DANISH MEMORIES

                                 Interesting Denmark
                             

When biking in Denmark, almost without exception, all of our rest/pit stops were at churches. The restrooms were well stocked and very clean. This seemed a bit unusual to me, but the guide knew where all the facilities were located and there was no rigmarole in searching for a key or roaming the grounds to find the common room. It was really nice and much appreciated!

            We ferried among many islands and biked on the islands of Sealand, Fuen, Areo, Langland, Lolland, and Falster over paved paths, streets, gravel, through forest, through many wheat fields, along the sea, and  up and down lots of hills. 

            We rode many kinds of ferries. The largest carried big trucks as well as trains. There were four train tracks on the loading deck. The ferry berthed where the land tracks ended at the end of the pier and the trains just rolled onto the ferry. It was an interesting operation to watch. The smallest ferry was a hand pulled one and an interesting one was the postal ferry.

Kirke means church. We visited many centuries-old churches. Many had frescos hundreds of years old. We saw the oldest fresco in the country, painted in 1120, over the altar at LyngeKirke. Most of the churches were originally Catholic. Reformation came to Denmark in 1530, and now most of the churches are Lutheran. In Texas we look for water towers; in Denmark one looks for the church tower which is always on the highest part of the church grounds. Chevrons in alternating colors are common from floor to ceiling in the graceful arches in gothic churches.

We stopped at Hesnaes, a quaint, charming and uniquely Danish village, to view all the thatched roof houses. Some of the homes even had thatched sides. The thatching was very thick but needs to be replaced fairly often and really is quite a fire hazard.

            We biked through the forest along the Baltic Sea. We stopped at the General’s teahouse. A couple of kilometers inland  there was a manor house. The owner, a munitions manufacturer,  made a lot of money and built the teahouse so each day he could visit it  and have afternoon tea while gazing out over the Baltic Sea.

            The Little Mermaid statue, a gift to the city in 1913 by brewer Carl Jacobsen, is quite small and sits on a stone in shallow water a few feet off shore. She is about a quarter mile from the palace.

            It is always fun to watch the changing of the guard at a palace. I’ve been fortunate to observe the one at Amelienborg Palace in Copenhagen on each of two visits.

           

GUTTENBERG

                         Mainz and Guttenberg  Museum

          

            Mainz, Germany, on the left bank of the Rhine, the third longest river in Europe, has bounced from German to French rule many times. This bustling city, capitol of the German state Rheinland-Pfalz, is home to the oldest castle on the Rhine.

Mainz remained a walled city until the late 1800s. The old city is 2000 years old, the new city from the 1800s. There is a mix of old and new buildings, often side by side, but they blend quite well. Bombing of WW II destroyed 85% of the city. Buildings were needed quickly and the old facades were not added until the 1960s

Our delightful city docent stopped in front of St. Martin’s and said, “This 975 cathedral, was built for coronations at a time when the city had a population of only 2-3000 people.  In the 11^th and 12^th centuries seven kings were crowned in the cathedral. The cathedral completed in 1009 burned down on its dedication day, but was rebuilt in 1036 and most of the present structure dates from 1239. The cathedral escaped damage in WW II bombings, but being made of limestone it is always in some state of repair or restoration.

“The clock is 200 years old. Look at the top of the spire. A single cross designates a church, but a double cross designates a cathedral. Inside, the pulpit will be on the right if it is a church, on the left in a cathedral. Before people could read, monks had different floor tile designs so people would know where they were. Dom means dominate, to the highest power.”

The highlight of my visit to Mainz was the Gutenberg Museum. Johannes Gutenberg was a Mainz native. After inventing movable type he printed 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible, of which 49 remain and are priceless. His error-free replaceable text revolutionized the printed word.

 A docent is necessary to understand the Bibles displayed in the darkened temperature-controlled room of the Gutenberg Museum, which opened in 2000. The Bibles have no page numbers. The cost of a Bible was four oxen, and owning a Bible in those days was a status symbol. The Bible was delivered as separate pages. Then the purchaser had to take the pages to an artist for color to be added in various places, then to a binder.

Centuries ago people would pay a pilgrim to travel to a place or church to relieve them of their sins. This was called selling indulgences. The pilgrim would return to the person with a coupon or token as proof that he had carried out his mission. Pilgrims often wore beards as they had little time to shave, and beards were seldom seen on men other than pilgrims.

We wrapped up our visit to the museum in a replica of Gutenberg’s workroom where we watched a demonstration on how the press worked. It was a tedious process to produce a single page, but once the page print was set up many pages could follow and it certainly was an improvement over the time consuming task of hand copying a page, which was often done by monks.

It was pretty exciting to be in the place where such history-making events had taken place.