All along the arc of the Alps, the farmers must be bringing their cattle down from the high Alpine pastures where they’ve been grazing all summer. Or maybe they’ve been down a few weeks already. A couple of years ago, in late September, my wife and I went hiking up one of the side valleys of the Inn valley, near Innsbruck, and we were lucky enough to catch the ceremony of the cows being brought down from their high pastures. And it really is a ceremony. The cows are decorated with floral wreaths, while the herders wear traditional dress. I only managed to take one rather poor photo of a cow with her floral wreath.
This ceremony is of course meant to signal that bringing the cows home is a joyful occasion, but this summer my wife and I came across a story which shows that it cannot always have been so joyful. We were starting a hike up into the Totes Gebirge (the Dead Mountains; strange name) from the shores of Altaussee lake. My wife later took this very Japanese-looking photo of the lake.
My wife’s photo
As we walked along the lakeshore, there came a point where the path narrowed dramatically, with a steep drop into the lake. And there, on the side of the path, we passed this memorial nailed to a tree.
My photo
The picture gives us a pretty clear idea of what happened, but the German text removes any doubt. It says:
On 17 October 1777, Anna Kain, aged 32, died here. During the cattle drive she was pushed by a cow into the lake and drowned. Lord, grant her eternal rest and a joyful resurrection. Amen
At the lake’s end, we swung left onto a trail that took us 1,000 metres up to the high pastures of the Totes Gebirge. As we crossed them, making for the mountain hut we would be staying the night at, we came across cows placidly munching away.
My wife’s photo
Judging by the old cowpats on the trail up, these cows had used the same trail we used to get to the high pastures in the early Summer, and will be going down the same way – like those cows back in 1777 – round about now, if they haven’t already done so. Given the narrowness and roughness of the path, it’s a miracle that more Anna Kains – and cows – didn’t fall off the path to a sure death. Perhaps they did but got no memorial.
Taking cows to and from the Alp’s high pastures seems to be a very old tradition, maybe 6,000 years old. It has been a key element in the economies of the Alpine valleys, so key that I can hazard to state that Switzerland exists because of it. As readers can imagine, locals living in Alpine valleys saw the surrounding high pastures as theirs and didn’t take too kindly to outsiders trying to cut in. In the early 1300s, a long-simmering feud between the people of Schwyz and Eisiedeln Abbey over grazing rights erupted into active fighting. Settlers from Schwyz had moved into unused parts of territories claimed by the Abbey, where they established farms and pastures. The abbot complained to the bishop of Constance, who excommunicated Schwyz. In retaliation, a band of Schwyz men raided the abbey, plundered it, desecrated the abbey church, and took several monks hostage. The abbot managed to escape and alerted the bishop, who extended the excommunication to Uri and Unterwalden (I suppose they had loudly applauded the exploits of their Schwyz neighbours, or maybe even taken part). It so happened that the abbey was under the formal protection of the Hapsburgs, so Leopold I, Duke of Austria, decided to show who was the boss. In 1315, he sent in an army to teach these Swiss peasants a lesson. But the clever men of Schwyz, supported by their allies from Uri and Unterwalden, ambushed the Austrian army near the shores of Lake Ägeri in Schwyz. After a brief close-quarters battle, the army was routed, with numerous slain or drowned. This illustration from the Tschachtlanchronik of 1470 shows the Austrians being skewered on land and drowning in the lake. Amen
This victory led to the consolidation the so-called League of the Three Forest Cantons, which formed the core of the Old Swiss Confederacy, which in turn eventually became the Swiss Confederation that we know today.
As I said, grazing cattle on the high pastures is an old, old tradition. So for millennia now we have had cattle eating fresh Alpine grass all summer long and making what German-speakers call heumilch, or haymilk. Milk aficionados say haymilk tastes different from normal, valley bottom milk, where the cows also eat fermented feed. I bow to the experts, never having drunk haymilk in my life (although maybe I should check the local supermarket shelves; it wouldn’t surprise me if the Austrians offer heumilch as a local delicacy). But in the days before refrigeration, the milk which the cows produced all summer long in the high pastures couldn’t just be drunk; it had to be turned into a more durable product. Thus we have the creation of that glorious, glorious category of cheeses, the Alpine cheeses. I’m sure we’ve all heard of some of the more famous Swiss entries to the category: Emmental, Gruyère, Raclette, Appenzeller. But every country with Alpine territory has their champion Alpine cheeses: Beaufort and Comté in France, the various Almkäse, Alpkäse and Bergkäse in Austria and Bavaria, Fontina in Italy. I use a wheel of Gruyère as a stand-in for all these wonderful Alpine cheeses.
In the old days, those holes, or “eyes” in the technical jargon, were considered unfortunate imperfections in the cheesemaking process. But then some Swiss PR whiz kid turned the imperfections into a Unique Selling Point and fortunes were made in the Emmen valley and beyond. Several other Alpine cheeses have eyes, although not as big as those in the photo above. They are caused by the presence during the cheesemaking process of a bacterium which produces carbon dioxide – the holes are actually bubbles of carbon dioxide.
The presence of this bacterium is due to a particularity in the process for making Alpine cheeses. Unlike most cheeses, where salt is liberally used during the cheesemaking process, the herders up in the high pastures used very little if any salt, simply because it was heavy and thus a pain in the ass to haul up to the high pastures (having carried moderately heavy backpacks up mountains, I can sympathise). Instead, timber was plentiful up there.
so the herders chopped trees down, made fires, and cooked the curds in copper kettles. Even though things are considerably easier now, low salt and cooking on copper is still an important part of the Standard Operating Procedure for making these cheeses, and it is the low salt levels (and low acidity levels) that allow the bubble-making bacterium to flourish.
Once the herders had made those large wheels of cheese, they had to also bring them down to the valley bottom. I wonder how they did that? When they were bringing the cows down, did they roll them down like those crazy people in Gloucestershire who take part in the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese Roll?
You can see these mad people charging down a hill after a cheese wheel.
I can’t believe herders would have rolled the wheels, even in a more temperate way. It would have ruined them. They were valuable products (indeed, a number of those pesky abbeys had their peasants pay their annual tribute in cheese wheels). I have to guess that the herders loaded them up on the cows when they brought them down, or maybe they had a team of mules for this. Or maybe there were people who spent the whole summer going up to the high pastures and then staggering back down with wheels of cheese on their backs.
Well, I can think of no better way for me and my wife to salute those Alpine cows and the haymilk they produce than for us to break our boring diet and get ourselves a nice slice of Alpkäse or Bergkäse (or both? in for a penny, in for a pound!) and eat it (or them) one of these evenings, with a big chunk of bread and a nice glass of wine. And why not throw in some nuts while we’re at it? In for a penny etc.
In our wanderings across the Austrian landscape, my wife and I have from time to time come across villages (or, in the case of Vienna, districts) called Sankt Veit. Here’s one such village in the region of Salzburg.
In the past, there has been no more than a flicker in my subconscious as some neurones somewhere registered the name. But the last time it happened, a neurone or two formulated the question, “who was this Sankt Veit?”, a question which led me to my usual desultory surfing of the web. The conclusion has been this post, which can be added to my various past posts on obscure saints whose names pepper the Austrian landscape and end up being our companions on our hikes across it.
Sankt Veit was originally Saint Vitus, a martyr from the late 3rd Century-early 4th Century. His story – or rather his hagiography – is quickly told. He was born in the far west of Sicily, in the town of Mazara del Vallo (and so, of course, in his italianised form San Vito, he is the town’s patron saint). I’ve never been there, but judging from photos on the web it has a nice central piazza.
In any event, Vitus’s mother died when he was a child. The times being what they were, his father wasn’t going to bring him up. Instead, he delegated this task to a nanny, Crescenzia, and a teacher, Modestus. Unbeknownst to him, the pair were Christians and converted Vitus when he was 12. Even though just a young lad, Vitus was of course very holy and began performing miracles. One such miracle took place in a locality near Catania on the eastern side of the island. Quite what he was doing there when he lived in the far west of the island isn’t explained. In any event, he met some shepherds who were in a frenzy because some dogs had torn a child to pieces. Vitus called the dogs over, had them hand over the remains of the child, and then brought the child back to life. This story explains why it’s common for him to be depicted with dogs. We see him here, for instance, on a capital in the church which was built on the site where Vitus met the shepherds, bringing those wild dogs to heel.
I presume being a Christian was a big no-no at the time, because when Vitus’s father found out, he had the three of them arrested and brought before the local judge, who ordered Vitus to recant. When Vitus refused, the judge invited his father to punish him severely, which he was glad to do, beating him to within an inch of his life. Still Vitus refused to recant. So his father imprisoned all three of them. At this point, an angel intervened and got them out of jail. Whereupon they fled, taking a ship to the ancient Roman province of Lucania, which more or less corresponds to today’s Italian region of Basilicata. There, all three continued their work of proselytism, with Vitus continuing to cure people.
Vitus’s fame as a healer grew to the point where the Emperor Diocletian up in Rome heard about him. We have here a bust of Diocletian. I must say, he looks rather grim, which fits nicely with the rest of the story.
It so happened that Diocletian’s son was possessed by a demon. Diocletian had Vitus and his two companions brought to Rome, where he implored Vitus to cure his son. This Vitus did, but the only reward he got was a demand from Diocletian that the three of them give up their faith (the ingratitude of it! but what could you expect from a pagan?). Vitus of course refused, so then started all those grisly tortures which hagiographers love to pile onto martyrs: see the tortures inflicted on Saint Blaise, Saint Florian, and Saint Pancras. First, Diocletian had Vitus and his two companions thrown into cauldrons of boiling pitch, which gave painters and sculptors of later centuries a very satisfying subject to work on.
But they remained unharmed! So then Diocletian had them thrown to the lions. But these ferocious beasts suddenly became meek and mild, licking Vitus’s feet!
But even though their bodies were close to breaking they survived! And so angels carried them off back to Lucania, where they died.
The End.
I won’t bother readers with a secondary complicated story of a princess who some four centuries after Vitus’s death was involved in carrying his remains from Lucania to San Polignano a Mare, some 30 km south of Bari, on the other side of Italy. I rather suspect that the story was a complete fabrication which nevertheless allowed the monks of a monastery in San Polignano to claim that they had the saint’s relics. This encouraged a vigorous relics-based tourism from which the monastery no doubt profited. The monastery has gone through many rebuilds in the intervening centuries, but it is still a rather arresting building, at least from a distance.
Whatever the truth is about the historical Vitus, assuming he even existed, the fact is that his veneration spread rapidly in Sicily and southern Italy. And then, once the great craze for relics started in the 3rd Century or so, his relics started circulating in Europe. In the 490s, Pope Gelasius I mentions a reliquary of Saint Vitus in the chapel of a deaconry dedicated to him in Rome. In 756, Fulrad, one of the great Abbots of the Abbey of Saint-Denis in what is now the outskirts of Paris, brought relics of St. Vitus to the Basilica there. This is what the abbey church looks like now, after its gothic makeover in the 12th Century.
About a century later, in 836, these relics were presented to Abbot Warin of Corvey on the river Weser. Founded in 822, this was the first Benedictine monastery in Saxony. It later became a princely Imperial Abbey in the political crazy quilt that was the Holy Roman Empire. The abbey has survived the vicissitudes of time, and is an imposing set of buildings. And Saint Vitus is still the patron saint of the abbey today.
The abbey of Corvey played a very important role in the Christianisation of eastern and northern Germany. Monks fanned out from the mother house, and to help along in their missionary work they took with them parts of the relics of Saint Vitus, thus also spreading the veneration of the saint throughout the German lands.
The same proselytising impetus brought Saint Vitus to the Slav lands, where he became extremely popular. It’s been theorised that this is because the German Sankt Veit was translated as Sveti Vid, which sounded very similar to Svetovid, the name of the Slav god of abundance and war.
Sveti Vid certainly became very popular in Prague after king Henry I of Germany gifted to Wenceslaus, Duke of Bohemia, the bones of one of Saint Vitus’s hands in 925. As a result, he became patron saint of Prague’s cathedral. To this hand was added Vitus’s head in 1355, when Charles, King of Bohemia (the Dukes had traded up to Kings in 1212) became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. He filched it from a church in Pavia – the town “belonged” to the Holy Roman Emperors at that time (in turn, the head had been brought to Pavia in 755 by the Longobard King Astulfus, God knows where from; I’m sure many PhDs have been written about the European trade in relics). This same Charles IV, by the way, was the man behind Prague cathedral’s Gothic makeover, which is more or less the version of the cathedral that we see today.
Relics don’t carry the same weight these days – at least, they don’t with me – but some of the reliquaries that were made to house relics are wonderful works of gold and silversmithing. Here’s one such reliquary holding a relic of Saint Vitus from the Treasury of the Cathedral. The artist even gave the young man a dimple in his chin!
Quite why Saint Vitus was plucked out from among all the martyrs of the early church and became so popular is not clear to me. Nevertheless, something in the stories and legends that accreted to his person got him connected to diseases where convulsive, uncoordinated movements were part of the symptoms. Thus, he became the go-to saint when you had epilepsy, chorea, and ergotism, all illnesses giving rise to uncoordinated movements. Chorea especially gives rise to rapid, jerky movements in the face, hands and feet, and so it was often called Saint Vitus’s dance. He was also your saint when you had been bitten by rabid or venomous animals, a fate which can also lead to convulsions. Somewhat more randomly, it seems to me, his intercession was also invoked in cases of bedwetting.
His connection to cases of uncoordinated, jerky movements also led him to be invoked in the strange European phenomenon of dancing mania. Although the first episodes were recorded in the 8th century and occurred intermittently in the succeeding centuries, there was an enormous increase in incidences between the 14th and 17th centuries, after which it disappeared abruptly. I’m not sure dancing mania is really such a good term. Dancing requires music, while here people were just hopping and writhing around. The phenomenon involved groups of people, sometimes numbering in the thousands, who went on “dancing” sometimes for days on end, until they collapsed from exhaustion or injuries. The condition was often considered a curse sent by Saint Vitus, and was therefore also, somewhat confusingly, called St. Vitus’s Dance. Victims of dancing mania often made their way to places dedicated to the saint, who was prayed to in an effort to end the “dancing”. Here, we have a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of women overtaken by dancing mania being taken to a church.
Not surprisingly, outbreaks often started around the time of the feast of Saint Vitus, on 15th June.
Even today, there is no consensus about what was going on here. It is speculated to have been a mass psychogenic illness, also known as epidemic hysteria, in which physical symptoms with no known physical cause affect a group of people, as a form of social influence. But what started off these bouts of epidemic hysteria? To my mind, the most reasonable suggestion that has been made is that people started “dancing” when their stress levels, induced by chronic poverty and political instability, got too high – although why, then, did the phenomenon abruptly disappear in the 17th Century? People were just as stressed in the succeeding centuries. Mystery …
Of course, people at the time had no idea how to stop an outbreak of dancing mania once it caught hold – other than praying to Saint Vitus. One possible remedy that was tried was music – in the drawing above, one can see a couple of men playing bagpipes. It was theorised that music would get people to channel their chaotic flailing around into a regular rhythm and so bring them down from their hysterical high. The type of music was important; as one writer put it, “lively, shrill tunes, played on trumpets and fifes, excited the dancers; soft, calm harmonies, graduated from fast to slow, high to low, prove efficacious for the cure” (one unintended side-effect of playing music, though, was that sometimes onlookers would now join in, swelling the numbers dancing). It’s not really relevant, but I thought this would be a good place to throw in a wonderful painting (by Pieter Bruegel the Elder again) of peasants dancing.
In the south of Italy, dancing mania was known as tarantism (because it was believed to be caused by the bite of a poisonous spider, the tarantula – confusingly, not a member of the well-known family of tarantulas). The music used there to tame the dancers was thus called the tarantella, which in the intervening centuries has become a well-known musical export from Italy. Many twee paintings of people dancing the tarantella have been produced, normally in a Neapolitan context, like this one.
But back to Saint Vitus after this interesting digression into phenomena of mass hysteria!
In the 14th Century, largely because of the shocks caused by the Black Death, Germans in the Rhineland created a collection of fourteen saints called the Nothelfer, or Helpers in times of need; their formal name in English is the Holy Helpers. Basically, these fourteen saints were tasked with helping people with all the ills they suffered from. We’ve already seen what Saint Vitus was meant to help you with. Another of the Holy Helpers which I’ve dealt with in a previous post, Saint Blaise, was to help with any illnesses of the throat. Staying with the head, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was charged with illnesses of the tongue, Saint Ciriac of Rome with illnesses of the eye, Saint Acacius with migraines, Saint Denis with normal headaches, Saint Barbara with fevers, and Saint Giles with mental illnesses (and with nightmares, I suppose by extension of his powers over mental illnesses). Moving to other parts of the body, Saint Elmo was invoked in cases of stomach and intestinal illnesses and Saint George when it came to diseases of the skin. Saint Margaret of Antioch was prayed to when backaches were the problem and when childbirth was looming (this was by extension, I suppose, since many pregnant women suffer from backaches). Meanwhile, Saint Pantaleon was the go-to saint when cancers and consumptive diseases were the problem.
But requests for help from our fourteen Holy Helpers didn’t stop there. They were also invoked to prevent risks to life and limb caused by events in the outside world. You prayed to Saint Barbara to avoid a sudden and violent death at work. When travel was necessary, you prayed to Saint Christopher to avoid the many dangers of travelling. I suppose by extension you also prayed to him to avoid the plague – a sensible thing; we all saw during Covid how plagues spread through travel. For good measure, terror of the plague being great, you also prayed to Saint Giles to avoid the plague. Storms and lightning must have been a common problem because you also prayed to Saint Christopher to avoid the consequences of storms (a good extension of his powers since storms are a common enough danger when travelling), to Saint Vitus to avoid both storms and lightning (a sensible combination) and to Saint Barbara to avoid lightning. Fire, too, must have been an ever-present threat when houses were made primarily of wood, because two of the saints looked after the risk of fire for you: Saint Barbara (by extension, no doubt, of her protective powers against lightning) and Saint Eustace. Interestingly enough, Saint Eustace was also the saint to go to for protection from family discord – this must have been quite a common problem if it warranted a Holy Helper. And of course, since this was a time when the great majority of people were peasants, and since much of their wealth was tied up in livestock and domestic animals, no less than five of the Holy Helpers could be invoked to protect these animals: Saint Blaise, Saint Elmo, Saint George, Saint Pantaleon, as well as our friend Saint Vitus. In fact, in the small Italian town of San Gregorio Magno in the province of Salerno, there is still an annual festival when people come with their animals and go round the local church of St. Vitus three times, followed – given the saint’s connection to dogs – by dog owners with their dogs. We have here goats doing the rounds.
But the help requested from the Holy Helpers didn’t end there. People were profoundly Christian and specifically believed in the afterlife, where depending on how good or bad you had been in this life you would either go to heaven or to hell. Here is a mosaic from the church on the island of Torcello in the Venice Lagoon of the Last Judgement, where parishioners could see just what would happen to them if they were judged to be bad.
And it was for all eternity! So it was incredibly important to end up on the right side of Divine Judgement. The Holy Helpers were duly invoked to help here. You prayed to Saints Barbara and Catherine of Alexandria to avoid a sudden death (i.e, one where you had not confessed your sins and received extreme unction). You prayed to Saint Giles to make a good confession: generally a desirable thing, but especially desirable just before you died. You prayed to Saint Ciriac of Rome to avoid temptation on your death-bed, which would indeed be a very ill-judged moment to give in to temptation since you might not have time to confess (but who on their death-bed would have the energy to be tempted, I ask myself?). You also prayed to Saint Ciriac as well as to Saint Denis to avoid demonic possession. I suspect in Saint Ciriac’s case this was as an extension of his powers to protect you from diseases of the eye (the eye could be an entry point for the devil, the Evil Eye) while in Saint Denis’s case, I see it as an extension of his powers to prevent headaches (I mean, when I’ve had bad headaches it’s often felt as if some small monster was pounding on the insides of my head). Saint Barbara of Antioch, meanwhile, was invoked for escape from the clutches of devils in general. Finally, you prayed to Saint Eustace to prevent you ending up in the eternal fires of Hell, a very natural extension, it seems to me, of his powers to protect people from fires in the terrestrial realm.
So there you have, in a nutshell, the fears that wracked the great majority of Europeans in the 14th and later centuries. The idea of a bevvy of saints who could help you with all the trials and tribulations of life proved to be so popular that it spread rapidly from its point of origin in the Rhineland to the rest of Europe, with local additions and subtractions from the basic list. Here is a collection of statuettes of the fourteen Holy Helpers from a chapel in Baden-Württemberg, where centuries ago you could have gone and asked the relevant saint, or saints, for help with your problems.
However, all I can say is, thank God for modern medicine, and thank God for governments which enact (and hopefully enforce) laws to protect us, and thank God for insurance companies which can cushion us from the risks of everyday life – as long as we read the fine print. As for fears of Hell, all I can say is, thank God Europe is dechristianising – although the fear of death is still there, in a different form, but still there.
Let me end this post with some examples of well-known people who have been named after Saint Vitus.
For Vitus, I tried to find a well-known Roman who was called that but failed to find one. So I choose Vitus Bering.
Bering was a Dane but spent most of his working life in the Russian Imperial Navy. His explorations in the northern Pacific Ocean gave us the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Bering Island (on which he died and was buried).
For Vito, I choose the very famous fictional character Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando in the film The Godfather.
I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Mario Puzo, who wrote the book on which the film is based, chose the name Vito for his character. As readers can imagine, it is a popular name in Sicily since Saint Vitus hailed from there (assuming, of course, that he ever really existed).
For Veit, I had difficulties finding someone who was really, really famous. So I choose Veit Bach, for the simple reason that he founded the Bach family, one of the most important musical families in history. There is no portrait of him, so I choose instead a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was his great-great grandson.
I also choose Veit Bach because he was a victim of Europe’s religious wars. He was a Protestant who lived in the Kingdom of Hungary, then ruled by the staunchly Catholic Hapsburgs. Religious persecution drove him to relocate his family to the Protestant state of Thuringia. He will contrast neatly with another personage I will mention in a second.
For Vid, I had even more difficulties finding someone who is even modestly famous. For lack of anything better, I choose Petar Vid Gvozdanović, a Croatian who was born at a time when Croatia was part of the Hapsburg Empire.
He joined the army, where his name was Germanified to Peter Vitus Quosdanovich, and he fought in the Seven Years’ War, then the War of the Bavarian Succession, then the Austro-Turkish war, rising steadily through the ranks. By the time the wars with the French revolutionaries started, he was a major-general and had been made a baron. After successfully fighting the French on their northern frontiers, he was made Field Marshall Lieutenant and sent to Italy to fight Napoleon. Alas! Napoleon was his nemesis, beating him repeatedly and leaving his reputation in tatters. After his final defeat at the battle of Rivoli, he was “retired”; he does look a little mournful in his photo.
The name game doesn’t end there! At some point during the invasions of Italy by the Germanic Longobards, the Latin name Vitus got inextricably mixed up with the Longobard name Wito or Wido and was transmuted into the name Guido. The French turned that into Guy, today pronounced very much like the Indian clarified butter ghee. The Normans brought the name with them when they invaded England, but its pronunciation over the centuries changed to the same as “buy” or “hi!” or “lie”. So now we have three more variants!
For Guido, I choose Guido Reni, a baroque painter from Italy. Here is a self portrait.
He is a Famous Author, and as a result I have never read any of his stuff. If any of my readers are curious to read him, Wikipedia informs me that his first published story, “Boule de Suif”, or “The Dumpling”, is often considered his most famous work. I welcome anyone who has read it to tell me what it’s like. Who knows, one day, at the next pandemic-induced lockdown, I might get around to read it.
For the English Guy, I choose Guy Fawkes. He, like Veit Bach, was a victim of Europe’s religious wars, although his situation was the mirror image of Veit Bach’s: he was a Catholic in a Protestant kingdom. He was also definitely more militant than Bach was in his response. He was one of the main conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, where the plan was to blow up King James I and the House of Lords. His role was to light the fuse which would set off the barrels of gunpowder which the conspirators had stashed away under the House of Lords. He was caught red-handed at the last minute, tortured, and hanged, drawn, and quartered. He is the third to the right in this contemporary engraving of eight of the thirteen conspirators (he was also known as Guido, because he had fought many years on the continent in Spanish armies).
Ever since, on 5th November, the day Guy Fawkes was caught, big bonfires are burned all over the UK on which are perched effigies, originally of the Pope but later of Guy Fawkes, and nowadays of just about any public figure whom the bonfire-makers dislike (in case readers don’t recognise her, it’s Margaret Thatcher in the photo).
So there we have it. I’ve taken my readers through quite a wander of things related to Vitus – sometimes rather remotely. And now my wife and I can wander over the Austrian landscape in our hikes, knowing that the next time we come across a village called Sankt Veit or a church dedicated to Sankt Veit we’ll be able to say “Ah yes! Remember that post?”
POSTSCRIPT
A week or so after writing this post, my wife and I went down to the Dorotheum auction house for tea and a nose around to see what was new. In a small section they have devoted to religious art, I came across this painting on glass.
My photo
It was a painting of the fourteen Holy Helpers plus God the Father with the Holy Ghost, Mary with the Baby Jesus, and Jesus with his cross. I can’t figure out who is who except in a few cases. The young man at the very bottom holding a palm must be St. Vitus; he’s always depicted as a boy. The bishop holding a candle must be St. Blaise (see my post about him to understand the meaning of the candle). The fellow with a baby on his shoulder must be St. Christopher. After that, I’m a bit lost. I leave it to my readers to figure out the rest.
The painting was being sold with a companion piece depicting the Last Judgement.
My photo
Somewhat more succinct than the mosaic in Torcello, it nevertheless passes on the vital message: “if you’re bad, you burn”.
I had to have them! So I forked out the €166 being requested, and they now hang proudly on our wall, on either side of another painting on glass I bought several years ago of God the Father blessing all and sundry.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere my little collection of art – nothing hugely expensive, I hasten to add; the most I have ever paid for a painting is €2,000, and I went back and forth in an agony of indecision for several days before made the final plunge. I love all my paintings, but there is one that I am particularly proud of because of the sleuthing which I carried out to properly identify its subject.
A little bit of background is in order. I bought the painting at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna – although not during an actual auction, but rather in the part of the Dorotheum where paintings and other objects are sold at fixed prices. I throw in a photo of it.
my photo
It’s an aquarelle, not very big – 46 by 63 cm. I loved its naïve style, I found the colour scheme cheerful, and I was intrigued by the scene it depicted. The description the Dorotheum gave it was:
“Belgien, 19. Jhdt.
Panoramablick von einer Brücke an einem Fluss, links and rechts Häuserzeilen, im Vordergrund Spaziergänger”
Or:
“Belgium, 19th C.
Panoramic view from a bridge on a river, left and right rows of houses, in the foreground strollers.”
The first thing I did was to take it to a framer who has a shop down the road from our apartment, for him to take off the frame and check the painting over. And here came a big surprise. On the back of the painting, someone had written “Vor Stadt im Paris”, which can be translated “In front of the City in Paris”. So the painting probably wasn’t of somewhere in Belgium as the Dorotheum’s description had suggested, but of Paris!
But where in Paris was this scene painted? Answering this question meant first understanding what waterways existed in Paris in the early 1800s – from the clothes the people in the painting are wearing it’s clear that the scene was painted some time in that period. A bit of sleuthing led me to the conclusion that the only waterway of any substance which existed in Paris in this period was the River Seine. The three canals which currently exist in and around Paris – Canal Saint-Martin, Canal Saint-Denis, Canal de l’Ourq – only got the go-ahead to be built in 1802 (from the-then First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte), and were only completed in the early 1820s, which is a bit late for the painting. So not only Paris but the River Seine! More and more exciting!
I won’t bore my readers with a summary of the hours I spent trying to find out where on the River Seine my painting was executed. Suffice to say that, given that the painting depicted a bridge, I became a real expert on all the bridges crossing the Seine in Paris in the early 1800s. But actually the breakthrough came from digging around for information on the shop to the far right of the painting – I throw in a close-up of it.
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As readers can see, the shop’s name was “DUHAMEL MD [MARCHAND] FAYENCIER” while underneath it says “Magazin de Porcelan …” (the rest to me is unreadable; however, if any of my sharper-eyed readers can make out what’s written please do tell me). So it seems that the shop was owned by a certain Duhamel and he sold porcelain and possibly earthenware. And here I had a real stroke of luck. Searching away on the internet, I discovered that the Bibliothèque de France had scanned a series of “Almanach du Commerce de Paris”. Here is the front page of the Almanac for 1798-1799, or Year VII in the Revolutionary Calendar, the first of these Almanacs that the Library had scanned.
These Almanacs were the period’s equivalent to the old Yellow Pages that we used to have before the internet came along (minus the phone numbers, of course). They listed all the businesses and shops in Paris, with – very important for me – their addresses. And here, in the Almanac for the Year VII, in the category of “Fayanciers” (the spelling wasn’t yet settled, it seems), I found an entry for a Duhamel. This was extremely encouraging! The name and trade fitted the name of the shop in the painting. The shop was listed as being in rue de la Lanterne. This street no longer exists. It is now the northern section of the rue de la Cité, which runs across the Île de la Cité, linking two bridges, the Pont Notre-Dame to the north and the Pont Cardinal-Lustiger to the south. I held my breath. Could the bridge in the painting be the Pont Notre-Dame? To make sure, I started working my way through successive Almanacs, and I soon got confirmation that the shop had been located at the foot of Pont Notre-Dame. Already in the Almanacs for the years 1806 to 1808 (the Revolutionary Calendar had been dropped by then), the address of the shop was given as “rue du Pont-Notre-Dame, 1” rather than rue de la Lanterne (although they went back to this address in later years), which strongly suggested that the shop was right next to the bridge itself. But the clincher came in the Almanac of 1812, where the address was given as “rue de la Lanterne 1 (Cité) et pont Notre-Dame”, while the Almanac of 1813 gave the address as “rue de la Lanterne, 1, au coin du quai Napoléon”, which at that time was the name of the quay that ran alongside the Seine from Pont Notre-Dame to Pont Saint-Louis at the far end of the island.
So I could finally identify the bridge! It is Pont Notre-Dame. This identification was strengthened by another feature of the painting. Readers will notice that a number of people crossing the bridge are holding plants. I throw in a close-up of two of them.
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It just so happens that behind viewers’ right shoulders as they look at the painting, a flower market was located! (and is still located.) Here is a drawing of that market done in 1829.
So now we can understand that the people in the painting holding plants have just bought something at the flower market and are presumably taking them home. The vicinity of the flower market to the shop is emphasised in the entry in the Almanac of 1817, where the address of the shop is given as “au bas du pont Notre-Dame, en face le marché aux Fleurs” (the emphasis is in the original), or “at the foot of Notre-Dame bridge, facing the flower market”. This connection, by the way, tells us that the aquarelle must have been executed after 1809, which is when the market was created.
Identifying the bridge in the painting as the Pont Notre-Dame also clarifies the rather odd wording of the phrase written on the back of the painting, “In front of the City in Paris”. Clearly, the “city” in this case is the Île de la Cité, which takes up most of the right-hand side of the painting.
A few years ago, during a visit my wife and I made to Paris, we visited the Pont Notre-Dame. I was curious to see how much the view had changed. Unfortunately, there were roadworks going on on the bridge and the traffic was horrendous, so I wasn’t able to get a clear view from the point where our artist must have been more or less standing. So I’ve turned to Google Maps Street View for today’s view from the bridge. It’s not brilliant, but it will have to do.
As readers can see, the view has changed quite considerably in the intervening 200 years. At the back of the painting, readers will note a somewhat humpbacked bridge – I throw in a close-up of it.
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That bridge is the Pont Marie, which connects the right bank of the Seine to the Île Saint-Louis. Here is a rather more professional painting of it from 1757.
The bridge in this painting has five arches and a slight hump. The painter of the aquarelle faithfully gave the bridge five arches but made the hump much more pronounced. This particular version of the bridge still exists, although the houses on the bridge, some of which you can still see in the 1757 painting, were all torn down by the time the aquarelle was painted, and more recently the hump has been flattened.
Since the aquarelle was painted, two more bridges have been built between Pont Notre-Dame and Pont Marie. One of them, Pont d’Arcole, is visible in the Google Street View photo.
The banks of the river have also been built up in the intervening 200 years. The most obvious change is on the left of the painting, where viewers can see a sort of beach (which is also visible in the 1757 painting of Pont Marie).
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This used to be the Place de Grève, a place where boats could be pulled up onto the beach and cargo loaded or unloaded. I presume that those white cocoon-looking things on the beach are some sort of cargo, Lord knows what. Here’s a more sophisticated view of the beach, by the same painter who painted the Pont Marie.
This whole area was “tidied up” in the 1830s, when today’s quays were built up.
The dome one can see above the Place de Grève is the dome of the church of St. Paul St. Louis.
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As the Google Street View indicates, you can’t see it any more from the Pont Notre-Dame because the intervening buildings have all increased in height, so here is a photo of it from nearby.
More or less opposite that dome on the other side of the painting, readers will see a spire peeking over the roofs. I think that is the spire of the cathedral of Notre-Dame – looking at maps of the period, I can’t see what else it could be.
Source
Alas, this spire no longer exists, having come crashing down when the cathedral’s roof burned down four years ago. This photo shows the spire enveloped in flames.
As for the building in which Duhamel’s shop was located, it has disappeared. The whole block was torn down to make space for a hospital, which was built in 1878. But it looks like Duhamel had already sold up in 1823 or ’24. Certainly, by 1824 the building housed a new shop, called À la BelleJardinière, which sold ready-made clothes. I suppose this was a revolutionary idea at the time. In any event, it did roaring business, bought up the surrounding houses and turned them into one big shop. When the hospital was built, the shop moved elsewhere and continued to do business until 1972.
The Duhamel involvement in the sale of earthenware and porcelain didn’t stop with the closure of the shop at the foot of Pont Notre-Dame. The Almanacs show an interesting story. A younger brother got involved in the business in 1804. Then one of the two moved out in 1809 or ’10 and set up another shop in what is now the first Arrondissement near the Halles. Then in 1820, a son of one of the two Duhamels set up a third shop on Boulevard des Italiens. The disappearance of the first shop in 1824 was followed by the disappearance of the shop on Boulevard des Italiens in 1827. The shop near the Halles kept going until 1837, after which it, too, disappeared from the record. Who knows what happened to the Duhamels after that?
There is one thing which the painter must have got wrong. You can’t see it in the modern photo from the bridge because the Pont d’Arcole blocks the view, but there is a small channel to the back right. This is the arm of the Seine which runs between Île St Louis and Île de la Cité – you see it very well in the painting of the Place de Grève. I can’t believe the painter didn’t see it; I have to assume that he first sketched the scene “en plein air” and then later painted the aquarelle proper, at which point he either forgot about the channel or decided it was making the painting too complicated.
Which brings us back – sort of – to the cast of colourful characters our painter has peopled the bridge with. I’ve already mentioned the persons carrying plants. We also have what seems to me to be a Gendarme on horseback.
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Gendarmes were (and are still) a type of policeman with military connections. Here is a modern picture of what the Gendarmes looked like in the early 1800s.
I have no idea what the other military-looking fellow behind our Gendarme could be, the one going for a walk with his Missus. I welcome inputs from any of my readers who are experts in military uniforms.
There is also what looks like a vitrier, or glazier.
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Here is a photo of a vitrier from a later period. You can see better the contraption on his back with which he carried his spare window panes.
I was rather pleased to see him. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, my mother often used to sing old French songs, and there was one song in her repertoire about vitriers. It was only one verse, which was repeated ad infinitum, and which went like so.
Encore un carreau d’cassé, v’là l’vitrier qui passe
Encore un carreau d’cassé, v’là l’vitrier d’passé
V’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier, v’la vitrier qui passe
V’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier d’passé!
which can be loosely translated as:
Another broken pane, here’s the glazier passing
Another broken pane, here’s the glazier’s gone past
Here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier passing
Here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier gone past!
Then we have an itinerant shoe-shiner.
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This is another trade which survived into the era of photography. I have chosen a photo of Neapolitan boys offering the service. Readers will see the word Sciuscià written on their box. It’s a term which came into use in Naples during the Second World War; it’s an adaptation into the local vernacular of the English word “shoeshine”, which shoeshine boys picked up from American troops. Vittorio De Sica made a powerful film in 1946 about these Neapolitan shoe-shine boys; I highly recommend it to my readers.
Which brings us to the person whose shoes – or rather boots – are being shone.
This character intrigued me. I thought perhaps he could help me date the painting. As I said, I’m not an expert on military uniforms, and even if I were we don’t know if the painter painted the uniform at all accurately. All that being said, I rather think we are dealing with a lancier rouge (although in the painting the man has a red feather in his shako while it should have been white or white and red). Here is a more sophisticated rendition of this uniform.
The regiment, properly known as the 2e régiment de chevaux-légers des Lanciers de la Garde Impériale (2nd regiment of Light Horse Lancers of the Imperial Guard), was known colloquially – and for obvious reasons – as the Red Lancers, or somewhat more irreverently as the écrevisses, or crayfish. The regiment has a grim but romantic history. It was originally formed in 1810 from hussars of the Dutch Royal Guard, after Napoleon merged Holland with France, and at the beginning it was primarily made up of Dutch recruits. The regiment served in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, where it was decimated, the depleted ranks being filled by Frenchmen (particularly from Paris and its environs). The regiment was dissolved a first time in 1814 at the Restoration, reformed during the Cent Jours, fought at the battle of Waterloo where it was again decimated, and finally dissolved at the end of 1815. If I’m right about the regiment, this means that the painting can’t have been painted that long after 1815 (soldiers from the disbanded regiment might have continued wearing their uniforms for a few years, either out of defiance or simply because they had nothing else to wear).
Which brings me finally to the anonymous painter. Who was he? (or maybe she, although I rather doubt it). Given the the phrase written on the back of the painting, I’m guessing that he was a German speaker, and given where I picked the painting up that he was a citizen of the Austrian Empire. Looking at the window of 1809 (when the flower market opened) to a few years after 1815 (when the Red Lancers regiment was disbanded) as the time period when the aquarelle was probably painted, I wonder if my anonymous painter was not an officer in one of the Austrian regiments that occupied Paris after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. In which case, the painting – or at least the initial sketch – would have been executed between 1815 and 1818, when the Allies maintained troops on French soil. But I have no name to give to my painter, who has given me so much pleasure since I purchased his aquarelle, and he will probably remain anonymous forever.
Just before my wife and I hurried over to Los Angeles to help our daughter, we spent a very pleasant long weekend in Innsbruck, celebrating our wedding anniversary. We actually weren’t visiting Innsbruck itself but rather using it as a base to do some hiking. As the city’s name indicates, it is situated on the river Inn. The valley down which the river flows is flanked on both sides by mountains, and it was these that we were there to hike, up, down and along.
Nevertheless, on the way to and from our hikes we found ourselves enjoying various parts of the old town through which we strode (on the way out) or shuffled (on the way back), and on the last morning we had time enough before our train left for Vienna to visit one museum. Being a fanatic believer in the Green Michelin Guide, I quickly looked up what museums it suggested to visit in Innsbruck, and discovered that this august publication bestowed its maximum encomium, three stars, on only one museum in the city: the Museum of Tyrolean Arts and Handicrafts. So the Museum of Tyrolean Arts and Handicrafts it was!
As usual, the Michelin Green Guide was spot on. I earnestly recommend any of my readers who are spending some time in Innsbruck to visit this museum. But this post is not really about the museum. It is about one particular painting which I chanced upon, of St. Notburga.
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Well! As any faithful reader of my posts will know, I have a very soft spot for obscure saints, the obscurer the better. In my time, I have written posts about Saints Radegund, Pancras, Blaise (who is also, incidentally, the subject of a small painting in the museum), John of Nepomuk, Hubert, Peter of Verona, Fructuosus, and a few other odds and ends in the Saints’ Department. So it was clear from the moment I clapped eyes on the painting that I would have to write a post about her. The train journey back to Vienna gave me all the time I needed to do the background research.
St. Notburga’s story is quickly told, and hinges around three miracles. If she existed at all, and I for one have my doubts about that, she was born in 1265 or thereabouts, into a humble family living in the small town of Rattenberg situated on the river Inn some 50 kilometres downstream from Innsbruck. So she was a Tyrolean girl.
Some time in her teens, she went to work as a servant in the household of the local aristocrats, the Count and Countess of Rottenburg. She was – of course – a very good girl and was scandalized by the fact that the leftover food from the Count’s meals was fed to the pigs when there were lots of townsfolk who went hungry. So with the Count and Countess’s blessing, she collected the leftovers and distributed them to the poor. (From here on, I show, very blown-up, some of the scenes which circle the painting above. They are somewhat dark and fuzzy; if I had known about Notburga beforehand, I would have taken close-ups from the painting itself. Ah well …)
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Alas! the Count died, and his son inherited his father’s title, lands, and servants. The new Count and his lady wife didn’t approve of Notburga’s good works at all. They wanted all the leftovers to go to their pigs. So the Countess, who was in charge of running the household, told Notburga to stop.
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Being – of course – a very obedient girl, Notburga did as she was commanded. But how she suffered! So she decided to put aside some of her own food instead, especially on Fridays – being not only good but pious, she fasted on Fridays – and gave this to the poor. The nasty Count and Countess didn’t like that either. As far as they were concerned, she was giving away their food, not hers, and saw this as theft. The Count decided to catch her in the act of leaving the castle with the food.
FIRST MIRACLE: So one Friday, Notburga was as usual carrying the food she had put aside for the poor in her apron and a jug of wine in her hand, when she encountered the Count and his entourage in the castle’s courtyard. He demanded to know what she was carrying. Notburga replied, “wood shavings and lye, Master”. The Count scoffed and commanded her to open her apron. Notburga obeyed, but in place of food, the Count saw only wood shavings and sawdust! Then he tried the wine, but tasted only lye!
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Of course, the Count being a nasty man, he suspected that Notburga had played a trick on him and fired her. She accepted her fate with forbearance, and left the castle and moved to a small village of Eben on Lake Achen, some 20 kilometres from Ratenberg. Here we have her (I think) walking to Eben.
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There, she was employed as a farm worker by a local farmer. She looked after the cattle and helped with the field work. Being, as I say, a very pious girl, Notburga only asked that the farmer let her stop work to pray when the bell first rang in the evening and let her go to Mass on Sunday and holy days, to which he graciously agreed.
SECOND MIRACLE: One afternoon, as always, Notburga stopped work when the first bell rang. But the weather was threatening to change, so the farmer demanded that no one stop until all the grain had been collected. Seeking divine assistance to make her case, Notburga raised up her sickle and said: “Let my sickle be judge between me and you.” She let go – and the sickle remained suspended in mid-air, caught on a ray of sunshine!
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Frightened half out of his wits, the farmer let her stop working, and he never tried that one again!
In the meantime, things were going very badly for Count Rottenburg. His pigs – the ones to whom the leftover food was given – were ravaged by some mysterious disease. His wife’s half-brother set the castle on fire after a bitter quarrel. Here, we have the half-brother attacking the castle.
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Finally, his wife sickened and died. Many residents decided that the Count had been cursed and left. The Count began to ascribe all his misfortunes to his dismissal of Notburga. He sought her out, together with his new wife, and implored her to return to work for him.
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She accepted, but only on condition that he let her resume her care for the poor. The Count immediately agreed, and of course his fortunes took a great turn for the better when Notburga came back. For 18 years, she served in the castle as nanny for the Count’s children, then cook, all the while continuing her charitable good works. She also succeeded in reconciling the Count with his first wife’s half-brother, the one who had very nearly burned the castle to the ground.
THIRD MIRACLE: In September of 1313, sensing that death was approaching, Notburga requested her master to place her corpse on a wagon drawn by two oxen and to bury her wherever the oxen would stand still. The Count did as she had asked. So off went the oxen, followed by the funeral procession.
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When the cart reached the Inn, the river parted and all the mourners were able to cross to the other shore without harm!
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The oxen continued on their way, covering at a leisurely pace the 20 kilometres to Eben (the mourners must have all had sore feet by now). There, just outside a wayside chapel on the outskirts of Eben they finally stopped. With much pomp and ceremony, she was laid to rest in the chapel; it is even said that angels carried her coffin into the chapel.
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And that’s Notburga’s life wrapped up. Readers will have noted by now the importance of the sickle in Notburga’s life. Hence her being represented in the painting above prominently waving a sickle around. I insert here a statue of her which I also came across in the museum, again waving that sickle around.
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I have told her story somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Quite honestly, it’s difficult for me to see what was so saintly about her life. I find the miracles ascribed to almost akin to conjurors’ tricks. But somethings about her definitely captured the imagination of the rural folk of the Tyrol and contiguous areas. Pilgrimages to that little chapel in Eben started up and became big enough for Maximilian I (whose own mausoleum sits in the church next to the museum) to decide to have a bigger church built in the village at the beginning of the 16th Century. It got a late Baroque makeover a few centuries later. Here is an aerial view of the church, set in the beautiful Tyrolean landscape (it really is a beautiful part of the world).
Her skeleton (or someone’s skeleton) was unearthed from the original chapel and, dressed in rich clothing, now rather macabrely presides over the church’s interior.
Notburga was until recently one of the most revered saints in Tyrol and South Bavaria, as well as in East Styria and Slovenia (I would imagine that the general dechristianization of Europe has put paid to this, although a quick search on LinkedIn and Facebook show that there are still quite a lot of people called Notburga). Rural folk would ask for her intervention in many situations of distress, from human or animal sickness to threatening storms. Apart from her representation on religious furniture and furnishings (paintings, votive images, statues, stained glass windows, church bells, even offering boxes and holy water basins) her image could be found on all sorts of objects of everyday use like salt shakers, stove tiles, and cupboards. There are even tiny, 2 by 2.8 cm., pictures of her to be swallowed or “inhaled” from; they were used as part of religious folk medicine and belonged in the home apothecary. It was believed that consuming or breathing in from these little images would release Notburga’s healing powers. Little silver Notburga sickles were worn on watch chains and rosaries as amulets. Many songs, prayers and litanies were dedicated to her.
There are those who say that Notburga was a Christian personification of much older goddesses who were prayed to in the mountains. Her sickle, for instance, is considered as pointing to a connection with a moon goddess, a common goddess throughout Europe and indeed the world; we have here the Roman goddess Luna.
This could well all be true. But I see another thread in her story, the constant struggle of rural folk with hunger, linked at least in part to their exploitation by landowners, both big (aristocrats) and small (rich farmers). Those rich folk were wasting food? Ha! She took it all and redistributed it to us poor folk! The Count fired her? Ha! He sure suffered for having done that! The farmer insisted that his workers work long hours? Ha! She sure put the fear of God in him for doing that, and after that he behaved himself! It’s no coincidence that she is the patron saint of the downtrodden in rural areas: servants, female agricultural workers, and the peasantry in general. I can understand that people would pray to her to deal with the richer folk making their life miserable. Personally, though, I think unionization is the better way to go.
I’m sitting in a doctor’s reception room, nervously waiting to see the good doctor. It’s a routine annual check-up, but at my age you never know what might emerge!
To while away the time and keep my mind on other things, I’ve decided to start a new post. The topic for this one is the elder tree. I was inspired to write it by the sighting I had on a recent hike with my wife in the woods around Vienna. It was of a branch of an elder tree hanging over the path, rich with berries – still green, but full of promise for the autumn.
The elder family is actually quite large, containing many different species. So just to be clear, I’m talking about Sambucus nigra,the European elder. It has a wide range, stretching from the Caspian Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west.
If I’m to be honest, it’s not a particularly pretty tree. It doesn’t grow very high, its leaves are nothing much to look at, and it evinces a rather fetid smell. But for reasons which are not really clear to me, it caught the imagination of the ancient peoples of Europe. A couple of thousand years ago or more, they invested the tree with magic powers. Then Christianity came along, and then the Enlightenment, and then the Scientific Revolution, and all these “pagan” beliefs became quaint folklore. Here’s one such tale about the elder tree, which was still quite prevalent in rural areas of Britain and Scandinavia in the early parts of the last century:
It was said that a spirit known as the Elder Mother (Hyldemoer in Danish) lived in elder trees.
If you were foolish enough to cut down an elder tree, or even cut a branch off it, you would release the Elder Mother. She would follow the wood – her property, after all – and bring bad luck on the owners of whatever was made from it. You could safely cut the tree only after chanting a rhyme to the Elder Mother:
“Elder Mother, Elder Mother,
Give me some of your wood,
And I will give you some of mine when I grow into a tree.”
Silence after you made the request meant that she had given permission.
As I said, quaint.
J.K. Rowling picked up on the elder’s supposed magical properties when she had a wand made of elder wood play a pivotal role in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Let me immediately say that, contrary to what seems to be 90% of the human race, I have never read a single Harry Potter book, so I have no idea what pivotal role the wand played. One of these days, I’ll ask my daughter, who I believe has read all the Harry Potter books; I certainly remember her lying on her bed devouring the first couple of volumes. What follows was gleaned from various Harry Potter fan sites I browsed. Elder was the rarest wand wood of all, and reputed to be deeply unlucky (which fits with my previous quaint story – the Elder Woman surely wouldn’t appreciate her wood being turned into a wand). As a result, elder wands were trickier for witches and wizards to master than any other. Harry’s Elder Wand (please note the capital letters) was said to have been the most powerful wand ever to have ever existed, able to perform feats of magic that would normally have been impossible even for the most skilled witches and wizards. Only a highly unusual person would find their perfect match in an elder wand, and on the rare occasion when such a pairing occurred, it might be taken as certain that the witch or wizard in question was marked out for a special destiny. Which means Harry, of course. As a final touch, the Elder Wand’s core contained the tail hair of a Thestral. This animal was a breed of winged horse with a skeletal body, face with reptilian features, and wide, leathery wings that resemble a bat’s (it makes me think of Chinese dragons).
If I bring up this last point, it’s because it allows me to segue smoothly back into the real world. Placing a Thestral’s tail hair in the core of the wand would have required hollowing out the elder branch being used to make the wand. It just so happens that young elder branches are easy to hollow out; their pith is soft and tender, and can be easily pushed out or burned out. People discovered this characteristic of the elder a long, long time ago, and took advantage of it to make all sorts of products which needed hollow tubes. For instance, shepherds in many parts of Europe used young elder branches to make simple flutes, to while away the hours looking after their sheep. In fact, the Latin name for the elder, sambucus, seems to be derived from the Ancient Greek word σαμβύκη (sambúkē) for flute. The shepherd playing a flute has certainly been a recurring theme in art over the ages.
Another use of hollowed elder branches was as bellows to blow air into fires, and it is this habit which seems to be at the source of the tree’s English name. It has nothing to do with old-age pensioners like myself and all to do with the Anglo-Saxon word æld for fire.
Of course, as one can easily imagine with a tree so laden with magic, various bits of it have been used over the centuries for folk remedies. Which is intriguing, because every part of the tree except the flowers and the ripe berries – so unripe berries, leaves, twigs, branches, seeds (even in ripe berries), roots – are mildly poisonous. Ingest enough and you will suffer from nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and generally feel horribly weak. That didn’t stop our ancestors, though, in using various elder-based concoctions to try to cure a wide array of diseases. And elder-based remedies – updated with smart packaging and slick advertising – continue to be offered. Here is one such offering for coughs.
I don’t propose to argue the merits of these folk remedies or their lack of them, I will merely cite a phrase I came across in my readings on the elder: “there is no high-quality clinical evidence that such practices provide any benefit”. My readers can come to their own conclusions about the medical efficacy of these modern versions of age-old nostrums.
Whether it was through their searches for remedies to the ills that afflicted them, or simply because of plain old hunger, or both, our ancestors also discovered that the elder could give them some nourishment. Archaeological digs in Switzerland at lakeside Neolithic pile-dwellings have unearthed elder seeds, seeming to show that these early Swiss lakeside dwellers were cultivating the elder 4000 years ago. We have here an artist’s representation of these lakeside dwellings.
If that is indeed true, we can imagine that hunter gatherers were collecting and eating wild elderberries considerably earlier than this.
In my opinion, based on my one experience of eating elderberries, you’d have to be pretty damned hungry to eat them. I tried the berries once when I was 13 years old and had just started high school. Elder trees lined one of the roads near the school, and the berries were ripe when the new school year started in early September (in fact, ripened elderberries were once considered an indicator that autumn – which officially starts on 1st September in the northern hemisphere – had begun). Frankly, the berries were pretty tasteless, which is not surprising since they have very low sugar levels. I must have also swallowed the seeds which I now know are poisonous, although I have no memories of throwing up or getting the runs. I guess I didn’t eat all that many – not surprising given their tastelessness.
This hasn’t stopped Europeans of centuries past from using elderberries as well as elderflowers in foods and drinks, and I want to celebrate the culinary inventiveness of our ancestors in the rest of this post. I suppose I also want to celebrate localism, the making do with what is available to you locally.
Elderberries and elderflowers can give a rather pleasant taste to things they are added to, and I suspect it is for this taste rather than any calories they impart that they have been used. Since I mentioned the berries first, let me quickly zip through some of the more interesting drinks and foods which people have created that involve them.
This is the only type of wine I have ever tried to make, a year after my attempt at eating the berries. It was a total disaster. I have recounted the whole sorry episode in an earlier post, so I won’t say anymore about it. For any readers who, come September, will have a whole lot of elderberries available, I annex at the very end of this post one of the many recipes to be found online for making elderberry wine.
In my youth in the UK, elderberry wine was associated with parsons’ daughters and genteel old maids.
This gentility is given a sinister twist in the hilarious film Arsenic and Old Lace of 1944 starring Cary Grant. SPOILER ALERT!! SPOILER ALERT!! Cary Grant’s character, Mortimer Brewster, discovers that his two spinster aunts, Abby and Martha, who are really lovely old dears, have taken to murdering lonely old men by poisoning them with a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and “just a pinch” of cyanide.
Somewhere between food and drink lie sweet soups. These are popular in Scandinavia, and indeed the Swedes use elderberry in one of their sweet soups. I must say, I’m rather intrigued by this concept of sweet soups, I really must try one one day. Is it a dessert or a starter? (Note to IKEA: time to add one of these soups to your menu, I’m getting tired of your Swedish meatballs). As one might expect of a berry that is commonly found in northern Europe, the northern Germans also make an elderberry-based soup. They call it Fliederbeersuppe (or lilac berry soup; not sure why “lilac”).
Interestingly enough, the Austrians make the same soup under the name Hollersuppe. In all the years my wife and I have lived in Austria, we have never, ever come across this dish. We clearly do not travel in the right circles. But now that I have been alerted to this dish I will keep a weather eye out for it. If readers with a stash of berries available to them in September want to try their hand at this soup, they will find a recipe at the end of the post.
Elderberries are of course used for making jams and jellies, but that is pretty run-of-the-mill, so I’ll skip them. They are also used to make a chutney, which is intriguing.
However, it is not quite intriguing enough to write anymore about it. Nevertheless, anyone wanting to try and make this chutney will find a recipe at the end.
Makers of it claim that it can give Lea & Perrins sauce a run for its money, which intrigues me because I am sufficiently into L&P sauce to have written a post about it. Anything that can stand up to L&P is worth looking into. The sauce also has a fun back story, which goes like so. Since the 1550s, the French family de Pontac owned vineyards in the Bordeaux region, exporting their wine to England. In 1666, taking advantage of the recent Great Fire in London, Arnaud III de Pontac sent his son François-Auguste to the city with instructions to buy one of the many now-vacant lots there. His idea was to build a tavern which would not only sell the Pontacs’ Bordeaux wine but also serve French food. François-Auguste completed his instructions to the letter, opening a tavern he called À l’Enseigne de Pontac. On the sign over the tavern’s door, François-Auguste depicted his father.
So Londoners nicknamed the tavern Pontack’s Head. This proto-French restaurant was a hit with all the Great and the Good, and it thrived. As part of the offerings, clients were served a sauce with their food. It came to be known as Pontack sauce, although whether François-Auguste invented the sauce or simply popularized it is unclear. The core of this sauce is elderberry juice and cider vinegar, to which are added various spices. Apparently, it marries very well with game. If there is any reader out there who wants to try making it, you know by now where to find the recipe!
And so we come to the flowers. Many drinks are made which involve elder flowers, primarily as a way to impart a distinct “elder” taste to them. The simplest is a concentrated sugar syrup in which elderflowers have been steeped for a while. Lemon juice or some other source of citric acid is add to give tartness. To drink it, a good deal of water is added to dilute the syrup to a drinkable concentration. I recently had one of these drinks at the local Anker café where we often go to have a coffee. It’s really very refreshing.
An interesting variation on this basic theme is where the drink is allowed to ferment – just enough to give it fizz but not enough to make it alcoholic. It is best known under its Romanian name, Socată.
However, all the Balkan countries make the same drink under a variety of different names, while Germany has a similar drink, this one mildly alcoholic and known as elderflower champagne. The non-alcoholic version of the drink has proved popular enough for commercial soft drinks manufacturers to market vulgar copies – I won’t deign to give them publicity by citing their names.
As one might imagine, this elderflower syrup is also used in various alcoholic drinks but I won’t bother with those. More interesting are a couple of ways to eat elderflowers. The first way is to dip the flowers in batter and fry them – rather like zucchini flowers, I suppose.
One finds this dish in the German-speaking lands, under the names Hollerküchel in Germany and Hollerstrauben in Austria. Once again, I have to confess to never having seen this dish during all my years in Austria. I could argue that this is because it is a seasonal dish, made when the elder trees flower in May, a time when we are almost never here, but I’m afraid I think it shows once again that we do not travel in the right circles. Recipe, as usual, at the end.
As readers will no doubt have noticed, pride of place in the creation of elder-based food and drinks has to be given to Northern Europe. However, my final entry comes from way down in southern Europe, from Calabria in Italy to be precise. There, they make a bread using olive oil in which elderflowers have been steeped. It’s known as pane col sambuco “elder bread” in Italian and pane è maju “May bread” in the local dialect, reflecting the month the trees flower.
Well, I finished my appointment with the doctor a long time ago; everything is in a satisfactory state of repair for a man my age, which is some comfort. There’s lots more to write about on the elder, but I will leave that to elder buffs to do; I think you could write a book about the elder. I saw an acronym for something or other a few days ago, which I think perfectly sums up this post: KKK. Not those hooded crazies from the US, but “Kunst, Kultur, Kulinarik”, Art, Culture, Cuisine. And now I leave my readers to the Cuisine part.
RECIPES
Elderberry wine
To make 1 l elderberry wine, you will need:
270g elderberries
1 litre water
250g sugar
1/2 tsp Acid Blend
1/4 tsp Yeast Nutrient
1/8 tsp Pectic Enzyme
1/4 Campden tablet
1/4 sachet of yeast
Once you get the elderberries back home after picking, remove the berries from the slightly toxic stems. Using a fork, gently comb the berries away from the stems a few at a time into a bowl. Fill the bowl with cold water. The ripe and mature berries will sink to the bottom. Any green, damaged berries will float, as will any leaves and bugs. Remove the bad berries and debris with a sieve and drain the well-cleaned elderberries.
Heat the water, add the sugar and stir to dissolve. Bring to the boil for a minute and then turn off the heat.
Take the prepared elderberries and place them in a straining bag inside a bucket. Use a potato masher to thoroughly crush the berries.
Pour the boiling water over the crushed elderberries and give them a good stir. Allow to cool for a few hours and then add the yeast nutrient, acid blend and the crushed Campden tablet. Mix thoroughly, cover and fit the airlock and wait for at least 12 hours.
After 12 hours add the pectic enzyme, mix thoroughly and wait for a further 24 hours.
After 24 hours add the yeast onto the surface of the must, there is no need to stir. Cover and fit the airlock and wait for fermentation to begin.
Stir the wine daily for the first week of fermentation, after 2 weeks lift out the straining bag and allow the wine to drain from the berries. Avoid squeezing the bag.
Leave the wine to settle for a day and then syphon the wine into a demijohn.
Allow the wine to condition in the demijohn for at least 3-4 months, racking when any sediment builds up. After the conditioning, sample the wine. You may want to back sweeten the wine if you prefer a sweeter taste. If not, rack straight to bottles.
Elderberry wine ages very well and will continually evolve so try and hold onto a few bottles for a year or more. You will be pleasantly surprised at how good an elderberry wine can get.
Fliederbeersuppe
Boil fresh elderberries with sugar and sieve the result. Thicken the remaining juice with corn starch, and cook with lemon zest (or lemon juice if necessary), peeled pieces of apple and pear and semolina dumplings (if flour dumplings are used instead of semolina dumplings, thickening is usually unnecessary). Cinnamon and clove are occasionally added as spices. In Carinthia, the soup is cooked with wild marjoram and possibly with honey instead of sugar. In Upper Austria, pitted stewed plums are also added, while in Vorarlberg the elderberries are cooked with some red wine.
Elderberry Chutney
You will need:
2lbs elderberries,
1 large onion,
1 pint vinegar,
1 tsp. salt,
1 tsp. ground ginger,
2 Tbsp. sugar,
a spoonful of cayenne, mustard seeds and any other spices you wish to add.
1) Put the elderberries into a pan and mash them with a spoon, chop the onion and add all the ingredients along with vinegar into the pan.
2) Bring the mix to a boil and simmer until thick, making sure to stir well to prevent burning.
3) Put into jars.
Pontack sauce
To make two small bottles of the sauce, you will need:
500g elderberries
500ml cider vinegar
250g finely chopped or grated shallots
Small piece of ginger, grated
4 allspice berries
4 cloves
1 tbsp black peppercorns
1 tsp nutmeg (or mace)
1 tsp salt
Wash the elderberries and de-stalk them with a fork – see above.
Heat the oven to 120°C. Put the berries in a casserole and cover with the vinegar, put on the lid, and cook for 4-6 hours.
When cool, strain the juices through a sieve, pressing firmly. Discard the skin and seeds of the berries.
Put the remainder into a pan with the shallots and other ingredients, bring to a boil and simmer, with the lid on, for about 10 minutes.
Turn off, let cool and strain again and bottle.
This will give you a thinnish liquid. You can reduce it to make it thicker or ‘blitz’ with some onion in a processor, which will give you something resembling a brown sauce.
Elderflower syrup (or cordial)
Collect the flower heads fresh and new when the tiny buds have just opened and come to bloom before the fragrance is tainted with bitterness.
Steep the elderflower heads in a concentrated sugar solution so that their aroma infuses the syrup.
Add a source of citric acid and lemon juice to help preserve the syrup and to add tartness.
Cover the mixture and then leave it for a few days so that the aromas of the flowers infuses into the syrup.
Strain to release as much juice as possible.
For drinking, the cordial is typically diluted with either water or sparkling water.
Socată
Steep the elder flowers in a lemon and sugar (traditionally honey) solution for a day.
Add the other ingredients. These can be raisins, mint, lemon or orange zest, basil leaves, ginger.
Leave for 2-4 days for primary fermentation to take place, in a covered but not airtight recipient.
Filter the drink, and consume within 1-2 days.
Fried elderflowers
Make a thin batter made from flour, eggs, beer or Prosecco and other ingredients, for example wine or beer batter.
Dip the blossoms, still on their stalks in the batter, and fry in a pan.
Before serving, dust the flowers with powdered cinnamon sugar, and serve with jam.
Use the thicker parts of the stalks to hold the food. Be careful not to eat the stalks when you eat the flowers.
Pane col sambuco
You will need:
300 g durum wheat flour
300 g flour 0
350 ml of water
1/2 Tbsp. salt
7 g fresh brewer’s yeast
1 tsp sugar
1 1/2 jar of elderberry flowers in oil (this is made by steeping elderflowers in virgin olive oil and salt)
Sift the two flours together and prepare the dough. Dissolve the brewer’s yeast in half a glass of lukewarm water.
Make a hollow in the center of the flour and start pouring a part of this lukewarm water, mix, add the dissolved yeast and sugar. Slowly pour more water. Put the salt on the edges so that it does not come into direct contact with the yeast.
Add the elderflowers under oil, knead them in until you have a nice smooth dough.
Oil a bowl and put the dough in it, cover it with plastic wrap and a cloth to keep it warm until it is well risen, which will take an hour or even two depending on the temperature at which you keep it.
When the dough is ready, make the shapes you like best. Put the shapes on a floured baking sheet and wait for them to rise for the second time, usually half an hour is enough.
Cook in a preheated oven at 240°C for the first 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 200°C for another 25/35 minutes.
If there’s one thing that will always depress me when I see them, it’s those tall industrial chimneys belching out white clouds of steam (sometimes tinged a faint orange by the oxides of nitrogen they can contain, depending on which way the sun is shining). Here’s a typical example of the genre, this one a frequent sight on our hikes upstream of Vienna – it belongs to a power plant.
It’s all that grey concrete that does it, often topped with garish red and white stripes to keep planes from flying into them. Just so ugly! And so damned tall that you can’t ignore them!! So in your face!!! They just drain any brightness and colour out of the surrounding landscape. I almost think that the older designs of brick chimneys were nicer on the eye. They were less high for one thing, and – at least in some models – took the form of long thin cones, which are considerably more elegant than mere cylinders. But that black smoke which they routinely belched out! Like in this British painting from about 1830.
The fact that someone actually painted all that black muck shows how our sensitivities have changed in the last fifty years or so. When the artist painted this, black smoke was a thing to be celebrated, it meant the economy was growing. Now, we think instead that the company’s top managers should be in jail for allowing it to happen.
But back to today’s industrial chimneys. Among all the gloom they have brought to my life, there have been two bright shafts of light over the years, caused by chimneys which I’ve actually enjoyed looking at. The first of these is a chimney in Vienna which belongs to a waste incinerator.
Wonderful piece of work! The design, both of the chimney as well as the rest of the facility, is due to an Austrian artist by the name of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. His normal output looks like this.
I’m sure readers can see the relation between this type of work and his chimney design.
The incinerator has been originally built in the late 1960s, but needed extensive repairs after a fire broke out in 1987. I was told that the mayor of Vienna brought Hundertwasser in to redesign the facades of the facility as well as the chimney, because the local community was up in arms about the city fathers’ plan to continue having a working incinerator in their neighbourhood. Hundertwasser, who was quite an environmentalist, was only persuaded to accept the commission when he was promised that the most up-to-date emissions abatement technology would be installed – and in fact the chimney hardly ever gives off anything. I must say I’m quite glad Hundertwasser accepted the commission, because he created what must be the jauntiest waste incinerator in the world. It makes you almost want to work there (almost …)
It was the second sighting, that of the chimney of another waste incinerator on the outskirts of Milan, which moved me to write this post, although it has taken me nearly nine months to get around to it. Last April, after the success of the hike my wife and I did from Milan to Monza, I decided to do a similar hike in another direction. I chose the direction pretty much at random, which meant, among other things, that there was one stretch where we had to walk along a very busy road with trucks thundering by and no space on the edge of the road for us to walk on. My wife regularly reminds me of this walk whenever I suggest doing a hike sight unseen around the edges of Milan … In any event, it was on this grim stretch of road that we stumbled across the waste incinerator. Its chimney immediately caught my attention. It had been painted a most extraordinary colour, a sort of shimmering, silvery grey blue, merging, but not quite, with the surrounding sky. It was really lovely to look at. I took several photos of it between the thundering trucks. I’m not sure any of them do justice to the chimney’s colour but I throw in the best one.
my photo
By one of those extraordinary coincidences that make one believe that there is some order after all in the chaos of the universe, this chimney happens to have been painted by another Austrian artist! Jorrit Tornquist is his name; his Wikipedia entry informs me that he is a color theorist and color consultant (no doubt it was in this latter role that he was called in by Milan’s waste management company to paint the chimney). As an artist, he does works like this.
Again, readers can surely see the relation between this type of work and the chimney.
As I say, these are the only two industrial chimneys which have ever brought some happiness into my life. But writing this post has moved me to search the Internet to see what other painted industrial chimneys await me and my wife on hikes we might one day do around the world. Here’s what I found, in no particular order.
A chimney at the sewage works in Milwaukee, where the art is actually part of the city’s water management system. The chimney is normally blue-coloured but turns red when heavy rain is forecast, warning people to reduce their water use so that the city’s drains are not overwhelmed.
An old chimney in Mount Vernon, Virginia, now hosting two graceful tulips.
I finish with a chimney which happens to be in Milan! It’s the chimney of the old factory where the Italian amaro, or bitter, Fernet Branca used to be produced.
This particular bitter was first formulated in 1845 in Milan. It is made by steeping 27 herbs and other ingredients in alcohol. Which herbs and ingredients are used is of course a tightly-held secret, a pesky problem I have already come across for these kinds of drinks. But apparently at least some of the herbs are pictured on the chimney, so perhaps a close reading of the chimney will lead me to figure out what herbs are used in this drink.
As readers have no doubt understood, I am planning to view this chimney. It can be the object of one of the urban walks my wife and I will take this winter. I’ve already checked on Google Maps to see how to get there, and I’m happy to report that we will not need to walk along busy roads with trucks thundering by. I’m going to have to wait for the right moment in which to casually suggest to my wife that we go for this walk, without spilling the beans about what we are going to see – and of course I will have to reassure her about the absence of busy roads with thundering trucks.
My son commented to me yesterday morning that I hadn’t posted in a while, and he’s right. It’s been over a month! The fact is, I’ve been busy these days (or B-U-S-Y as my son used to write in reply when we fond parents sent him a WhatsApp message suggesting a chat; luckily, he wasn’t B-U-S-Y yesterday morning). I’ve been helping students at a school in Wales figure out how the school could reduce its carbon footprint and I’ve had to prepare and deliver quite a number lectures for webinars on the topic of Circular Economies. All fascinating stuff, but it has eaten into my blogging time.
Anyway, it seems to me that as the days shorten, the temperatures fall, and my wife and I have our last hikes in the woods around Vienna before we migrate south to Italy for the winter, it would be good to celebrate Saint Hubert, the patron saint of all things linked to forests:
– Of hunters and their hounds, here painted by Paolo Uccello.
– Of trappers (another type of hunter who lurked in forests trapping beavers and other animals for their furs), here seen in a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Here is a photo of Hubert on one side of a small forest shrine that we came across during one of our recent hikes.
my photo
And this is the shrine.
My photo
Hubert’s story, which explains why he was made patron saint of all things to do with forests, is quickly told. He was born in the 650s AD in Toulouse, into a family that was part of the high Frankish aristocracy. Initially, he joined the Neustrian court centered on Paris, but because of quarrels with the Mayor of the Neustrian palace he transferred to the Austrasian court centered on Metz, where he was warmly welcomed by the Mayor of the Austrasian palace, on the grounds of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – the two Mayors were constantly fighting each other. He seems to have quickly inserted himself into the local elites, marrying the daughter of the Duke of Leuven (if you’re a Flemish speaker, Louvain if you’re a French speaker).
Like all good aristocrats of the time (indeed, like all good aristocrats of all ages), Hubert loved to hunt, and he seems to have spent most of his time roaming the forests of the Ardennes looking for some red meat to shoot. His predilection for hunting only increased after his wife died in child birth, to the point that one Good Friday, when he really should have been in a church on his knees praying for his soul, he instead vaulted onto his horse and rode off into the forest in pursuit of game.
The story goes that he spied a magnificent stag and was riding full tilt after it, when the animal suddenly turned. Hubert was astounded to see a crucifix hovering between its antlers. This scene has captivated various artists over the centuries – or more probably, it captivated their clients and the artists merely executed their clients’ wishes. Here’s a version by Albrecht Dürer.
In any event, the story goes on that Hubert heard a Voice, telling him to clean up his act or else he would be going straight to Hell. When he humbly asked the Voice what he should do, It told him to go find Lambert, Bishop of Maastricht, who would straighten him out.
And straighten him out he did! Under Lambert’s direction, Hubert gave away all his worldly possessions, entered a monastery, led an ascetic life, evangelized among the heathen folk who lived in the depths of the forest of Ardennes where he had once joyously hunted, etc., etc.
In about 705 AD, Lambert was assassinated, the victim of some quarrel between different Frankish factions. The event is depicted in all its gory detail in this painting by Jan van Brussel.
Hubert became bishop in Lambert’s place. At some point, he moved Lambert’s remains from Maastricht to Liège, where Lambert had been killed, as we see here in this manuscript miniature.
He built a magnificent basilica, which was soon turned into a cathedral, of which he naturally became the bishop (in the process, he kick-started the rise to greatness of Liège, which was then just a pissy little village). Alas, this cathedral was demolished by revolutionaries in 1794.
Much to his disappointment, Hubert wasn’t martyred but died peacefully in his bed in the late 720s AD. He was, as might be expected, initially buried in Liège, but about 100 years later his bones were dug up and transferred to the Benedictine Abbey of Amdain. This event was depicted in this wonderful painting by Rogier van der Weyden.
Not surprisingly, the town around the abbey renamed itself Saint-Hubert in his honour and became a focus for pilgrimages over the succeeding centuries (no doubt making the Abbey rich in the process).
I think readers will now understand why Hubert is patron saint of all things forest. He was a very popular saint among the little people in the Middle Ages, probably because forests played an important role in people’s livelihoods until deforestation shrank those forests, first to woods and then to woodlots on the margins of rural lives. Not surprisingly, given his passion for hunting, Hubert was also very popular among the aristocracy, and several Noble Orders dedicated to hunting were named after him. Take, for instance, the Venerable Order of Saint Hubertus, which was founded in 1695 by Count Franz Anton von Sporck.
The Order brought together the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI and hunting enthusiasts from various other noble families throughout the Holy Roman Empire. It still exists, its current Grand Master being Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen.
Given that in the early days of the European presence in Canada so many French Canadians were involved in the fur trade as trappers, I also now understand why Saint Hubert was a popular saint in French Canada; in the teen years I spent there, I was intrigued by the number of places called Saint-Hubert (there is even a chain of chicken restaurants in Quebec called Saint Hubert). No doubt the saint’s protection was invoked by the Catholic trappers as their canoes set off on their way to the beaver grounds out west.
Of course, since the regions we now call Belgium and southern Netherlands were the saint’s favoured hunting grounds, both literally and figuratively, many places there are also called Saint-Hubert (French) or Sint Hubertus (Flemish/ Netherlandish). One beer has taken its name from the town of Saint-Hubert around the abbey where Hubert was eventually buried. Here is a bottle of one of the company’s brews (triple amber for any beer enthusiasts among my readers).
Source
There is also a brew that is popular here in Vienna, the Hubertus Bräu.
I’m not sure why it’s called Hubert’s Brew. It’s certainly not named after the place it’s brewed in, which is Laa an der Thaya (nice area; we’ve been on a couple of hikes around there). But it has a very distinguished pedigree. The town obtained the right to brew it back in 1454, from Ladislaus Postumus, Duke of Austria (and for this privilege they had to deliver the good Duke a keg of beer on each holiday, which doesn’t sound much – but maybe there were lots of holidays back then).
As readers will note, both these beers have as a symbol the famous stag’s head with the crucifix hovering between its antlers. So does the digestive Jägermeister, that concoction of herbs macerated in alcohol, which for some strange reason became popular with the student crowd.
In this case, the connection to Hubert is via its name, which means Master of the Hunt.
Of course, I understand why any alcoholic drink which has some sort of connection to Hubert would use the symbol of the stag with the hovering crucifix. But I wonder if the makers of these drinks have thought this idea through. For me, the implication is that drinking the beer or digestive will make you see things which aren’t there (rather like that hoary chestnut that alcoholics see pink elephants).
Not perhaps the best image one wants to give to an alcoholic drink. On the other hand, putting a picture of Hubert as a bishop, like the one in the photo which I started this post with, could well put a damper on one’s enthusiastic desire to drink. A tricky marketing conundrum …
With that, I lift a good glass of wine to my readers and go and join my wife to do the packing. Auf wiedersehen, arrivederci, we will see each other again once we’ve moved down to Italy!
The tree has been a constant companion on our hikes this summer as we explore the western reaches of the Wienerwald, the woods encircling Vienna to its north and west. Apart from the odd oak, wild cherry, and conifer, the European beech reigns supreme in the Wienerwald.
My memories of the beech start at the age of 10 or so, at my Prep school (Brit-speak for a private, boarding, primary school). Just outside the school gates, at the bottom of a field, was a magnificent copper beech; we would pass it every time we made our way to the school’s playing fields which were down the road. I have no photo of this tree, it may even no longer stand, so this photo will have to stand in for it and for all these magnificent variants of the beech.
I used to think the copper beech was a different species, but no, all the world’s copper beeches are fruit of a single spontaneous mutation that occurred in a beech tree in a forest in Thuringia, in Germany. It was noticed back in 1690 and was carried from there around the world. One single mutation … like blue eyes.
My next memory of beech is a long beech hedge at my Public school (Brit-speak for a private, boarding, secondary school), which bordered the campus’s entrance road. It was lovely during the summer, with that long solid block of tender green running along the road. Again, I don’t have a photo of this hedge, so this photo of a wonderful hedge somewhere in the UK will have to stand in for it.
It was really only when we moved to Vienna and got to know the Wienerwald that my wife and I discovered beech woods. And what magnificent woods they are! I insert here one photo we took, where the sun dappled the trunks that stretched off into the distance.
my photo
But our iPhones can’t do these woods justice, so I’ve also picked out a few photos from the Internet taken by people who’ve got the right equipment and know what they are doing.
That last photo could be of us, following the marked paths through the woods, rather like Hansel and Gretel following Hansel’s white pebbles.
Having been enchanted by these beech woods, my wife and I have decided that some day we will visit some of Europe’s primeval beech forests. These are beech forests which have never, ever been cut or otherwise exploited by human beings, the kind of beech forests through which our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have wandered ten thousand and more years ago. There are 94 such forests in Europe, and as a group they have become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Austria has five of the 94, Italy 13. In one way or another, we’ll figure out a way of getting to a couple of them. In the meantime, I throw in a photo of one of the Austrian forests, Hintergebirg.
Interestingly enough, the UK has no primeval beech forests (nor does Ireland, for that matter). It could be that over the centuries the British have simply not been able to leave any of their beech forests alone, cutting them, clearing them, or otherwise fiddling around with them. Or it could be that there never were any primeval beech forests in the first place. The beech is considered natural in the southern part of the island. However, some voices have been raised wondering if this is actually correct. These voices suggest that perhaps the beech was brought to the UK by our Iron Age ancestors, who wanted to have it with them as a source of food – the food in question in this case being the beech tree’s nuts, or mast as it is called. Here we have a (very) close-up – the nuts are quite small.
I must confess to having been surprised to read that our ancestors ate mast. But that only goes to show how alienated I have become from natural sources of food – “if it ain’t on supermarket shelves it ain’t food”. By my reckoning, it’s five generations since any of my ancestors might have foraged for beech mast. But foraging is becoming popular, with many websites dedicated to this lost art form. A good number of them mention beech mast, claiming that the nuts are good to eat (although small and time-consuming to gather). Other, probably more objective sites warn that the nuts can taste bitter because of their high levels of tannins, but that they can be ground to a flour and the tannins leached out – that’s probably how my more recent ancestors would have eaten mast, if and when they ate it. I now know that I should start looking out for fresh nuts on our hikes in a few weeks’ time; they fall in late August, early September. I’ll try a couple – and see if I can’t persuade my wife to try them too – and will report back.
Coming back to beech woods, one of their characteristics is that they are – relatively speaking – quite dark; the crown of leaves at the top of the trees are dense enough to keep out a lot of the incoming sunlight. As a result, little if anything grows in the shade of the towering beech trunks. The most common sight is a carpet of bronze-coloured beech leaves lying on the forest floor, the product of the trees losing their leaves year after year. My wife and I see this most spectacularly on the hikes we do during the winter months through a beech wood high above Lake Como, when the dead beech leaves on the ground are the only colour present.
But from time to time we walk through sections of beech woods where a beautiful field of grass lies at the feet of the trees.
My photo
I don’t know what grass this is, or why it only grows in certain places, but the sight of these lawns stretching off into the distance between the trees is a joy to behold. But perhaps not as breathtaking as the fields of bluebells in some of the UK’s beech woods.
The bluebells escape the deadly shade of the beeches by flowering before the trees are fully in leaf. I’m ashamed to say that I have never visited any of these bluebell groves – another item on our bucket list.
The other characteristic of beech woods is the trees’ smooth bark. It’s quite a striking sight to see all these pale grey, smooth trunks towering up into the sky above our heads. And one can immediately spot the lone oak or cherry or conifer skulking among the beeches; their rough barks stand out. This smoothness actually signals a fragility in the beech’s bark; it is easily scarred and the marks remain forever as the bark cannot heal. Many of the beech trees we cross are marked by scars in their bark, no doubt caused by branches of other trees or bushes scraping against them when they were young. But on our walks we also see examples of silly boys, and perhaps some silly girls, using the inability of the beech’s bark to heal to carve their initials into it, quite often combined with the initials of a loved one and the whole enclosed within a heart; they will stay, more and more distorted as the tree grows, until it is cut or blown down.
Initials carved in a beech’s bark is another of my beech memories. This particular beech was in my French grandmother’s garden and the initials carved into its bark my uncle’s. He must have done it 30-40 years before I saw it. Family lore has it that my grandmother was furious with him when she discovered this disfigurement of her tree – “so vulgar!” – and gave him a good thrashing. The tree has gone, alas. It died some 15 years after my grandmother died, shaded out, I suspect, by the mighty sequoia nearby, but also probably suffering from a drop in the area’s aquifer: too much water is being pumped out.
Scratching initials on beech bark allows me to make a connection between this wonderful tree and another wonderful item of which I have many exemplars: the book. Beech and book actually come from the same root, the Old English bōc. This has the primary sense of “beech” but also a secondary sense of “book”. The connection is perhaps more obvious in other modern Germanic languages. In modern German, the word for “book” is Buch, with Buche meaning “beech tree”. In modern Dutch, the word for “book” is boek, with beuk meaning “beech tree”. In Swedish, the word bok means both “beech tree” and “book”. This connection allows me to hold forth on another favourite topic of mine, trade – or rather, the exchange of ideas that comes with trade.
When the Germanic tribes migrated into Europe, pushing out the Celts, they were illiterate, with no culture of writing and no alphabet of their own. When they met the Romans, they fought them of course, but they also traded with them and in so doing came into contact both with writing and with the waxed wooden tablets on which traders (and many others in the Roman Empire) made notes or wrote short missives. As far as the alphabet was concerned, the Germanic tribes adopted a precursor to the Roman alphabet, the old Italic alphabet, to create their runes. As for the tablets, the Germanic tribes used the tree that surrounded them, the beech, to make them, and called these tablets after the tree from which they came. Later, when the Germanic tribes shifted to using parchment, they continued to call what they wrote in books.
Being made of wood, these tablets have normally decayed away, but some examples of Roman tablets have been unearthed along Hadrian’s Wall, somehow miraculously avoiding the normal decay processes.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts the migratory habits which regulate our lives since we retired: when it begins to get cold in the late autumn we migrate south to Italy, when it begins to get hot in the early summer we migrate north to Austria.
It’s me, really, that’s imposed this pattern on our lives. I have a great dislike of intense cold, so I prefer to abandon Austria to its fate in the winter. But equally, I have a great dislike of intense heat, so I hasten to vacate Italy when the mercury begins to climb vertiginously. I suppose it’s my Anglo-Saxon genes that dictate this behaviour: the breeding of generations have led them to feel most at home in places with mild, not too sunny weather.
I was thinking of this as my wife and I hiked this last week in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria, high up along the edges of the Salzach valley. The weather was cool, cloudy, with patches of sun, but also a little rain now and then, ideal weather for hiking. I throw in a couple of photos which we took.
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Yes, I was glad to be out of the furnace that is Italy at this time of the year. Even the lure of the Mediterranean Sea in Liguria, our favourite site for hiking, cannot overcome my dislike of Italy’s summer heat.
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That being said, there is one thing I do miss from our hikes in Liguria: the scent of fig trees. It’s actually one tree in particular which I miss. It borders the path leading from behind our apartment up to the village of Pieve Alta.
I cannot even begin to describe the cloud of scent that will suddenly envelop us as we pass that fig tree in late May, early June. It is a scent which for me evokes a dollop of fig jam dissolved in coconut milk, with a pinch of vanilla added, along – perhaps – with a sprinkling of cinnamon. It is like someone passing under my nose a plateful of very ripe figs, all cut open.
I used to think that it was the fruit giving off this scent, but after reading up on fig trees I now think it is more likely to be the tree’s beautiful, deeply lobed leaves that are emitting the scent.
Wherever the scent is coming from, and for whatever reason the tree is giving it off (surely not to attract me), I thank the Good Lord that I can get such pleasure from passing a fig tree. Sometimes, as I stride across high Alpine pastures or thread my way through dark stands of tall fir trees, I feel a point of nostalgia for that humble fig tree growing along the path between our apartment and Pieve Alta.
During this year’s week-long hike in the Dolomites (which I also mentioned in passing in my previous post), I managed to squeeze in a visit to the parish church of Sesto (or Sexten, to give its German name; we are in Sud Tirol, after all). Let me repeat here a message I have tried to pass in previous posts: always visit every church you come across in Europe, no matter how small it is, because there is a good chance that you will discover an artistic gem (or two). The church in Sesto / Sexten was no exception.
The church itself was OK – it had some interesting frescoes on the ceiling.
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But what really made the visit worth while was the cemetery. My wife will tell you that I have a morbid streak, and indeed I don’t deny having a certain preoccupation with death – a preoccupation which, naturally enough I think, is growing with age. But cemeteries do also often contain wonderful art, as people try to lessen the pain caused by the departure of loved ones and reduce the fear of death itself through art. Things started with a bang at the entrance to the cemetery, which took the form of a small circular pavilion reached by a covered staircase from the road.
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The ceiling of the pavilion was adorned with a Totentanz, or Dance of Death (danza macabra in Italian). This type of artistic depiction flourished in Europe during the 15th and 16th Centuries, probably in response to the Black Death and the lesser outbreaks of the plague which continued to periodically sweep through the continent. They were a form of memento mori, a reminder to us that we must all die sooner or later: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return”. I came across a typical example of the form several years ago, in a church in Milan.
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The phrase on the left says “I was what you are”, while the one on the right says “You will be what I am” (I emailed the photo to a dear friend of mine as an attachment to a lighthearted note; he died a year later – death catches us all, some of us sooner than later).
Dances of Death were different because they stressed that Death was the Great Leveller: whatever your social position, however powerful you were, you could not hide from Death. I suppose this idea was thrown into sharp relief by the Plague: here was a disease which made no distinctions, remorselessly scything down rich and poor, powerful and powerless, old and young, sick and healthy. And so Dances of Death would depict men and women – and children – from all ranks of society and all walks of life dancing with, being embraced by, skeletons. Here are typical examples of the genre.
In the earlier versions, each person would be accompanied by a short poem, often written in an ironic tone, commenting on him or her and their incipient death. And the skeletons would be quite jolly, not only dancing but frolicking about.
Even though the example on the ceiling of that pavilion in the cemetery of Sesto / Sexten was quite modern – it was painted soon after the First World War – its author, Rudolf Stolz, followed the traditional iconography quite faithfully. Thus, we have a ruler.
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He is accompanied by a rhyming couplet in German, which states (in my rather free translation)
“The sands have run out,
Lay aside your scepter.”
The skeleton is holding an hourglass, so we can interpret these couplets as something the skeletons are saying to their charges.
Then we have a mature woman, a “matron” as they used to be called.
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Her skeleton is saying to her
“Woman, your devotions are over
Idly burns your candle”
To make the point, it pinches the candle’s wick. Like many a matron in a village like Sesto, she must have been a regular churchgoer.
Next we have a mature man, no doubt a local farmer, dressed the way locals would have dressed until quite recently.
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With a scythe slung over its shoulder, his skeleton is intoning
“Your virility, your creativity
Cut like grass by a stroke of my scythe”
He is followed by the most poignant of the depictions, that of a baby.
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The skeleton is crooning to the baby
“Sleep, my angel, sleep sweetly
You’ll awake in paradise”
At a time when the death of babies and children was still quite common, I can only hope that this painting was of some comfort to grieving mothers on their way to tend the graves of their children.
On goes the dance! We move on to a young man.
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His friendly skeleton, bony arm wrapped around his shoulder, is telling him
“Not so sad, young blood
Go homewards with cheerful heart”
Presumably “homewards” in this context means home to the kingdom of God.
Which brings us to a young woman.
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Her skeleton is telling her
“Fair maiden with the myrtle wreath
Follow me to the wedding dance”
And indeed the skeleton seems to be about to start the kind of square dance that was common in these parts. But no doubt it is referring to a wedding with Death.
And so we come to the final character, a bishop.
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His skeleton is telling him
“Bishop with the shepherd’s crook
Set aside your heavy burden”
and is helpfully taking away his crosier (his crook), no doubt as a first step in divesting him of his other accoutrements.
When I saw this Dance of Death, I was immediately reminded of another Dance of Death which recently went under the hammer at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna, a version of Albin Egger-Lienz’s “Totentanz 1809”.
The affinity between these paintings is no surprise. As his name indicates, Egger-Lienz was born just down the road from Sesto / Sexten, in Lienz, now in Austria. Most of the themes of his paintings were Tyrolese. Rudolf Stolz was a great fan of his.
Suitably reminded of my own approaching demise, I passed into the cemetery itself. Tyrolese cemeteries are a joy to visit. Each grave is a little garden, carefully tended by relatives. This one was particularly well kept, and the view on the Dolomites of Sesto was magnificent.
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In addition, the crosses over the graves are often masterpieces of ironwork. I throw in a few examples I came across.
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I have to assume that all those flowery curlicues are to remind the Christian viewer that the wooden cross is the bearer of (eternal) life, rather like a stick which – when stuck in the ground – sprouts leaves.
Behind the first cross you can see an example of the frescoes that are painted on some of the cemetery’s family tombs. Rudolf and his two brothers Albert and Ignaz painted a good number of these (Albert also painted the frescoes on the ceiling of the church). I rather like this fresco by Ignaz Stolz, a nice take on the story of the Sermon on the Mount.
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In the end, though, I rather preferred the sculptures in wood – another great art form in the Tirol; not surprising, given the wealth of wood here – that adorned some of the family tombs.
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I’m not sure I would want a sculpture on my family tomb strongly suggesting that I would be burning in Hell …
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The story of the women coming to the grave of Jesus to prepare him, only to find an angel sitting at the mouth of the tomb.
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A pietà.
Yes, if I am finally laid to rest in a cemetery – which is not a given; cremation is a strong possibility – I think a Tyrolese grave, surrounded by mountain flowers, will do me very well. And I want a brass band to see me off! Once, many years ago, when I was convalescing at home after a knee operation, my wife took me for a spin through the countryside around Vienna. Quite by chance, we came across a funeral procession that had just reached the village cemetery. We stopped to watch. Suddenly, the sombre silence was broken by a duet between trumpet and trombone. What a way to go, to the sound of brass!
I have often told my wife of this desire, but I suspect she has been dismissing it as an emanation of the Monty-Pythonesque side of me, not to be taken seriously. But really, what better way to say that that final goodbye than through the booming notes of a brass band? Since she and I like jazz so much, maybe she could fly in one of those New Orleans funeral bands. Now that would be something!
the heart thrills 
