2016/05 Europe cruise - Passau |
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Monday May 16th 
Passau was cool and drizzly, not a good start. It was Whit Monday, part of the Pentecost holiday, and the shops and offices were closed here too; the town looked quiet in the rain.
On our walking tour, the first thing that caught the eye was the column of flood level markers, going up to way over our heads. It showed centuries of recorded floods, the last in 2013. The 2013 level was just below the oldest recorded in 1501. Three rivers come together at Passau, the 
Danube that we came in on, the glacial green Inn that comes from the Alps, and the dark, tannin-stained Ilz that comes from the Bavarian forest. When all three areas have heavy weather Passau goes underwater.
Dominating the town are St Stephan’s cathedral, on the hill between the Danube and the Inn, and the Veste Oberhaus palace, on the 
Danube’s opposite bank. The prince-bishop’s palace is surrounded by the walls and turrets of a castle, with the guns nicely placed so that he could lob a reminder cannonball onto the townspeople if they were late with their taxes.
Our guide took us through cobbled alleys and up and down steep stairways below rounded arches. The painted cobbles are part of an art project. Passau too had an Italian feel about it. (Italy is only about two hundred miles away.)
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Passau |
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The cathedral, like the surrounding streets, is in the baroque style, rebuilt in the late 1600s after a massive city fire, and with its domed towers it is very different from others we’d seen. Inside was a bigger surprise with soaring columns and stucco arches and ceiling frescoes brightly lit by plain glass.
It’s famous for its organ, the second largest in the world, unfortunately silent while we were there. I’m not sure what emotion this gaudy pulpit was meant to convey but I don’t think it was humility.
The rain became steady as we made our way down the hill towards the boat, so we dived into the Bohemian glass museum for an hour 
or so. We took the elevator up to the fourth floor and found an entire floor of magnificent pieces. It’s hard to see how anyone could blow glass into such enormous vases, let alone get two or more to match.
Then we realized there was another floor below, and other mezzanine floors and side rooms and chambers then more floors, over forty rooms in all. We finally came out in the basement. This museum was both exhaustive and exhausting.
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Passau Glass - 1 |
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By this time the rain had eased and we had missed lunch on the boat and I’d heard that there was a restaurant up on the hill by the castle, so we set off across the bridge and up the castle path. We took a wrong turn and ended up on a steep forest trail that might have taken us all the way to Austria. At the top of the hill we found an overlook of Passau and the Danube, maybe the best view of the trip, with its churches, colourful buildings, and waterfront. The river in the foreground is the Danube and the one behind the cathedral is
the Inn.
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Passau (3.27) |
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There’s a large complex up there with a youth hostel, conference centre, the castle, and luckily the restaurant, open and busy; there must be a way to drive up. These people looked to be eaters not hikers! It wasn’t expensive, given its prime location. Service was slow and we almost left, but eventually we shared what I’d seen advertised in Nuremburg as “curry wurst mit pommes”; the beginning of 
a new Euro language?
I’d hoped to get to where we could see the confluence of the three rivers, but the gates to the Ilz side of the castle were closed. We made our way down to the river through the castle’s massive defences, never breached despite a number of attacks. We could see where the Danube and Inn met and we walked to that point and from there we could see the much smaller Ilz flowing in below the castle on the opposite bank.
Downstream we had a distant view of Austria. In the last few months this proximity to the border has put Passau right in the path of thousands of Syrian refugees trying to reach Germany, though we saw no signs of this while we were there.
It had been quite a day and the sun had finally emerged but we were worn out and we made our way back to the boat shortly before it set off towards Austria.