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geopirat

Utata Guidebook
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This weekend's project assignment is to take a photo you feel is representative of your town/neighborhood/city/state - etc. Extra bonus points (we'll think you're uber cool) for anyone who writes up a nifty little tourism-type blurb for their photo's description.

It would be very very cool if you could remember to place your photo on a map so we can see where we all are ...
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From Wikipedia: Fritzlar is a small German town (pop. 15,000) in the Schwalm-Eder district in northern Hesse, 160 km north of Frankfurt, with a storied history. It can reasonably be argued that the town is the site where the Christianization of northern Germany (north and east of the Roman Limes) began and the birthplace of the German empire as a political entity.

The town has a medieval center ringed by a wall with numerous watch towers. Thirty-seven meters high, the Grauer Turm ("Grey Tower") is the highest remaining urban defense tower in Germany. The city hall, first documented in 1109, with a stone relief of St. Martin, the town's patron saint, is the oldest in Germany still in use for its original purpose. The Gothic church of the old Franciscan monastery is today the Protestant parish church, while its other buildings have been converted into a modern hospital. Many houses in the town center, notably around the market square, date from the 14th to 17th centuries and have been carefully maintained or restored. The town is dominated by the imposing Romanesque-Gothic cathedral from the 12th-14th centuries in the center of the old town.

The cathedral stands at the site where the Anglo-Saxon missionary St. Boniface, apostle of the Germans, in 724 A.D. erected a chapel from the wood of an oak dedicated to Thor and sacred to the local German tribe, the Chatten/Chatti (ancestors of the Hessians). A year earlier, in 723, Boniface, then still known under his original name Winfrid, had Thor's Oak, one of the most important sacred sites of the Germans, felled to prove the "superiority" of the Christian god over Thor and the Germanic deities. According to St. Boniface's first biographer, his contemporary Saint Willibald, Boniface started to chop the oak down, when suddenly a great wind, as if by miracle, blew the ancient oak over. This event marked the beginning of the Christianization of German tribes and lands beyond the old Roman frontiers.

Boniface established the first bishopric in Germany outside the boundaries of the old Roman Empire on a hill (Büraburg) across the Eder river, but after the death of Witta, its first and only bishop, in 747 the bishopric was incorporated into the diocese (later archdiocese) of Mainz by Lullus, the disciple and successor of Boniface as archbishop of Mainz. The Benedictine monastery founded by Boniface in Fritzlar in 724 gained prominence as a center of religious and worldly learning under its abbot St. Wigbert who built the original stone basilica of 732 at the site of Boniface's wooden chapel. In 782 Charles the Great (Charlemagne) granted it imperial protection and substantial territory, and this triggered the rapid development of the town. The monastery was converted into a canonic college (Chorherrenstift) in 1005, its members no longer living in monastic union and simplicity, but maintaining their own, and generally rather well-to-do, households. Several imposing stone residences (Curias) built by wealthy canons during the 14th century survive to this day in the old part of the town. The canonic college was dissolved only in 1803.

More is here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzlar

If you want to see a set of my most interesting photos have a look at www.flickr.com/photos/geopirat/sets/72157594425165308/