Historic Anabaptist Places (Pictures itt)

[temporal1]

I learned a lot reading through this thread. Thanks guys.

The mix of pics with commentary is super.

[silentreader]

About 15 miles west of there, on the Austrian side of the border, is an open-air museum that looks interesting, Museumsdorf Niedersulz. One of the houses relocated to the site has an exhibit about the Hutterites. It's on my list for the next time I'm in the region, and I might have to add Veľké Leváre as well.

Unless you rent a car, which I will not do, the trains/bus there is a real treat. Slovakian branchline service takes me back some 40 years. Then there is the "buffet," my wife needed a bathroom, and the train station did not have one. I tired german, no go. Wife tried french, she was told the WC was in the "buffet." Think of your worse dive bar, with a gal behind a bank style window, pouring shots to the customers through the hole, for half a euro a shot, a fennel type potion. Wood fire heat only. This time my german worked. WC was clean. I tried to buy a coke, nope, only one item on offer.....shots of fennel liquor.

Wife still willing to travel.

J.M.

No wonder you feel comfortable where you are.

[ohio jones]

About 15 miles west of there, on the Austrian side of the border, is an open-air museum that looks interesting, Museumsdorf Niedersulz. One of the houses relocated to the site has an exhibit about the Hutterites. It's on my list for the next time I'm in the region, and I might have to add Veľké Leváre as well.

Unless you rent a car, which I will not do, the trains/bus there is a real treat. Slovakian branchline service takes me back some 40 years.

I had an email today from the ZSSK (in Slovak) encouraging me to download their latest app, with which to buy e-tickets for those ancient trains.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic have such an interesting mix of centuries-old history, Soviet-grade infrastructure, and English-speaking millennials with the latest tech.

[Swiss Bro]

Great stuff Judas, thanks.

The liquor must have been Becherovka, In my late teens I made a trip to Prag with a few friends and in the Pivovar U Fleku, every pint of dark beer came with a shot of Becherovka. On my travels, I found out a lot of countries have an anis flavoured national liquor:

Switzerland: Absinthe
Czech/Slovakia: Becherovka
Greece: Ouzo
France: Pastis

There must be more but I‘ll never know since I‘ve stopped drinking alcohol a while ago.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Great stuff Judas, thanks.

The liquor must have been Becherovka, In my late teens I made a trip to Prag with a few friends and in the Pivovar U Fleku, every pint of dark beer came with a shot of Becherovka. On my travels, I found out a lot of countries have an anis flavoured national liquor:

Switzerland: Absinthe
Czech/Slovakia: Becherovka
Greece: Ouzo
France: Pastis

There must be more but I‘ll never know since I‘ve stopped drinking alcohol a while ago.

Raki:Turkey
Arak: Arab World

Only one I have actually tasted is Arak, one of my neighbors when we lived in Amman handed me a glass diluted with sugar and water during a National Day celebration. I ASSUMED it was not alcohol since he was Muslim. Wrong. I could feel the effects in 5 minutes.

This Slovakian stuff had the distinct odor of Fennel. Arab stuff was pure Anis. Regional variation was noted almost immediately.

J.M.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Now on to another slightly obscure place, Alzey, in the Rheinland. Here in the Hutterite chronicle there is an account of about 350 people executed, in what may have been one of the largest single such incidents in the mid 1500s. From GAMEO:
""The Hutterite chronicle placed the number executed in the Palatinate at 350, basing this on the testimony of refugees who later came to Moravia from the Palatinate and who had witnessed how the Anabaptists there had been seized in their homes "and brought to the place of judgment like sheep to the slaughter." They reported that those who recanted had their fingers cut off or a cross branded on their foreheads with a red-hot iron""

The round tower, in which they were held:

IMGP2357 by [url=https://flic.kr/p/2iUAKSA]IMGP2360 by The courtyard where the braidings and amputations likely took place:

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2iUy1gU]IMGP2358 by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/183228940@N08/]

People in the town don't seem to be aware of this castles dark past. It is, however, a beautiful town.

[Karstan78]

Will you post the pictures of the castle? I doubt I'll ever get to one, but I think it would be so interesting to visit one, or more!

I actually have posted a picture of it but maybe you can't see it, it's a panorama shot? Anyway, I'll post some more since you asked.

Disclaimer: This post has absolutely nothing to do with Anabaptist places so if you came for those, please stop reading/looking now. I will post new Anabaptist places in due course.

Ok so the Hallwyl castle is not extremely big or fancy but what makes it really special is that it is a water castle. That's quite rare in Switzerland. What's even cooler is that it is a double water castle actually. You can see it on the pictures below:

On this picture you have the main (and only) entrance on the right hand side, a stone bridge. On the left, what seems to be a few ecclectic buildings, the ones in front grey stones, the ones in the back white:



But actually, the grey stone castle is separated from the white castle by another bridge, one that can be pulled up:



And from the other side:



So it's actually two separate "islands", and even if the first one was taken, once the bridge was pulled up there was no way you would get into the white castle.

Now as we are off topic anyway I'll jump on the occasion to show you my top 3 castles I've visited so far:

No 3: Glengorm Castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland:



This is now run as a bed and breakfast and I spent a few days there last year. Needless to say it was fantastic. Yes, that's the sea right behind it:



No 2: Kisimul Castle, Isle of Barra, Scotland:



This is the seat of Clan MacNeil. However, in 2001 the castle was leased by the chief of Clan MacNeil to Historic Scotland for 1000 years for the annual sum of £1 and a bottle of whisky. Anyway, this is a true sea castle and can only be approached by boat. It looks best from Heaval, the island hill, with views over the Bishop Isles. One of my favorites views in the world.



No 1: No contest, the most spectacular castle of them all is Neuschwanstein in Germany:



Built by the excentric (to say the least) King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, it is not even a real medieval castle but was built from scratch in the second half of the 19 century. It's only half finished on the inside because the King was declared mad during the construction time, amongst others because of the exorbitant sums he splashed out for constructing castles. The King subsequntely drowned himself but Neuschwanstein is now the most visited castle in Germany and generating decent revenues to the Free State of Bavaria. It wasn't such a mad idea after all...



Anyway that was it, my next post will be Anabaptist places only, promised.

Great pics we visited Neuschwanstein last year and surprisingly the children were very underwhelmed. We haven’t made it to Switzerland yet, hopefully one day. Here in Hessen we have a fair bit of Anabaptist history, hopefully when things calm down we can search it out.

[ohio jones]

My previous post on this thread might have cast doubt on Marpeck’s competence as a civil engineer due to the runaway logs. However, he did similar work quite successfully for the city of Strasbourg a few years earlier.

Marpeck arrived in Strasbourg in the fall of 1528, after leaving his native Rattenberg, Austria in January and spending the intervening months in Moravia. In the spring of 1530 he negotiated, on behalf of the city, a 30 year lease for woodlands in the Black Forest and a waiver of tolls on wood transported from there by river. He implemented that plan over the following year, but at the end of 1531 was banished from Strasbourg due to his beliefs and moved to Canton Appenzell, Switzerland.



The logging was done in the hills north of Hausach, Germany. Dams were built across the stream and logs piled up behind them, so that as the snow melted and water accumulated behind the dam, it would break and send the logs hurtling downstream to the Kinzig river at Hausach. This photo from October shows the normal flow of the Kinzig, but in the spring the adjacent floodplains would likely be under water.



At that point the logs were tied together to form rafts; the rafts were connected end-to-end and piloted downstream to the Rhine at Kehl, opposite Strasbourg. This photo on a historical marker in Hausach shows a reenactment of a 90-meter flotilla, but reportedly 600-meter assemblies were not unheard of.



From the lumber yard at Kehl, the logs were cut into firewood and sold in Strasbourg’s market at Place Kleber, where today on market days you might find a fast food stand obstructing the view of the Gutenberg statue. For the next century or so, this wood was called "Pilgram timber."



Rafting of this sort had been done earlier in the region, but apparently Marpeck’s innovation was the dams that facilitated the transport of logs down to the main river. As he found out at Augsburg, upstream dams work a whole lot better than downstream dams.

During his time supervising the timber harvesting in the Black Forest, Marpeck must have also found time to do some church planting work in the region. Not much is known today about these fellowships, except from letters he wrote to them in 1540 and 1555.



At Gengenbach, midway between Hausach and Kehl, the Flößerei Museum shows the history of rafters and rafting, and also has upstairs a display on the Schwarzwaldbahn, the railway line through the Black Forest that solved the problem of elevation change (without exceeding the grades that locomotives of 150 years ago could handle) by lengthening the route with loops that resemble a meandering river.



Rafts not destined for Strasbourg’s firewood supply were reassembled at the Rhine to form wider barges and loaded with cargo. The flößerei would steer them downstream, sometimes as far as the port of Rotterdam, selling both the cargo and the wood, then make their way by land back to the Black Forest to repeat the trip.

These were the type of rafts used for the mass deportation of Anabaptists from Canton Bern in 1710-1711 (with the Amish and the Swiss Brethren on separate rafts since they were not quite yet on peaceful terms after the separation).

[ohio jones]

Most everyone with an interest in church history is aware of Martin Luther's testimony at the Diet of Worms, 500 years ago this past April. Although he was promised safe passage to return home to Wittenberg, his friends did not trust this and abducted him en route, hiding him away in the Wartburg Castle at Eisenach.



In his room in this building in the castle complex, 500 years ago today, Luther wrote voluminously and began translating the New Testament from Greek to German. The New Testament was published in September 1522, but the Old Testament was not completed until 1534.



Fritz Erbe read the New Testament in German, believed it, and put it into practice. He was arrested and released in 1531 as part of a group of Anabaptists. In 1533, after refusing to baptize his newborn child, he was arrested and placed in the city jail, where he remained until 1540. After resisting all attempts to convert him, he was moved to the south tower of the Wartburg.



Like other prison towers of the period, prisoners were at or slightly below grade level, with the entrance at the top of the tower. Bread and water were lowered from above.





What irony that he was imprisoned for 8 years here for his obedience to the New Testament, mere meters from the place it was translated into his language.

Fritz Erbe died here in 1548 and was buried nearby. During archaeological excavations in 2006, a skeleton (probably his) was unearthed. Several plaques at the tower (1€ entrance) tell his story.



From the Eisenach Bahnhof, there are multiple routes to the Wartburg for those who don't mind an uphill hike. One option is to start at the Predigerkirche and take the Lutherweg, which has a display every hundred meters or so with a scene from Luther's life. Or just follow the street signs, which lead to a footpath through the forest.

Eisenach is also the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach, so of course there's a museum dedicated to his life and work.

[Karstan78]

Thank OJ, this is only 120miles from where we live. Will have to explore this summer.