I am not obsessing about Koblenz but it is bugging me that I didn't remember that statue, which I have subsequently found out is of the emperor William I on his horse, as I mentioned in my last post.There is something quite splendid about the fact that the Mosel to the right or top of the picture flows into the Rhine along the bottom and that the city grew from this.
I love rivers anyway. I grew up on the mouth of one , the Mersey. And I love the idea of them - that they just find their own way to the sea, either meandering quietly or gushing directly... or both!
I used to push Biddy along a little river, the Würm, near where I used to live in Munich and I couldn't get over the fact that we could have jumped into it and been slowly swept to the Black Sea, via the Isar and the Danube.
Anyway, I was talking to the barman in the place where we played on Friday night and he said that the statue had been destroyed in the war and not replaced until the 1980s, which would explain me not remembering it cos it wouldn't have been there in the 1970s when I was there last!
Justification!
But, subsequent perusal of Wikipedia dashed my short-lived hopes. The statue was indeed destroyed by American bombs in the 2nd WW, but replaced in the 1950s... ho hum.
On the other hand what I did kearn from Wiki was how Koblenz got its name. It is a corrupt form of confluentes, the Latin for 'flowing together' which is what they called this place where the 2 great rivers meet.
You may, one day, look back and thank me for that information!
(... or you may not)
2 comments:
Well yes, it could come in useful. I've heard of the Würm.
Perhaps you are older than you think.
Well, there you go! I didn't know that!
I saw a rather splendid confluence of two rivers in New Zealand. All rather dramatic and wide and gushing - most impressive! I can't remember what the nearby town was called.
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