On the left bank of the Rhine, we have Mainz – cathedral domes and church spires and stuff. On the other side of the river, we have Mainz-Kastel. Which gets…
…Orbis.Well, not quite accurate – it’s actually Urbi et Orbi (“to the city and to the world”) – and Orbis, a small town in the Palatinate with a population of…
2014 was the celebration of the 1200 year anniversary of the demise of Carolus Magnus’/Charlemagne/Charles the Great/Karl der Große. King of the Franks who united most of Western Europe during…
The Jewish cemetery in Hechtsheim
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – dig at your peril in Mainz. You’re likely to stumble across a Roman boatyard with the remains of 17 canoes.…
I attended the laying of two Stolpersteine – “stumbling blocks’ – yesterday morning on a cold wet day that was a friend to no-one and which seemed more than appropriate…
A long time ago (3 years actually, but at my age…), Robin Fullmer wrote to me about a program on a Jewish emigree to New Zealand, I did some research…
…but heaps of other good stuff… Natural History Museum
Mainz has a coloured history – Romans, Franks, Vandals, Swedes, Austrians, French all turned up at some stage and stayed for various periods of time – but it’s the bleu-blanc-rouge…
Or Maria Ward, pronounced in German to rhyme with “bard” Yorkshire lass, born into a Catholic family at a time (16C) of great religious conflict in England, forcing her relocation…
The old Customs building at the river port, a fine example of creative conversion and now housing start-ups and media companies. The rest of the area will be growing apartments…
……”Bring on the cavalry”, you’d be dead wrong. Also if you’re thinking of the English Civil War. Royalists, Roundheads and such. A “Kavalier” is an architectural term, being a firing…
The Osteiner Hof at the head of the Schillerplatz has a bit of history. Even for Mainz The Osteiner Hof (“Court of Ostein”) is one of several Baroque-era palatial mansions…
The Dionysos restaurant in the Germanikusstrasse is generally accepted as being the best Greek restaurant in Mainz. Tucked in behind the Kästrich and off the tourist track, you have to…
Jürgen Winterberg knows about these things. He runs the meticulously researched bier-in-mainz.de website and has the history of the 78 breweries which have lived and died in and around Mainz.…
The Feldbergschule on the Feldbergplatz is one of those massively forbidding buildings that have survived the onslaughts of bombers and city planners and continue to dominate their surroundings. Built in…
The Nasengässchen (Nose Alley) links Leichhof (the site of the original church cemetery, Leiche meaning corpse) and Grebenstrasse (possibly originating from Graben, a ditch) in the Altstadt. There are heaps…
…but not off topic. In Frankfurt (which STILL doesn’t have a DP…) the other day and was taken by strips of fabric on the phalanx of plane trees lining the…
Show me another kiddies’ playground that backs onto a medieval city wall and I’ll send you a signed 10c coin. Only in Mainz…
….the district military recruiting office in the Kapellenstrasse in Gonsenheim is now a medical centre, healing everything from ingrowing toenails to ER stuff. Also the offices of Theo Plod…er Braunshausen,…
They could have organised the meteorological side of things a bit better and Ms jb could have not been suffering from TFA (Totally F@#&ed Ankle) Syndrome, but apart from that,…
Rotes Tor, Rheinpromenade, Mainz
The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, “How does it work?” The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost?” The graduate with…
New place just down the road from the remnants of the city wall (which would still have been standing, had not the populace murdered Archbishop Arnold von Selenhofen in 1160…
An embrasure (aka loophole, slit, arrowslit, balistraria, barbican, crenel) in the remants of the city wall on the Rheinstrasse.
Wilhelm Holzamer, novelist, librarian to Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, Paris correspondent for a number of German newspapers, Nieder-Olmer gets his own monument.
The fortified church of St Igbert stands on the eastern reaches of Ingelheim, below the Mainzer Berg (200 metres, you drop 100 metres in little over a kilometer, most of…
Or is it “Iri”? Whatever. Roof garden at the top of Emmerich-Josef-Strasse. (Named after Prince-Elector and Archbishop Emmerich Joseph von Breidbach zu Bürresheim. Doubtlessly truncated to spare the city coffers…
…or has your horse been playing “tag” again..? St Martin about to take the last fence in the Kupferbergterrassen Stakes
Company….dis..missed! This what the Osteiner Hof used to be. The Osteiner Hof (“Court of Ostein”) is one of several Baroque-era palatial mansions along Schillerplatz square in the German city of…
Mainz Daily Photo 