Wednesday, 15 May 2024 Meissen and Torgau

Written 1 July 2024

At 6 am, we cast off from Dresden, and half an hour later we passed the Viking Astrild, headed the other way, upstream toward Prague. Viking operates only two ships on this route and is the only cruise line to operate any. Beyla and Astrild were specially built for this river and are only half the size of a "standard" Viking longship. I assumed that was because the locks were smaller on the Elbe, but as it happens, we encountered no locks on the route at all. The real reason is that they had to have such shallow draft.

On this cruise, the ship only moved by daylight. First, the distances were not great, but probably more importantly, the captain really had to be able to see what he was doing to avoid running aground.

Astrild soon disappeared astern, and by 8:15 am we had reached Meissen. As we approached, we passed this row of colorful restored houses that ended in one dilapidated, unpainted one with broken windows. Later, our tour guide mentioned it through gritted teeth—"If you want to contribute to the cause of reunification and restoration of German culture, buy that house and renovate it!"

Half an hour later, at 8:45 am, I set off with the group for our tour of Meissen and its famous porcelain factory. David's head cold had gotten worse, so he decided to sleep all morning instead.

Here's the view of Meissen cathedral we got as we approached the city.

And here's a particuarly nice rhododendron we passed on our tour of the city. Despite the blue shirt and the Tilley hat, that's not David in the photo but another member of our group.

As I think I've already said somewhere, Meissen is older than Dresden. It had a hill with a fort on it, so in 929 AD, Heinrich I built a castle there. That castle hasn't survived but a newer one was later built on the site. Early in the town's history, a bishop showed up and christianized the people (the place had been settled by non-Christian slavs). If I've got the story straight, that was Benno, also mentioned somewhere above. Meissen became the capital of the Electorate of Saxony In 1423, but then in 1464, Dresden replaced it as capital. Dresden grew, and Meissan shrank.

So how did porcelain come to Meissen?

The reason we use the word "china" to mean ceramic dishes is that fine china used to come only from China. Before 1710, it had to be imported, at great cost, by ship, so it was hugely expensive and highly prestigious. Europeans worked long and hard trying to duplicate it but couldn't.

Johann Friedrich Böttger was an German alchemist working, like all the other alchemists, on a formula for making gold from base metals (and/or a universal formula for curing all diseases). Promising alchemists of that time tended to be "taken into protective custody" (i.e. imprisoned) by kings and other powerful people who wanted to monopolize their output in case they should succeed. Böttger escaped from one such situation only to fall into the hands of Augustus the Strong (living in Dresden), who was also fond of gold. He kept working away at the formula, but Augustus, like all the other "patrons" of alchemists, started to get impatient. If Böttger couldn't make gold, could he at least make porcelain? He was assigned to help Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, who was working on that problem. Böttger didn't much like it, but after von Tschirnhaus died, realized he'd better keep at it, since progress toward china was going much better than that toward gold, and the increasingly annoyed Augustus was drumming his fingers. In the end, he hit on the formula—65% kaolin (white clay) mixed with powdered feldspar and powdered quartz. That mixture was found in nature in China and could simply be mined, but Europeans had to mix their own.

The formula, maybe not as valuable as that for gold but pretty close, was of course kept a secret, and Augustus decided to move the production facility to the castle on the hilltop in Meissen, where secrecy should be easier to maintain than in bustling Dresden. Production started in 1710. The factory has been there ever since, though they moved it down from the castle, closer to the river, when they got tired of lugging water for the clay and fuel for the kilns up the hill.

On the tour, three levels of activity were possible: A few people took the bus into town, then settled in the first (small) market square to have a coffee until time to visit the porcelain factory. The rest of us continued through the larger main market square and up the hill to a historic bakery. Its claim to fame is invention of the Meissner Fummel. It was supposedly commissioned by an 18th-century Saxon Elector who suspected that his messages were being read en route by unauthorized persons. The fummel is a large, hollow, and extremely fragile (but reportedly tasteless) pastry into which a tightly rolled note could be slipped through a small hole in one end but could not then be retrieved without damage to the crust—the original tamper-evident packaging. Too many reflections off the window for a good photo.

Our guide told us that, as elsewhere, most of the renovation of the town took place after reunification and then again after the floods of 2002 and 2013. All the ground floors along the river were flooded. The river is currently down to 1 m, but during the most recent flood, it was at 9 m 40 cm. They've had two 100-year floods within 11 years, which is why everything had to be renovated twice. The Triebisch, a tributary of the Elbe that we drove along on the way into town, is almost empty now—its banks are 10 or 12 feet down from the level of the road—but during the flood it, too, came up over its banks and flooded the whole area.

The town occupies both banks of the river and has a population of about 28,000. The bank we were on is the historic part; other bank is mostly residential.

At this point, I and a number of others peeled off while the rest climbed another of those 100-step paths to the top of the hill for the view. I spent the time replenishing our euros from an ATM and buying a postcard for sister-in-law Martha.

Once the intrepid hikers returned, we all adjourned to the Meissen porcelain works.

At the left is the corner entrance to the porcelain factory's modern building (photo taken through the bus windshield as we approached the drop-off point).

At the right is a wall displaying variations on the famous Meissen cross-swords trademark that have been used over the years.

At the left is a view (taken from a balcony later in the visit) of the lobby we entered through.

At the right is a bust of the man himself, Böttger, in (of course) tinted Meissen porcelain.

We entered through a small museum containing the bust and other items of historical interest, as well as particularly interesting pieces made in the factory. The firm (owned now by the Free State of Saxony) has a real museum, dating from 1960, much larger and more elaborate, on the other side of the river, but we didn't get to visit that. It apparently houses a 2-m statue of Saxonia, goddess of Saxony, the largest Meissen piece ever produced, as well as Augustus the Strong as Hercules. Another whole factory over on that side of the river produces porcelain bathroom fixtures.

Here are a page of Böttger's notes, perhaps containing the formula itself, though I didn't study it closely.

At the right is a case containing the three elements of the formula. Left to right: powdered feldspar, kaolin, and powdered quartz. Reducing quartz to powder cannot be easy!

At the left here is a depiction, in porcelain, of the labors of Hercules. He's standing with his club over his shoulder and his foot on somebody's stomach (I forget who all he had to slay), and some goddess or other is about to put a wreath on his head.

At the right is a selection of animal figurines.

Here are larger animals. The one above the goat with curled horns is a quite detailed, life-size vulture.

In the middle of one room was a circular display of some of the many pigments used in decoration of Meissen pieces (generally metal oxides mixed with turpentine), both in the colors they are when painted on and in the colors they turn when fired. Their full pallette includes 1,000 color formulations, all secret.

And here, two versions of what has got to be one of the most popular mythical motifs in all of world art—the rape of Europa.

Both Europas seem rather placid, the one on the left tranquilly European and the one on the right almost festively Asian!

Here's an organ with porcelain pipes! The local cathedral apparently has such a porcelain organ as well as a tower with porcelain bells!

And here's a wall we walked past that was clad in tiles hand painted with birds of the world on a background of clouds. Beautiful.

Here's a more systematic presentation of the various Meissen logos. At the very beginning, pieces were marked with the initials of the site of manufacture (and sometimes a number). The site didn't change, but its name did. Within 10 years, though, the crossed swords emerged and have been used ever since. They are considered ones of the oldest trademarks in the world.

We were then ushered into the first of a series of demonstration rooms. Note that the potter's wheel is not motorized—the potter turns it with his feet, by pushing on the wheel under the table.

Here he is, throwing a small cup before our eyes. The pot to the left of the wheel is full of "slip," a thin, watery clay mixture used to smooth the surface. When he had shaped the cup, he cut it off the pile of clay and pressed it into one of the molds on the right-hand edge of the table, spinning it on the wheel to ensure it remained symmetrical and using a gauge to determine its thickness, then set it aside. He had at hand another that had spent its requisite time in the mold and could be removed to show us the result. He dumped it out onto a little tray to show us the pattern of flowers that the mold had made on the outside of the cup.

As we left that room, we passed this wall of molds, just a sampling of those used in the building. The full archive holds 10,000 molds from three centuries.

In the next room, we saw how pieces are assembled that can't be molded in a single piece. I don't know the German word for the worker who touches up and joins the various parts, but it was translated for us as "repairer." Here, he's working on the parts that will eventually form the elegant lady in the right foreground.

On the front of his table was an assortment of multipiece flowers he'd assembled earlier. Behind them is a heap of body parts that will form the finished lady. They've been molded, then left in the mold to dry until he can handle them, trimming off flash, joining them to the others with slip and smoothing the joints to invisibility. His work on this piece takes three and a half days, and the piece will take six 6 months start to finish.

When he's finished, the piece is fired briefly and a relatively low temperature (i.e., under 500°C, I think). At some point, during either this firing or a subsequent one, the feldspar melts first, and the quartz dissolves into it; the kaolin keeps it all in shape. The mass gets bigger then contracts, shrinking the piece by 30%. For elaborate objects, firing can last up to a week. Think about that for a minute. Meissen produces organ pipes and bells that must be shaped, then fired, glazed (adding a little weight and bulk), and fired again, and must then be precisely the right shape and size to produce a specific musical tone! How do they do that?!

Here are back (left) and front (right) views of the ladies standing on his table. I think they started out the same size, but the the smaller one has been fired and is therefore smaller.

Next came "underglaze decoration." The young woman shown here is painting directly on a "bisque" plate, i.e., one that has undergone only that initial firing. She uses both pens and brushes to produce the old-fashioned but still popular "blue onion" pattern.

In the right-hand photo, she is holding up a thin stencil (it looks like aluminum) with pin-holes in it. Before painting, she places the stencil on the plate and scrubs it gently all over with a sack of powdered charcoal. This is exactly the same process David and I used while painting our own faience tiles at the tile museum in Lisbon in 2015! Check it out in my 15 August 2015 diary entry. The charcoal rubbed through the pinholes leave a faint gray outline to guide the painting.

When she finishes, the plate gets a light glaze and is fired again, this time at around 950°C, I think she said. Exposed to heat, the black markings shown in the left-hand photo turn to cobalt blue, as in the right-hand one. Cobalt blue isn't the only color that can be used at this stage. Light brown pigment apparently changes to deep red on firing.

In the left-hand photo, she is also pointing out the little crossed swords that mark the piece as Meissen. The plate she's holding is not yet finished—if you compare it to the right-hand image (or to the one on the wall behind her), you'll find differences. I don't know whether the additional details are added at this stage before second firing or whether they are added in the next step.

Finally, if the pattern calls for it, another layer of colors, the overglaze painting, is added and covered with a second light glaze before a final firing at 1400°C.

At the left here, the painter is holding up a plate that she has just stenciled with the pattern she will work on (it's probably too faint to show up at the size the photo appears). On the edge of her table are the pigments and implements she will use to do so.

Here are three plates at different stages of the overglaze painting of that pattern. Gilding can be added to the edges and is up to 90% pure gold (brownish-gold before firing).

And then a longer shot showing a few other pieces produced with overglaze painting.

Each of these artitsts served a three- to four-year apprenticeship in this building to get their jobs. Every piece of Meissen porcelain goes through these processes. All the sculpting and painting are done by hand, and all that hand work explains why Meissen pieces cost the earth and are prized the world over.

After the demonstrations, we exited, in quite leisurely fashion, through the show room, where the porcelain was beautiful but the prices were hair-raising.

At the left and right here are animals made of a brown variant of Meissen porcelain. The bull in the center of the left-hand photo is priced at 5,990 euros, the bison to the right of it at only 4,490 euros.

The camel in the right-hand photo, rather more detailed, is 6,490 euros. Note all those 90's—the luxury-goods version of supermarket prices ending in 99 cents. A nearby all-white swan, though, was priced at an even 20,000 euros.

This covered dish, entirely clad in little raised flowers, strikes me as a horror to wash, or even to dust. You could get whole tea sets like that, some pieces with additional flowers and foliage vining over the surfaces.

These little thimble-sized bells, which I liked a lot, were priced from 109 euros for all white or all brown to 409 euros for the one with the little blue tit painted on it and 449 euros for the one at the lower right with all the gold. Again with all the 9's (so manipulative!). I didn't buy any.

If you're not the delicate Meissen bone-china teacup sort, you can buy these handsome mugs, which take care to leave no doubt of their pedigree and cost 95 euros each.

Also available were Meissen replicas of take-out coffee cups, complete with the flexible drinking ports on top (those were rubber or silicone; they still haven't developed flexible porcelain). On these, I think the blue band is part of the cup, but others nearby had leather replicas of those cardboard grips you get with take-out coffee. Those said "This is Meissen" on them rather than just being covered with crossed swords. The two in this photo go for 214 euros (with the blue band) and 199 (without).

Also posted in the showroom was a poster advertising workshops where you get to paint your own Meissen piece.

After the porcelain factory, we strolled back through the town. Here's the small square, Heinrichsplatz. The erect figure to the left of the tree is Heinrich I, founder of the town and builder of the castle.

At the right is a nearer, frontal view of the statue, standing in the center of a fountain. Note the lower, rectangular basin in the lower right corner. I'm pretty sure that was for the convenience of horses and other livestock.

On another side of the square was the 15th century Rathaus, town hall. Note the tall, dormered roof for storage and the sundial set in the wall (above the yellow café umbrella). The yellow umbrellas read "Ratskeller"—traditionally, the local tavern was in the cellar of the Rathaus, and I think they hold to that here.

Along the way, our guide showed us this map of the city, in various shades of granite and other stone, set into the pavement.

Near the locations of particularly notable buildings, bronze plaques of their façades were embedded, as in the right-hand photo.

The two-story red house is 15th century; the taller buildings around it are newer and taller.

And standing in front of a restaurant called the St. Benno Keller was this handsome butterscotch-colored horse, who, with a companion, pulls loads of tourists around the town all day. They are actually visible deep in the background of the photo, above, of all the yellow café umbrellas.

The St. Benno Keller is named, of course, for Benno, the same bishop credited with Christianizing the region as well as bringing wine culture to it. It is also said that when Henry IV was excommunicated, Benno locked the church and threw the keys into the river. A fisherman later found the keys in a fish and brought them back. Statues of Benno therefore usually include a fish with keys in its mouth. Another of his miracles was that, while he preached in a meadow on a hot day, his listeners got thirsty. When he stuck his staff in the ground, a spring broke forth.

After the tour, we were ferried back to the ship just in time for lunch at 12:15 pm. As soon as we sat down, the ship cast off and headed downstream. I started with the potato-salad fine-print appetizer.

My real starter was red lentil and coconut milk soup.

David chose the Cuban sandwich, which he said was not such a much. Nor was the coleslaw that came with it.

For dessert, I thought the melon ice cream with port-marinated melon and whipped cream was great.

David shuddered at the very thought and ordered chocolate mousse off the always-available menu instead.

We cruised all afternoon, but lest we be bored, the crew staged, in quick succession, a cooking demonstration by the chef, a "where was this photo taken" quiz, and German afternoon tea before the ship was moored in Torgau at 6:15 pm. And during and after lunch, the captain welcomed anyone interested to visit the wheelhouse. I've done that, so I skipped it. Occasional wind turbines dotted the landscape.

The cooking demonstration was production of Quarkkeulchen, a sort of fried pastry with made with Quark, cottage-cheese-like German dairy product. At the left here is the layout of ingredients: eggs, cream, butter, sugar, lemon zest, flour, quark, shredded potato, raisins, and maybe honey?At the right is the set-up with hot-plate, mixing bowl, and skillet. The ice-cream scoop is for portioning the batter into the skillet of hot oil. In the past, the chef has prepared whatever he was demonstrating, and then waiters have emerged from the kitchen with previously prepared portions for everyone, usually cold and soggy.

This time, they served the previously prepared portions before and during the demonstration, but they were still cold and soggy and did not look or taste like what the chef was preparing. We were given the recipe, so I'll try it at home, though I'll have to make some substitutions, starting with the quark.

Our chef was from Bulgaria. He said he sometimes uses sweet potato, but that's not traditional. He cooks them in a combination of butter and oil, and he uses an ice cream scoop to scoop them into the fat. If the batter is very thick, he finishes them in the oven to be sure they cook all the way through.

During and after the demonstration, the chef fielded questions. For example, we learned that the entire kitchen crew is only seven people (of six different nationalities!).

Becauae the waiters beam the orders directly to the kitchen from tablets they carry from table to table, the kitchen staff have a little advance notice; they see how many people ordered ice cream, so they have 20 min to make that amount of ice cream; they only have five minutes' notice to make the right number of salads. They get 10 min notice to prepare the seared tuna and are able to make exactly the right number of portions. Everything can be made "à la minute"!

My team didn't do terrifically well on the "where was this photo taken" quiz. All the locations were stops on Viking cruises, of course, and we mostly got the ones right that we had actually visited.

Then came afternoon tea: the usual tea, scones (these rather more sconelike than those at other Viking teas) with cream and jam, cucumber and ham sandwiches, and assorted little cakes and petit fours.

Eva did the port talk for the following day a little early, just before we docked in Torgau at 6:15 pm. As soon as the ship was tied up and the gangway in place, Eva led everyone who was interested on a brief walking tour of the town.

Torgau's principal claim to fame outside Germany is that it is where the allied forces from the eastern and western fronts first met, on 25 April 1945. The riverside monument at the left (and its inscription, at the right) marks the spot where Americans coming from one direction made contact with Soviet (actually, Ukranian) forces coming from the other. Both were extremely cautious in their approaches, until they were able to establish one another's identities. Joseph Polowsky, a member of the American group, was the son of Russian immigrants and was able to act as interpreter.

Second Lt. William Robertson and Lt. Alexander Sylvashko were the two men in charge of the units that met. Both groups were horrified by the German civilian casualties they saw in Torgau and swore to work henceforth for peace. Polowsky, in particular, although he returned to his job as a cab driver in Chicago, organized commemorations, met with Russian and East German leaders, and returned frequently to visit the site. On his death in 1983, he was buried in Torgau as he wished. Many other members of the two groups because friends, returned for reunions, and never lost touch.

In Germany, the town is famous for its history, Hartenfels Castle, and its connections with Martin Luther's wife Katarina.

I think Eva said the current population is about 2500 people, but she joked that she never saw anyone when she led tours. And sure enough, we encountered only one family group out for a stroll the whole time we were there.

The town is about 1000 years old. It was first mentioned in 83 AD, settled by slavic tribes as a marketplace ("Torgau" comes from a word meaning marketplace") where the river could be conveniently forded. Hartenfels is the best preserved renaissance castle in Germany, built in 1536. Its amazing staircase has no no central pillar, and the courtyard is said to have room for up to 30,000 people in time of need. Daphne, the first opera performed in Germany, was staged here.

Most memorably, though, the elector who built the castle realized that Luther was the new new thing, so he built him a chapel, the first Lutheran church, right here in the courtyard. Luther's eventual wife had been a nun, and when she and a few companions managed to escaped from the nunnery (literally smuggled out in empty fish barrels), she first came here to Torgau before moving to Wittenberg. Later, in her widowhood (she couldn't inherit anything, by Saxon law), during a year of bad harvest and plague, she came back here to Torgau. She died of infection after a carriage accident but managed to see her six children provided for. Katarina is buried in a secret location on the grounds of the castle.

According to Eva, a few hundred years ago, Torgau exported 1600 barrels of beer a month.

Torgau is also known for its bears, three of them: Bea, Benno, Jetta. Apparently, the region once had wild bears, but they were gone by the early 15th century, so around 1950 Torgau built themselves a bear habitat and imported some. We got to watch them from a bridge over the top of their enclosure.

Then, as we strolled back to the ship, Eva told us a little about her background. We were all curious, since she's clearly a native speaker of English with a very British last name (her husband's, as it turns out), but she speaks fluent Czech and German and, she assures us, has lived in the south of France for over 30 years!

Her parents are Hungarian, escaped Hungary in 1956, and settled in England. They had to wait until 1970, when they finally got British passports (and Eva was nine), before they could go back even to visit. As soon as they could, they loaded up a "little bitty Ford" and drove from England to Budapest. They were given a very hard time at the border; it took them five hours to get through customs. The guards even slashed her younger brother's teddy bear in half to make sure no contraband was hidden inside. Once they were finally through, her father got out to kiss the ground and got back in with tears in his eyes.

They visited Eva's grandparents in the village where they lived, and the children were showered with candies and sweets. She said she only learned much later than the grandparents scrimped and saved for months in advance to be able to do that. On subsequent trips, the family learned that stocking up on Wrangler jeans at the factory store and selling them in Hungary would pay for the trip.

Eva admitted that she found her parents embarrassing throughout her childhood. She wished her name were something like Susie Smith and that she had quiet and reserved British parents, but instead, she said, she got Eva Gabor and some flamboyant Hungarian actor whose name I didn't recognized and that her home life was one of constant drama. She watched dinner slide down the wall more than once.

When her mother first visited the 500-year-old farmhouse in Beziers, France, that Eva and her husband were restoring, she was horrified. She could not understand why anyone would want to live under such primitive conditions—she herself wanted new appliances every two years and each set whiter and more shiny than the last.

On the way out of town, we passed this whimsical fountain that features young men (some rather scantily clad) gamboling, spouting water from bowls and trumpets, and consorting with bears, also spouting water.

As soon as we got back to the ship, dinner was served. I started with "Würzfleisch" from the regional specialty menu, which I think is literally translated "sausage meat" but in this case was described as "gratinated cheese and pork casserole." It was just as described and quite tasty.

The main course was a favorite of mine from the Viking repertory: Chateaubriand with sauce Béarnaise, au gratin potatoes, and glazed veggies. The alternative was steamed cod with light mustard foam; nice enough but not in competition with the Chateaubriand. I think they cook it sous vide (probably in some central kitchen in Amsterdam or Vienna) and truck it out to all the ships—it's really, really good.

For dessert, I went back to the regional specialties: Lukewarm creamy pudding cake with berry compote. Very good.

Alternatives were the ice cream of the day (pistachio, maybe?) and lemon matcha cake with maracuja (i.e., passionfruit) sorbet, both shown here.

Then as usual, the shipboard musician played in the lounge until the last guest retired for the night.