| Stein am Rhein, with its medieval ambience and architecture, is like a woodcut from a book of bedtime stories. |
Out of a fairy tale: Stein am Rhein.
A round stone tower rose near the landing. It looked the sort of strange place where cruel despots locked up fair maidens like The Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel of the long, golden, hair fame. “What’s that?” we asked our guide, the elegant Verena Merz.
“That was a prison,” she said, confirming our presumption. “The entrance was on the third floor so no one could escape till they were hauled up again!”
Clearly, the worst crime was not paying your taxes to the hereditary Bailiffs, who ruled from a hill-top castle. Or to the Bishop who lived in a sprawling monastery at the other end of the town. Then, presumably, when a wretched prisoner was released, he made a bee-line for the Bath House. There, bathers stood on wooden gratings above heated stones while attendants sluiced them down with water, forming clouds of steam. It must have been an exhausting encounter with hygiene!
Enchanting sights
But if the realities of medieval life were rather grim and grimy, the visual appeal of their hamlets was enchanting. Beyond the tower and the Bath House, a quaint little cobbled street wound into the heart of the old town. It was like a woodcut from a thick-leafed book of bedtime stories. Half-timbered houses hemmed in both sides of the winding street. Often the upper floors thrust out over the ground floors. “When families grew,” Verena explained, “they added more rooms, making the first and second floors larger than the ones below.”
We walked past an overhanging old house into the main street and stopped, amazed by what we saw. Most houses, their jig-saw of wooden frames picked out in red or mauve, had intricate frescoes painted on their facades. Window boxes cascaded with flowers. And every so often, the faces of the painted buildings were embellished by beautiful oriel windows that jutted out over the street. William Shakespeare could have staged any of his lighter plays here without altering the setting one bit.
We stepped into the austerely unostentatious Museum Lindwurm. The last owners were two unmarried siblings. When they died they willed their mansion to the town and also gave a grant to be invested and used to help the people of Stein um Rhein maintain the character of their old buildings. Their own dwelling has been converted into a museum recapturing the life and times of their days. The street-level floor was the functional and service area: the wine-cellar with its huge barrels, the larder, kitchen, laundry; all with life-size models of servants at work. This led to the back court with pens for pigs and poultry, stalls for horses, a hayrick and a cart, and the servants’ quarters above. The first floor in front was the social and domestic one: an ante-room for visitors, a drawing and dining room with a table set for a meal, functional bedrooms. A 21st century family would have been delighted with such a town house, with a few modern modifications, of course.
Our walk down the street, when we left the museum, was a stroll through a bright gallery of legends. Water from a natural spring flowed into a stone fountain for pack horses and mules, a relic of the days when Stein am Rhein was the transshipment stage for cargo around the shallow stretch of the Rhein. The town’s prosperity had grown around this transportation activity.
Often transportation takes one far. We stopped at a mansion carrying an unusual mural. It depicted a rich man, shaded by a turbaned umbrella carrier, riding in his carriage drawn by four horses with postillion riders. Verena told us the story. As a boy the man had been captured by the Turks. He had made good use of his captivity by learning Turkish and the German spoken in Austria. He had been ransomed and asked to serve as a negotiator between the European powers and the Turks during a period of impending hostilities. His mission was so successful that he managed to defuse the crisis and was appointed as a Turkish Ambassador. He retired to this mansion and donated a golden chalice to the town. To this day, when people get married in Stein am Rhein, the Mayor can permit them to drink wine out of this historic cup as Verena and her husband had.
Mayors do, however, tend to be conscious of their own status. When a hotel owner asked the Mayor for permission to build an oriel window in his hotel, the Mayor refused. And oriel window, in those distant days, was a sign of elevated status and the Mayor did not consider a hotelier of sufficient stature to boast such a symbol. While the battle between the Mayor and the hotelier was raging, another person went ahead and built an oriel window on his own house. When the mayor saw it, he liked it so much that he lifted the ban on oriel windows. The watershed window still stands. Its corbels, or supports, show two people laughing with their tongues sticking out in hilarity. A German proverb says: “When two people fight, others laugh!” An excellent dictum for the self-inflicted wounds of coalition politics!
Happily ever after
And then, at the end of our tour, we paused at a house close to the Mayoral Mansion. Its façade was covered in murals showing people in various situations many of which were so medieval, embellished with mythical creatures that they made no sense to us. One, however, depicted a couple tied back to back on a stake, about to be burnt. They were star-crossed lovers, we were told, who had been condemned by their arrogant families. A perennially tragic tale that has serious echoes even in our own times. But, like all good fairy tales, it had a happy ending.
They were reconciled with their relatives and, as might be expected in a fairy tale town like Stein am Rhein, they lived happily ever after
Quick facts
Getting There: Swiss Rail from Zurich.
Accommodation:
Hotel Chlosterhof.
Email: mail@chlosterhof.ch
Can also be a day excursion from Zurich.
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