schickrobert: 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.