The first snow

Winter in Mallorca

In Palma de Mallorca I usually stay at Hostal Pons in the heart of the old town, in Carrer del Vi, Wine Street. It is a small hotel converted from an old aristocratic palace, with an Arab-Renaisance columned patio, so characteristic of the city. The owners – a young brother and sister – also live here, in the back. It offers beautiful views, especially in the morning and early afternoon, as sunlight passes through and breaks in a thousand different ways in the columned courtyard, the windows of the hall and the small rooms. The only problem is that the rooms have no heating. Of course, it is not needed for most of the year, as it is mostly hot, and fortunately the tourist season also falls on that period. But Palma can also be cold, especially in January. Most other hotels are therefore not open either, since there are no visitors. I am also alone in Pons. The owners don’t show up very often, so I feel like the last bachelor descendant of a baronial family in his mountain mansion, as described by Llorenç Villalonga in his Bearn, or a mansion in Mallorca. Fortunately, the brothers were attentive enough to set up a mobile gas convector in the hall for the evening, so I can work at one of the tables without the risk of freezing. I remember when living in Rome, where, in early March, central heating is already switched off but the heat of the sun is not yet turned on, so that cold radiates profusely from the damp walls, my landlord consoled me that a Swede lived there before me, who complained that he had never had a cold in all his life as he did here in Rome.

The windows of the bathrooms overlook the courtyard of the St. Alfonso Liguori School. The sound of children chirping wakes me in the morning. As I slowly get up, the second-stage wake-up call comes on, the bells of the medieval Church of the Holy Cross behind the block of the hotel. It is one of the best preserved medieval churches in Palma, but its beautiful interior can only be seen once a week, at eleven on Sundays, when a Mass is held in German. I once mingled with the priest after Mass, and it turned out that not only was he from Berlin, but we even had a common regular pub on Yorckstraße. Of course, it is understandable that I never see him there, since he spends all his time in Mallorca.

Leaving the hotel, I head to the beach for the first coffee at Plaçe Drassana, the place of the former shipyard. In January, most of the bars, restaurants and shops in Palma are closed, which is now also justified by covid. The Drassana, usually throbbing from the crowds in the bars around it, is now completely abandoned. Only two places are open, a curry eatery and the Bar Arenas 1951, the area’s popular pub. I sit in there. While working on my laptop, I am listening to the girl at the bar serving guests. Altough I said there were no tourists, nevertheless occasionally some English and Italian slips in: probably expats living here. She speaks in excellent English and Italian with them, besides Spanish and Catalan, obvious here. “Enhorabuena, how many languages you speak and how well,” I congratulate her when I pay. “Oh, I also speak German and French”, she adds modestly. “Where did you learn so many languages? Here, in the bar?” “No, at home.” It turns out that she was born in Verona, in an Italian family, but her grandmother was Romanian, and her grandfather German, apparently a Saxon from Transylvania, and then she worked in many bars all over Europe. “Here in Mallorca is the best”, she says, “the freedom is great, and the guests are relaxed. This is better than anything else. But it’s very important that you work,” she underlines seriously.

If they opened a window on the place of the giant poster, you would see more or less the same as on the poster: the Gothic cathedral of Mallorca:

On the way back, the “old gallery” almost opposite the hotel is also closed. Although I do not remember of having ever seen it open in the twenty years since I have been coming to Mallorca.

Its being a gallery is only confirmed by the ad hoc exhibition on the façade. To the left of the gate, a “found poem”, written in chalk:

I want to sleep a while. A while, a minute, a century. But all must know that I have not died, Federico is alive.

Federico García Lorca: Gacela de la muerte oscura (The ghazal of the dark death)

Quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas Alejarme del tumulto de los cementerios. Quiero dormir el sueño de aquel niño Que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar. No quiero que me repitan que los muertos no pierden la sangre; Que la boca podrida sigue pidiendo agua. No quiero enterarme de los martirios que da la hierba, Ni de la luna con boca de serpiente Que trabaja antes del amanecer. Quiero dormir un rato, Un rato, un minuto, un siglo; Pero que todos sepan que no he muerto; Que haya un establo de oro en mis labios; Que soy un pequeño amigo del viento Oeste; Que soy la sombra inmensa de mis lágrimas. Cúbreme por la aurora con un velo, Porque me arrojará puñados de hormigas, Y moja con agua dura mis zapatos Para que resbale la pinza de su alacrán. Porque quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas Para aprender un llanto que me limpie de tierra; Porque quiero vivir con aquel niño oscuro Que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.

I want to sleep the dream of the apples, to withdraw from the tumult of the cemeteries. I want to sleep the dream of that child, who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas. I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood That the putrid mouth goes on asking for water I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass Nor of the moon with the serpent's mouth that labors before dawn I want to sleep a while A while, a minute, a century But all must know that I have not died That there is a stable of gold in my lips That I am the small friend of the west wind That I am the immense shadow of my tears Cover me at dawn with a veil Because dawn will throw fistsful of ants at me And wet with hard water my shoes So that the pincers of the scorpion slide For I want to sleep the dream of the apples To learn a lament that will cleanse me of the earth For I want to live with that dark child Who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas. English version by Joan Baez

There are two small niches in the wall on each side. The installation arranged in them completes the experience. To the right is a distorted photograph of a child and a half-eaten apple, as if to hint at the poet’s dream.

And to the left, a peculiar association, the image of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, who fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, although she was only allowed to shoot once, because she was nearsighted, and her target unsure.

In the evening, as I am coming home, a candle burns in front of the photo. I stop, but I don’t have a camera, I cannot take pictures. At the gate opposite, two boys are just saying goodbye. The one who stays turns to him: “Do you like it? I have put there the photo, because it fits so well. And I light the candle in front of it.” Then it turns out he does not even know who Simone Weil was. The absurd genius of Spain continues to work. Federico is alive.

A border trip

From my Prague scholarship, granted by Agosto Foundation for Modern Art, I choose an unfamiliar route home to Berlin. On the way, I would like to see the Pravčická brána or Prebischtor, the largest natural stone arch in Europe, on the Czech-German border, in the Saxon and Czech Swiss sandstone mountains.

The Pravčická brána, as it lives in my imagination

I travel by train to the Czech border station Děčín (until the resettlement of its German population in 1946, Tetschen). There I change to the two-hourly bus that takes me along the Elbe to the border town of Hřensko (Herrnskretschen).

Before the war, the town was a popular resort in the Sudetenland, on the banks of the Elbe and at the feet of the “Swiss mountains”, with Art Nouveau hotels and villas, hiking trails to the Prebischtor and other lookout points, and boats into the picturesque Kamnitzklamm (Edmundová soutěska), the gorge of the Kamnitz/Kamnice river. In the spindle-shaped town center along the river, turn-of-the-century hotels and restaurants stand around the Baroque church of St. John of Nepomuk, including the Art Nouveau building of the former acetylene gas factory, founded in 1905 for public lighting and later, with the spreading of electricity, converted into a villa.

The Gabriela or Lynx trail to the Prebischtor forks off the main road three kilometers above the town. It winds between high rock walls, pines, oaks and beech trees at the bottom of Dlouhý důl, the Long Valley. In some places it is still covered with basalt cubes. According to old recollections, before the war, in the German world, the whole road was paved with basalt, since there was so much tourist traffic to the Prebischtor. On this, gentlemen could go up to the attraction on horseback and ladies in horse-drawn carriages.

Not long past noon, but fog is already coming down heavily. Suddenly the weather cools down, and soon the snow starts to fall as well.

In the nature reserve, fallen trees are not cleared. They remain there in the cycle of nature. They are only towed off the tourist roads, but not from the unmarked roads, as we will see later.

On the uncovered paths, erosion washes the roots into magnificent vascular networks.

The trail turns unexpectedly in front of the Prebischtor cliff. Stepping on the small valley bridge, the sandstone arch formed by erosion suddenly rises, with a barren black tree with Japanese contours in front of it. The really nice view would open from the other side, but the road leads through a ticket office which is closed now, in covid times.

Turning back to the Gabriela trail, soon a steep trail climbs on the back of the Prebischtor cliff. It is marked in the tourist map, but otherwise it is almost invisible, especially under the freshly fallen snow. I slide back on it again and again. A spasm settles in both of my legs by the time I get to the top of the two hundred meters, where the trail joins the Fremdenweg.



The Fremdenweg was the first tourist route in Saxon Switzerland, roughly between 1790 and 1851. It was established by the artists of the Dresden court, beginning with Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, who were the first to come here to paint the bizarre rocks of the sandstone mountains. By the early 1800s it was an already established route, described in detail by Carl Nikolai and Wilhelm Götzinger in their ever-expanding guidebooks written for an ever-growing educated audience. Its exact route was reconstructed by Matthias Krell in his 1998 dissertation. The second Hapsburg military survey from 1843-1853 already shows it on the map of Bohemia.


The Malerweg, developed by the Saxon Tourist Office in the 20th century as the main tourist route in Saxon Switzerland, only partially follows the Fremdenweg. It obviously does not even come over to Bohemia, unlike the Fremdenweg, of which this one section alone bears the original name. Today, however, few walk on it, partly because it is not a marked tourist route, and partly because it requires a paperless border crossing, which is legal but still unusual for EU citizens.

Hřensko and surroundings. The route of the border trip branches off the main road in the middle of the map section and goes northeast to the border, and then west along the border to the Elbe, as indicated by the red dots. It’s worth zooming in. I did not use this map for the tour, but the very detailed Locus Map tourist map, but it only has an Android version, so I cannot insert it here.

The German border is only five hundred meters away along the Fremdenweg. To the right, the edge of the steep valley full of fog is bordered by scary barren trees, as if Caspar David Friedrich had been here (as he was indeed). At the end of the ridge, the road branches in four directions. I would like to follow the Fremdenweg for a while longer, but it is closed by fallen trees, so I head west to the Elbe on the Grenzweg along the border, lined with border stones on both sides.

After a while, the Grenzweg ends in a steep-walled swampy cauldron. The way out is blocked by fallen trees. I have to fight myself over to the parallel Fremdenweg. Here and later throughout the journey, the deer and wild boar runs in the snow are of great help in avoiding the huge logs. They, knowing the terrain well and preferring to follow the trodden paths, avoid the fallen trees with good intuition and ergonomy.



Several cliffs along the Fremdenweg show why this route was preferred by Romantic painters. The largest is the Lion Rock group, the monumental pieces of a collapsed large sandstone column, around which the trail goes in a large loop.

Nevertheless, the Fremdenweg is no runway either. It is also thickly covered with fallen tree trunks. Fortunately, the forest animals have already marked the recommended bypass in the snow. I make the three-kilometer trip in nearly two hours. After a while, the trail arrives at the border and runs along the border line, together with the Grenzweg. Again, border stones and bilingual inscriptions warning of the state border on both sides. In the meantime, it is twilight, I am cold, and the battery is exhausted. From now on, I have to navigate by heart.



Then the road branches off to the north, and it soon becomes the green-marked tourist route, the Malerweg. In addition to the markings, the numerous footprints and half-built snowmen also show that this is a beaten path. The swampy terrain is also made accessible by a wooden grid in many places. I pass under the Großer Winterberg, and turn onto the Bergsteig, the hundreds of steps leading down to the river. The most exciting of the bizarre rock formations that line the trail is a three-headed troll, which awaits the tourist stumbling down unsuspectingly with its mouth open and its eyes closed. At this point of twilight and fatigue, it provides a very convincing performance.

In Schmilka, the last German border town along the Elbe, the lights come on just as I reach above the town on the Bergsteig. Timing was good. I would have hated to do any part of this trip in the dark.

The Schmilka mill today (above) and in the engraving of Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803-1884) from Dresden (below)

The ferry runs until night. I cross the Elbe to the narrow-gauge railway on the other bank. I transfer to the Berlin express in Dresden.

Agua estancada • Tired water

Palma, a orillas del Parque del Mar, bajo las ventanas del palacio del obispo,
donde el agua se acerca más a la muralla.

Palma, along the Parque del Mar, under the windows of the Bishop’s Palace,
where the water is the closest to the wall.

White Christmas

A childhood dream. Freshly fallen snow, a walk on the hillside in the twilight, on the crunching snow, the light of the candelabra dissolving as the milk loaf, the sound of the snow being bumped off the branches. A dream becoming increasingly unreal with global warming. In only a few places has it become a reality. Jerusalem, for example, where Két Sheng / Gyuri captured the following scene:

“He spreads the snow like wool
and scatters the frost like ashes.”
(Ps 147:16)

The countries poor in snow, what can they do? They borrow their Christmas postcards from countries rich in snow. This is what Canada does, from where in November we received this message:

I work for a non-profit organization in Canada. I saw a beautiful picture in your blog, which I would gladly use for our Christmas postcard. Would you please give permission?

Of course.



As to why the Canadian The Centre of Israel & Jewish Affairs sends a Christmas postcard, it can be questioned only by the most nitpicky. In fact, Hanuka and Christmas exactly coincided this year. And to make ecumenism even more complete, I received this postcard exactly today, on the day of the Orthodox Christmas, from Gyuri, who received a bunch of them from the Centre as a complimentary copy. So I forward it to our readers as long as the feast lasts.