Dear Chrissy is doing her best to keep me entertained, so she suggested checking out a pretty medieval town 40 km away named Büdingen, at the very edge of the Vogelsberg, where the basaltic lava flows bank against Triassic red sandstones with prominent cross-bedding. Castle and city walls are built of these sandstones, which gives them an attractive firey aspect. Medieval times are considered a Dark Age with respect to the humanities, but these folks were accomplished engineers who built amazing fortifications and castles. A common design, like in Büdingen, was a form of "8", where one of the circles was slightly elevated and more heavily fortified to host the castle of the lord. The other circle is where the daily life of the castle took place, the men at arms trained, and the servants did their daily chores. In case of attack, the first line of defense was this "lower" court, and to enter the "upper" circle the enemy would have had to go through the narrow passage connecting both, where they could be stopped by a portcullis or rocks thrown from the ramparts above.
The houses of the common people outside the castle were also well engineered, rising four stories high and standing today, thanks to a solid skeleton of massive timbers. The walls, as I understand it, were little more than adobe but well protected by plaster and slate roofs. There was also an old water mill, reminding me that these Dark age folks were also excellent hydraulic engineers that harnessed the energy of flowing water to operate all sorts of ingenious processes, such as the fulling of wool.
While in Büdingen we noticed that there were images of frogs everywhere. This fascination with frogs comes from the time when the lord of the castle married. There was a big celebration, lots of wine, and coming the night the lord fell asleep immediately and started snoring. The frustrated bride couldn't get any rest and went to open the window, only to add to the snores the croaking of hundreds of frogs. The following morning the angry bride told the lord that he had to get rid of all those frogs, who inhabited the moat of the castle. If that was not done immediately, she would have the marriage annulled and depart. In desperation the lord gave instructions to his second in command to mobilize all the inhabitants of the town to gather the frogs. Everybody came, with buckets, sacks, pots, and wallowing through the muddy floor of the moat gathered hundreds of frogs. What to do with so many frogs? The suggestion of burning them in a big fire was considered to cruel, so finally they dumped them in a nearby river and allowed the current to carry them away. The bride was satisfied and everybody lived happily ever after.
Stepping back in time, Chrissy took me to the Keltenwelt am Glauberg (literally "the World of the Celts"). Once we got there I recognized the place as one I had visited with friend Kerstin 10 years ago. It is one of the important archaeologic sites around Frankfurt, dating for the first millennium BC, when the linguistic group of the Celts extended from Ireland and Spain in the west to Türkiye (Anatolia) on the east. The heart of the Celtic world was France (the Gauls were Celtic people), Germany, and Poland. They could be considered the original inhabitants of Europe from about 1000 BC to 100 BC, when first the Alemanni and other Germanic tribes started to invade them, followed by Julius and his Roman legions.
Anyway, Keltenwelt was discovered in the 1960's when the farmer that grew corn on the flanks of a small volcanic plateau took a flight over his land and saw that the corn was not doing that well on the periphery of a perfect circle. He mentioned that to the municipal authorities and in the 70's an archaeology team discovered a burial at the center of the circle, and somehow speculated that a mound or barrow a good 10 meter high had covered the tomb (mind you, the land was flat, so the barrow that stands there right now is an archaeologic reconstruction). Geophysics also identified a series of ditches that went around the footprint of the barrow, and in one of them found a statue of a warrior wearing a padded vest and a headdress that looks like he had gone to Disneyland and gotten a pair of Mickey ears. He was immediately hailed as the Prince of the Celts, and a very fine museum has been built around this find. I visited this museum 10 years ago, so we didn't go in, but later Kerstin reminded me that at the time I had thought they really knew very little about who this fellow was, or who had been buried under the (imaginary) barrow.
However, Chrissy, Leo the dog, and myself took a very fine walk up to the plateau that overlooks the site, where all sorts of artifacts have been found spanning the first millennium BC, and at a later date the remains of a Medieval village. The archaeologists did not try to reconstruct the village, but they exposed a series of cellars that made me think that this village must have looked like the street where Chrissy and Gustav live, with pretty orderly houses in close succession. The view was amazing, so this must have been the heights where the nobility and rich merchants could look over the fields and valleys around them. Very nice!
For dinner we did something special. We got together we Andrea and Frank, Kerstin and Alex, Heidi and Titus, and went to this little train-station restaurant that seemed a little modest for going out with friends. Ah, but they are locally famous for their steak tartar, a dish much appreciated by Germans, French, and Italians. You start with a good cut of lean beef, chop it into little bits (or grind it like ground meat), and serve it raw with an accompaniment of delicious things like capers, chopped onions, pinion nuts, herbs, and a raw egg yolk, add salt and pepper to taste, mix the whole thing at eat it with slices of good bread. I had the piamontese style, with wine vinegar, olive oil, arrugula, onion, tomatoes and shaving of parmesan cheese. Try it; I am sure you will like it.
I do steak tartar at home when I find a good piece of tender
beef in the market, but I am going to have to try some of the different
variants. Gustav tells me he has his father's secret recipe, and I will have to
remind him to give it to me. Yumm!
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