Dresden May 26 to May 29

May 26

A 2-hour train ride from Prague to Dresden.  We check into the new Swisshotel.  Very nice, but rooms have a strange set up with the bathroom essentially part of the room.  There is a very large indoor shopping center nearby.  We bought another computer at the Saturn electronics store.  Saturn seems larger than any Best Buy and offers a huge variety.  We bought an HP Pavilion.  Over the next couple of days we spend the usual hours getting set up.  Victor's tips are very helpful.

We dine at a Thai restaurant.  Nice change.  Excellent duck.


May 27.

Dresden, once one of the most beautiful German cities, largely survived WWII intact until February 1944, when the allies bombed it to shards. Around 25,000 were killed.  Large swathes of downtown Dresden remained vacant during the Communist period. Beginning in the 1990s, the historic center buildings were restored and the surrounding neighborhoods rebuilt with modern buildings. There is some unavoidable sadness to this place.

A large parcel of land to the south of the old center is being built on now.  The archaeologists have been called in to evaluate the site.

The development will be called "Judenhof," the area's pre-Nazi name.

We visited the Zwinger. We spent most of the time at the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, the old masters gallery.  It has this iconic Vermeer:

Bruce took a quick turn around the porcelain collection. We both looked at the old scientific items.

We celebrated Leslie's birthday at Eidelweiss with roesti potatoes Zurich style with veal and mushrooms in a cream sauce and venison and potato dumplings in a cranberry sauce with salsify. Very good.

Wednesday May 28

Today, we spent a lot of time a getting to know the computer and getting out the blog backlogs.

We visited the Schloss.  A so-so exhibit on Dionysos Greek and modern, ottoman stuff, armory.  Then the famous Green Vault - a collection of all the gaudy precious stuff that monarchs collect.

Sandwich lunch. Dinner at Dresden 1900 Museumsgastronomie.  Just from the name, we had to try it.  There was an old trolley car inside and the wait staff wore conductor's caps.  Pork and gravy over bread.

Finishing Armenia May 16 to 18

Still trying to catch up.  We are writing this from our tiny room in Amsterdam on May 29.


Friday May 16, 2014

We headed back to Yerevan, stopping at a recently discovered Jewish Cemetery.  A local bishop looking for a source of water came across some stones with lettering that was later identified as Hebrew.  Scholars from Hebrew University dated the 70 odd tombstones to a period straddling the 13th and 14th centuries.  It is not known where this community came from or where the went. There is no documentary evidence of a Jewish community there.  Apparently, they were there about 100 years.  The symbols accompanying the Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions suggest some connection with the ruling class from Georgia.

Lunch was the usual salads and grilled pork, perhaps the best meat we have had.

Our last stop was the caravanserai at the top of the pass linking Armenia with its eastern panhandle and the Ngoro Karabakh region, about 7500 feet up.  It served to shelter merchants and their animals using this part of the Silk Route:

 There was a small group of horses nearby.

Our group departure dinner was hastily arranged.  We shared the dining room at the Ararat Restaurant with a group of 20 Russian military personnel.  They were very large and determined to get drunk.  Public drunkenness is very rude in Armenia.  The band stopped playing and walked away.

May 17.  The group departs, but we remain in Yerevan a couple of days.   We are exhausted.  We revisited the manuscript museum (incorporated in earlier report) and slept.

No lunch. Dinner at Yerevan Tavern:  soupy dumplings, tolma, "province chicken stew".

May 18.  We went to the National Art Gallery which shares its building with the History Museum.  The quality of the art was not enough to keep Leslie, who returned to the hotel for more sleep.  Bruce continued with the paintings and went on to the historic maps and ethnology sections.

Bruce then walked across town to the Cascade, a public park with a lot of opportunities for people watching.

 The main shopping street in Yerevan is closed to autos:

Armenia May 11

Sunday May  11

Up early by bus to Armenia.   At the border, we must change buses and drivers, so we trudge our baggage a couple hundred meters and change our money from Georgian lari to Armenian dram.

 Like Georgia, Armenia has a unique alphabet.  Georgia's has 33 characters...

and Armenia's has 39.

 Each alphabet was devised to fit the language (one sound per letter).  The first version of the Georgian alphabet was being used by the end of the 4th century.  The current Georgian alphabet is said to be derived from grapevine tendrils.  The Armenian alphabet was created by Mestrop Mashtots in 405.  He was sainted for his effort and is very well known in Armenia.

Both Georgia and Armenia are Christian:  Georgia is Orthodox; Armenia is Apostolic.

 The Armenian Apostolic Church is so designated as the first to bring Christianity to Armenia were Saints Bartholomew and Thaddeus, two of the apostles, the followers of Christ.  In the late 3rd century, Saint Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned for 13 years by the king for evangelizing. He was released when the king was sick and Saint Gregory's prayers healed him. The king therefore declared Christianity the state religion in 301 and Gregory became the first head if the church, the Catholicos.  To enforce the state religion, all pagan temples were destroyed (except for Garni, infra) and churches built on them.  However, to make the new religion more palatable, some pagan ritual was incorporated.  This included animal sacrifice which is still practiced today.  To what extent we do not know, but we saw this sheep being led out of the church where it was possibly blessed for ritual sacrifice.

Our main stop is at the Hagphat Monastery, perched above the industrial town of Yesayan.  The monastery was built in the 10th century.

It has very thick walls to resist earthquakes.  Also, the main church has clever interlocking blocks.

Everything is beautifully carved.

. 

YeSayan has a seven-hundred-year-old bridge.

Lunch was at the home of a couple who belonged to a sect (name unknown) that separated from the Russian Orthodox Church. They split over issues like icons.  They resemble the Amish in their rejection of modern technology.  Our host had the only TV in the community. We were not allowed to take pictures lest they end up on the internet.

The meal was a cup of tea, meat borscht, and compote ( sweet fruit juice).  On the table were the usual salad, bread stuffed with cabbage and carrots and fried potato bread.

Dinner was a stuffed baked lavash stuffed with beef and chicken.  We had a lecture from Boris, a local archaeologist who is excavating a site we will visit.  He found evidence of cannabalistic offerings.  More on this when we visit Areni.

Leaving Budapest Oct 11-13

Sat. Oct 11.

       We take in the Parliament Building.   This is the Senate chamber.  

It all looks like this.

Bruce is sick (food poisoning?),  Short day.  He sleeps 4 hours +.

We happened on to a very controversial monument just recently erected over great protest. It is the WWII monument.  It shows the archangel Gabriel (a symbol of Hungary) attacked by a German eagle.  The criticism is that it glosses over Hungary's role in the war and in the holocaust by showing Hungary as a victim just like the Jews.  The monument is dedicated to the "victims of the German occupation".

We do not know whether the stuff in front represents participation in the 70 th year remembrance or part of the protest.  We deduce that it was placed by Jews because of the stones.

 Also, the many shoes may be a reference to the other holocaust monument that we did not see.

As the Russians approached Budapest, the fascist Arrow Cross marched the Jews to the Danube and shot them. Many of these Jews had been protected through the war by papers issued by Wallenberg.

We dined at Strudel.  Shared crispy piggy (sic) chops with potato strudels.  We took back apple and cherry + cottage cheese strudels.  All great.
****
Sun. Oct 12   visit to Jewish quarter.   This is a hugely popular tourist destinatiom, with long ticket lines.

Hertzl was born in this neighborhood.

Judaism in Hungary

Before the war there were three types of Jewish worship in Budapest.  As soon as it was permissible, in the 1870s, each group built a synagogue.  First there is the orthodox.  About 20% of the Jews today worship there. The interior is distinguished by stained glass skylights:

Worshippers purchased their seats and looked their payer books when not in use.

Floor marble decoration:

Then there is the Neologue.  This started as part of the reform movement, ie, it used the "Hamburg rite".  The description off the rite is posted at the synagogue:

About 80% worship there.  They are much closer to orthodoxy now.

Unusual features include 2 pulpits.  The pulpits held translators, as there were  both Hungarian and German speaking congregants.

A third group was between these two.  Its synagogue is no longe active.  It went for an oriental style.  The “minarets” are indeed part of a puropose built synagogue.

Restoration of the interior is under way.  The interior of the dome is finished.

An engraved banner, now on a paper mockup, states:

      The Almighty said the ten commandments in one sentence in order to teach us that the ten commandments are one organic unit and cannot be separated into parts.  The first tablet contains the preaches of the faith; the second one the preaches of the ethics.  The ethics can (sic) exist without the faith, but in the same way,  no Jewry exists without morals.

     

    



Behind the neologue cemetery, there is a memorial to the 2200+ Jews that were murdered here by the Hungarian fascists (Arrow Cross) as the Russians were at the city's edge.

 There is a name of each leaf of this willow tree sculpture:

And a memorial to Raoul  Wallenburg:

There is a museum with Judaica, including a few elaborate bris knives.

Part of the neighborhood has become popular with the younger, hipper set.


We ate lunch at a "ruin pub."  Consumed the meat and vegetarian starters and 2 small glasses of wine -- Weniger kekfrankos 2011 and Heimann kadarka 2012.  The list was extensive and cost was less than $3 each glass.  The wines here are a surprise on the plus side.

***
Monday, October 13.  Last day here.

We walked down a few blocks of Andressy Ut,, a UNESCO world heritage site.  There are now over 1000 of these designations.  The currency has become quite inflated.

Anyway, one is supposed to admire the Hungarian secession movement architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These structures are often embellished (?) with statues like this one:

After coffee, we toured St. Stephan basilica.

After it went up around 1852, the interior dome fell.  Then it was severely damaged in WWII.   Today it is in pristine condition.

 Here's the interior dome:

Elevators allowed us to view the dome structure

and the city

Besides the basic Byzantine format, there are many hints of eastern influence.

This Saint Stephen is the canonized first king of Hungary, ruled 1000-1038.   His right hand is in this reliquary:

His statute is behind the main altar:

For lunch, Bruce had Hungarian fish soup, a "must" according to our Baedeker.  Too greasy with a lot of paprika.  Leslie had a chicken strudel.  

We snacked in the room in lieu of dinner and packed for tomorrow's early flight.

Tuesday, October 14

We fly to the states.  Our travel blog is ended.