Walking through Bavarian villages

This is the last post on Bavaria for now.

In this post I want to show you some impressions from different villages.

You can find rich decorated houses in each village. Not only the craftsmen (i.e. butcher, bakery and so on) paint their houses. Also the village major and the government buildings (i.e. post office, fire brigade) are decorated as well as hotels and common houses. I love it.

As a general rule you can say, the smaller the village, the more decorated house you can see. In bigger cities you can also find some, but less than in smaller villages (as a percentage of  ‘all’ houses). Houses are less uniform in smaller villages.

Maybe you want to take some time to review the past posts until my next post will be online. You can do it easily by clicking on the tag Bavaria in the right sidebar.

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Thanksgiving

Maybe you’ve heard about Thanksgiving in a Hollywood movie. But here, in Germany, it has a slightly different meaning. It’s a traditional religious feast for giving thanks to God for the harvest. It’s held in autumn. And even it’s a religious feast, the date isn’t necessarily fix. It’s mostly held on the first Sunday of October, but the date varies from region to region.

For Thanksgiving the sanctuary is decorated with local fruits, vegetables, potatoes, grain and bread. The decoration vary from region to region. There is no rule, what has to be shown. In Bavaria these decorations are very nice and more elaborated, than in other German states. Many traditions are still in place in Bavaria, even they are already vanished away in other regions.

Here are some impression I took in Marienmünster of Dießen and The Wies.

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Happy Valentins day

Inside The Wies

Today I’ll show you the interior of The Wies (Die Wies), as I proposed in my last post. If you wonder, why I write the article with a capital “T”, that’s because even in German the church is called with an article, because there are more churches with that name, but this one is a special one.

Wies is Bavarian dialect for Wiese (= meadow, grassland, grazing land). That’s because it’s located out in the fields.

One of the special features of this church is the ceiling. When standing inside and looking at the ceiling,  you see a white, arced ceiling decorated with stucco and colorful frescos. A fresco is a painting, when the artist had painted the color in the wet plastering. You can imagine, how hard that is. Laying on your back and painting over-head without any possibility to correct any mistake.

But, the ceiling isn’t arced! It’s plane, but the painting is so artistic distorted to create the illusion of an arced ceiling. That’s called: Trompe-l’œil (= cheating the eye). It’s really incredible and unbelievable. You can find this fact only in the German Wikipedia, and of course a local guide can tell you about this. The technique itself is describe in the English Wikipedia, too.

I love this church. It was my second visit. The first one was many years ago on a vacation trip with my parents.

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The Wies

The Wies church is also a famous church. It’s also located out-of-town in beautiful landscape on a small hill. A big parking space is available for busses as well as for individuals. When visiting the church, expect many people, because it’s a pilgrimage church and wonderful decorated inside.

Right next to the parking ground, at the foot of the church hill, there is a small chapel. Even this chapel is much decorated.

I split this post in two parts, as I did with the Marienmünster in Dießen. Today I show you the outside and a view from the hill. The inside will follow in my next post.

The left photo is taken from behind the church, while it was drizzling. In the buildings left of th church you can find gift shops and restaurants.

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