Speyer

We spent the weekend in Speyer.  It's about a 2.5 hour train ride from Duisburg. It's in the area where I lived as a child (Kaiserslautern, which is about an hour away), so I suspect I have been here before, but most of the town has clearly been rebuilt since the 1950s -- I don't think the town was bombed in the war, but all the non-historical buildings look like they come from the 80s or 90s; the town must have had a growth spurt then. 

The town is lovely, with a interesting combination of modern and old, but winter is probably not the best time to visit it.  There are some nice parks to wander through, and you can stroll along the Rhine, but it was pretty chilly, windy and barren.  We still managed to fill a day and a half with the various sights.

Speyer is along the German route to the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, so there were lots of pilgrims heading to Spain from here (and this is in part why there are so many churches in the town -- they were needed to minister to the pilgrims and they also got money from them)  The main street has a statue of such a pilgrim, just down from the old town gate.  He looks pretty cold to me with those bare feet. 

Speyer has a cathedral (Roman Catholic), a few other Catholic churches and numerous Evangelical churches (by which the Germans primarily mean Lutheran and a few related denominations) --Memorial Church (being a memorial to the Reformation), Trinity Church and Holy Spirit Church are the most notable ones.  Speyer was the location of the "Diet of Speyer" in 1529, where a variety of high level folks of the Holy Roman Empire met to conduct church and political business.  There had been some "Lutheran reforms" in some counties, but those new-fangled practices were rescinded by the Diet.  A group of representatives protested this rescission, which is where we get the term "Protestant" for people who broke off from the Catholic Church. So this town has been at the center of conflict between Catholic and Protestant for a long time.

When we toured the churches, I found there to be a lot more "glitz" (silver, gold, etc) in the Protestant churches than in the cathedral.  That surprised me, as my experience of Protestantism is that it's a lot less glitzy.  But I think this is in part because these were early Protestant churches, where they had to appeal to what was familiar to people, and because when we visited the history museum (see below), there was a big exhibit of religious items from the cathedral.  I wasn't able to figure out how they ended up in custody of the state rather than the church (maybe this was a way to save them/rescue them from the Nazis or the Russians).

Here are my attempts to capture the main churches.

The cathedral:

The Memorial church:

We also visited the ruins of a former Jewish Synagogue and a pretty intact mikvah (ritual bath).  This is apparently the oldest known mikvah in northern Europe, with it being mentioned in writings of the 12th century.  Our main reaction was that the whole experience looked cold. And probably was; there was apparently an attendant there to make sure you submerged yourself for the required amount of time.  (Of course, it was mostly the women who had to cleanse themselves here). The synagogue was built about the same time as the cathedral (11th Century) and probably by the same masons. The Jewish community in Speyer was extinguished in 1529 by some new laws that made the town unhospitable for Jews. While there was never a thriving Jewish community in Speyer again, in 1940 there were 53 Jews in the town who were rounded up and sent to the concentration camps.  Fifteen of them survived, which I find amazingly high given how early in the war this happened.

Here is the actual submersion part viewed from above:





We spent a long time at the Historical Museum of the Rhineland-Pfalz, a local history museum.  There was a large, detailed and very interesting exhibit on Richard the Lionhearted, who spent time in Speyer while he was being held for ransom on his return from the Third Crusade.  (One of the "cuter" parts was a display of his travels from England and back as a series of tweets superimposed on a map).  As Jay said "I didn't expect to go to a quaint town in Germany to get updated on British history".  My German is now good enough that I can understand about 90% of the information on museum placards, which enabled me to get a lot more information from the exhibit than Jay did. 

There is also a Transportation Museum in Speyer.  We didn't pace ourselves well enough to find time to visit this (its hours in the winter are limited, and we got engrossed in Richard the Lionhearted exhibit), but we walked around the outside, where you can see everything from firetrucks to space shuttles.  The largest item (that we saw) is a 747.  Apparently there is everything you ever wanted to know about vehicles there.

Early Sunday morning it snowed, making our trip back a bit more of an adventure (walking to the train station through the snow -- about 1-2"; a bit of concern about delayed connections, but it all worked out).  It was damn cold out both Saturday and Sunday and windy too, at least for us in our inadequate winter clothing. 

A nice, relaxing weekend.  Even with the cold, it was probably nicer weather than Duisburg, and we took in a lot of history.