Bamberg October 11-November 11

On Monday morning October 11, I was able to move into the apartment that I had rented for a month. It was a small but expensive single ground floor room about a twenty minute walk from the university.

The front entrance to my apartment

I continued to work principally on my sites and monuments of Islamic Jerusalem project, but also did some work reviewing Nadia Sukhtian’s draft translation of the first volume of Gustaf Dalman’s Arbeit und Sitte volumes about Palestinian customs.

On several evenings I participated in sessions of Irish set dancing and French dancing at the Volkshochschule and I attended two evening natural history lectures about the Steigerwald National Park and landscapes in Oberfranken.

Most weekends I traveled somewhere. On the weekend of October 16-17, I traveled by train to Wismar, one of the UNESCO world heritage cities along the Baltic Sea coast. I took the trip because I was able to book a cheap 20 Euro train ticket due to a special promotion to commemorate 20 years of German unity. It was a long eight and a half hour trip via Berlin, but I still had a couple of hours to walk around the historic buildings in the old city center. Wismar is famous for its interesting architecture using brick.

The town square of Wismar

One of the brick-built churches in Wismar

The next morning I took the train back to Bamberg and stopped at the city of Madgeburg along the way to see the sights there. I went to the cathedral, where the excavations in the interior have been left visible to visitors.

The excavations in the cathedral

I also stopped by a shopping mall in the city center of Madgeburg, where I noticed that a lot of people were heading on a Sunday when stores are normally closed. A flea market was underway.

The flea market

On October 23 I went on the VHS nature hike to the Steigerwald national park to the west of Bamberg, as always lead by the naturalist Hermann Bösche.

Hermann Bösche speaking about one of his beloved black berry species along the trail.

On October 24 I went to Hirschaid, a town to the south of Bamberg, for their autumn street festival with the inevitable band performance.

The band performing in Hirschaid

On Saturday November 6 I went with my colleague Klaus Bieberstein on a day trip to the biannual meeting of the German Palestine Society at Rauschholzhausen, near Marburg. I had attended that conference two years ago.

On Sunday November 7 I went to Nürnberg to attend the performance of Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt, taking advantage of the special deal that people with tickets for such performances in the Nürnberg area can travel for free by train. I had not heard that opera before and I was struck by the famous aria, Marietta’s Lied, so over the following days I spent a lot of time listening to all of the versions of the aria that have been posted on YouTube.

On Tuesday November 9 I travelled to the University of Mainz to give a public lecture about the Archaeology of Early Christianity: The Jordanian Contribution. I also spoke with Johannes Pahlitzsch, the professor of Byzantine Studies there, about my applying for a grant to do research at the university. I stayed overnight in a hotel and then returned to Bamberg the next day.

On Wednesday November 11, I moved out of my apartment; I would not have minded staying a couple of days more until I left Germany, but the room had already been rented by someone else.