Around the world

The sun beat fiercely down on my head. I passed beneath a high arch decorated with intricate carving. The worn stones beneath my feet radiated heat. The road was 2000 years old. On my right hand rose the columns of a temple, on my left a hill, its steep slope terraced with more tall buildings.  Ahead lay the open space of the Forum, the heart of ancient Rome. I had been waiting for this experience for approximately half a century.

The Roman Forum lies between the Capitoline and Palatine hills. It dates back to the 8th century BCE, when the first religious and civic buildings of the future centre of empire were constructed, and was the focus of civic life in Rome. As Rome declined, so did the Forum. Many of the buildings were preserved because they had been taken over as Christian churches, but after c.800 CE the Forum was used as a stone quarry for medieval and Renaissance builders, and many buildings have vanished or lie in ruins. Picturesque blocks of fallen masonry and broken columns are grouped around the tourist walkways, with small trees and acanthus growing among them, begging for a watercolour sketch. But you can still walk along the main road and even the ruins are several stories high.

I couldn’t get over the massive size of these buildings, and the height to which some of them had survived. I am used to Roman buildings which survive as low flint footings for wattle and daub walls.  Looking up at them, I remembered painfully translating Juvenal’s satire on the dangers of Rome at night, where he mentions tiles falling off the roofs of tall buildings and cracked pots being thrown out of the windows (Satire III, 268-314).  I passed the temple of the emperor Antoninus Pius and his wife Faustina (as imperials both were of course deified after their deaths). It was during his reign that the Antonine Wall was built in Scotland, although he never visited himself.  According to his statues and the opinions of various Roman historians, he wore a beard and was quite a good guy. In fact, if the description given by his adopted son and successor Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 1.16 and 6.30) is at all accurate, many a modern politician could benefit by following his example. The temple was adapted to serve as a Christian church in 1602, and a rather odd-looking extra bit added above the row of columns where the roof used to be.

A little further on, at the foot of the Palatine Hill were the ruins of the temple of Vesta. For many centuries virgin priestesses had the duty of guarding a sacred fire in the temple, which symbolised the hearth of the city and could never be allowed to go out. Another of the texts I had had to read was some lines from Ovid’s poem about the foundation of Rome (Fasti II, 381-422). According to legend, Romulus and Remus’ mother had been forced to become a Vestal Virgin to prevent her from marrying and producing an alternative king to her usurping uncle. The god Mars got around that one… Next to the circular temple with its three surviving columns was the house where the Vestals lived, and its courtyard garden or atrium, originally enclosed by the buildings of the massive complex. A Vestal was chosen as a child and served for thirty years. Today broken statues of long-dead Vestals line the paths and show the dress and hairstyles and even the names of the women who, long ago, spent their lives here. Reading their names and seeing what they would have looked like somehow made the experience more personal.

As I walked around the various temples in the Forum, I thought of the poet Horace, wandering idly around the Forum 2000-odd years ago, asking the price of cabbages and corn and listening to the fortune-tellers. (Satire 1.6, 111-131). Now I was wandering idly in the same place, surrounded by increasing hordes of tourists with their forests of selfie-sticks. Strangely enough, those hordes of tourists didn’t actually detract from the experience. I sat in a shady spot on a fallen block, sipping at my water bottle, and somehow the Romans I knew only from their poems and letters were as real to me as the coach party posing beside the columns of the temple.

When Horace had finished his stroll in the Forum, he went home to a bowl of leeks, chickpeas and however you want to translate the word “laganum” (pasta, pancake, etc.?). I repaired to a nearby café for cold lemon tea and a magnificent ice cream – pistachio plus coffee plus chocolate. There are some pleasures the ancient Romans hadn’t discovered!

I love smoked eel. My kind sister-in-law stuffs me with smoked eel from Germany every Christmas, to the point where I actually can’t eat any more. Well, it is rather rich and oily. I like it even better than kippers, although I love them too. I am fond of smoked salmon, and I won’t say no to a bit of smoked mackerel, or pickled and salted herring. Perhaps I should have been a Viking?

Preserved fish is really the reason why I visited Lübeck, Queen of the Hanseatic League, in 2018. I got involved with a local project which included trade with the Baltic. During medieval and early modern times, Orkney and Shetland traded stockfish and other salted and dried fish such as ling and tusk with towns in the Baltic area, including Bergen and Lübeck, and during the course of researching my contribution I got really interested in the Hanseatic League. Why on earth did nobody teach me about the Hanseatic League before? I can’t remember any mention of it in our school history lessons although for hundreds of years the Hanse was a major force in North West European trade. Beginning in the 12^th century and lasting for about 600 years, a confederation of merchants from areas speaking Low German built an extensive trade network which crossed political borders. They dominated the Baltic markets and their trading range extended as far as Southern Europe. The League had enormous power. They received protection and “privileges” from local rulers, and enforced their wishes and their monopolies by means of trade embargoes.  “Privileges” were deeds granted by a ruler allowing the Hanse a trading post, lower customs duties, free import/export of goods, freedom to trade with all locals & foreigners.  Their principal kontors or trading enclaves were at Bergen, Bruges, London and Novgorod, although there were many smaller ones.

From the mid-14C, representatives of the Hanseatic towns and cities held assemblies called “Hansetage” to take joint political & economic decisions. The first Hansetag was in 1356 and the last in 1669, the official beginning and end of the league. By the 17^th century the Hanse was winding down, eclipsed by the rise of new territorial states whose rulers wanted their law followed without special economic or political status for merchant towns.  The Thirty Years War (1618 – 48) and the rise of trade with the New World also contributed to the end of the League.

But getting back to fish, since there weren’t any freezers in medieval Europe, drying, salting and pickling were the only ways to preserve fish. Salt herring and stockfish were very important for the many fast days demanded by the church, at one point Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and all of Lent and Advent, and for long sea voyages. Stockfish is cod, which is not very oily and can therefore be salted and air-dried until it is as hard as a board and keeps for years. It is possible that being forced to eat salt cod for such a large percentage of the year might become a little tedious, especially as to reconstitute it, you have to soak it for hours and beat it with a mallet.  I think I might lose my Viking foodie tastes if I really had to eat it so much of the time.

Lübeck was founded in 1143 CE, and from 1230 to 1535 was one of the leading cities of the Hanse. The city was a major port in the lucrative salt trade dominated by the Hanse. All that salted fish meant that salt itself was a vital commodity, and it came mostly from the inland town of Lüneburg where it was mined from a geological formation known as a salt dome, and sent to Lübeck to be shipped on to Scandinavia for salting herrings. One of the sights of Lübeck is the “Salzspeicher”, a group of six salt warehouses built between 1579 and 1745, used for storing the all-important salt.   

So I decided to visit Lübeck, and its wonderful Europaische Hansemuseum (European Hanseatic Museum).  Today the old quarter is still a very pretty town, built on an island in the river Trave near its outlet into the Baltic Sea. I went there in spring when the trees were green with young leaves, and flowering cherries overhung the main bridge.

Lübeck is famous for its Brick Gothic architecture, characteristic of the area around the Baltic Sea, which has little suitable stone for building, and in spite of extensive damage during World War II is a Unesco World Heritage Site.  The 13^th – 14^th century Marienkirche is a striking example of the Brick Gothic style. It has the highest brick vault in the world, twin spires and pointed arches over huge windows. The style was derived from France and the Marienkirche was the prototype for around seventy brick Gothic churches in the Baltic area.

The streets of Lübeck are lined with tall gabled brick houses up to seven stories high. The gabled houses which survive today are mostly 15^th and 16^th century and would have belonged to the elite but they were building brick homes as far back as the 13^th century here. Around 1200 CE Lübeck was mainly wooden houses, but by about 1300 CE, seven hundred to thirteen hundred houses had been built of brick, with gable ends facing the street & lots of storage space. Those merchants were mega-rich to afford all those bricks!

The island city was surrounded not only by the river but by a town wall with four massive gates, two of which survive, the15th century Holstentor, and Burgtor, also built of brick.  The Hansemuseum is located in part of a large Dominican monastery, founded in the 13^th century on the site of the original castle. I particularly liked the town hall (Rathaus) which started life as a brick Gothic building but with Renaissance additions. The round shields visible from the side of the Market Square designate the city’s status as a Free Imperial City. In the 13^th century the Holy Roman Emperor gave it the status of an imperial free city, which added to its importance.

Having enjoyed the standing buildings and indulged in an orgy of medieval brick and German stoneware jugs inside the museum, I turned my attention to food. The culinary delight for which Lübeck is most famous today is marzipan. It even has a marzipan museum. You can buy excellent marzipan in practically any form, including some rather nice marzipan coffee. But the food I enjoyed most was a fischbrot (fish roll) filled with salt herring which I ate sitting in an open-air café beside the river, washed down by a large glass of German beer. Lovely!

One of the side effects of the covid-19 epidemic has been panic buying, with supermarket shelves being emptied of pasta, baked beans, and toilet paper. It caused me a certain amount of amusement that people should consider toilet paper to be as essential for human survival as food.

My son spent two years working in Singapore and travelling all over South-East Asia, so he has first-hand experience of the fact that over large areas of the planet, people don’t use toilet paper and never have. They use water. In the up-market office where he worked as a computational chemist, the toilets were provided with both toilet paper and a “Malay hose” for those who preferred the traditional method. I will spare you the exact details, but I Googled them and it does sound as if it takes practice to spray your backside clean without soaking your clothes. However, the result is generally acknowledged to be a cleaner rear end than using paper alone. Some of these conveniences are extremely sophisticated. A modern Japanese toilet has a sort of bidet arrangement which is electronically controlled, and if you can’t read Japanese and you press the wrong button, you can end up flooding the cubicle. I like the sound of the warm air dryer though. I found a charming Youtube video on how to do it properly.

What people used to wipe their behinds in the days before loo rolls is an interesting topic for speculation and archaeological research. Historical records come up with some appalling ideas: potsherds; washable flat sticks (“shit sticks”), stones, shells and corn cobs. Most uncomfortable. The Romans are supposed to have used a sponge on the end of a stick to clean themselves, although literary references to this are few and ambiguous. It is suggested that the sponge was used by everyone who visited the loo and washed in between in salt water or vinegar. Yuk!

Leaves, moss, raw wool and old rags are a more attractive idea. I worked for many years in a town near London with an interesting history.  During the medieval period the local monastery had a number of toilets, recorded in the abbey chronicles. The monastery buildings were mostly demolished during the Reformation, but in the 1920s a flint-lined cesspit below the toilet attached to the abbot’s lodging was excavated. It contained fragments of coarse cloth which were likely to have been used as toilet paper.

The possibilities are endless. The 16^th century satirical novel “Gargantua”, by Francois Rabelais has a chapter which explores the subject of anal cleansing in earthy fashion. In chapter XIII the young giant Gargantua tells his father about his experiments with various materials in his search for the perfect wipe.  These included such things as a young lady’s velvet mask (lovely and soft); a page’s cap (also good); leaves of various plants (mostly good); and a selection of live birds and animals including a cat, which didn’t work so well because it scratched him in a most delicate place. He finally decided that the best “torche-cul” or bum-wipe was a nice fluffy young goose with the head held between your legs.

Gargantua didn’t consider paper very efficient. It is widely recognised today that he was right, and that using toilet paper alone is not actually very hygienic. You will find a neat article on the subject, one of many, at this link to a bbc website.

Both paper and water have their disadvantages. What do you do in a country where water is hard to come by?  See Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth’s book “How to Shit Around the World. The art of Staying Clean and Healthy While Traveling” (2006 Traveler’s Tales, Books, Palo Alto) for suggestions.  The disadvantage of using paper is that it has to be disposed of afterwards. There is a famous story about Queen Victoria, who was visiting Cambridge and noticed bits of paper floating down the River Cam. She naively asked what they were, and instead of telling her the unsavoury truth, that they were toilet paper which in the days before sewage treatment ended up in many a river, she was told that they were notices forbidding bathing in the river. Even modern toilet paper needs a strong efficient flush to move it along, or your toilet will block up. When I was a young woman in Greece, many toilets had a small bin beside them for you to deposit your used loo paper, as the flush mechanism couldn’t cope with it. What a fun job emptying them must have been!