Rothenburg ob der Tauber
— — a medieval town the war forgot to take down.
Not only on a wall.
“A walled town on a sandstone bluff above the Tauber, kept almost whole through six centuries by a long run of luck and one careful American officer in 1945. The Plönlein, that small forked street with the half-timbered house and two towers, is the picture most people carry of medieval Germany even before they know its name. Snow falls early here. The Christmas market in the market square has run, on and off, since the late Middle Ages, and the night watchman still walks the lanes after dark with a lantern and a horn. — from the studio
Rothenburg ob der Tauber, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Rothenburg ob der Tauber sits on a sandstone spur about 425 metres above sea level in Middle Franconia, in the north-west of the German state of Bavaria. The Tauber river runs in the valley below the western wall. The town became a Free Imperial City in 1274 and reached its medieval high point in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the population was larger than it would be again for five hundred years. Roughly 2.5 kilometres of city wall still encircle the historic core, with a covered walkway along most of it. Rothenburg lies on the Romantic Road tourist route between Würzburg and Füssen.
The Plönlein, at the foot of Schmiedgasse where the road forks past the Kobolzeller Tor and the Siebersturm, is one of the most photographed street corners in Europe. Most of the town's half-timbered houses date from the rebuild after the Thirty Years' War, when the city, having sided with the Protestant cause, was occupied by Tilly's Catholic army in 1631 and impoverished for generations. Much of the old core survived the Second World War; on the night of 31 March 1945 American bombs destroyed parts of the eastern wall and 306 houses, and US Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy intervened to spare the rest.
The Reiterlesmarkt, the Christmas market on Marktplatz, runs from late November through Christmas Eve. Käthe Wohlfahrt's Christmas shop on Herrngasse operates year round. In early September the town remembers the Meistertrunk legend with a costumed pageant: by tradition, the burgomaster Georg Nusch saved Rothenburg in 1631 by drinking a 3.25-litre tankard of Franconian wine in one draught at General Tilly's challenge. The story is almost certainly a nineteenth-century invention, but the play has been performed since 1881. The night watchman tour through the lanes runs nightly in season at 8 p.m.