Return of the Easter Wells

[selenak]

Well, some of them had already been decorated last year, but this year all of them were, and thus I offer my seasonal pic spam as a visual brightener in dark times.






If you are relatively new to my ramblings, in my home province of Franconia, which is a pretty dry area, the wells are decorated at Easter in the hope of more rain, so the story goes, and it looks exceedingly pretty.



This is my APs favourite Easter Well in Tiefenpölz. However, he was a bit crushed to find that they stopped with tihe custom of decades to offer boiled eggs as well as these decorations.



Some of the eggs are veterans of decades, but there also are new eggs each year, all hand painted:



The source of the small river Aufseß:



In nearby Drosendorf, they decorate the bridge over the river Aufseß, not a well:





Some sheep in the background, not exactly easter lambs but:



The well at Beringersmühle:



In Pottenstein, they decorate the well in the central market place. Pottenstein made (some of the) headlines this last week because it's one of the locations where the police raided the homes of a bunch of right wing extremists who were planning a coup d'etat via blowing up a couple of electricity plants, I kid you not, and the kidnapping of the secretary of health, Karl Lauterbach. Which would all sound like a kind of black comedy, but they had a lot of ammunition squirreled away, plus only a few years ago a politician named Walter Lübke was murdered at his home by a Neonazi.



On to nicer things again: sometimes you spot the Easterly decorations in people's gardens:





Obertrubach has two Easter wells. This is the first:



And that's the second:



Some of the larger wells of yesterday have scaled down a bit, like Kleingesees, but they're still very nice to look at. Behold:





It's built in front of the firemen station, and there are a lot of puns in the details, like here, "Eieralarm" instead of "Feueralarm":



Or the note that the eggs were painted by the kids, i.e. the "Löschzwerge" ("Extinguisher dwarves"):





Also nice to look at, each year: the well at Gößweinstein:





The largest well of all, Bieberach, last year almost deserted, this year terribly crowded, which made me glad I had my mask with me:



Some details:









The well at Ebermannsstadt:




Bieberach may be the largest, but this one in a smaller village impressed me the most with all its incredible details:



Because just look:



Characters from Wilhelm Busch's Wilhelminian horror stories for children:



One side is a calendar made of eggs:




And the well at Heiligenstadt, of which I'll show you details first, before concluding this pic spam with the overall picture.




And repeated on all sides of the well:






And now for the overall look:

Comments

[liriaen]

Wow! I had no idea. I just looked quizzically at dr_zook who is from Oberfranken, going, DO YOU KNOW THIS, THIS IS CRAZY, and they were very much "no freilich"... I'm all wowed because we don't do that in Hessen. What a rich tradition! :D

[selenak]

Baasst scho. :) Sadly, the tradition doesn't go back to the Renaissance, otherwise I'd challenge you to imagine an Albrecht Dürer created Easter Well in Nuremberg...

[liriaen]

I had to read up on it, and was suprised the tradition seems to have sprung up in the early 20th century? Interesting! - I bet Albrecht would have gone way over the top, with something in style of the Triumphal Ark for Emperor Maxi... :D

[ratcreature]

I had entirely missed the electricity plant thing, but only registered a few headlines about some wackos wanting to kidnap Lauterbach (and seriously that was supposed to become a coup d'etat? that's some underpants gnomes level of planning there, not that you'd want strategically minded extremists).

[selenak]

Quite. It has all the makings of a farcical comedy, except for the lethal weapons part and the fact that idiots can hurt or kill, too.

[trobadora]

Your photos, and the wells, are lovely as ever! Thank you for sharing. :D

[selenak]

You're very welcome!

[cahn]

This is just so cool :D The overall effect is really neat, and then the details of the different individual eggs are just amazing. <3

[selenak]

I do love visiting these wells each year. Often, entire school classes are painting these eggs, and also adult hobby painters.

[reverancepavane]

Thankyou for all these.

[selenak]

You're very welcome!

[elisi]

I have missed these!! <3

And then I saw 'Characters from Wilhelm Busch's Wilhelminian horror stories for children' and died! :D :D :D I had the book as a child and the story about the fussy eater who wouldn't eat the soup was my absolute favourite. It was the detail of the soup on his grave that was just beyond brilliant. *claps*

[falena]

This sounds so hard. Sending much love and good vibes your way.