It has just gone 10.00pm on Wednesday 8th May. It has been the Captain's Farewell Cocktail Party and Gala Dinner this evening. A chance to meet and thank all 51 members of the crew.
Tonight, we are on our way to Budapest some 290 kilometres downstream – remember the Danube flows into the Black Sea at Talcea. We only have one more deep lock, a 19metre descent, to complete all 68 locks on our route from Amsterdam. By the time we dock we will have sailed 1811kms!
The first of our excursions on Monday was to the Melk Stift – Stift means Abbey in German. This was a magnificent and huge Benedictine Monastery set on a hill overlooking the Danube. The Melk Abbey website: https://www.stiftmelk.at/en/ describes the Abbey as "one of the biggest and most beautiful European Baroque buildings in the world. Its splendid architecture is famous worldwide and part of UNESCO's world heritage.
Since 1089, the Benedictine monks have been living and working in Melk Abbey in uninterrupted tradition."
A monastic school, a forerunner of the modern-day High School with 900 pupils of both sexes, occupies one wing of this enormous complex of buildings and was founded in the twelfth century. The monastic library soon became renowned for its extensive manuscript collection and production, many of them contain musical compositions. Today the library houses over 30,000 volumes including some of the earliest Gutenberg printed books.
The Abbey that stands today, built in 1702, caught fire in 1974. This fire marred the ornamented rooms and damaged the interior and its art, leading to its restoration from 1978 to 1995. The nave of the abbey was a part of the restoration. Eight pounds of gold bullion were used to restore the statues and altars. The Marble Hall, a popular guest attraction, was also restored during this period. The ceiling of the Marble Hall if you stand in the centre looks to be domed but it's an illusion. All four corners of the ceiling have been painted by perspective lines drawn from this centre point. If you stand in a corner, you can see how the pillars in the frescoed ceiling slant along the perspective lines.
Today the Abbey is run as for-profit commercial organisation funded through tourism. The Abbey is visited by over 500,000 people a year with an average footfall of 2000 a day.
Many of the religious relics on show are priceless but others are there for show. Post the Gothic and into the Baroque period it was less about venerating relics of the saints or Jesus and more about bling as we might call it today showing the magnificence of entering God's house. Few of the items displayed are made from pure gold.
Another interesting point of view offered by our Guide today was that prior to the Gothic period images of Jesus showed his body as intact. Gradually over time depictions of Christ on the cross began to include the nails in his hands and feet and then the blood from the wounds in his side.
Now it's 11.00pm so time to retire so you will have to wait for the Schnapps update!
