Winding through the Wine Country-Day 9

Wine and monasteries seem connected in Central Europe. We had a great time exploring both.
Throughout this trip, I have been pondering the question of contradictions. The beautiful, fertile land has also been the site of bloody conflict, from the 30 years war and the Counterreformation to the brutality of the Holocaust. The land inspires belief in truth and beauty, a sort of calm and contentment that is stereotyped in the Bavarian gasthaus and Oktoberfest. The various bits of ancient architecture, from the ruins of the castles to the magnificent gothic and romantic cathedrals compliment the landscape and have endured. Yet these people, the height of human civilization, still house that darkness of the human soul so evident recently in Darfur and Sarejevo (just down the Danube). How does this happen? Our last ride presented some insight into that condition.
Another easy ride, they said, and in a sense it was. We had a wonderful breakfast and pedaled west, upstream to Melk. We passed vineyard after vineyard, with grape picking in active progress. Looking up, the hills were terraced with south facing grapes, mostly whites, but some reds, despite rumors that there are no good reds in Austria. We biked through several little wine towns, enjoying the architecture and the cobblestone streets (maybe not so much the bumpiness- cobblestones are quaint, but hardly bicycle friendly). The were occasional war memorials. I saw one to the First World War, and one to the Napoleonic war veterans. In Willendorf, we stopped to contemplate the finding of a 30,000 year old Earth motherish statue, a fertility goddess, that showed that the Wachau Valley has been inhabited for a long time. Finally, we crossed the Danube into Melk, and parked our bikes before learning more about the Benedictine order that build what Jan calls the most elaborate Baroque cathedral in Europe.
The Benedictine order was of the Empire (Roman, Holy Roman and Hapsberg), and the church was drawn into the argument. Benedict argued that his monks needed to fight the battle for spiritual virtue within themselves, and that really required that they withdraw from worldly life into cloisters. Melk was at the border of the Eastern Marches, and for a while served as the capital of the province of Austria. Of course, the purity of purpose soon became entwined in worldly pursuits; the monks owned a lot of land, grew food and grapes, and became a tool of state power. In fact, one wing of the monastery was designed for the Royal family, so that they would have a place to say on the Danube while visiting the area. The whole thing was refocused during the Counter-Reformation, but unlike the Jesuits who fought the Pope’s battles by looking outward, the Benedictine monks turned inward. They accumulated an amazing library, developed a school and built a gorgeous cathedral. After the fall of the empire, the monks diversified their holdings, using tourism and a slick new message about the order: “Hore” or “Listen” is the theme of well-designed museum. The income from the tourists allows 37 monks to continue thier life of contemplative teaching.
We toured the museum and the cathedral, and the buildings were beautiful. I was especially struck by the integration of new and old- frescos done in 1999, showing the four virtues and an annual “lecture” by a Nobel level scholar, whose words are scrolled and preserved in a giant Moebius strip. The message of the place helped me to tie together the contradictions of this beautiful place where so many bad things have happened. The hard part is to maintain that inner contemplation that allows you to understand the virtous life; the Benedictines have been trying to do this for centuries, and have fallen off the path on several occasions. But they still try, and it is in the trying that virtue is found. The war, for the crusader, the jihadi, the Nazi, the Klansman, is not with the infidel, the non-believer, the black, the Jew; it is a war within your soul, and it is a very easy one in which to loose your way.
After an epiphany, lunch. We bought food at several local eateries and packed them on our bicycles for the ride back up the Wachau. The other side of the river had a major hill, and a long stretch on a main road where they are building a new bike path. It will be nice when it is finished. We had a lovely view of the other side of the river, though. Some of our group boated back to Spitz, skipping the construction, and joining us via a ferry boat across a place where the Danube runs strong. It had a cable to keep it from drifting too far downstream. We rode through more vineyards and then took a ferry back to Durstein, now downstream from Weissenkirchen. Durstein has a reputation for good wine, so we stopped there to look for wine, and found apricot liquor- good stuff. We then biked our last 6K back to our hotel, reluctantly turning in our gear and preparing for our last night with the tour group, another dinner with a well connected family in town.
The dinner was bittersweet; we did a “secret Santa” sort of thing where we gave each other little gifts bought for less than 2 Euro. Julie got her initials carved in word- I got chocolate (they know me so well). It is funny for us because we still have three days in Vienna. The vacation isn’t over; just the bicycling. Tomorrow night, the Zauberflote.