2022-07 - Blog Posts
A ceux qui pensent "on n'a jamais essayé": si si, on a essayé. Et ceux qui en sortent nous laissent assez invariablement les mêmes messages.
The things people write on clocks...
Craignez la dernière - Eglise Notre-Dame de Croaz-Batz, Roscoff
Literally, this means "fear the last". OK, but the last what? Well, you're looking at the sundial for the time, which here, in French, would be "12 heures", so the full saying is inferred to be "craignez la dernière heure" - "fear thy final hour". Reminding people of their own mortality was an important part of medieval-Renaissance Christian discourse, as we saw with the ages of Man passing before Death among the automatons on the Astronomical Clock in Strasbourg Cathedral, built around the same time as this church in Roscoff.
Die Zeit eilt, Die Zeit heilt - Rathaus St. Johann, Saarbrücken
I've only got a close-up of one, but the tower of the historic town hall in Saarbrücken has at least two clocks, each with a message. The meaning of "die Zeit eilt" is similar to "time flies", and could be linked to what we saw above: be aware of what time you may have left. The second clock cleverly adds one letter to that to make "die Zeit heilt": "time heals".
"How to use this sundial" - Piazza della Borsa, Trieste
In the ground in front of the Chamber of Commerce in Trieste is a sundial, but conspicuously, the hand is missing. That is because you are the hand! Taking astronomy into account, one should stand in a slightly different place depending on the season, and apply corrections to the minutes to get official time. It was cloudy when I saw this, so I'm afraid I don't have a nice picture of the sundial in action. The instructions are in Italian on the left side of the base.
A few views of the Saar and Mosel rivers in Germany, which recently burst their banks due to heavy rain. The lower levels of the multi-lane motorway through Saarbrucken (second picture) were underwater, and the historic towns of Trier (top) and Cochem (below), which I have fond memories of, were flooded too.
Hoping that the communities can recover soon.
