13/10/25 Colmar Old Town

Pierre Vacances offered pastries for breakfast, order by 18:00 the night before. Add to that a proper kettle in our kitchenette and there I was sipping tea and eating croissants for breakfast on our terrace. Not that I stayed out there for long before the cold chased me inside.

I spent the day exploring the old town. Roger and Steve not so much. Colmar old town had similarities to Brugge, but without the grand old buildings and big market squares. In Colmar half-timbered houses jostled each other shoulder to shoulder in a maze of roughly cobbled streets and alleyways. Shop owners decorated whole facades in extravagant displays related to their wares, and gave free cheese samples from the doorway to encourage impulse purchases. It took but one chocolate macaron, fresh from the oven, and next thing I knew a bag of them had followed me home.

I tasted stinging nettle cheese.  It was nice.

It seemed that decorating houses was a tradition that had existed for some time in Colmar.  There was the Pfister house:

Built in 1537 for a wealthy (mad?) hatter.  The paintings are attributed to Christian Vacksterffer and represent the Germanic Emperors of the 16th century, the Evangelists, Church fathers, allegorical figures, and biblical scenes.  In other words, anything that took the artist's fancy.  The house's current name came from the merchant who acquired it in 1841, but I dare say he doesn't own it now.

Then there was the House of Heads: this one was built in 1609 for one Anton Burger, who became mayor of the town.  Presumably it was him who decided to decorate it with a large number of heads.  Up at the tippy-top of the gable there was a statue of a barrel maker, not that the barrel maker was famous but the sculptor was one Auguste Bartholdi who went on to design and make the Statue of Liberty (the one France then gifted to the US, not the Statue of Liberty which stands on a traffic roundabout near Colmar's airport).

I want to know if these were real people that Anton chose to immortalise by putting their heads on his house.

I took a boat trip on Colmar's canal to rest my feet, in the care of a tour guide with an engaging French/British accent and an hilarious turn of phrase.  She assured us that the reason for the coloured houses was not that the colours had originally designated the profession of the inhabitants but was instead due to the owners being encouraged to paint their houses any colour as long as it was different from their neighbours.  This all happened some 50 years ago when the area was being revived, tourism was trickling in, and some smartypants had worked out that cute multi-coloured houses all jumbled together would fetch a lot of tourists.

It worked, too.

I visited the St Martin Collegiate Church, discovering that things were not quite as they seemed in the pipe organ department of St Martin.  The organ was originally installed and built by a famous Strasbourg organ builder in 1755.  Now what you see is, as the information plaque coyly informed me, in fact 'facade pipes.'  The current Eulise, built and installed in 1979 by a Swiss organ builder, was 'very far from the original aesthetic' and thus what you see was most definitely not what you got when it came to pipe organs in St Martin.

"Huh" I thought.  "That's a teeny tiny organ for a great big church."

Then I turned around, and there was more.  And then I learned that at least some of it was just a facade, and I felt cheated.

On the way home I visited the carousel/merry go round again, having found out that it was the largest covered carousel in France.  The Sunday crowd had all gone home and the carousel was quiet.

Don't you think she looks like Princess Leia?

Oh all right.  A window to finish.