We continue in Strasbourg, the capital of the Alsace region.
Let’s start at the center of the city, at the Place de la Cathédrale.
The star of the Place de la Cathédrale is, big surprise, the cathedral. In some sense, it’s yet another gothic church. Still, the density of sculptures and filigree carvings is impressive.
“A prodigy of the gigantesque and the delicate,” as Victor Hugo claimed. Strasbourg Cathedral (1015-1439) is an absolute masterpiece of Gothic art. The 142 m high spire looks incredibly lightweight and made the Cathedral the highest edifice in all Christianity until the 19th century…. [T]he facade is the greatest “book” of images the Middle Ages has to offer. Hundreds of sculptures stand out from the wall accentuating the effects of shadow and light. The colour of the red sandstone changes throughout the day depending on the colour of the sky. (source)
The Kammerzell house is the second most gregarious building here, after the cathedral. Built in 1571 in the Renaissance style, it’s one of the most famous houses in Strasbourg.
[The Kammerzell house] was bought in 1571 by the famous cheese merchant Martin Braun, [who] had the upper floors built above the stone ground floor, the upper floors in wood in a very particular Renaissance style. The carved wooden decoration animating the facade, pierced with windows with cul-de-botteille windows, represents sacred and profane scenes, medieval legends, the five senses, the four ages of life, faith, hope and charity and finally, and the signs of the zodiac. Several important characters of history appear on the facade: Caesar, Charlemagne, Hector and Godefroy of Bouillon. On the gable, we can still see the pulley that was used to raise goods to the attic. (source)
The Cathedral Square is known for being particularly windy. Some legends recount that during the construction of the Cathedral, the Devil rode by on his steed, which was the wind. The new building intrigued the Devil. He stopped to visit and asked the wind to wait for him. Entranced by the cathedral, he was caught unawares by the morning mass and found himself locked in a pillar. To this day, the wind endlessly circles the Cathedral while waiting for its master, the emprisoned Devil. ※
Branches of the Ill River ring the historic center of the city. The first stone walls were erected in the 12th century, and there were eighty towers. The towers we see today are remnants of Strasbourg’s city walls from the 13th to 17th centuries. Contemplating these muscular towers, we try to imagine the condition of threat and fear felt by the residents of even significant medieval cities. ※
We enjoyed a walking tour of central Strasbourg. Our path included crossing the “Great Fortification Lock” over the River Ill. Louis IV’s prolific military engineer, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, designed this combination bridge / dam / lock. In Vauban’s time, advances of artillery and combat techniques made ineffective the existing defensive covered bridges at the city’s edge. It was therefore decided to build, a few meters upstream, a new structure capable of responding to the new parameters of the “modern” war. The idea was to be able to flood the entire southern front of the city to create defensible distance from offensive artillery. This combination dam and lock was used 200 years later, in 1870, during the siege of Strasbourg by the Prussians. The defending French flooded the upstream neighborhoods. Alas, the strategy was not successful; the Prussians took the city.
Strasbourg still has a medieval neighborhood much like Colmar, Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé. It’s called La Petite France.
But we’re in France already, so why The Little France? The answer is colorful and unpleasant:
The picturesque district of Strasbourg owes its name to the… syphilis, which the soldiers of the King of France, Charles VII, imported into Strasbourg, a city that was not French at that time. The neighborhood once housed a hospice where mercenaries sick with smallpox and syphilis, arriving from infected countries, were isolated. At the time, this infection was considered the disease of the French, hence the “Little France”! (source)
La Petite France was unsavory for more reasons than smallpox and syphilis, although that’s plenty. This was the district of prostitutes, delinquents, and, significantly, tanners. Traditionally, tanning of hides is a noxious, polluting, unhealthy process.
The tanning of cattle hides was a labour-intensive and smelly activity After the hooves and horns had been chopped off the animal skins provided by butchers, the skins were immersed in pits filled with dog dung or lime, scraped and then sprinkled with urine and left to rot in a warm environment. Finally, the hides were soaked for up to twelve months in a tanning liquid to achieve the desired quality of leather. (source)
Back then, what are today’s attractive waterways were horribly polluted and putrid.
We can see a gentler remnant of the tanning era in some of the buildings of La Petite France. The top floors still have terraces that face south; these were for drying the hides.
You may notice that quite a few of the half-timbered buildings in La Petite France are just black and white — not the explosion of color that we’ve seen in the Alsatian villages. One reason was utilitarian: White is standard, replicable, and less expensive that color pigments. However, there’s a sectarian reason as well. In Strasbourg, buildings owned by Protestants were white; Catholic buildings were colorful. Even in the 17th century when Louis IV mostly outlawed Protestantism in France, Catholics and Protestants continued to co-exist in Alsace. Today, we can see traces of this cohabitation of sects.
Today, Strasbourg is the home of the European Parliament.
We wanted to visit one of the political centers of our adopted continent, a bit like our childhood pilgrimages to Washington DC.
Because Strasbourg’s roots are both Germanic and French, the choice of this city as home to the European Parliament is an important symbol in the coalescing of Europe after the world wars.
At the intersection of roads and influences, but also of conflicts, Strasbourg has always played a European role. And so it was quite natural that, after the Second World War, the city was chosen as a symbol of reconciliation to host the emerging European institutions. In 1949, it became the seat of the Council of Europe, and then, in 1958, of the European Parliamentary Assembly (renamed “European Parliament” in 1962).
Over the years, the institution has undergone profound changes: from an assembly comprising nominated members, it was transformed into an elected parliament, recognised as a major political player of the European Union.
The European Parliament currently represents about 450 million European citizens. It has 705 Members, elected for 5-year terms. It holds legislative, budgetary and political supervisory powers. The European Parliament is the largest parliamentary assembly elected by direct universal suffrage in the world.
(source)
The huge glass façade of the Parliament building, measuring 13,000 sq. meters, symbolizes the democratic transparency of the European Union. Its open oval tower, 60 meters high, reaches towards the Cathedral. The top of the tower appears unfinished, to symbolize the European project, a perpetual work in progress. ※
Members of the European Parliament meet twelve times a year during plenary sessions to debate and vote on European legislation. On the day of our visit, it wasn’t members of Parliament who filled the Hemicycle, which is the grand meeting hall. It was a large group of teenaged students who were learning about the workings of the institution.
We think they were easily getting the hang of the place; like good ministers, quite a few had their heads folded down over their phones.
Just a nice autumn view of the grounds of the Parliament:
And a slightly altered photo in the Parliament courtyard rotunda, looking optimistically up to the sky:
L’ami Schutz – Notable for tarte flambée over wood fire; tarte flambée is a kind of Alsacian pizza. No other tarte flambée restaurants in Strasbourg have wood fires because of all the wooden buildings. This restaurant does because its oven is outside in the garden.
October 2024