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Saturday July 28th
Meringen is a wonderful little town, friendly, full of life and history and things to do, and very well laid out. I particularly liked the surprisingly large church together with massive free-standing campanile in a deeply peaceful setting just up the road from our hotel. The inside is, despite the typical Swiss Protestant lack of ornamentation, very unusual, with free-standing massive wood columns of almost Egyptian stature supporting the roof.
Even more interesting are the ruins of previous churches that you can visit underneath the present-day church. These were discovered during renovations and reveal that the church had been destroyed and rebuilt on many occasions over at least a thousand years, mostly, it seems, as a result of the massive flash-floods known as "Murs" (or at least that what I think they are called).
Murs are actually almost more like avalanches or landslides: walls of water bringing vast quantities of rock, sand, gravel, and earth down with them. On a wall inside the church there is a line that must be 5 or 6 meters above the floor. Above it an inscription says that in the eighteenth century one such Mur filled the church with sand and rock up to the line! It also adds that through the effort of "four quarters" of the population, the church was cleared of the rubble and reopened in a mere fourteen days. Given the number of locals whose houses must have also been damaged or destroyed in the event, this is a remarkable testament to their piety.
It is easy to forget today that until quite recently life must have been very hard for the Swiss in their Alpine valleys. From avalanches to landslides, to Murs and regular floods, to snowstorms cutting off access for weeks at a time, to Foehn-driven fires (the Foehn is a hot dry wind that can blow at near hurricane force for days at a time), it seems as if they must have aspent at least half their time rebuilding their villages and towns.
Meiringen in particular seems to have been particularly subject to catastrophes, as evidenced both by the excavations and inscription at the church and also by the unusual and unusually consistent Belle Epoque appearance of most of the houses. The explanation for this is that in the 1840s, after a particularly massive fire caused by a Foehn that destroyed most of the town, they decided that henceforth houses would be built in stone... and they haven't burned down since.
Our hotel, Hotel zum Alpbach, is also very pleasant, and we had an excellent evening meal accompanied by a couple of fine bottles of St. Emilion Grand Pontet 2000, which was particularly pleasing to me since I have a case or two of the wine in my cellar!
The rest day, by the way, was spent fairly typically: a mixture of errands, blogging and email, games, reading, a modicum of sightseeing (key decision factor: very little walking must be involved!), and generally relaxing and gathering energy for the next hike.
