Friday, 31 March, Wesel: history, all the way back to the Romans

Written 4 May 2023

As I said in my last entry, our ship cast off from Kinderdijk during lunch and headed for Nijmegen, but that wasn't our destination for today. For logistical reasons, we docked in Nijmegen about 8:30 pm, so those who wished to go ashore to sample the night life were free to do so, so long as they were back on board by 1:45 am. The ship then cast off again at 2 am and headed for Wesel, Germany, where we moored at 8 am, during breakfast. Half an hour later, one group headed off by bus for a full-day tour of Münster (Westphalia's historic capital), but we instead took the 9 am bus the short distance into Wesel (at the confluence of the Rhine and Lippe rivers, for the walking tour of the historic town. Afterward, we would have the option of strolling 20 minutes or so back to the ship or of catching a shuttle bus back at 11:10 am, 11:30 am, or noon.

Right next to where the ship was moored was the site of a bridge that is no more. At the left, you can see the main support pillar of the near end. You're allowed to climb up to an observation deck on top, either along the horizontal walkway at the top (from a spot much farther inland) or by climbing the staircase you can see at the far right edge of the photo, below the bus's right-hand mirror.

The photo at the right shows the matching support pillar and part of its approach road on the distant opposite shore. Until it was bombed to smithereens in 1945, this was the longest railway bridge in Europe, 1.2 miles long.

The bridge was blown up by the Germans in 1945, in an effort to slow the Allied advance, but the town was destroyed by the Allied Operation Plunder in March of that year. They deployed 4000 guns, 2000 upstream and 2000 downstream, which fired for 12 hours before 250,000 soldiers crossed on rafts and amphibean vehicles. Allied engineers threw floating bridges over the Rhine in less than 7 hours—a speed record. Meanwhile, Operation Varsity deployed 18,000 paratroopers from 7,000 aircraft—the planes took two and a half hours to pass a given point. Needless to say, Wesel was 98% destroyed (though civilian casualties were very low, because almost everyone had already left the city).

Our tour started not with the historic center of town but with the huge (1,200-yard diameter), now disused, star-shaped cidatel built between the town and the river by the Prussians (who inherited Wesel in the 16th century when the Duke of Cleves died without an heir). The town was not best pleased about the whole thing. First, the fortress cut off the town's access to the river. Second, the Prussians wanted to line the dry moat and outer walls with sod, which they simply went and stripped from farmer's fields and pastures (without permission or payment) and applied it to the fort. Third, they garrisoned the place with 3000 troops but didn't build any barracks; they just quartered the soldiers on the townspeople. But the town couldn't do anything about it and has been firmly associated with a military presence ever since. The town has (or at least had) more than 100 pubs, because of all the soldiers.

The glassed-in section at the far end is the entrance to a cultural center, art school, and museum complex.

in the right-hand photo is what the locals call the "Kaiser Aquarium." It's a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, first protestant kaiser, that used to stand in front of the railway station. As German Kaisers go, he wasn't a bad sort, and they didn't want just to destroy the statue, so they've installed him horizontally here, to make clear he's not someone to look up to.

The object shown at the left here, a few yards to one side of Kaiser Wilhelm, is a mortar, maybe three feet high, the only piece of weaponry on obvious display.

And if you continued toward the glassed-in entrance, then took your first right, you'd find yourself here, inside the only gate from the citadel toward the town. It led to a little wooden drawbridge (at least the current reproduction is little; we were told the original was three times the size) that spans the moat and originally led to a vast open space that served as the citadel's parade ground (about which more below).

Here's what the outside of the gate looks like, with the German/Prussian eagle on top.

And at the right, the famous sod-covered dry moat—not quite so dry today, in the rain.

Back inside the citadel, the guide pointed out a couple of buildings to us. Behind the bus as it stood in the photo above are barracks built by Napoleon after he took over the fortress. And out of sight to the left of the bus was a low pink building in which the Marquis de Lafayette (the one who helped out during the American Revolution) was imprisoned for a while.

But soon we scurried through the rain from the shelter of the gate to the shelter of the bus for the short ride back into the middle of town. We were greeted by this fiberglas donkey, painted with a rhyme that seems to say "in this town, as you walk around, you'll find many colorful donkeys." It seems that the German word for donkey "Esel," rhymes with "Wesel," so the town and its folk were the but of many, many donkey jokes. In response, they took ownership of the concept, ordered 111 fiberglas donkeys, and distributed them to merchants to paint and use as advertising. For example, the dapper donkey at the right stands outside a haberdashery.

But of course, there's always one . . . . This bright yellow cow advertises the daily specials at a small eatery‐liver cheese (liverwurst, I think) in a bun, bokwurst or mettwurst in a bun, frikadelle in a bun, currywurst, etc.

And outside a pharmacy was this sign saying, "Your experts for green medicine."

Written 7 May 2023

Wesel got "town rights" in 1241 and became very prosperous as a result. To show off its wealth, the town built a cathedral, the Willibrordidom (St. Willibrord's cathedral, shown here at the left) which they wanted to be the tallest in the region. I didn't think I got a very good shot of it, but except for all the people and being a little farther away, it's a lot like the one that shows up in Wikipedia.

You get a better idea of the shape of the building from the model displayed inside (shown here at the right).

They also built a handsome gothic town hall, intended to rival the one in Bruges. Both buildings faced on the Great Market Square.

Unfortunately, as you can see in the historic photo at the left, both got pulverized during WWII. Part of the cathedral still stood, but the town hall was obliterated.

The cathedral was rebuilt to the original design, but the town hall had already been too small, so they replaced it with a modern building out on the edge of town. But darn it, they really liked the old façade, and it really ought to be on the market square, like the one in Bruges, so they rebuilt just the façade on the square. That's it in the right-hand photo—the building behind it is just an office building.

The original town hall had a row of seven saints across the front, between the windows at second-floor level, but since the town had since become so resolutely protestant, that just didn't seem appropriate. So they substituted seven historical personages: Saint Willibrord, wearing the bishop's mitre; Charlemagne to the right of him; The Duke of Cleves, at the left end; the Prussian prince elector who started to build the citadel; etc. The stone façade is all hand carved, except for the figures which were cast.

The guide described the cathedral interior as "very Calvinist, almost Dutch," in its simplicity. The original statuary and polychrome elements disappeared after the reformation.

At some point in history, the spire was struck by lightning and fell into the church, and on that area of the ceiling, the centers of the vaults are plain, but elsewhere they are decorative and all different. Three of them actually have decorative elements suspended below them, as in the photo at the right, rather than stuck to the ceiling.

One of the stones incorporated into the structure during the reconstruction after WWII is inscribed to say that it comes from the Church of Our Lady in Dresden. A similar stone from Wesel was incorporated into the reconstruction there.

The Bible in the right-hand photo was presented to the church by "Empress Elizabeth" (I'm not sure which one) and was later stolen, right off the altar. It was missing for a long time, until it happened to appear on TV for some reason. A sharp-eyed viewer spotted it, the town was able to prove it was theirs, and they got it back.

Back in the (13th–15th-century) day, Wesel was a proud member of the Hanseatic League. To keep that heritage alive they have installed a long, linear strip of stones running from one end to the other of the central, all-pedestrian shopping district.

At the left here is one end of it, then at the right a series of the stones, each of which bears a letter, that spell out part of the name of a Hanseatic city.

At the left here, you can see the strip of dark gray stones stretching off into the distance along the center of the street, spelling out on the way the names of all the cities belonging to the league.

To the left of it, in the white hat and carrying a bright-red furled Viking umbrella, is David, standing next to our guide.

A mural also commemorated the Hanseatic days, but I couldn't get a good photo of it.

The guide explained that because Wesel was so military its society was "very narrow," and the population included very few jews, but we still saw a few memory stones in the sidewalk, shown here at the right—four people, same last name, two older (one died in 1941, the other in a concentration came in 1942) and two younger (both fled to Palestine in the late 1930's).

Other things we learned on the tour:

• After WWII, housing was in critically short supply, especially for the workers trying to restore the town. Because the entire town was covered by a 9-foot layer of rubble, which would take years to clear, they looked to the only open ground available—the vast parade ground between the citadel and the town proper—and thew up emergency housing there, in 1949. The did so without even asking permission—it had been the property of Prussia, and after the war, Prussia no longer existed, so there was nobody even to ask! They were in a hurry, so it was pretty shoddy, but just 10 years ago, they spent 50 million euros refurbishing it all, and now it's very popular and in demand. I'm not sure whether the guide said the apartments are 16 square meters or 60 sqare meters, but they go for 650 euros/mo, which includes heating.
• Napoleon used the cathedral as a stable, a recurring theme in his conquests.
• Peter Minuit is buried in the cathedral; he's the one who bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24 worth of glass beads.
• Some of the gargoyles on the corners of the the cathedral ceiling are images of old master builders who worked on it.
• After WWII, Wesel was in the British zone of Germany.
• Konrad Heresbach (1496–1576) is buried in the cathedral and commemorated by a monument in the town. He was a very liberal and enlightened scholar, quoted as saying, "Errors must be eradicated, not people." He was entrusted with the education of the Duke of Cleves, who kept him on as an advisor when he became the local ruler. As a result, the town attracted a lot of protestant refugees from elsewhere.
• The duke's sister, Anne of Cleves, was the fourth wife of Henry VIII of England. It was Konrad Heresbach who arranged the match. She's the one members of Henry's court called "the Flemish mare." When Henry had the marriage annulled, she didn't object, so he pensioned her off, and she outlived him and all the other wives.
• Anne's ornaments were donated to the town (in commemoration of its being so hospitable, I think the guide said). During WWII, they were put in a coffin and buried in the graveyard, then dug up again afterward.
• Back when Wesel was a commercial power, rafts came up the Rhine from Amsterdam to get oak for the pilings on which houses there were built. The rafts were huge, and when they were fully loaded with wood and stone and carrying 400 people, they became very unwieldy. To get from Amsterdam to Wesel took 1–6 weeks, depending on the weather.
• Most of the small shops in town have been replaced by chains and by electronics and telephone shops, etc.
• The large space-needle-type structure in town is a communications tower and is called "Long Henry."

My own observation: Gardeners here trim their forsythia very differently. In the US, forsythia tends to grow as large fountain-shaped mounds. Here they train it into tight vertical columns or neat globular shapes.

We took the shuttle bus back to the ship rather than walking in the rain. As we reached the dock, we found crates and crates (and crates) of empty coke bottles being offloaded, together with many, many bags of garbage.

The fine-print appetizers were a slice of a chicken-salad wrap, a salad of some sort, and this little dish of shrimp salad, which was pretty good.

The regular appetizer was curried cauliflower soup, which was excellent.

For the main course, I chose stir-fried beef with black pepper sauce, and it was not such a much—tough and flavorless.

David had penne all'arbrabiata, which was better but still nothing to write home about.

Not the chef's best day.

For dessert, David got the chocolate mousse from the always-available menu, which was pretty reliable.

I tried the île flottant (floating island), which was exemplary except that Viking always omits the caramel drizzle that to my way of thinking (and that of all French chefs) is part of the definition of the dish, substituting a sprinkle of chopped pistachio. Why break up a classic formula and introduce a potent allergen?!

At 1:30 pm, it was back into the bus for our afternoon excursion to the archeological site at Xanten (the only town in Germany that starts with "X," pronounced "KSANTun"). Unfortunately, the ship also replenished its supply of bottled water at this stop, and it was that awful "Harz Qwell" brand. I accepted the bottle they handed me as I left the ship, hoping it had improved, but no. My theory is that it doesn't contain quite enough CO₂ to be fizzy but just enough to make it taste horribly sour. Ick. That's what they used for the rest of the cruise, so I took to relying solely on my own water bottle rather than accepting a spare from Viking.

Anyway, our destination was Colonia Ulpia Traiana, a Roman settlement on the fringes of the empire. People were already living there, but the Romans showed up shortly after the birth of Christ, established a permanent colony, ans set about trying to Romanize the local German tribes. The locals didn't like it, and at one point set a trap that allowed them to destroy three Roman legions of about 6,000 men each.

That's the main entrance at the left. At the right, a pretty good photo of a jackdaw that I got on its front lawn.

The Rhine was the border of the Roman empire, and they were never able to cross it and move east to the Elbe. The Romans established a camp, around which a village of camp followers grew up, and in 98 AD, they got the title of Colonia Ulpia Traiana (from the name of Emperor Marcus Ulpius Traianus, i.e., Trajan). Because they were a colony, they could have an amphitheater (an arena), but only a city (a munia) could have a theater as well.

The settlement was protected by a Roman legion that occupied a camp a short distance away, called "Vetera," I think (Pliny the elder served there!). The city wall was therefore originally more for show and prestige—and, the guide assured us, to show the goddess of the city what area she was to protect.

Soon, though, the Roman empire started to fray at the edges. Barbarian raids over the borders, including the Rhine, started penetrating farther and farther into Roman territory. The legions were withdrawn from their camps and instead built and occupied fortified towers, the bourgii, scattered through the region being raided. The town shrank, and they built a four-times-thicker wall around it and higher towers to make it actually defensible, but between 400 and 450 AD, they all gave up and left, abandoning the town altogether.

All the buildings were mined for building stones, which were taken elsewhere for reuse, but fortuitously, nobody else built on the site (perhaps because plowing or digging there was such a pain because the ground was full of foundations). The result was that the Roman structures were removed down to ground level and grass grew over the whole thing. Records revealed that it had been there, but its location was a mystery until it was rediscovered in 1839. It's now the largest archeological work in Germany and draws 650,000 visitors/year.

The site is unique in that it's all there, intact, just a foot below ground level, uncomplicated by the centuries of new buildings, excavations, and accumulated debris that have jumbled the strata and raised the ground level just about everywhere else. Archaeologists project that it will about 300 years to excavate the whole thing.

At the left here is an artist's rendering of what they think the town looked like in its heyday. We entered through the gate near the middle of the left edge of the photo. The so-far-unexcavated buildings are speculative, but they've already located a number of the towers on the walls, and since the towers in a Roman town were always at the ends of the (invariably straight) streets, they know where the streets were.

At the right is that portion of the amphitheater (lower right corner of the artist's rendering) that has been reconstructed to show what it probably looked like. They don't intend to reconstruct the whole thing—just about 25% of it, enough for educational purposes. The complete amphitheater held 10,000, which was the population of the city.

Here's what the reconstruction looks like from the inside, where we're standing in the arena. The Roman empire was all about making everywhere as much like Rome as possible, so going by the description given by our guide, the activities carried out in this amphitheater followed the same format and schedule as those in the one we toured and learned about in Nîmes in 2013. You can read all about it in the entry for 27 May 2013.

Just outside the amphitheatre was this (modern reproduction) statue of Emperor Trajan. Originally, it would have been polychrome. In a colonia, everyone could vote for the city officials, but the emperor was the commander in chief of the roman legions (all 26 of them) and was head of the religion as well.

The guide emphasized that this is a reconstruction, not a ruin—nothing was left above ground when the site was discovered. Because the Romans insisted on building in stone, which wasn't available locally, they had to bring it in from distant quarries. They used one type for the foundations and lower parts of the aphitheater, because it had to be strong enough to bear the weight of the levels above, but they used a different type higher up, because it was easier to cut. When the amphitheater was excavated in 1933, and they found no trace of decoration or cladding in marble; even if later builders had dug it up and pilfered it, some chips or traces would be left, so archeologists conclude that there was none.

The military was in charge of fetching, transporting, and cutting the stone as well as the construction work. I was surprised to learn that every legionnaire had apprenticed in a trade before joining the military, though it makes sense when I think about it. Young men who grew up to be soldiers had to be doing something between the age of 12 or so and when they got old enough to join up. Therefore, Roman legions were equipped to build their own camps, butcher their own meat, shoe their own horses, sew their own tents, repair their own wagon wheels, etc. I was also surprised to learn that the Roman soldiers could write and read. The empire couldn't have been organized or held together without a lot of correspondence.

In the large open space around the amphitheatre was this working model of a Roman crane, part of the equipment used to construct all this monumental architecture.

And nearby, for some reason, the powers that be had placed this piece of what I assume to be art, though clearly not Roman.

For less monumental building, were were told, they used "loam." That's a term I knew only as a type of soil, so I was picturing something like adobe, but it turns out that a 40-40-20% mix of sand, silt, and clay qualifies as loam, and with the addition of some straw, can be used to make bricks, plaster walls, and even construct wall-board sort of like Sheetrock. I looked it up, and it's still used today and is recommended as a more ecofriendly building material than most.

Our walking tour took us as far as the Harbor Temple, shown at the left—again a partial reconstruction, not a ruin. It was 27 m high, the podium is 3 m high, and it was built of chalk stone out of France. On the artist's rendering, it has a bright-red roof and is halfway along the right-hand side, near the gate leading out to the waterfront. The leafless beech hedge around it stands in for the low stone wall on the rendering. They haven't yet figured out what deity the temple was dedicated to.

At the right is the crawl space under the temple. Leading away from the camera, you can clearly see a line of imprints left by the original stone blocks, giving archeologists the exact dimensions of the stones used in the construction.

At the left here is a well, though the guide did not make clear whether the structure over it represents the way it would have looked in Roman times. He mentioned, though, that the Romans made a practice of filling any well that ran dry with trash, to prevent children and animals from falling in. That makes those dry wells treature-troves for archeologists, who just love picking through ancient trash for clues to daily life.

At the left here is another "living room" sort of space, and at the right is a dining room. A small sign at the middle left shows how a Roman would, and would not, have reclined while dining.

At the left here, behind a fence, is the area currently begin excavated, covered with plastic because of the rain.

At the right is a portion of an aqueduct bringing water into the town. The municipal sewers emptied into the river, so clean water was piped in from elsewhere. When it was in use, the duct would have been covered, to prevent contamination and evaporation. This can't have been the main duct supplying the whole town—it's too small—so it must just be a branch to serve this immediate section.

That night's dinner was a good one. David started with the red pepper tartlet (at the left), and I had the excellent Gouda cheese soup with cream and walnuts.

The main course was the slow roasted boneless beef short ribs we enjoyed so much on last fall's cruise. They were again excellent, but not quite the equal of the same dish in Chef Job's hands. Same garnish of roasted carrots and zucchini and little puffs of duchess potatoes.

We got back to Nijmegen just after dinner time, and a "nostalgic music" duo came aboard to provide the evening's entertainment. I didn't stay for it, but I tried to watch on the lounge cam. They finally had the picture working, but no sound, so I got tired of watch a guitar and string base play in silence and went back to the bow cam.