and they as well as my brother John and his wife Renee joined Mom and Dad and me for church at St. Peters. Then we went to the restaurant at the Julien Inn downtown. Dad had invited Roger Bentley and his wife Marilyn to join us. Roger is a recently retired teacher and coach at Dubuque Senior High School, although I have no clear memory of him from high school days. Marilyn had worked with Mom on a number of volunteer activities over the years.

 

Roger Bentley, Renee, John, me and Linda on the left, Marilyn Bentley, Mom, Dad and Dennis on the right.

 

The Schick family

On Wednesday afternoon November 2 I traveled to Chicago for a night flight back to Jordan. I decided to take the Burlington Trailways bus to Rockford and then to take the Van Gelder bus from Rockford directly to O’Hare. That worked for my 10:00 pm flight back to Jordan with stopovers in Heathrow and Frankfurt on November 3.

Chicago October 20-23

I traveled to the USA on Thursday October 20 in order to attend the annual Byzantine Studies Conference, held this year in Chicago. The flight left Ben Gurion airport early in the morning and after a few hours layover in Warsaw arrived at O’Hare at 3:45 in the afternoon. Unfortunately there was an hour and a half long line to get through passport control. Thus it took me a while to get to the Art Institute in downtown Chicago, but still in time for the opening reception of the conference. During the days of the conference I stayed in Hyde Park with Yorke Rowan and Morag Kersel, two archaeologist friends of mine who work in Jordan.

I spent the next day, Friday October 21, attending the sessions of the Byzantine Studies Conference held at De Paul University. That evening I attended the conference lecture and reception at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago; I otherwise did not spend any time at the University of Chicago on this trip. On Saturday October 22, I attended the conference sessions and gave my presentation on The Archaeology of Early Christianity: the Jordanian Contribution that morning. I attended the conference business lunch and the conference reception at the De Paul University campus that evening. The conference continued through noon on Sunday October 23. The conference was especially useful for meeting people I had not seen for years; I had last attended the Byzantine Studies Conference in 1993.

After the conference ended, I stopped at the De Paul University Art Museum and then, on a beautiful fall day, I walked around to Lincoln Park, where I went to the Nature Museum and the Zoo; I was last at the zoo in 1985.

Butterflies in the Nature Museum

Meerkats at the Lincoln Park Zoo

Jerusalem October 2-19

I spent the first half of October in Jerusalem. My crossing over the Allenby bridge on the morning of Sunday October 2 was routine, but long. In Jerusalem I stayed at the Albright Institute, sharing the Annual Professor’s apartment with another research fellow. The group of current Albright fellows was particularly friendly, and included three researchers from China, part of a new fellowship program for Chinese scholars. One evening we all walked around the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods to see the preparations for Sukkot. Sy Gitin, the director of the Albright Institute, also held a reception one afternoon for the Albright community.

My reason for coming to Jerusalem was to resume work with Khader Salameh on the catalogue of Arabic inscriptions in the Islamic Museum. With some difficulty, Khader had obtained a permit for me to enter the Masjid al-Aqsa compound freely, which was a help. Khader has now retired as the director of the museum, but continues as director of the library. I spend most days with him in the library working through our draft text of the catalogue.

During these weeks I also worked on my article about the Masjid al-Aqsa compound and did some further work on the Dalman translation project.

On the afternoon of Monday October 17 I went to Bethlehem to visit Iman Saca, who is now on sabbatical from Saint Xavier College in Chicago. I met her at the Palestinian Heritage Center that her mother runs.

Iman, her mother and brother and me with some tapestries in the background at the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem

Back in Jerusalem that evening, I met Tawfiq Deadle, an archaeologist at Hebrew University, whom I had first met at the American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting in Atlanta last November.

On October 19 I gave a public lecture at the Swedish Studies Center on Muslim Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman Period; in past years I have given other public lectures there. That evening I packed up for my trip to the USA.

Amman September 18-October 1

During the second half of September I continued to stay at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, with my main goal being to finish the Humayma excavation reports. John Oleson, the director of the Humayma project arrived on the evening of September 17 for a two-week stay, and so I shifted to high gear on my chapters during his stay; Yvonne Gerber, the ceramicist for the project, was also around at ACOR. By the end of my stay, I had finalized the reports of my excavations of three of the Byzantine period churches at the site, but still needed some more days to finish the chapter on the marble pieces found during the excavation seasons and write some concluding remarks about early Christianity at Humayma.
  

John Oleson and I discussing the Humayma report.

I mostly put aside any further work on the Gustaf Dalman volumes, but continued to work some evenings on the captions for Humberto da Silveira’s Masjid al-Aqsa book. I also proofread the latest issue of Near Eastern Archaeology, and finished proofreading the Lot’s Cave excavation report, so these days were particularly productive. I can tell whether I am having an especially productive day, if I can motivate myself to work the full morning long until lunch at 2:00 without stopping to take a nap.

Muhammad Ghosheh was also around in Amman once again and he came by ACOR a few times to discuss his Dome of the Rock book that he is preparing. One evening he, Ali Bawwab, a Jordanian scholar interested in Jerusalem, and I went out for dinner.

Muhammad Ghosheh and Ali Bawwab

Among other social activities, on September 21 John Oleson gave a public lecture at ACOR about Roman architectural disasters, which was followed by a reception. The German Institute also hosted a reception on September 28. Also on Friday September I joined the Friends of Archaeology trip to sites on the south side of Amman, some of which I had not been to before. This was the first time I had been on a Friends’ trip for some years. We went to see an Iron Age site at Mabraq, another Iron Age site at Qasr Irmidan, then the Roman necropolis at the Cave of the Sleepers site, important in the Islamic tradition, a Roman temple converted into a church at Khuraybat al-Suq, a Roman mausoleum at Qasr al-Radinah and finally the Umayyad palace at Mshatta.

Owen Chesnut and Christoph Eger, two scholars at ACOR these days, at one of the Roman rock-cut tombs at the Cave of the Sleepers site.

The Friends of Archaeology group at Mshatta, in front of the recently reconstructed arches.

Amman August 17-September 17

I arrived back in Amman on August 17 and spent the following weeks staying once again at the American Center of Oriental Research. I stayed put, without going on any trips.

Me in the ACOR library

I worked on a number of different projects. I spent a few days working on the Jerusalem sites and monuments project. My Palestinian colleague, Muhammad Ghosheh, was in Jordan and he came by ACOR a few times. I got to see his most recent publication – five volumes of historical photographs of Jerusalem. He is now working on a spectacular book about the Dome of the Rock. But I soon put the Jerusalem project mostly aside until I will return to Bamberg in the summer of 2012.

I also resumed work on the Gustaf Dalman translation project. I continued to work through the draft translation that Nadia Sukhtian had prepared of volume 1, part 2 of his series of volumes about Palestinian customs.

I also did some further planning for my project to survey some early Buddhist sites in India in December, involving emails and a Skype call with my colleague Rani Sarma in Visakhapatnam. The pieces have now fallen into place for that project.

I also got started on a new project – a book about the Masjid al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem. Humberto da Silveira, a Brazilian photographer who lives in Riyadh, contacted me concerning a picture book about the Masjid al-Aqsa that he has been working on. He wants me to write a chapter to accompany his couple hundred photographs and write the captions. He will pay me so well that I could not refuse.

Dino Politis, the director of the excavation at Deir ‘Ayn ‘Abata (Lot’s Cave), in which I had participated in the 1990s, was also around for a few days. I did some further proofreading of his final excavation report.

One afternoon I met the photographer Bill Lyons, who is taking the photographs for the upcoming Metropolitan Museum exhibit on Byzantine and early Islamic art, for which I have written some of the catalogue entries. I joined him during his session photographing a metal vessel from the Umayyad period that I have written the entry for. I went with Dino to meet him at the Spanish archaeological mission in Amman, headed by Ignacio Arce.

Bill taking his photographs

Dino showing the Lot’s Cave volume to Ignacio

But the main objective of my being back at ACOR this time around was to work on the final report of my excavations at the site of Humayma from the 1990s. The reports have been mostly done for a while, so this stay is to be the final push to get them completely done. For some days I had a good work rhythm. I would work on the Humayma reports in the morning until lunch at 2:00, then after a nap work on the Dalman translation for a couple of hours in the late afternoon, and then work on the Masjid al-Aqsa chapter in the late evening until around midnight.

One unusual event of the month was when an absentee ballot unexpectedly arrived in the mail for the upcoming school board elections in Dubuque, Iowa. So I spent a few hours browsing the internet, trying to get some information about who to vote for. Some of the candidates had a couple minute long video posted on the Dubuque Telegraph Herald newspaper website, and if articulateness is a virtue for members of a school board, several candidates were failures.

Bamberg August 1-16

In the first half of August I continued to live in Bamberg. I continued to work mostly on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project, concentrating  on accounts of western pilgrims and travelers to the city and their descriptions of the Masjid al-Aqsa compound.

Teaching at the university ended at the end of July, but exam period lasted for the following two weeks. Beginning about halfway through the semester, the university libraries have been heavily used during the day time to the point that virtually all the available desks have been in use, so I shifted my schedule to work in the libraries mostly in the evenings up to the extended closing hour of midnight.

The theology library filled to capacity. That’s my computer on the desk at the far right end of the row.

One trip I made out of the city was on August 2, when I went to Nürnberg to meet Ute Verstegen, a professor of Christian archaeology at the University of Erlangen/Nürnberg, and Sebastian, a student of hers, for lunch. I had most recently met Ute at the conference last month in Heidelberg.

Ute, Sebastian and me in Nürnberg

That day was the first really sunny day in quite some time. July had been remarkably cold, cloudy and rainy, which continued in August as well. With daily highs mostly in the 60s or at best low 70s, I had to wear a jacket around half of the days.

After meeting Ute and Sebastian, the day was too sunny to return directly to Bamberg, so I stopped off in Erlangen, half way to Bamberg, to go to the park around the university and the botanical gardens.

A flower bed in the Erlangen park

The Botanical Gardens in Erlangen

Bamberg has many attractive features, among them the fresh produce market along the main pedestrian street in the center of the old city.

Some of the fresh produce vendors in Bamberg

Bamberg also has an active city-wide recycling program. Every two weeks is yellow sack day for plastic and metal, which need to be put in yellow sacks for collection. Blue bins are for paper.

Yellow sack day in Bamberg. My apartment is the one with the green shutters in the center of the photograph.

My current stay in Germany came to an end, when on the morning of Tuesday August 16 I took a train to  Frankfurt for a flight back to Amman, Jordan. The least expensive ticket was with Baltic Air, which entailed a first leg to Riga and then a quick transfer to the flight on to Amman. That was a few hours longer than a direct flight, but significantly cheaper.

Bamberg July 1-31

In July I continued to live in Bamberg. I continued to work on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project, concentrating this month on accounts of western pilgrims and travelers to the city. I also continued to teach my history and archaeology of Jerusalem seminar until the end of the summer semester at the end of July. On July 19 I gave a public lecture at the university on Muslim Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman Period.

On July 28, the Oriental Studies Faculty held their end-of-semester party. Some belly dancers performed.

The belly-dancers

Among other academic activities, on Friday July 1 I attended the annual conference of the Ernst Herzfeld Society for Islamic Art, held this year in Berlin. This year I decided to attend just the first day of the two-day conference as a day trip from Bamberg: it is about a 4 ½ hour train ride each way.

Also from July 10 to 12 I attended a conference at the University of Heidelberg on the theme of relations between Constantinople and Jerusalem in the Byzantine Period. I gave a presentation about the Iconoclastic Period in the 8^th and 9^th centuries. The conference was held at the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum building, a lovely facility, where there are rooms for the participants to stay.

The view from my room with the Heidelberg castle in the background

I also spent some time in July making arrangements for a small survey project in India for December. I exchanged numerous emails with my Indian colleague Rani Sarma in Visakhapatnam, who is writing a book about early Buddhism along the east coast of central India, about ideas for a survey of some little documented early Buddhist sites in the Visakhapatnam district. It took a while, but the pieces have fallen into place for that project.

In Bamberg there are always a lot of cultural activities going on, especially during the summer. The event in July that attracted the greatest number of visitors was a week-end of performances by street magicians on July 16-17. I did not enjoy it much because the crowds were so large that it was difficult to actually see the performers.

A crowd watching a street magician

Also often on the main streets there are people who dress up in outlandish costumes and then stand motionless for hours, expecting to get donations for their performances.

A King Tut performer

Among other activities, on Saturday July 9 I went on the Volkshochschule nature hike led by naturalist Hermann Bösche to the South Thüringen National Park. Among other places, we stopped at the Itz spring, said to have curative properties.

The hikers

Hermann Bösche with an old boundary marker

Me at the Itz spring

I rarely go to movies, but on Sunday July 17 I went to see Willkommen in Cedar Rapids, a German-dubbed version of the Hollywood movie that had been released in the USA earlier in the year. It turns out that the movie was filmed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, rather than Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

In Bamberg, my apartment in the city center is only a few minutes’ walk away from a large wooded park and nature preserve known as the Hain.

The botanical gardens in the Hain

Within the park are a number of pavilions and monuments.

A theatrical performance at one of the park monuments

In May I started jogging in the park, the first sustained jogging I have done in over twenty years. A circuit through the park is about three miles long; I was in such bad shape that it took a while before I could run more than a portion of the full distance. I went jogging about every other day until in early July my left ankle began telling me to not run so much.

One of the paths I jog along in the park

Bamberg June 1-30

For my currrent three-month stay in Bamberg I have rented an apartment in the city center, a five minute walk away from the university campus. My apartment is on the ground floor of a historic building in a heritage preservation zone, so the landlord cannot significantly alter the building fabric, such as the too-low door lintel in one room, built for people of smaller stature than today.

My apartment

What the landowners think of the restrictions that heritage preservation places on them can be seen on an inscription placed on a neighboring building. It reads: “God protect me from dust and dirt, from fire, war and monument protection”.

The inscription

On the building across the street is a plaque with an elephant sculpture, one of a number of such sculptures in the city.

The elephant sculpture

During the summer semester at the University of Bamberg I am teaching a seminar one-day a week on the history and archaeology of Jerusalem from the Roman through Ottoman periods. One student is taking the course for credit, while three others audit.

But the main reason for my being in Bamberg is to continue work on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project that I have been involved in for some years now. I am focusing my attention on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, with the hope of getting a volume done about that portion of the city by around the end of the year. I have been taking advantage of the extensive rare book holdings of the Bamberg State library to look at some old books about Jerusalem that I would not find easily anywhere else. I also needed to spend some time finishing up my catalogue entries for the Metropolitan Museum upcoming exhibition about Byzantine art and responding to the queries of the copy editor.

In June I mostly stayed put in Bamberg, but on Saturday June 13 I visited two friends who were students of mine in Hyderabad. Armin is the pastor in the small village of Rohr in southern Thüringen, a two-hour train ride from Bamberg. Terini, from the state of Mizoram in India, has been living there since their marriage in October 2008. Viktor is their six-month old son.

Terini, Armin and Viktor

At the end of my visit, they dropped me off at the English Gardens in the nearby city of Meiningen, where I attended an open-air performance of Wagner’s opera Rienzi; the weather was ideal. I had not heard Rienzi before. On May 13 I had attended the live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, shown at a movie theater in Bamberg.

The performance of Wagner’s Rienzi

But the big event of the month in heavily Catholic Bamberg was Fronleichnam, Corpus Christi Day, on Thursday, June 23, marked by a big procession. (I was corrected when I once called it an ‘Umzug’ ‘parade’, rather than a ‘Prozession’. In the procession a number of statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary are carried from the cathedral through the streets of the old city and back. The procession takes a couple of hours and because it happens during a warm time of year, it is the largest popular church event of the year in Bamberg, although Protestants do not take part.

A statue in the procession

Another statue in the procession

I find it amusing to watch the tables being carried behind the statues to rest them on at stopping points.

A statue with a table being carried behind

Bamberg May 1-31

After my stay in Krakow, I took an overnight train to Vienna and then an intercity express train on to Bamberg, arriving in the early afternoon of Sunday May 1. I returned to Bamberg for the summer semester at the University of Bamberg until mid-August to continue work on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project. That project has brought me to Bamberg for repeated earlier stays.

Bamberg is a city of some 70,000 population with a well preserved old city that is on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites and pulls way above its weight in terms of culture and cultural events. The big event in May was the bi-annual World Heritage Run on Sunday May 8, with over ten thousand participants with separate runs over varying distances through the historic old city for children up to a half-marathon for adults.

The race for the youngest children

The race for older elementary school children

The adult runners getting refreshed

(The theology library where I spend a lot of my time is in the background)

The runners crossing a bridge in the old city

There are also numerous musical events all the time, such as one evening of performances by church choirs, as well as frequent street musicians.

 A church choir performance

Ann outdoor band performance

 There are also frequent events for various charitable causes, such as a ‘People in Need’ fundraising event on May 22, at which some nursery school children performed.

The performance of the nursery school children

 There are also around one or two lectures each week at the University that I attend in lecture series about medieval studies, archaeology and oriental studies. I also joined again the Irish Set-Dancing group on Wednesday evenings; I participate whenever I am in Bamberg.

Sunday May 15 was museum day and I went to the Natural History museum on the university campus; the renovation of the main historic exhibit hall had been recently completed.

The Natural History Museum

 In April I had done a lot of travel, so in May I mostly stayed in Bamberg. One trip I did make was a day-trip on Saturday May 28 sponsored by the Volkshochschule (community college) to a historic monastery at Plankstetten, about an hour’s travel away. As part of the tour, we rode a tow-boat along a short stretch of a 19th-century canal. That canal has been replaced by the modern Main-Donau canal, which runs through the city of Bamberg.

The tow boat

The modern canal in Bamberg

At the Plankstetten monastery, we got a tour of the main church and underground burial crypt painted with Byzantine-style icons by a wise-cracking 90 year old monk.

The wise-cracking monk

Auschwitz April 27

On Wednesday April 27, I went on a day-trip guided bus tour to Auschwitz. It is a bit over an hour’s travel from Krakow. We spent a somewhat rushed couple of hours at the central Auschwitz concentration camp, which was not enough to see everything. During the peak months, the site is overrun with tourists, so tours have to be tightly managed to keep everyone moving.

The entrance to the inner compound with the Arbeit Macht Frei sign

The electrified fence around the inner compound

We then went to the nearby Birkenau extermination camp for another hour. The Birkenau camp is much larger in size, so the tourist groups there can be spread out more. Also it seems that many tour groups do not come to Birkenau, but just go to the central Auschwitz site, which is a pity. I found the Birkenau site more impressive.

A barracks building at Birkenau

A building with latrines at Birkenau

A railroad car at the unloading siding at Birkenau

One of the gas chambers at Birkenau