Lubeck - Hanseatic heritage
Medieval merchants in north Germany
Some towns evolve over the ages. Others remain, forever, testimony to a single age of greatness. Lubeck, German merchant town on the Baltic sea, is still a medieval city, and on a misty winter's day, when the sounds of the city streets are dulled by the fog and the modern town is far out of sight, you might even feel you have stepped back into the Middle Ages.
Lubeck was the commercial hub of Europe for three centuries, from about 1200 to 1500. It was the head of the Hanseatic League, the world's greatest trading bloc of the time, and traded as far as Novgorod in Russia, as well as down the Atlantic coast to Bruges and London. Lubeck was particularly lucky since it had access to the herring fisheries of the Baltic - but also to the salt from Luneberg, fifty miles south, with which they could pickle the herring and export it.
There's no decent building stone here on the Baltic coast, nor is it an area where forests flourish, so the main building material is brick - and it's this which gives the town its character. The churches are brick, the houses are brick, even the main gate to the town is brick - the Holstentor, built for show rather than defence, at the very end of the Hansa's period of greatness in the 1470s, and just before it began to decline.
And they built high in Lubeck, a city still marked by its seven great spires. You can climb the tower of St Peter's and look down on the courtyards and gardens behind the houses, and out over the flat land toward the sea. The houses are thin, with narrow passages behind them, and reach four, five, even six storeys high, with stepped gables and often with pulleys over a high door to the attic warehouse.
Lubeck stayed modestly successful even after the decline of the Hansa, though its great days were gone. It could afford a great organist like Dietrich Buxtehude - Bach himself made a pilgrimage to Lubeck to hear his playing - and the work of celebrated organ builder Arp Schnitger to give Buxtehude the instrument he wanted. It could even afford a delicate new Renaissance façade on the gothic town hall. But there wasn't quite enough money for wholesale rebuilding of the town or its churches, and so it stays - with a few exceptions - a perfect Gothic city to this day
There is something rather heavy about Lubeck. Perhaps it's mainly the fact that this brick isn't the delicate pink of Toulouse, or the fiery red of East Anglia - it's a dull, dirty brownish red. But it seems to have got into the soul of the place. There was a famous painting of the dance of death in one of the churches - and there are some gruesome mausoleums in the cathedral. The grimmest sight of all perhaps is the bells of St Mary's, twisted and shattered where they fell from the tower to the pavement during the air raid of 1942. Shards of the bell are buried several inches deep in the stone.
But there's a lighter side to the town. Warm lights shine out of a café half way up the road by the side of the town hall; it's the Niederegger marzipan Konditorei. The Lubeck marzipan tradition started in 1800 and it's still going strong. You can get marzipan pigs, marzipan frogs, marzipan fruit - probably marzipan skeletons too.
And on one of those bitterly cold Baltic winter days, when the city seems to shrink to a few hundred yards of grey mist, a cup of hot, sweet coffee - mit Zahne of course - is just what you need.