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 That canal has been replaced by the modern Main-Donau canal, which runs through the city of Bamberg.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