There's a wayshrine near my village that was erected by a 18th century farmer who got a fishbone stuck in his throat. After several days it was still stuck and he had no choice but to try and make it to the next village where there was a doctor. Half way there he finally coughed up the bone and was so thankful that he decided to build a cross there. Always think of that guy when I ride my bike past the cross.
WARNING! IT'S NOT ACTUALLY CALLED A WAYSHRINE! If you look that up you'll just get a bunch of Elder Scrolls screenshots. The correct term you need to look up is "Wayside Shrine"
In fact, there are several of these wayside crosses and shrines, which do not differ in appearance, but in their meaning. Just as there is no difference between a torture pole and a totem pole: one was used to torture prisoners of war and the other to worship sacred animals. Expiatory crosses were erected in the Middle Ages when a nobleman had slain another and the two families agreed to atone for the murder by paying a sum of money and erecting an expiatory cross. So while these were a request for forgiveness from a very specific person at the scene of the crime, wayside crosses are places where anyone could pray for their salvation. Thanks for the video.
Great video! I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments, even as an atheist. Furthermore, your presentation was phenomenal, perhaps even the best you’ve done so far. Worthy of a true standing ovation!
When my dad and I visited Normandy in 1997, the same care was given to German graves by the roadside as were the French and American graves. You didn't have the freedom to choose to fight. You either did, or were shot or imprisoned or your family got the brunt of it if you deserted. They were doing their "job" and were killed away from home. At least we can respect their position if we don't their cause.
The same is true in my home area, the Lower Rhine, where during Operation Veritable 30000 German and 15000 Allied ( mostly Scottish, Welsh and Canadian) soldiers were lost. Thus there are well kept after graveyards for many of these soldiers, be they from one side or the other.
As a German I truly understand the pain people experienced from losing loved ones who served in the Wehrmacht. On the other hand, being Jewish and coming from a family that was almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis it's still very hard for me to see these memorials, as the action of the people enshrined there contributed directly to the murder of my family members. It's a complicated feeling.
Catholicism will never disappear. We have buried our enemies for 2,000 years. What will fade away, though, are the current political regimes, when Christ returns.
I've seen one on a mountain path and it marked a mass grave. It was pretty weird to find it in such a remote place where you can't even dig. It had a rhyme stating that two armies thought and the people fell together and despite being enemies they stay together as only god can tell them apart (they were apparently only found after they were no longer recognisable). The other oddity I found was a 500 year old gravestone in a suburban garden. It was in the middle of nowhere until urban sprawl swallowed it.
On old St. Peter's cemetery in Straubing there is a grave of an former major from 1811 where an angle shows his naked butt in the direction of the town hall. The major was wrongly accused to have taken from the city's money and deposed.
That Hamburg "graveyard of churchbells" is one the most bizarre, lesser important parts of WW II history. Bronze and all other copper alloys are needed for bearings, cartridge shells, electric wires and more technical installations. No wonder that all of Europe was plundered for those metals during WW II. Churchbells from all over the continent, not only from Germany, were confiscated and sent to to the foundries to be molten down. One of the biggest yards where those bells were collected was in Hamburg. When British troops reached that city around May 1st in 1945 they could not believe their eyes. Churchbells of all sizes covered an industrial area as far as the eye could see. It looks as if the infrastructure to melt down the bells had collapsed long before the war ended and that had saved them. Luckily German bureaucracy had been at its best when the bells were taken off their churches. Most of them were documented and photographed so the surviving ones could be traced back to the place they had come from and returned home.
Sounds a lot like the animitas of Latin America - which are now showing up more in North America, often put up by non-hispanic folks - marking roadside deaths. Of course the worship of death in Latin America makes them particularly spiritualistic (as part of the Inca culture of “paying the Earth [gods or goddesses] for example). Didn’t think it was a particularly northern Europe thing. Thanks for the video.
Agree completely about the soldiers..... respect for them and I would say prayers, but I can't imagine any deity that would sit by and let the horrors of that era transpire, would listen to me >.
Most are in the list of memorials (Denkmalliste) of the state of Bavaria and you can look them up online. That said, I like these little gems! In my area which had many coal mines you can find statues of Saint Anne, the patron saint of miners.
I thought Saint Barbara is the patron saint of miners. At least here in austria every road tunnel has an illuminated little statue of saint barbara in it.
@@nirfz Yes, for tunnels, especially those of today, St Barbara seems to be standard. For mines both were used, as it seems a bit depending on the area. My region had 2 mines named after Anna which is now a park.
@@MartinBrenner Interesting! I am learning something new here. Naming of a mine and being the patron saint of mines, where i am from are seperate. My grandfather and my father worked in a coal mine named Karlschacht long ago for example. And while i am not able to find after which Karl it was named (my fathers guess was Emperor Karl I of Austria), it's clearly neither Barbara nor Anna ;-)
Hello Andrew, thank you for your videos! I thought the idea of an outdoor church was amazing, so I've been searching for it, but I need a little help. I didn't hear you mention the name of the village in the video, so if it is there, sorry that I missed it. I heard you say the town only has 600 people. Then, I looked through the details and didn't see the name of the village, either. I fast forwarded through the video to find the name of the village, and I thought from the sign it might be called Edelbach, but that also might be the name of the river. I see it is called the Fatima Grotto. Do they have a lot of outdoor churches in Germany? Is that the word, Grotto, in German? In English, it just means cave.
Not only religious. There is a sign near Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania, which tells about an old post road there which was used until the 18th century. But the sign is so random there and no inscription who put it there.
Interesting! Even learned something about my home! I didn't know that the saints in/at a "Marterl" here in austria point to the churches they are the patrons of. Thanks!
I live in Austria and in our village there are many wayside crosses ans shrines wgich we call Marterl. Most of them are documented, why tjey are there and when they are from. My grandfather has made a stone cross of marble about ten years ago, it's in front our house :)
Not really. We also have those in the protestant north, but not so many and most of them were made in remembrance of the wars people from the village this way shrine can be found in were fighting in and never returned.
But protestant regions still have place names (Flurnamen) like "Helgenstock", "Heiligengarten", "Kreuzgarten" etc., remembering the locations of crosses or saints before 1520/30 or whenever the region became protestant.
@@barbarossarotbart I wouldn't compare wayside shrines to war cementaries or their monuments, which get attention on poppy day. See de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildstock#Verbreitung
I thought they are in every country, they are normal here in croatia. What i find really intriguing tho are as i call them "coffin stops" - in some narrow footpaths in dalmatian mountains where the flat space is rare and cemetaries were only in some bigger villages due to rocks instead of soil, they would bring their dead in coffins from small remote villages in the mountains, and for that purpose they would have the rest stops with a flat part to put down the coffin and rest, usually with some crosses or such shrines or something.
Whenever I visit my wife's family in Germany around the Aschaffenburg and Miltenberg area, I see these and have been fascinated by them! This was a really good video, and I was kind of conflicted about another momument inside of a church. It was dedicated to those who died in WWII and I felt odd about it because those were people who fought for the Third Reich, yet also recent family members of those still living.
Some see it as a reminder that they died for a criminal regime. Whose army wasn't an army of volunteers for the most part. And even some of the volunteers realized what's up at some point. So, as nobody can tell who of the fallen of a community was "convinced" or not rather than to demonize all, the monuments most of the time do not say hero but say "fallen". -> "Gefallenendenkmal" or sometimes they are called "warrior memrorial" "Kriegerdenkmal" (But you have to keep in mind, that the word Krieger -> Warrior does not have the same positive connotation as it has in english.) As for the recently deceased if i understood it correct: That's most likely because their family grave is in the church. Such a family might be in that village for a very long time, and might have been one of the wealthier families at some point who donated money to the church and in exchange were allowed to have the familiy grave in the church instead of outside in the graveyard.
@@nirfz Thank you for the insights to this. I do remember seeing another Denkmal in a town square saying something along the lines of "to the fallen of both world wars as a reminder to horrors of war". This one felt less ambigous to me as a warning than the church one, but that makes sense with the wealthier families and living there for a long time.
I haven't heard of a wayshrine before! Now, I know a lot more about them, from eerie messages ("O sinner, I see everything"?) to commemorations of fallen soldiers, and even the practical usages in helping travelers! Thanks for the video!
WARNING! IT'S NOT ACTUALLY CALLED A WAYSHRINE! If you look that up you'll just get a bunch of Elder Scrolls screenshots. The correct term you need to look up is "Wayside Shrine"
The message isn't "eerie." It's simply reminding everyone what is really going on beyond our mere earthly existence. It will be crystal clear one day. Peace to all.
When things go well, God often do not need. But those who get into trouble remember that there was help. Maybe we should pray right now to get through the winter well. What else could we do? It has never done any harm.
"Hilfts nix, schad's nix" as people where i am from tend to say. (And a friend of mine years ago found a quote that fits to your second sentence: "In einem brennenden Flugzeug findet man keine Atheisten", "You won't find atheists in a bruning plane." -> everybody starts to pray in such a situation)
I would like it if the wayshrine tradition was continued without adding the religious context. Keep building them, but make them pure about the actual thing they're meant to remind us of.
In Berlin I've seen bicycles, entirely painted in white, (semi-)permanently chained to places where bicyclists have been killed in traffic. That's kind of a secular wayside shrine, I guess.
Dude, the more of your wonderful videos I watch, the more I feel a strange kinship. I am 10 years your elder, I am a native English speaker who more or less learned German by living there, and I have a very similar view of so many of the topics you cover. To wildly switch gears in my own devilishly complicated story, in the summer of 1985, when I first briefly lived in (West) Germany, I rounded out my Sommersprachkurs at the Uni in Stuttgart by immediately attempting to hitchhike across East Germany from Hof, not so very far from you by my American standards, to West Berlin. Great larks, interminable interrogations in cold, windowless, concrete rooms ensued. But the things I saw firsthand! From the Teufelsee nudist park and the Kaufhaus des Westens that so intentionally featured caviar that even the Wessies couldn't afford to the Soviet military maneuvers I witnessed on my way out of West Berlin on the Autobahn nach Hamburg, it was historical drama on the highest stage. So, when I washed up on the shores of Ireland not long after, in the company of a Swiss border guard who was alternately alarmed by my very long-haired appearance and my seeming ability to cross "locked" borders at ease (I think it was my stories of smuggling hash from Zurich into the German Federal Republic that most sold him), it was encountering the bizarre phenomenon of the "awoken" Irish grottos that most gave me pause that summer. The scenes of chubby, housecoated, fanatical Irish Fraus clambering up muddy hillsides to touch the crying statues of that Virgin Mary, and then sliding back down on their ample backsides that first truly informed me of the power of these medieval roadside attractions. That is living history, my friend.
There's a wayshrine near my village that was erected by a 18th century farmer who got a fishbone stuck in his throat. After several days it was still stuck and he had no choice but to try and make it to the next village where there was a doctor. Half way there he finally coughed up the bone and was so thankful that he decided to build a cross there. Always think of that guy when I ride my bike past the cross.
WARNING! IT'S NOT ACTUALLY CALLED A WAYSHRINE! If you look that up you'll just get a bunch of Elder Scrolls screenshots. The correct term you need to look up is "Wayside Shrine"
In fact, there are several of these wayside crosses and shrines, which do not differ in appearance, but in their meaning. Just as there is no difference between a torture pole and a totem pole: one was used to torture prisoners of war and the other to worship sacred animals. Expiatory crosses were erected in the Middle Ages when a nobleman had slain another and the two families agreed to atone for the murder by paying a sum of money and erecting an expiatory cross. So while these were a request for forgiveness from a very specific person at the scene of the crime, wayside crosses are places where anyone could pray for their salvation. Thanks for the video.
Wayshrine , hallmark of Catholic faith.
Great video! I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments, even as an atheist. Furthermore, your presentation was phenomenal, perhaps even the best you’ve done so far. Worthy of a true standing ovation!
*20th century Portugal (1917)
I didn't realise how many way shrines there are in my hometown until I played pokemon go a couple of years ago. Every single one is a pokestop.
When my dad and I visited Normandy in 1997, the same care was given to German graves by the roadside as were the French and American graves.
You didn't have the freedom to choose to fight. You either did, or were shot or imprisoned or your family got the brunt of it if you deserted.
They were doing their "job" and were killed away from home. At least we can respect their position if we don't their cause.
The same is true in my home area, the Lower Rhine, where during Operation Veritable 30000 German and 15000 Allied ( mostly Scottish, Welsh and Canadian) soldiers were lost. Thus there are well kept after graveyards for many of these soldiers, be they from one side or the other.
Our Lady of Fatima was sighted in 1917, not the 19th century.
I believe Christianity is only going out of fashion in the West, isn't it? It's not everywhere like in Germany.
As a German I truly understand the pain people experienced from losing loved ones who served in the Wehrmacht. On the other hand, being Jewish and coming from a family that was almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis it's still very hard for me to see these memorials, as the action of the people enshrined there contributed directly to the murder of my family members. It's a complicated feeling.
Catholicism will never disappear. We have buried our enemies for 2,000 years.
What will fade away, though, are the current political regimes, when Christ returns.
You can add Belgium to where these wayside shrines are common.
And the southern (Catholic) part of the Netherlands.
@@annaapple7452 that's honorary Belgium 😋
@@barvdw not the road quality!
@@ruthenium6648 😅
Rewboss : here is a German (well, Austrian) word you can do - Ausbruch. Won't tell you what it is, that is for you to find out.
In Piedmont, Italy, we have thousands of "Piloni".
I've seen one on a mountain path and it marked a mass grave. It was pretty weird to find it in such a remote place where you can't even dig. It had a rhyme stating that two armies thought and the people fell together and despite being enemies they stay together as only god can tell them apart (they were apparently only found after they were no longer recognisable).
The other oddity I found was a 500 year old gravestone in a suburban garden. It was in the middle of nowhere until urban sprawl swallowed it.
I'm not sure if you mentioned the name of the village. So, for anyone who is looking for that shrine: Kleinkahl, Kleinlaudenbacher Straße 15.
I like it when you take us around and we learn at the same time! It is beautiful there!
On old St. Peter's cemetery in Straubing there is a grave of an former major from 1811 where an angle shows his naked butt in the direction of the town hall. The major was wrongly accused to have taken from the city's money and deposed.
In Limburg, the south of The Netherlands, you find them too. I’m not a Christian, but always experienced a kind of silent atmosphere around them.
That Hamburg "graveyard of churchbells" is one the most bizarre, lesser important parts of WW II history. Bronze and all other copper alloys are needed for bearings, cartridge shells, electric wires and more technical installations. No wonder that all of Europe was plundered for those metals during WW II. Churchbells from all over the continent, not only from Germany, were confiscated and sent to to the foundries to be molten down. One of the biggest yards where those bells were collected was in Hamburg. When British troops reached that city around May 1st in 1945 they could not believe their eyes. Churchbells of all sizes covered an industrial area as far as the eye could see. It looks as if the infrastructure to melt down the bells had collapsed long before the war ended and that had saved them. Luckily German bureaucracy had been at its best when the bells were taken off their churches. Most of them were documented and photographed so the surviving ones could be traced back to the place they had come from and returned home.
Sounds a lot like the animitas of Latin America - which are now showing up more in North America, often put up by non-hispanic folks - marking roadside deaths. Of course the worship of death in Latin America makes them particularly spiritualistic (as part of the Inca culture of “paying the Earth [gods or goddesses] for example). Didn’t think it was a particularly northern Europe thing. Thanks for the video.
We have that too in Germany. Or at least Kind of.
We put little crosses with the Name of the deceased to the place where the accident took place.
Agree completely about the soldiers..... respect for them and I would say prayers, but I can't imagine any deity that would sit by and let the horrors of that era transpire, would listen to me >.
Most are in the list of memorials (Denkmalliste) of the state of Bavaria and you can look them up online. That said, I like these little gems! In my area which had many coal mines you can find statues of Saint Anne, the patron saint of miners.
I thought Saint Barbara is the patron saint of miners. At least here in austria every road tunnel has an illuminated little statue of saint barbara in it.
@@nirfz Yes, for tunnels, especially those of today, St Barbara seems to be standard. For mines both were used, as it seems a bit depending on the area. My region had 2 mines named after Anna which is now a park.
@@MartinBrenner Interesting! I am learning something new here.
Naming of a mine and being the patron saint of mines, where i am from are seperate.
My grandfather and my father worked in a coal mine named Karlschacht long ago for example. And while i am not able to find after which Karl it was named (my fathers guess was Emperor Karl I of Austria), it's clearly neither Barbara nor Anna ;-)
Hello Andrew, thank you for your videos! I thought the idea of an outdoor church was amazing, so I've been searching for it, but I need a little help. I didn't hear you mention the name of the village in the video, so if it is there, sorry that I missed it. I heard you say the town only has 600 people. Then, I looked through the details and didn't see the name of the village, either.
I fast forwarded through the video to find the name of the village, and I thought from the sign it might be called Edelbach, but that also might be the name of the river. I see it is called the Fatima Grotto. Do they have a lot of outdoor churches in Germany? Is that the word, Grotto, in German? In English, it just means cave.
Not only religious. There is a sign near Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania, which tells about an old post road there which was used until the 18th century. But the sign is so random there and no inscription who put it there.
Interesting! Even learned something about my home! I didn't know that the saints in/at a "Marterl" here in austria point to the churches they are the patrons of. Thanks!
Germany: Grotto - I don't think it means what you think it means. 😏
I live in Austria and in our village there are many wayside crosses ans shrines wgich we call Marterl. Most of them are documented, why tjey are there and when they are from. My grandfather has made a stone cross of marble about ten years ago, it's in front our house :)
ich denke vor allem an die marterl in den bergen, wo mal jemand umgekommen ist ... das ist eine warnung an alle, hier könnte es gefährlich werden.
I a m living in Aschaffenburg since i was born, but here on this Channel i learned so much New about my hometown! Thank you Andrew!
It's a rather catholic thing and mostly absent in northern Germany...
Not really. We also have those in the protestant north, but not so many and most of them were made in remembrance of the wars people from the village this way shrine can be found in were fighting in and never returned.
But protestant regions still have place names (Flurnamen) like "Helgenstock", "Heiligengarten", "Kreuzgarten" etc., remembering the locations of crosses or saints before 1520/30 or whenever the region became protestant.
@@barbarossarotbart I wouldn't compare wayside shrines to war cementaries or their monuments, which get attention on poppy day.
See de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildstock#Verbreitung
Then there is "The Grotto" at NE Skidmore St in Portland, Oregon.
I thought they are in every country, they are normal here in croatia.
What i find really intriguing tho are as i call them "coffin stops" - in some narrow footpaths in dalmatian mountains where the flat space is rare and cemetaries were only in some bigger villages due to rocks instead of soil, they would bring their dead in coffins from small remote villages in the mountains, and for that purpose they would have the rest stops with a flat part to put down the coffin and rest, usually with some crosses or such shrines or something.
Whenever I visit my wife's family in Germany around the Aschaffenburg and Miltenberg area, I see these and have been fascinated by them! This was a really good video, and I was kind of conflicted about another momument inside of a church. It was dedicated to those who died in WWII and I felt odd about it because those were people who fought for the Third Reich, yet also recent family members of those still living.
Some see it as a reminder that they died for a criminal regime. Whose army wasn't an army of volunteers for the most part. And even some of the volunteers realized what's up at some point. So, as nobody can tell who of the fallen of a community was "convinced" or not rather than to demonize all, the monuments most of the time do not say hero but say "fallen". -> "Gefallenendenkmal" or sometimes they are called "warrior memrorial" "Kriegerdenkmal" (But you have to keep in mind, that the word Krieger -> Warrior does not have the same positive connotation as it has in english.)
As for the recently deceased if i understood it correct: That's most likely because their family grave is in the church. Such a family might be in that village for a very long time, and might have been one of the wealthier families at some point who donated money to the church and in exchange were allowed to have the familiy grave in the church instead of outside in the graveyard.
@@nirfz Thank you for the insights to this. I do remember seeing another Denkmal in a town square saying something along the lines of "to the fallen of both world wars as a reminder to horrors of war". This one felt less ambigous to me as a warning than the church one, but that makes sense with the wealthier families and living there for a long time.
1:29 to 2:07 good commentary
I haven't heard of a wayshrine before! Now, I know a lot more about them, from eerie messages ("O sinner, I see everything"?) to commemorations of fallen soldiers, and even the practical usages in helping travelers! Thanks for the video!
WARNING! IT'S NOT ACTUALLY CALLED A WAYSHRINE! If you look that up you'll just get a bunch of Elder Scrolls screenshots. The correct term you need to look up is "Wayside Shrine"
The message isn't "eerie." It's simply reminding everyone what is really going on beyond our mere earthly existence. It will be crystal clear one day. Peace to all.
It's amazing that these places haven't been vandalized yet.
When things go well, God often do not need. But those who get into trouble remember that there was help.
Maybe we should pray right now to get through the winter well. What else could we do?
It has never done any harm.
"Hilfts nix, schad's nix" as people where i am from tend to say. (And a friend of mine years ago found a quote that fits to your second sentence: "In einem brennenden Flugzeug findet man keine Atheisten", "You won't find atheists in a bruning plane." -> everybody starts to pray in such a situation)
I would like it if the wayshrine tradition was continued without adding the religious context. Keep building them, but make them pure about the actual thing they're meant to remind us of.
In Berlin I've seen bicycles, entirely painted in white, (semi-)permanently chained to places where bicyclists have been killed in traffic. That's kind of a secular wayside shrine, I guess.
Fatima was actually in WW1, and two of the kids actually died from the Spanish Flu.
Australian living in Wien here. Well done! Absolutely excellent!
From what I know about modern Germany I forget that it used to be overtly Christian.
Dude, the more of your wonderful videos I watch, the more I feel a strange kinship. I am 10 years your elder, I am a native English speaker who more or less learned German by living there, and I have a very similar view of so many of the topics you cover.
To wildly switch gears in my own devilishly complicated story, in the summer of 1985, when I first briefly lived in (West) Germany, I rounded out my Sommersprachkurs at the Uni in Stuttgart by immediately attempting to hitchhike across East Germany from Hof, not so very far from you by my American standards, to West Berlin. Great larks, interminable interrogations in cold, windowless, concrete rooms ensued. But the things I saw firsthand! From the Teufelsee nudist park and the Kaufhaus des Westens that so intentionally featured caviar that even the Wessies couldn't afford to the Soviet military maneuvers I witnessed on my way out of West Berlin on the Autobahn nach Hamburg, it was historical drama on the highest stage.
So, when I washed up on the shores of Ireland not long after, in the company of a Swiss border guard who was alternately alarmed by my very long-haired appearance and my seeming ability to cross "locked" borders at ease (I think it was my stories of smuggling hash from Zurich into the German Federal Republic that most sold him), it was encountering the bizarre phenomenon of the "awoken" Irish grottos that most gave me pause that summer. The scenes of chubby, housecoated, fanatical Irish Fraus clambering up muddy hillsides to touch the crying statues of that Virgin Mary, and then sliding back down on their ample backsides that first truly informed me of the power of these medieval roadside attractions. That is living history, my friend.