Imagine finding yourself in a town outside Frankfurt at a nippy, late-September 8AM, and all you want to do is crawl into the nearest bed because it’s 2AM back home. What fresh hell? Your concerned friend, on the other hand, wants to keep you awake as long as possible so you can have a post-lunch nap. So, he drives you around this town, his town of Darmstadt, happily chattering on about its history which include an artists’ colony and a wedding tower.
And then he makes you walk up a hill to this:
Ok, nice hallucination, I’m leaving to go sleep in the car now. Come find me after you climb back out the rabbit hole again. See, all I was expecting from Darmstadt was an industrial suburb with one very pre-glasnost building called the Fraunhofer Institute. We’d hang out there for the duration of my conference and then leave for the rest of Germany and Austria. As I said in my last post, Darmstadt pleasantly surprised the wind out of me.
Check the crest of the city of Darmstadt, replete with Gothic lion and fleur de lis, as it should be!
Then, there’s this bewildering non sequitur of a Russian chapel which sits right next door.
The chapel is actually older than the Wedding Tower. Turns out local Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt married a certain Russian Tsar Nicholas II in 1894. As a married couple, Nicholas and Alix traveled back to Darmstadt a number of times, when Nicholas refused to pray at any of the local churches. The story goes that, in order to attend proper church services while on vacation, he had this orthodox chapel constructed between 1897 and 1899 and had it underlain with soil brought in via train from Russia. Crazy? Yes. If you have that kind of money, however, and the art-loving locals bless your venture, who are future generations to question it?
Fat lot of good all that gilded pomp and prayer did. You may know Princess Alix better as Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, close friend of mystic Grigori Rasputin, and mother of the infamous Anastasia. She was also the last Empress of Russia, executed along with Nicholas in 1918 by Bolshevik firing squad.
That, ladies and gents, is way too much mind-blowing history and context to take in on one chilly, jetlagged morning. C’est la vie in Europe.
