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choco_froshDammit, Sovay, you´ve put me in a writing mood! Just when I could actually be getting some work done...
As most of you know, my camera was stolen a week ago. This is rather annoying, as I´d like to send you photos. The strange, post-modern decorativeness of the library (the world´s most confusing), with its chandelier-like ornaments and staircases. The Appenzellgebirge rising like something out of The Far Pavilions, behind the castle-topped ridge of the Seerucken above the lake. Swans in the mist. The awful handwriting of the Ammanngerichtsbuch. My Mom would be amused to see the modern return to chained books for the refence books; and I still owe my grandparents photos from Vienna. Of course, to post any of these, I´d also need to be able to connect my computer to the internet (hopefully tomorrow), and figure out how to use my Yale webspace. But it´s a pain not to have a camera to at least take the pictures. Though perhaps it´s better to use words, to recall a place to memory. For the moment, I´ll be content with that. Or just use this post as a way to keep track of what to get photos of later.
Biked several miles out to Reichenau yesterday. The island is connected to the shore of the Untersee (just downstream from Konstanz) by a mile of causeway. Before the causeway, you tooks a bridge of sorts, before that, you had a choice of boat or hiking several miles through swamps. Hence why there was a monastery there: when old Permin showed up in the eighth century, there was still a lot of the old Irish tradition of founding monasteries on islands kicking around the continent from the missionaries a century earlier. Like an irish monastery, Reichenau had several different cells (three, all with impressive medieval churches that are just about all that survives from the period). Mittelzell was and is the largest: double-apsed, with a choir rebuilt in gothic (currently under repair: why does this keep happening with places that I visit??). But the rest dates back to about the 11th century...or maybe earlier, since it may actually be the site that the 9th century St Gall Plan was actually designed for (esp. since the two were sister-monasteries). And unusual, in still having an altar in its western apse--possibly just because of the relics of St Mark that are said to be there (so how come he´s in Venice too? ;-d) Unterzell, at the tip of the island, is the only one to have been rebuilt in baroque: fortunately tastefully, and preserving the 12th c wall paintings. Those in Oberzell, which we finally got back to after Grace had been revived with cake (linzer torte AND some kind of Schwarzwald-torte-like substance: thus continuing the trend of 50% calorie intake through desert that had been initiated in the orientation internation buffet the night before...just about the only part of the orientation program I showed up for...) are even older: tenth-century--miracles of Christ, with abstract optical-illusion band underneath. The building goes back to the late 9th, and is an interesting example of what happens when a space is repeatedly converted by the changing liturgical imperatives of different centuries... (door cut through W apse c. 1100 to create solely W-E axis; chancel enlarged and actual windows added, 13th. century; hideously baroque altarpiece, fortunately now removed, c. 1700; new altar, with strange modernist furnishings, installed near center of church sometime after 1965)
We passed up a chance to eat at George´s Fish Shack (I may have to go back), and bicycled all the way home again, various body parts complaining, across the lake (which we could now actually see), and past the ruins of the Schlöpfen, the abbatial castle guarding the access point to the island, rebuilt in the 14th century after enraged citizens of Konstanz burned it down after the abbey Steward had cut off two fishermens´ noses. It´s now ruined again, and it turns out that our choir director lives in the house built into the side of it. The random things...
As most of you know, my camera was stolen a week ago. This is rather annoying, as I´d like to send you photos. The strange, post-modern decorativeness of the library (the world´s most confusing), with its chandelier-like ornaments and staircases. The Appenzellgebirge rising like something out of The Far Pavilions, behind the castle-topped ridge of the Seerucken above the lake. Swans in the mist. The awful handwriting of the Ammanngerichtsbuch. My Mom would be amused to see the modern return to chained books for the refence books; and I still owe my grandparents photos from Vienna. Of course, to post any of these, I´d also need to be able to connect my computer to the internet (hopefully tomorrow), and figure out how to use my Yale webspace. But it´s a pain not to have a camera to at least take the pictures. Though perhaps it´s better to use words, to recall a place to memory. For the moment, I´ll be content with that. Or just use this post as a way to keep track of what to get photos of later.
Biked several miles out to Reichenau yesterday. The island is connected to the shore of the Untersee (just downstream from Konstanz) by a mile of causeway. Before the causeway, you tooks a bridge of sorts, before that, you had a choice of boat or hiking several miles through swamps. Hence why there was a monastery there: when old Permin showed up in the eighth century, there was still a lot of the old Irish tradition of founding monasteries on islands kicking around the continent from the missionaries a century earlier. Like an irish monastery, Reichenau had several different cells (three, all with impressive medieval churches that are just about all that survives from the period). Mittelzell was and is the largest: double-apsed, with a choir rebuilt in gothic (currently under repair: why does this keep happening with places that I visit??). But the rest dates back to about the 11th century...or maybe earlier, since it may actually be the site that the 9th century St Gall Plan was actually designed for (esp. since the two were sister-monasteries). And unusual, in still having an altar in its western apse--possibly just because of the relics of St Mark that are said to be there (so how come he´s in Venice too? ;-d) Unterzell, at the tip of the island, is the only one to have been rebuilt in baroque: fortunately tastefully, and preserving the 12th c wall paintings. Those in Oberzell, which we finally got back to after Grace had been revived with cake (linzer torte AND some kind of Schwarzwald-torte-like substance: thus continuing the trend of 50% calorie intake through desert that had been initiated in the orientation internation buffet the night before...just about the only part of the orientation program I showed up for...) are even older: tenth-century--miracles of Christ, with abstract optical-illusion band underneath. The building goes back to the late 9th, and is an interesting example of what happens when a space is repeatedly converted by the changing liturgical imperatives of different centuries... (door cut through W apse c. 1100 to create solely W-E axis; chancel enlarged and actual windows added, 13th. century; hideously baroque altarpiece, fortunately now removed, c. 1700; new altar, with strange modernist furnishings, installed near center of church sometime after 1965)
We passed up a chance to eat at George´s Fish Shack (I may have to go back), and bicycled all the way home again, various body parts complaining, across the lake (which we could now actually see), and past the ruins of the Schlöpfen, the abbatial castle guarding the access point to the island, rebuilt in the 14th century after enraged citizens of Konstanz burned it down after the abbey Steward had cut off two fishermens´ noses. It´s now ruined again, and it turns out that our choir director lives in the house built into the side of it. The random things...
Hey ...
Date: 2005-10-16 03:35 pm (UTC)Need. Popcorn.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-17 07:01 am (UTC)rebuilt in the 14th century after enraged citizens of Konstanz burned it down after the abbey Steward had cut off two fishermens´ noses.
*blink*
Whoa.