Prague June 30

My two months in Bamberg came to an end on Friday June 29. I traveled from Bamberg via a train to Nürnberg and then a convenient direct bus to Prague, arriving in the evening after four and half hours of travel time. I had passed through Prague for a couple of hours on my way to Bamberg in May and I wanted to take the opportunity to spend some more time there on my way to Jerusalem. Flights from Prague to Ben Gurion Airport were also significantly cheaper than from elsewhere.

I spent the next day Saturday June 30 sightseeing in Prague. I walked around and ended up at the royal castle. I took the full tour, seeing everything there was to see, including the windows of the infamous Defenstration of Prague that triggered the start of the Thirty-Years War in 1618.

The Defenestration of Prague windows

I then walked around some more and went to the Naprstek Anthropology Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures. My fancy was especially taken by a brief video display of Korean breakdancers accompanied by zither (gayageum) players. Over the following days I spent a lot of time watching related videos on YouTube.

I then got a 90-minute subway ticket and rode some of the subway lines until it was time to go to the airport for my flight to Ben Gurion Airport that left at 10:20 pm. The flight arrived at 3:00 am and so I hung out at the airport terminal for a few hours before taking a sherut van to Jerusalem.

Bamberg and Meiningen June 6-29

I continued to live in Bamberg for a second month to continue work on my various Jerusalem research projects. I spent much of my time examining what Western pilgrims and travelers who came to Jerusalem from the 14th to 19th centuries wrote about the Masjid al-Aqsa compound. I also spend some days translating into English a long Arabic document about Jerusalem in the 19th and 20th centuries for a website about Jerusalem being prepared by the Jordanian Royal Scientific Society.

During the month I also met my colleagues Anja Heidenreich and Ilse Sturkenboom to discuss progress on the report of our archaeological survey in the Visakhapatnam District of India last December and plans for a second season this coming December.


On June 6 I went to the nearby city of Erlangen to meet two colleagues of early Christian art and archaeology at the university there: Ute Verstegen and Carola Jäggi.

Ute Verstegen in the university scent garden

The next day June 7 was Corpus Christi Day, a state holiday in Bavaria, marked by a big religious procession through the old city in the morning.

The procession with the offices of the Natural History Museum (where I had my office in 2007) in the background

One of the statues being put back

That afternoon I went to Erlangen again to meet Jürgen Zangenberg, a Hellenistic and Roman historian who is one of the editors of the encyclopedia for which I had written my Roman Jerusalem article last month.

Jürgen Zangenberg, his daughter and me

In the middle of the month was a series of concerts on the theme the Turks Before Vienna; the group Accentus Austria gave two concerts of Austro-Hungarian music. I bought their CD, which I listened to a lot in the following days. Also part of the series was a lecture about Alla Turca music, in which a pianist played a piano with a janissary novelty pedal that produced a thump and rang a bell.

The piano with the janissary element

On Saturday June 16 I joined a day-long nature hike, led by naturalist Hermann Bösch. One highpoint of the trip was him showing us a cluster of some 15 plants belonging to a very rare and endangered species. We also saw an early medieval archaeological site with little to see above the surface.

Hermann Bösch at the find spot of the rare plant.

The group at the archaeological site

On Friday June 22 I had to move out of my apartment because someone else had rented the apartment for the weekend a long time ago. So I went to the city of Meiningen in southern Thuringia, a two-hour train ride away. On Saturday I went to the nearby village of Rohr to visit my two friends Armin and Terini, who were both students of mine in Hyderabad. That evening I attended a performance of Wagner’s early opera Das Liebesverbot, based on Shakespeare’s comedy Measure for Measure at the South Thuringia State Theater. The opera was nice enough, but I could understand why it is only rarely performed. On Sunday morning I went to Meiningen’s Elizabeth Palace museum and the English Garden with its artificial romantic ruins. That afternoon Armin and Terini drove me back to Bamberg and they went on to see the State Garden Show.

The artificial romantic ruins in Meiningen

Armin, Terini and Viktor

Later that afternoon, I went to the nearby town of Ebern and walked around for a couple of hours before returning to Bamberg and moving back into my apartment.

An historic bridge with statues in Ebern

Bamberg May 6-June 5

After the conference in Warsaw I returned to Bamberg for the next two months to continue work on my various studies about Jerusalem. I focused my attention on the accounts of Western pilgrims and travelers who came to Jerusalem from the 14th to 19th centuries, and especially on what they wrote about the Masjid al-Aqsa compound. Hundreds of travel accounts are available for easy downloading via Google Books and archives.org. I also wrote an encyclopedia article about Roman-period Jerusalem and worked on some revisions to my Masjid al-Asqa article for Humberto da Silveira’s forthcoming book of photographs.

I stayed in the same vacation rental apartment where I had lived during my last stay in Bamberg a year ago. I went jogging occasionally in the public park / nature preserve area a short distance from my apartment; I had fallen out of shape once again after the jogging that I had done during last year’s stay.

For the first weeks of my stay in Bamberg I did not travel anywhere out of the city, but I did attend some of the events on World Heritage Day on June 3 and went on May 17, a public holiday for Ascension Day, to the State Garden Show, held on some waste land in a former industrial area that the municipality has reclamated as a public park.

Flowers at the garden show

A musical performance at the garden show with an interfaith relations pavilion in the background