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WROCLAW
The Polish alphabet is extremely interesting. It has 24 letters. No V and no X. However it has other little strange letters. These all have a different sound. They have an L with a slash through it, a t with a slash thru it, an a with a little tail, and e with a little tail, and a z with a little dot over it. Ad on it goes. As a result the town that we cal Lodz (Lod zee) should be pronounced wuch. So to see a town name in Polish is still to have no idea how to pronounce it. The same goes for the town we are staying in tonight, Wroclaw. Not pronounced at all like it looks but rather as Vroystadt. During WWII the Germans renamed many polish towns I think because they couldn’t pronounce the polish names. Wroclaw was renamed Breslau.
We have a new guide today, Mathias. Our driver Michael picked us up at 8 am and we left for Swidnica which is in lower Silesia. This area has a very turbulent history. First a part of Prussia and then the Hapsburg Empire. The official religion kept changing. The Hapsburg Empire was
catholic and insisted that all its area convert to catholicism. The Church of Peace is the largest wooden religious building in Europe. It was built in Silesia in the mid 17th century amid religious strife that followed the Peace of Westphalia. The building of the church was constrained by physical and political conditions and is an expression of Lutheran ideology . The church is built of wood, clay and straw and had to be finished in one year. The structure is lovely on the outside resembling an English half-timber houses. On the inside it is spectacular. It supposedly can hold 7,000 people. It has a beautiful altar and a large organ. A painting of Martin Luther adorns one end of the church. It had an interesting feature of a set of four hour glasses on the pulpit so that the sermon would never last too long. As soon as all of the sand had run to the bottom of the half hour glasses, the sermons had to end.
We then had a delicious lunch of sour rye soup with polish sausage, and pirogue. It was delicious and quite filling.
We then went to the Ksiaz Castle which was
known as the Pearl of Lower Silesia. It was first built in the 13th century. It had many owners but between 1509 and 1941 it belonged to the Hochbergs. The Hochbergs expanded the castle and contributed to its splendor especially after Hans Henrich Xll married “Daisy” a member of the British aristocracy. Daisy was 17 at the time of the marriage and he was 48. Daisy was a free artistic spirit and he was of rigid Prussian upbringing. She decorated the castle beautifully and had all the beautiful gardens built. At this time the Hochbergs were one of the richest families in Europe. In 1941 the castle was confiscated by the Nazis. Under their occupation many historic chambers were destroyed and they built a series of tunnels under the castle. After the castle was liberated the Soviet army continued the destruction that the Nazis had started. In 1952 renovations work was started to restore the castle to its former elegance.
It was another busy day and we walked 1.62 miles and climber 11 sets of stairs.
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