Day 9: Ruins

Just one ruin, actually, but we’ll get to that. Your typical Euro vacation will run from Friday-Sunday over the week, maximizing the weekends, meaning, if you count your arrival on Saturday as Day 1, by Day 9 you’re heading back to the airport.

Suckers! I booked this for two weeks plus, so we still had days to burn. Since we were just coming off of a long drive day (Heidelberg) and heading into one tomorrow (Stuttgart) we chose to stay local. Walk around Mitteltal, visit their local church (we lit candles all across the trip) and even take an afternoon dip in the hotel pool – we’d lugged swimsuits all the way from America, after all.

But all that’s not a complete day, and not 5 miles away as the crow flies lies a highly recommended ruined church – the Allerheiligen (All Saints) outside of Ruhestein. Now, 5 miles by air will still take you 30 on the ground in the Black Forest, but that was still in our schedule. We headed out there in the mid morning.

The concept of a ruin is the work of modern man, even if the ruin itself is not. It comes from an unlikely and possibly last alliance between the poet and the scientist, who proposed the rather outlandish idea that a dilapidated building should neither be destroyed nor repaired. I wonder sometimes if JRR Tolkien had this in mind when he had the Elves and Men join forces, one final time, to defeat Sauron at the end of the Second Age. Well, not really.

Regardless of the desire of poets and archaeologists, having a decaying building in the center of a town is generally bad business. Sensibly, most burghers would not tolerate them until it became apparent that tourist money was to be made, but by then it was usually too late. Thus, what ruins remain in Europe (and there are more than a few) are generally located too far away from a town to be considered useful land. The secluded Allerheiligen certainly fits that bill, as did the old castle ruin above Baden-Baden.

Side note – there are a few city-ruins scattered here and there. Rome, obviously, and that stands as a testament to just how backwater Rome was for the 1,500 years after the Fall. And how large the Empire was before. The remaining 50,000 medieval locals viewed the Forum as a cheap and endless supply of masonry, who can blame them? They were able pilfer bricks and blocks for centuries, and still the Colosseum stands (mostly).

Further aside: There’s another type of city ruin – the memorial, the testimony to catastrophe, the warning to future generations. Think of the A-bomb dome in Hiroshima or the rusted “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over Dachau. I suspect the ruin above Heidelberg was meant to serve a similar purpose, unheeded. But this ruin was decidedly not of that type.

Allerheiligen hit the proper ruin notes. Peace and seclusion, green and stone, angles and archways. It must take a serious amount of effort to keep a ruin in this state – any homeowner knows how quickly the vines and weeds will encroach on unused space – but the squad in charge here makes it look like you’ve stumbled on a church no one has seen in 500 years.

There’s a restaurant and delightful gift shop just past the ruin (more local schnapps!) And several walking trails that branch out from the site, one leading to a WWI memorial, another that parallels the stream that tumbles down along the site. A sample itinerary – take the walk down along the stream, hoof it back up, and have some restorative wine at the restaurant’s patio. The kids can have the $5 yoghurt smoothie. OK, we did none of this, but you can. Instead, we drove up to the Mummelsee, as I'd mentioned earlier, for mountaintop views and Black Forest cake.

For the evening: we dined again at the hotel, and for the first time, they let us down. Most dishes were ok, but Annemarie ordered a Fisch Maultaschen (smoked fish ravioli, basically) that was inedible. But we also got to watch a spectacular thunderstorm roll across the hills, from our balconies. Before we left, Germany was going to give us a show.