Halfway down the Danube

Ostheim again

So we're back in Ostheim for Christmas.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that Ostheim is a small town in northern Bavaria. It's where Claudia's parents live. Claudia is an important person there: her mother is the Deputy Mayor, her father was principal of the local high school. So, I am "Claudia's Mann" for the duration.

Ostheim is on a little river -- a creek, really -- called the Streu (pron. "Shtroy"). It would be thematically consistent if the Streu eventually emptied into the Danube. Alas, we're just a bit too far north; the Streu flows into Saale, which flows into the Main, which flows into the Rhine.

Ostheim does have one connection to Romania, though: it has an enormous fortified church, just like the ones in Transylvania. It's a little spooky. Fortified churches were a Saxon thing; Ostheim was an enclave of Saxony, about 100 miles east of the rest of the kingdom. The Saxons of Transylvania, same-same, except 1200 miles away and in the opposite direction.

Anyway, today Ostheim is a pleasant market town of about 3000 people,set in a hilly rural area in Lower Franconia. That's big enough to have a lot of conveniences -- a supermarket, a bookstore, several restuarants, some nice parks -- but small enough that people still greet you as you pass on the street.

It's a great place for small kids. On Boxing Day (the day after Christmas, for our American readers), Alan and I went for a walk along the Streu. We brought bread, and had a happy ten minutes feeding the ducks. Then we got up on the New Bridge (it's the youngest of the town's three bridges, dating from 1898) and watched the old mill wheels turn and turn. Then we walked under another bridge, and yelled into a culvert: hellooooo! is there a troll in there? Then Alan got a little uneasy with the whole idea of the troll (he's been a very brave kid, but recently he seems to be experimenting with the concept of "scary"), so we walked to the Town Hall -- the Rathaus.

The Rathaus is a huge, half-timbered building; it was built in 1562, and has been meticulously kept up for four and a half centuries. It looks like it belongs to a much bigger town. There are historical reasons for this that I'll go into if anyone is really interested in the complicated history of northern Franconia and western Thuringia, but for now let's just say that it's a big impressive building.

There's a huge Christmas tree in front. I told Alan that Oma (grandmama) worked there, and that she was a very important person. He nodded, understanding: of course she is, and a fifty-foot Christmas tree is entirely appropriate. Right then the old clock in the Rathaus tower struck the half-hour, as if punctuating.

Then we walked up through the center of town (lots of little winding, cobblestoned streets) to the old fortified church. This is sort of hard to describe, but try this: take a small castle, with thick walls, corner towers, a drawbridge, window-slots for shooting out of and all that good stuff. Then, remove the castle and replace it with a big old church. But keep the walls and the towers and all. Okay? Like that.

The inside used to be a place of refuge during the endless wars of religion. The Ostheimers dug deep cellars under the church to store food and to live in. Today, they're used as root cellars, and for storage -- sort of like a Public Storage or Penske in the US, except that they're hundreds of years old and are owned by the (Protestant) church.

It's a great place for a little boy to run around and explore. Stairs going up and down, odd little cul-de-sacs, the towers looming over you. ("Is that a dragon tower?" asked Alan at one point. Oddly enough, there is a Dragon Tower in Sighisoara, where we visited last summer. I wonder if he remembered it.)

Across the street is a big park with a sports field. By this time it was after 3:00, and our shadows were stretching far ahead of us on the snow. We walked around the park for a little bit, nibbling on snow (Alan loves to eat snow) and looking at different plants and things. See these red berries? They were roses. See, they still have thorns. And look, this seed pod is like paper -- crumple it and the little seeds fall out.

The grandparents live on the edge of town, up on a steep hill; from their yard, there's a spectacular view across the valley, with the town nestled between fortified church and stream below. This is very nice, but it means that there's a half-mile hike uphill to reach them. Alan had never done this before; I'd always carried him the last few hundred yards on my shoulders. But he did very well, slowing a bit but marching along sturdily. Overall we walked four or five kilometers, down hill and up, in a bit over two hours, which is not bad for a kid who's still several months short of his fourth birthday.

I have a strong suspicion that Ostheim is the sort of place where the teenagers gather in the park at night to smoke cigarettes, be sullen, and complain that there's nothing to do. But for now... it's all right. It's really all right.

Posted by douglas at December 27, 2005 09:45 PM