Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!

I spent yesterday in the Dark Ages, 2005-style. The streets teem with people, a crazy juxtaposition of knights, nobility, peasant wenches, court jesters, pseudo-monastics, college professors in full regalia walking alongside your average Hans-Peter, Gudrun and Luisa. The occasional punk or goth lends an intermillennial charm to the overall scene. Booths line the streets in all directions.

The more hard-core streets are filled with hand-constructed wooden booths in which entire pigs are roasted on spits, soups bubble in enormous cauldrons suspended over a wood fire, and signs proclaim, roughly, "death to all ye who enter here! Bwa hahahaha!" For one euro, you can can get your picture taken in the stocks; two euros buys you a ride around the perimeter on a tired old donkey. On the outskirts, exiled from the authentic center of festivities, lie the not-so-medieval vendors: here's a booth in the shape of a garlic clove, there's a Peruvian vendor hopefully hawking his wares.

The weekend's entertainment is multifaceted: the scheduled public hanging was, unfortunately, canceled due to a sudden hailstorm--apparently a last-minute reprieve from the Big Governor in the Sky. But yesterday we did manage to catch the Plague parade, a couple of fire-breathers and some lovely medieval concerts: we jigged and twisted and grinded along to bagpipes, banjo, Elvis and John Denver.

The Plague parade was the real highlight, however--Death with his scythe and a monk with a cross led the masses. Half-dead peasants limped and lurched along behind, malignant warty buboes spreading slowly across their wan, pinched faces. The stronger among them bore a cage with a cowering naked man inside, who occasionally yelled out, "I'm not dead yet! I'm feeling better!"*

Today, the "real" festivities begin. We can renew our wedding vows at the Town Church and hear a lovely collection of wedding music for organ and trumpet at the Castle Church. The wedding parade is followed by a reenactment of the matrimonial event itself, with elected Wittenbergian representatives, and is sure to be accompanied by some gloriously off-key fanfare.

(*Public service announcement: the infectious bacteria Yersinia pestis killed about a third of Europe's population in the 14th and 15th centuries. The bacteria is still endemic in many parts of the world, including the US. Some forms of plague are fatal within 24 hours of infection. Rodents are the repositories, fleas are the vectors, so if you make a habit of eating squirrels, keep a lookout for necrotic tissue or big ugly buboes, and get thee to the doctor, man!)