Spared the ravages of history, Quedlinburg has one of the world’s biggest collections of medieval architecture
THE FAIRYTALE town of Quedlinburg is as far as you can get from German clichés about engineering and efficiency.
With narrow, crooked streets and timber-frame houses tilting at alarming angles, you almost expect Hansel and Gretel to slope around the corner.
Spared the ravages of history, the town in the central Harz mountains offers one of the largest ensembles of medieval architecture in the world – 1,300 half-timbered, wood-and-wattle houses in all.
Walk around this charming town for a few hours and you soon feel gratitude for whatever miracle allowed it to survive, a place where Germany’s romantic heart trumps its efficient head.
After Charlemagne’s 9th century Frankish empire fell apart under bickering heirs, his family line eventually died out and the East-Frankish empire, much of today’s German territory, fell to a Saxon aristocratic line.
In 919 their ruler Heinrich I (in English, Henry the Fowler due to his love of bird hunting), was crowned head of this empire and went on his own expansion conquering Slavic Brandenburg and Bohemia to the south-east.
A travelling monarch, he returned often to his favourite palace on a hill over Quedlinburg and on each visit until his death in 936 he presented a piece of treasure to the convent founded on the castle hill by his wife Mathilde. For 800 years until Napoleon’s arrival the abbesses of the convent would rule the town, an early example of sisters doing it for themselves.
Today the castle hill offers wonderful views over the red-roofed town which has had many lucky escapes over the years.
Spared Allied bombs, it found itself in post-war East Germany and was thus spared the worst excesses of West Germany’s car-friendly city redevelopment.
“Having no money was a blessing, too, because no one in the east could afford to tear down the buildings,” says Barbara, a resident, artist and part-time tour guide.
Quedlinburg’s luck appeared to have run out in 1989 when authorities scrabbled together money to demolish an entire derelict district, but fortune smiled again and the plans went the way of the Berlin Wall.
Huge subsidies have flowed since unification to renovate the Unesco-listed city and popular destination with West German tour groups.
After a day of exploring, I spend the night in the spectacular, newly renovated home of a friend and fall asleep pondering the black support beams overhead that are 800 years old. Certainly beats counting sheep.
Quedlinburg was the scene of a great drama in 1945 when, shortly after the war, a substantial part of the monastery’s priceless treasure vanished from a mine where it had been put for safe keeping.
Among the lost treasure was the Samuel Gospel, a priceless manuscript donated by King Heinrich. The gospel has a heavy cover of jewels and coral and in the gold-ink text, most importantly, the only known signature from the period.
Other objects stolen included a bejewelled comb from Heinrich, indestructible Byzantine glass vessels for religious relics and a precious ivory reliquary chest donated by Heinrich’s son, Otto I.
The treasure remained missing, presumed lost, until a dealer approached the West German government in 1989 offering to sell the gospel.
Discreetly, they put an art detective on the case, who identified the most likely suspect as Joe Meador, a Texan-born art student who had served in Quedlinburg after the war.
Hearing about the mine from a fellow soldier, Meador had broken in, smashed open some crates and posted home what he could carry out in one visit.
After the war, he occasionally pulled out the treasure to impress friends and lovers, said Owen Hunsacker, a fellow veteran and friend, to Texas Monthlymagazine in 1990.
“When Joe handled these things his eyes took on a strange, forbidden look, like he was caressing his neighbour’s wife,” said Hunsacker. When he asked Meador why he held on to the treasures, he replied: “I just take them out, thumb through them and admire them.” Hunsacker said he had convinced Meador to return the treasure when he became ill with cancer. His health deteriorated quickly and he died in 1980 aged 63, leaving his estate to his sister and brother.
Shortly before the detective tracked Meador's family to Texas in 1990, West Germany bought the Samuel Gospelback for $3 million (€2.3 million). But the game was up for the Meador heirs: months later, the detective secured a court order to open their safety deposit boxes, disclosing the rest of the priceless treasure in battered cardboard boxes. In 1993, after nearly half a century, the priceless treasure was returned to its rightful home.
