For our wedding anniversary trip this year, Anne and I went to Trier, not the nearest large German city to us (Aachen, Cologne, Bonn and most of the Ruhr are closer) but certainly the most ancient German city within easy striking range. I’ve been a couple of times before, first I think in 1986, and I always love going back to the Porta Nigra, the Roman gate which has mostly remained through the centuries.

The other place I particularly love in Trier is what is now the Protestant Church of the Redeemer, originally built in the early fourth century as the throne room of the Emperor Constantine I, who made Christianity the official religion. It is the largest enclosed space to have survived from the Roman Empire, and thought to be the fifth largest constructed in those times (the other four, now destroyed, were in Italy). It is just amazing to stand there in a room constructed 1700 years ago for imperial audiences.

Trier is commemorating the fall of the Roman Empire this year with a massive set of exhibitions, and we went for the full tourist package, which I would actually recommend; details below. The basics are:

Accommodation: Holiday Inn Express, 15 mins walk from the Porta Nigra, very good breakfast and comfortable basic rooms.
Friday dinner: Weinstube Zum Domstein, Hauptmarkt 5; more below.
Saturday lunch: er, McDonalds. At least you know what you are getting.
Saturday dinner: Restaurant Balkan, close to the hotel, nostalgia for Balkan days.
Sunday lunch: Okoki Sushi & Grill, who have an attractive all-you-can-eat offer though in fact we went for the bento boxes before leaving.

The full tourist package comes with a ticket to all three major museums in Trier, also a Roman meal, a guided walking tour and a wine tasting. I should say that it is wise to book at least a week in advance with the Trier tourist office; my own booking got stuck in my Gmail spam filter, and a couple of glitches needed to be sorted out – however the tourist office were very helpful, taking into account that last weekend was a holiday weekend in Germany.

So. We started with the Roman meal, hosted by the Weinstube zum Domstein, a gemütlich enough place. This was a large set of small dishes based on the Apicium, a Roman recipe book attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius. No potatoes or tomatoes of course; for me the standout dish was the ham with myrtle fig sauce, but it was all perfectly yummy. You can have this outside the tourist package as well at the Weinstube zum Domstein as long as you order in advance.

On Saturday morning we went to the big exhibition at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier. They have pulled together a colossal assembly of artifacts from the Roman Empire, starting more or less from the time of Constantine (who reigned from 306 to 337) and ending with the successor states in the region. Two points to flag up: no photography is allowed, and it’s a lot more accessible if you have decent German (there is an audioguide in English but it doesn’t cover everything and is scripted as annoying banter between an uninformed man and an expert woman).

My breath was taken away by the very first exhibit: the scepter and insignia of Maxentius. Maxentius was the rival emperor to Constantine who was killed at the battle of Milvian Bridge outside Rome in 312. His imperial regalia were hidden under a staircase, and found in 2006, almost seventeen centuries later. They are the only surviving regalia of a Roman emperor. Normally they are in Rome but they’re in Trier until the end of the exhibition.

The whole thing is great, but three other things particularly caught my attention. The first was a fifth-century silver jug, engraved in beautiful detail with the apostles and the evangelists, found in Trier in 1992. It is believed to have originally been part of a hoard of Roman silverware found in 1628, 49 pieces weighing 74 kilos in total, which were melted down (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) by order of the ecclesiastical authorities. The surviving jug is a thing of wonder.

I was also particularly grabbed by a letter from a Roman official who had inside knowledge of a currency devaluation (“The divine fortune of our masters has decreed that the nummus will be reduced to half its value”), lent by the John Rylands Library in Machester; and also a reconstruction of the grave goods of Childeric, found in Belgium in 1653, but stolen from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and mostly destroyed in 1831.

The walking tour of the city was conducted enthusiastically by one of the city’s accredited guides. She took us over the highlights of the conflicts that have shaped the city (Napoleon – rather good; Prussians – rather bad; Prince-Bishops – a mixed bunch) and bemoaned the fact that the university was suppressed in 1797 and restored only in 1970. She indicated, but did not take us to, the large statue of Karl Marx donated by the Chinese government in 2018 to mark the bicentennial of his birth in Trier. We went back later to look at it.

The wine tasting in the Oechsle Wein- & Fischhaus featured white wines from all over the Moselle valley. Well, two from Luxembourg and a fair few from the Saarland. All Moselle wines taste like Moselle wines, though different from each other. I got a couple of bottles of Elbling.

The cathedral retains a small amount of the original Roman fabric, though most of the building has been rebuilt several times since. The façade just right of centre in my picture below, with a triangular pediment surmounting three windows with circular arches (and more with circular arches on the next level down) is more or less original from 1700 years ago. Wow.

Inside it is a lot more baroque. I need to look into the potential linkage between the western dome and my favourite stuccist Jan Christian Hansche. I hope this stereoscopic image works for you.

The Cathedral Museum has some fascinating religious art relating to the fall of Rome and the neighbourhood. There are some fascinating tombstones and grave goods – a third of all burials are of children; their shoes are interred with them; there’s also a grave inscription for the local woman doctor Sarmanna of the fourth century.

I’m afraid that I broke the rules and took a photo of the reconstructed fresco ceiling from the house built for the Bishop of Trier by the Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena. This woman’s eyes follow me through the centuries.

There is a lot about the necropolis of St Maximin, a large building which housed a thousand tombs in Roman times. I have not come across any other such arrangement on such a large scale for civil burials in any culture, though there is a First World War necropolis near where our daughters live. There’s also a nice exhibition about local bigwig, St Paulinus, whose skull was proven to have spent time in the Middle East by the presence in his nose of a pupal exoskeleton of an insect found only in those parts.

Finally, the Stadtmuseum Simeonstift has a lot of relevant art on display. I am sure I had seen it before, but in this context the Auzon Casket aka the Franks Casket really grabbed my attention – Anglo-Saxon, carved with runes, but referring to Roman history as well as Germanic legend.

The romantic story of the successors and challengers of the Roman Empire has inspired many artists. Here is Hermann / Arminius being crowned leader of the Germans by his wife Thusnelda, as portrayed by Angelika Kauffmann.

The collection includes a miniature version of Rubin Eynon’s Gallos, whose 8-foot original keeps guard at Tintagel:

But I must say that the other piece that grabbed me, not part of the Roman Empire collection but one of the pieces illustrating the history of Trier, was the bleak portrait of three women who had been transported to Nazi Germany as forced labourers, painted by the artist Mia Münster in 1944. There’s an awful bleakness in their eyes.

Anyway. A good weekend culturally, and on the way home we dropped in on my cousin J in Luxembourg, her children L, S and N, her husband D and my old friend M who I had not seen in 20 years and who now works with J. Small world.