Travel Tuesday When we took a brief visit to Sibiu (Hermannstadt to the Germans), we marveled at the massive wall surrounding the city, its combination of thirty-nine towers and four bastions a bulwark against invading Ottoman Turks. But while Sibiu defended the [...]
Pia?a Mare, the largest square in Sibiu. Called “Der Grosse Ring”when Lisi, my grandmother, worked here for Mrs. Jickeli Travel Tuesday In two previous Travel Tuesday posts, I wrote about my brothers and my visit to the small museum at the [...]
The pocket watch lay in Box 14 for the past seventeen years—and untold decades prior—in my grandparents’ cedar chest. I had assumed it was my grandfather’s watch, but didn’t know when he had acquired it. Its wide, crisply-numbered face and [...]
Lutheran Church, NeppendorfWelcome TRAVEL TUESDAY Come, enter with me into the courtyard of the Evangelische Kirche Neppendorf. We’ve been here before—and learned when and from where (late 18th century and Gerstheim, Alsace, respectively) our forebears made their way [...]
Lutheran Church Neppendorfinterior TRAVEL TUESDAY After my brothers and I read the summarized history of the Gärtz (originally Gerz or Görz) family handed to us by the church secretary, Renate, when we visited my grandfather’s church in his hometown of [...]