A town nestled into the hills of upper Franconia is perhaps the last spot you’d expect to find a statue of Neptune, god of the sea. And yet my wife and I are seated under the stoic gaze of the god as we huddle against a chill wind, a harbinger of an imminent winter.
We’re in Bamberg, Germany, a town of clean air and smoky beer, cold streams and warm fires. We’ve spent the last few days wandering the old town in often drenching rain, the sidewalks and streets spangled with downed foliage we’re familiar with from our Ohio home on the other side of the world: sycamore leaves the size of our heads, glossy buckeyes like varnished gems. We’ve climbed a steep hill to an ancient monastery and then, thanks to a misleading guide map, climbed it again from the other side.
The statue of Neptune in the market square was built in 1697 by Kaspar Metzner for the archbishop of Bamberg, whose imposing 12th century cathedral sits up the hill to the west. The statue’s seat has been the site of a fountain since the 1300s. At some point the likeness of Neptune astride the waves, holding a trident with sea serpents at his feet, took on the name “Gabelmann,” or “man with a fork.” It was damaged by a bomb during World War II but has since been restored. As we sit, a pigeon lights upon the top of his head.
It’s one of many curious effigies and adornments around the small city. At the aforementioned cathedral sits a statue of a lion so deteriorated by the centuries it looks like a child’s crude clay rendering of a giant salamander. Elsewhere there’s an ornate door knocker of a long-forgotten figure of mythology. A stone carving of a demon at the feet of god. A water fountain of a child riding a fish.
While the landlocked town is far from the ocean, it is nonetheless founded on water. Hooped on one side by an arm of the Reglitz River and fissured through the heart by another arm, the town’s essence seems embodied by clear, cold waters. The serpentine course of the smaller “Linker” arm wends in and around the buildings of the town center—the oft-Instagrammed Altes Rathaus is only the best-known example—and numerous bridges cross its narrow but spirited course.
We wander into Eckert’s Wirtshaus for a late dinner after dark one evening and are seated by a window. I look outside at one point and catch the glint of light on moving water and am surprised by how close it is. Then I look down and catch the same shimmer nearly beneath me, and feel uneasy. The restaurant sticks out into the main flow of the river all around us in the night, and there’s an eeriness to the scene that is divorced from named danger, so much dark motion out of sight, the susurrant hum of the current a reminder of a world barred to us.
Perhaps it was a scene like this that led the archbishop to commission a monument to a figure who knew a thing or two about that world.
Words + Photo by David Nilsen