Das Saarland kurz vor Lothringen

Traveling is a philosophy, a way of life. Living in other cultures has given me values no university in the world could have taught me. The willingness to walk the extra mile, to seek out valuable people, to sit down and actually listen to people's stories can create magic. Every single individual has a personal story to tell. I recently spent an entire day harvesting grapes in one of the world's steepest vineyard alongside Polish seasonal workers on the Moselle river. It was a delightful day that granted me insight into the daily toils of these benevolent migrant workers. Vintner Gernot Hain patiently explained the work to be done that day and entrusted me with specific instructions for the harvesting of a special selection of fermented grapes during the 2009 wine harvest. What does that have to do with the image above? Nothing. It simply depicts a beautiful road to be taken. I shot this photo in the Saarland just a few miles before crossing the border into Lorraine (France) that proved to be no border at all. It was a wonderful country road that took me through the southwesternmost region of the Hunsrück highlands and revealed to me landscapes I had not yet discovered. I invite you to view the photos that follow and to travel, to learn a new language and make new friends.

Goldtreppchen: Stairs into Gernot's Wine Cellar

My girlfriend Larisa and I spent one Friday in October working a day's journey in Gernot Hain's vineyards. Gernot, 45, has taken over the winemaking business from his father Kurt whose name still appears on some of the family's wine labels. Gernot has brought the business up to date and is currently producing some very interesting Pinot Blanc (Weissburgunder) and of course different qualities of the traditional Riesling. He ages a Pinot Noir (Spätburgunder) in French barriques with excellent results. Documents prove that the Hain family has been making wine in Piesport upon Moselle since the 17th century. I felt honored to be able to roam around the premises freely yet discretely. It was at this time that I took the photo above. The family also runs a lovely hotel and restaurant that grant the traveler peace and warm hospitality steeped in history.

The Moselle River Valley Near Piesport

Approaching Piesport on road L50 reveals one of the most spectacular views of the Moselle river  valley to the faithful traveler. Descending this serpentine road into the village from the Eifel highlands can cause a feeling of effusiveness while viticultural trails shoot off in all different directions. This experience is augmented at grape harvest when vintagers arduously negotiate the steep slopes to collect the harvest as tractors haul the large plastic bins into which the grape pickers empty their load.

Piesport

Piesport is an ancient Celtic settlement. It is located on the left banks of the Moselle river in Germany just under some of the world's steepest vineyards. The expansive Romans called this village Porto Pigonito from which the name Piesport derives and the entire area formed part of the province of Belgica Prima of which nearby Trier was the capital. An old winepress has been excavated and restored as a museum there. This winepress is the largest such installation found north of the Alps and hints at Piesport's importance during the late imperial period. After nearly 2000 years Piesport is producing some of Germany's most interesting wines as can be experienced at vintner family Hain's inn: the Goldtröpchen (the golden droplet).

Römisches Weinshiff auf der Mosel

As early as the 3rd century AD the Moselle River had become an important waterway for shipping wine to the middle Rhine valley and upstream to Lorraine where Roman legions were replenished with the precious commodity. Also, troops and supplies would be shipped up the Rhône & Saône rivers, then carried across the Vosges mountains to be finally shipped at Épinal down the Moselle river. The photo above shows details of a sculpture found in Neumagen which served as a grave memorial at the tomb of a wealthy Roman wine trader. The town of Neumagen, Noviomagus in Latin, eventually became a fortification (Kastell) and embodies the last boom of Roman civilization under Constantin the great on the middle Moselle. When archeologists excavated the walls of the ancient fort in the late 1800s they were surprised to find such a wealth of sculptures and bas-reliefs that adorned the graves of wealthy Romans. Today these works of art can be admired at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in nearby Trier. A replica of the sculpture has been placed at Saint-Peter's chapel in Neumagen. A real wood replica of the wineship has been reconstructed and can be chartered to row up and down the Moselle river in summer. It can be manned with up to 40 diligent oarsmen who will be rewarded with some of the finest local wine at journey's end.

Burg Hohenzollern

The greatest medieval castles of Europe were built either in the 11th or 12th centuries. One must also understand that the term "medieval" is a purely relative term in view of the space-time continuum. We, for all that matters, could be in a deep primitive state in relation to possible civilizations in universes as a whole. But if we are speaking of civilizations at the outset of stone & iron age technologies, okay, the high medieval ages on this planet might have been its crux. Maybe. That being said, Burg Hohenzollern was the cradle of the like-named genetic line: the House, or Lords, of Hohenzollen who became the foundation of the later Prussian dynasty by intermarrying with the house of Mecklenburg in northeast Germany. It is somehow a paradox that the ancestral seat of Prussian kings should be in Swabia, in Germany's current southwest, nevertheless it was crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia who in 1819 decided to restore the family's original seat in the light of romantic tendencies then pervading the heart of Europe. Thus what the visitor can enjoy today is pretty much a product of this current. Only few castles of Germany can claim original medieval construction.

Metz

Metz is a wonderful city that can proudly boast a fascinating history. The Moselle river winds its way mostly through rural country, however, there are two towns on its banks that can claim the title of "metropolis": Metz (département Moselle, France) and Trier (Rheinland-Pfalz) downstream in Germany. The entire length of the Moselle, from its source in the Vosges mountains to the Rhine river, was once in the realm of the Roman province of Gaul. Its origins are lost in prehistory but evident through archeological finds now exhibited in the local museum (Musée de la Cour d'Or). They testify human presence in the area to as far back as 3000 BC. Many place names, toponyms, of central Europe are derived from the names of its original Celtic population as is the case with Metz. It is first mentioned by Roman historian Tacitus as "Divodurum" and is afterwards known as Divodurum Mediomatricorum.

Vines

The Riesling grape has withstood the test of time and is now considered to be the best German varietal. It brings forth some of the most elegant white wines and is the German grape varietal par excellence developing its fullest potential on slaty soil. For this reason the steep vineyards of the Moselle river valley deliver racy fruity wines with earthy mineral tones. Sexy is an attribute the author of this blog likes to ascribe to the best wines of this genre.

Metz sur Moselle: Ancienne Citadelle Lorraine

The name Mettis is first used in the 5th century AD evolving eventually into Metz (in French pronounced as English mess). Metz is the craddle of the Carolingian dynasty. Arnulf, bishop of Metz from 614 to 629, is considered to be the 1st ancestor of the Carolingians and thus forefather of the greatest monarch Europe has produced: Charlemagne. As barbaric warlords gained power on the ruins of the Roman empire, bishops, who in the beginning almost always hailed from Roman provincial aristocracy, became indispensable consultants to their new Merovingian masters, and as tutors to their dauphins ascended up the ranks to eventually overtake the throne. Metz was one of the backdrops where such dramatic history took place. Today the capital of the French département Moselle is a stunning city in the din of city rush hour with charming restaurants, cozy cafés, diverse shopping venues all surrounding its mighty cathedral Saint-Étienne, truly one of France's most magnificent temples.

Ruelle Messine

Metz abounds in narrow streets that entice the weary wayfarer to stop off at one of its cozy brasseries and regain energy with regional cuisine. I especially like to stroll at night in search of places where locals congregate for a cozy Friday-night chat. It is always a joy to meet natives and find out what they recommend in their own city.

Saint-Juste de Valcabrère

Historians have long disputed the origins of this ancient temple. No document has been found that mentions this sanctuary prior to the 12th century. The fact that it was constructed re-employing architectural elements of the late Roman period confounds the matter even more. Saint-Juste de Valcabrère is thus shrouded in a veil of mystery. A term commonly used in French to refer to the earliest Christian temples is "paléochrétien", paleo-Christian, which applies in this case. The only certain date was discovered on a parchment found in 1885 by the parson. It refers to its consecration and mentions the date October 1200.

Mon véritable PEBEO béarnais I

I have come across some very interesting articles on the web about the origins of the so called "Basque béret" or, as some people have even called it, the "French béret" because it has been intimately associated with French culture. But why? Humans are into symbols of course and are always looking for tags to classify things for easy identification. Yet another rewarding task lies in the differentiation of data, in pulling facts apart in the sometimes cumbersome work of finding truth. Take the cowboy hat for example which actually comes from the Hispanic-Mexican realm of Texas and northern Mexico yet in march Anglo-American troops in the mid 1800s, take over Texas, adopt the Mexican garb and "Tejano" lifestyle and all of the sudden the image of the Mexican vaquero becomes the symbol of North America: the cowboy. And to boot they go around saying "Mexicans get out of Texas". Quite a psychotic paradox indeed but why so much cultural identification with a fucking hat? In their essence hats had a protective function just like any other garment, but while the cowboy hat has come to symbolize male chauvinistic arrogance of plebeian nature, the béret became the accessory of coolness as in the case of perhaps the most popular revolutionary of our times, Ernesto Guevara from Argentina known to the world as "El Che". And both have similar origins too, namely as the favorite headdress of herders. While the origins of the cowboy hat might be in Spain, perhaps in Castile, the béret has its cradle on the northern slopes of the western Pyrenees in a region called Béarn.

Mon véritable PEBEO béarnais II

One way of tracing the historical track of an object is through the derivation of the word that designates it as is done in investigating the origins of place-names, so called toponyms. Thus in researching the toponymy of say Spain, or France for that matter, one could determine the extent of the Basque-speaking territory in the 11th century. It's a type of archeology with words but totally dependent on the existence of sufficient texts and other manuscripts to follow a word's evolution. The French word béret seems to derive from the Béarnais word berret. This language belongs to a larger yet closely related group of Romance languages which linguists used to call "langue d'oc" from an area roughly corresponding to the territories south of the Loire river in what today is France. This word is a direct descendant of the Latin word birrus which was the name for a short brown hooded cape popular in all levels of Roman society. It seems that Roman troops in the Val d'Aspe (valley) inspired local shepherds with this garment who in turn needed protective clothing to shield themselves against the elements of nature, theirs being a profession that required constant roaming about the terrain over long distances following their herds in pursuit of fresh pastures. The foothills of the Pyrenees were once settled by the invading Iberians who seemed to have pushed the Celts further north. However, they soon became romanized under the administrative and military pressure of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless the word seems to have followed this path of evolution: (Latin) birrus, (its diminutive) birrettum, (Provençal) birret in the realm of langue d'oc or berret in the Béarnais variant of this language in which the double r is rolled and the t at the end of the word is pronounced.

Mon véritable PEBEO béarnais III

The original color of the béret was brown like the natural pigment of the sheep's wool in the valleys of the western Pyrenees. It has been said that its origin are to be found in the Aspe and Ossau valleys of south Béarn, an area that borders directly on to the Basque Country to the west. The oldest witness to the béret's existence, however, is a sculpture on the portal of the 13th-century fortified church of Bellocq (on the Pau river) further up north depicting a pilgrim on his way to Santiago de Compostela. Béarn today prides itself in its Gascon (Aquitanian) roots and Romanic language as opposed to the Basquic culture of its immediate neighbors to the south and west, or, for that matter, the Francilien culture of its centralistic administrators north of the Loire river. In the mid 19th century the berét's authorship was erroneously ascribed to the Basques by Napoleon III who used to spend his holidays in the posh coastal Basque town of Biarritz. Upon seeing the heads of so many Basques covered with this accessory, he thought that they were surely its inventor. The béret, or berret, is however believed, by those who have researched the matter a bit more seriously, to be of Béarnais origins, not Basque, and surely not French. It was the artist, or perhaps the bohemian of the early 20th century who in Paris began to identify with peasant immigrants from the valleys of Béarn as a form of liberal protest, or simple identification with the otherness of the peasant world of the western Pyrenees. It was around this time that the béret began to make its début on the screen. Now, one could argue that the ancient roots of the valleys of Ossau and Aspe, were at one time Basque as attested by the basque root of many béarnais toponyms; but by the time the béret had become the standard headdress of Béarnais shepherds around the 13th century, the area was by then of a distinctly Romanic culture.

Teufelsmoor

Northern Germany was flattened out by a series of glacial periods. This accounts for the lowlands that cover much of the area north of the Harz mountains. The north, nevertheless, can amaze the traveler with fantastic landscapes as can be seen in the photograph above. This is the "Teufelsmoor", literally the devil's marshland near the town of Worpswede, once an artist colony that was home to artists such as poet Rainer Maria Rilke and painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. Northern cities such as Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen are steeped in history and offer plenty of entertainment to the curious visitor.

Templiner See bei Potsdam

The greater Berlin area, which also comprises parts of the surrounding state of Brandenburg, is dotted with many lakes which provide local residents excellent leisure opportunities in summer. Shown above is Templiner lake near the city of Potsdam, capital of Brandenburg and once palatial residence of Prussian kings.