Via Romea Germanica Day 35: Kürnach - Randersacker (Würzburg)

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000)

I began my day breakfasting in my motel room on instant coffee and porridge with strawberries and banana slices, all smothered in coffee cream: no need to worry about calories, when you're walking 20 kilometres a day! My motel was located in the extreme outskirts of Würzburg, by the motorway exit, in a district of giant supermarkets, big box stores and logistics warehouses, and I left this area by the quickest possible route, taking a shortcut along the road to Estenfeld. Here I rejoined the Via Romea Germanica to walk along a cycling path beside the Kürnach, which, I discovered, is a stream as well as a village. 

Approaching the outskirts of Würzburg, I found a bakery on an industrial scale, a sort of bread factory, with a café where you could buy fresh baked goods, and stopped in for a cinnamon bun. Or cinnamon snail, as they call them here!

Identifying a pedestrian-friendly way to get in and out of a big city is never easy, but the Via Romea people have done a very good job in Würzburg. After passing through another district of light industry and warehouses, and successfully navigating a number of overpasses and railway tracks, the well-marked route went back to the cycling path along the Kürnach, coming out among office buildings and medical centres and then into the city centre.

Würzburg 

A bronze-age Celtic castle and then a Roman fort stood on the site of the present-day Marienberg Fortress, across the river from what is now a city of 130,000 people which has managed to preserve important traces of its past despite being very nearly wiped out in the Second World War. 

My first destination was, as always when walking into a big city, the cathedral. The organist was practicing when I arrived, and the volume and depth of the sound achieved by the modern (1968) cathedral organ was most impressive. I discovered that the organist plays a brief recital for fifteen minutes every day just after noon, and so I stayed to listen to the music.

The first church on the site of the present Würzburg Cathedral was built as early as 788, and consecrated that same year by Charlemagne himself; the current building was constructed from 1040 to 1225, and is Germany's fourth-largest cathedral in Romanesque style. It is dedicated to Saint Kilian, one of three Irishmen who evangelised the city in the year 686, and whose remains are preserved in the high altar. The cathedral was burnt out in 1945, rebuilt and consecrated in 1967, putting back the original carvings, decorations and gravestones, which had been removed for safekeeping during the war.

Next door to the cathedral is the 11th-century Neumünster, like the cathedral an odd mixture of Romamesque architecture and Baroque decoration with contemporary artworks and modern replacements for features destroyed in the war, such as the stained-glass windows. 

Würzburg is the site of one of the world's biggest ever mass trials held in peacetime: the Würzburg witch trials of 1626 to 1631, in which 600 to 900 alleged witches were burnt. It took the invasion of a Swedish king, Gustav Adolf, to put an end to the nonsense!

The year 1720 saw the laying of the foundations of the Würzburg Residenz. Designed for Prince-Bishop Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn by Balthasar Neumann, still a young unknown architect at the time, the palace took sixty years to complete. The best-known feature of the Residenz is its monumental staircase, roofed by an unsupported vault and decorated in 1752-53 with what was at the time the world's largest ceiling fresco, measuring 18 by 30 metres and representing the four continents: the masterpiece of Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who also frescoed the Imperial Hall.

The vaulted ceilings of the Grand Staircase and the Imperial Hall were so strong they survived the bombing of 1945, which destroyed the roof over the neighbouring apartments. In just 17 minutes on 16 March, 1945, 225 Royal Air Force  Lancaster bombers dropped about 400 tonnes of high-explosive bombs and more than 300,000 stick-type incendiary bombs. Würzburg was razed to the ground by a gigantic storm of fire; 90 percent of the historic city centre was destroyed, and at least 5000 people were killed.

But this was not the end of the city's suffering in the war: before American forces reached the banks of the River Main below Marienberg Fortress on 2 April, the German Armed Forces blew up all the bridges and prepared to defend the ruins of the city. Only after heavy artillery fire and three days of fierce fighting, with numerous military and civilian casualties, were American troops able to capture the whole of Würzburg on 6 April 1945.

Art historian John Davis Skilton, stationed in Würzburg as American Second Lieutenant and Officer of the Monuments and Fine Arts Section, organised the initial measures aimed at rescuing the city's cultural heritage. With the aid of German architects and historians, he succeeded in the nearly impossible task of finding lumber, tar paper and cement to replace the destroyed roofs over the palace and save Tiepolo's frescoes and other treasures of art and architecture from destruction through exposure to the elements. 

The furniture, decorations, artworks and wall panelling had all been removed from the palace and safely stored away, and could all be put back in place once the structure of the building had been repaired. The palace is now a UNESCO world heritage site, and more than 40 rooms are open to visitors, as well as the palace garden and the opulent Baroque royal chapel, which are open to the general public, with no admission fee.

Having had my fill of cultural attractions, I turned to culinary ones, which can be overwhelming when you come to a big city after spending a lot of time walking across open fields, stopping only in tiny villages! Limiting myself to street food only, I started with a herring sandwich from Nordsee, then a tray of take-out sushi, and finally a slice of raspberry cake at a table outside a bakery. Unusually for Germany, there is a fountain in the market square with drinking water (most fountains are clearly marked as not drinkable), so I was able to refill my water bottle and save money on drinks!

There are a variety of take-out food options in the market square, as well as sit-down cafés 

The Rococò Haus zum Falken was originally an inn, but is now the public library 

Domstrasse

On the Domstrasse, between the cathedral and the bridge, I went into a Media Markt to replace my power bank. Then I continued onto the Alte Mainbrücke, the old bridge, constructed between 1473 and 1543, with the statues of saints added in the 1730s. There is a wine seller on the bridge, and people buy glasses of Stein Wine and stand about on the bridge sipping their wine under the watchful eye of Saint Kilian, while admiring the view of the vineyards where the wine was made. 

The Via Romea Germanica doesn't actually cross the bridge over the Main, so I only walked to the middle and back, and then went down the stairs and walked along the side of the river for another five or six kilometres, to Randersacker. 

Once out of the city, following a cycling track through a riverside park, I was back among the vineyards. Randersacker is definitely a wine-making town; every other building seems to be a Weingut. My inn for tonight is an exception, conveniently located right where I came into the town. Not so conveniently, the hotel's restaurant is closed on Wednesdays, as are many of the other dining establishments in the village, but I eventually found an Italian pizzeria, and ordered a colourful pizza featuring plenty of vegetables!

Gästehaus Kröne

Kürnach - Randersacker 19 km