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Book and Sword

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Book and Sword

Tag Archives: Innsbruck

Innsbruck’s Tell

29 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

archaeology, Innsbruck, modern, tell, whimsy

A street which slopes visibly upwards, so that there are steps down from the sidewalk to the ground floor of the shops

Looking south along the Universitätstraße, Innsbruck

Mud brick has fallen out of fashion, so cities no longer rise ever higher on the jumbled bones of dead houses. When the Flood or the Umman-Manda next come, perhaps we will regret that, for there is nothing like a good tell for persuading nasty people to go brutalize someone else. But if you follow the Universitätsstraße which runs from a vanished city gate past the Hofkirche and a secularized cloister by the theological university towards the railway arcade, you can see this process still at work.

A gigantic excavation 6 or 8 metres deep with the foundations of mud-brick buildings at the bottom

The trench down to the Old Elamite 15th city in the Ville Royale at Susa. There are three tells like this at Susa covering a square kilometer.

I suspect that this rise in street level had something to do with the works to construct the railway arcade, or maybe converting the street from bare earth to asphalt with sewers below. These days the city fathers of Innsbruck have rediscovered that rebuilding the streets is a great way to create work, but they seem determined not to raise the streets any further just move a bus stop here and a tram station there. In a few thousand years, I don’t think Innsbruck will look like Susa. But customs change and the future is full of surprises.

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A Tag from the Bard

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Innsbruck, modern, not an expert

One would think that someone coming this way on a cycle with headlights and reflectors would need to watch out to the right and bear a little bit left, since cyclists coming from the left can see you coming and slow down if they want to make the turn onto the bridge, but anyone coming from the right will only see you as they start turning onto the bridge. But its never a good idea to assume that people can see and think!

On Wednesday evening, I calculated that the cyclist coming from the left like a bat out of the Land of No Return would either continue straight or slow down as he turned onto the bridge. I was wrong, but the Bard always has an apposite quotation!

So he spoke, and balanced the spear far-shadowed, and threw it,
And struck the sevenfold-ox-hide terrible shield of Aias
In the uttermost bronze, which was the eighth layer upon it,
And the unwearying bronze spearhead shore its way through six folds
But was stopped in the seventh ox-hide.

– Iliad, 7.244-248, tr. Lattimore

Fleece gloves with a cut through one finger from a cyclist ramming into the wearer

These gloves are just threefold thinsulate, but they will do too

The Innsbrucker Labyrinth

13 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

21st century, Innsbruck, monster, whimsy

The Innsbrucker Marktplatz in July 2017. Where do you turn, and turn again? How do delivery vans, bicyclists, and pedestrians share the space with the construction site, the underground garage [right next to a major river, natch], and the farmer’s market?

Last summer I regaled my gentle readers with the story of the Innsbrucker Scylla and Charybdis. Time passed, and that monster was vanquished (perhaps when the wine bar on the riverbank side of the farmers’ market noticed that a lack of pedestrian access was cutting into its profits). But its always possible that when one monster dies, another will take its place and occupy the vacant real estate, or ecological niche if you want to go all second-edition-Dungeons-and-Dragons. I see a labyrinth with walls and paths which shift and turn when I am not looking, and while I am pretty sure that the dung on the street belongs to the horses which pull the tourist carriages, and all the cows in town are up in the high pastures for the summer, I am not so sure that there is not a minotaur lurking about, perhaps in the depths of the underground parking garage under the Marktplatz. For something built metres away from a river, it descends through a surprising numbers of spiralling turns, and that raises another disturbing possibility. Did the diggers of the storm drain delve too greedily and too deep? The Nordkette has been wrapped in an unseasonable fog split only by flashes like lightning of late …

Since I took this photo, the labyrinth has vanished and been replaced with a fish market. But I would not be surprised if the dragons across the street take up residence there, or a sea serpent wriggles its way up from the Inn across the stones which Hapsburg engineers enthusiastically laid in concrete to keep the Inn within its bounds. If the last few years have taught me anything, it is that monsters are not as easy to banish as we think.

The Ice-Spitting Dragons of Innsbruck

04 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

dragon, gargoyle, Innsbruck, medieval, no seriously I read it on the Internet

A copper rainspout with an icicle hanging from its mouth

The dragon-mouthed waterspout on the former church opposite the Marktplatz, Innsbruck. Photo by Sean Manning, January 2017.

A few weeks ago the Scholarly Skater asked “What beautiful old places are there where you live? Send me some pictures so I can enjoy them, too!” I took some photos in January which sort of qualify.

Dog people know how dogs start to pant when they get too hot. Dragon people know that some species start to drool when they get too cold. While the days when the Tirolers spent all winter huddled in the parlor* or the kitchen are long gone, there is usually snow on the ground in the valley bottoms for a few weeks per year. The dragons sometimes get tetchy as they warm up, and have been known to spit ice at passersby. A former room-mate was injured by one of these spitting dragons. The City of Innsbruck has the street-cleaners keep careful watch on buildings where dragons are nesting, and leans colourful wooden poles against buildings to warn pedestrians not to approach until the cold weather is over.

A copper rainspout with an icicle hanging from it

Another view of the dragon-headed rain gutter on the former church opposite the Marktplatz, Innsbruck. Photo by Sean Manning, January 2017.

* German Stube “a heated room for sitting” … semantically equivalent to English parlour (a Weinstube in Tirol today is more or less a beer parlour in Farley Mowat’s Saskatchewan) but etymologically related to the word which came into English as stove because that was what made it fit for sitting in in winter) ⇧

The Tiroler Scylla and Charybdis

01 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern, Not an expert

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

21st century, Clashing Rocks, Innsbruck, modern, Scylla and Charybdis, Tirol, traffic

A map showing a rectangular building in the bend of a street with another street running along its other two sides.

A map of the closed main route (red) and blue temporary route
around the Markthalle, Innsbruck. The official sign makes the changes look very orderly.

Odysseus overcame Scylla and Charybdis, Jason the clashing rocks. Cyclists heading towards the Innsbrucker Hauptuni while the streets are torn up to install storm drains face another fearsome challenge, the alley behind the Markthalle. I lost the words to tell stories some time ago, so below the fold I will reveal its horrors in pictures:

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Heraclitus Sighted in Innsbruck

02 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Medieval, Modern

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ancient, Archaic Greek, Heraclitus, Innsbruck, modern

A steel construction fence of wires and tubes with tall stone houses and snowy mountains in the background.  A panel of cloth on the fence has a photo of a hand reaching towards a stream and the label "Alles fließt"

I am more familiar with this one as πάντα ῥεί but “Alles Fließt” and “everything flows” are perfectly fine translations too. Looking north from the Innsbrucker Marktplatz not so far from Conrad Seusenhofer’s house and the mansions and warehouses turned hotels and souvenier shops, April 2016.

Low Water in the Sill

26 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

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Tags

Innsbruck, modern, not_an_expert, River Sill

A crystal-clear river with broad stretches of gravel and some hibernating trees on either bank and a blocky glass building in the background.

Low water in the river Sill at the beginning of March 2015. Photo by Sean Manning.

Living in Innsbruck, its hard to ignore the changes in the local waterways over the course of the year. The local rivers are fed by runoff, and these days large areas of the Alps are bare by May. I took these photos on the tenth of March, in a week where snow fell for several days but melted as it hit the ground of the valley.

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Rus in Urbe

10 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern, Not an expert

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ancient, farming, Innsbruck, modern

SAM_4758

It is easy for ancient historians to forget about farming. Ancient literature does not say much about it, ancient art rarely depicts it, and farming is distant from our own lives. Yet most people in the ancient world made most of their living by farming or herding or fishing, and the basic realities of farming pervaded their mental world. I am therefore glad that some of the land near the Zentrum für alte Kulturen in Innsbruck is still working fields and orchards. Although the caked soil at the edge of the field is marked by the tyres of the farmer’s tractor and not the hooves of his oxen, and the plot is crammed between a modern glass monstrosity, the loading dock of a supermarket, and a concert hall built out of shipping containers, it is still worth watching as the seasons turn.

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