Baths and Persecution

One of the interesting places that I found while I was walking around near the station was the Via delle Terme di Diocleziano or the Road of Diocletian's Baths.  The road ends up in a little roundabout with a fountain in the middle.  One side of the circle was a really large, fancy white building with stores in the bottom.  But the other side of the circle was a very, very old building made out of red bricks that were crumbling into pieces, they were so old.

This is just a tiny part of the Diocletian baths.  Diocletian was a 3rd century AD Roman emperor.  (Who was kind of a scary looking fellow.)  He is known for a few things.  First, for his political innovations and reforms, which strengthened the empire significantly.  One big change that he made was setting up co-emperors, and then co-caesars, so that Rome was ruled by a tetrarchy, or a government by four people.  This made succession much smoother and allowed him to resign from office instead of being assassinated.  Second, he is known for instigating an extremely vicious persecution of Christians.  John Foxe, in his Foxe's Book of Martyrs, records the Diocletian persecutions as the the 10th persecution and includes a bunch of really unpleasant stories about the kinds of things that happened, including pictures.  I've copied that section of the book (which is in the public domain) and posted it as its own post, in case you want to read it.  It is a bit gruesome but it might be a good history lesson?  Interestingly enough, Diocletian was the emperor right before Constantine, who made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire.

Third, Diocletian really, really like his baths.  The Diocletian Baths were the largest baths in Rome but the buildings also included libraries and other important official meeting places (it wasn't just a place to bathe).
This website (which looks like it is someone's school project) looks like it has some interesting information about the baths.  As near as I can tell (from estimating from different sources, it looks like the whole Baths compound is about 1,500 x 1,200 feet.  That is five football fields by four football fields!  The Baths were built by Christian slaves and, at least according to some sources I found, the slaves marked crosses on some of the bricks and you can still see them, if you know were to look.  That was one of the reasons why there are now at least two churches in the building.

The little bit of the old Baths wall that I saw from the street is part of what is now the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri (the Basilica (which is a kind of church) of St. Mary of the Angels and Martyrs). 

If you go here, you can see the English language version of the church website.  It has a lot of pictures of the church interior, as well as panoramas of some of the halls.  If you click on the "Guided Tour" button, and then choose a room or area, you can see pictures of the rooms and the history of the room and paintings.  If you go here, you can see the Italian website.  The first picture down is a video tour of the church.  Unfortunately, the descriptions are all in Italian, but it is still a very pretty church.  The whole Baths complex is now a national museum.

On interesting and very relevant tidbit is that after he retired from being Emperor, he moved to the Dalmatian coast.  He actually lived in what is now Croatia, (a very beautiful part of the coast, too!) but the Dalmatian region was actually very broad and included what is now Albania.  And, just a few hours after I stopped at Diocletian's Baths, I headed to Albania!

"The Tenth Persecution Under Diocletian," from "Foxe's Book of Martyrs"

This is the section on the Diocletian Persecution, as outlined by John Foxe.  (The text is in public domain but I got these particular images from Google Books.)

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(page 44 was just the blank back of the prints)

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The Viking Ship Museum

The Viking Ship Museum was pretty good.  However, they declined to give us our Copenhagen Card discount and we ended up spending more money than we intended which kind of colored our experience.  I think we both liked it but were not entirely sure that it was worth the $10 price tag.  It was a good day to go.  The sky was very blue and the clouds were very fluffy and the sun was very shiny.

Rows of model ships in front of the museums. 

These are the workshops.  They have a few displays here but mostly it is where they build life-size replica ships.  Some of them are for the museum and historical type places but, apparently, they have quite a business building viking ships for private individuals who want sail like their ancestors. 

A church boat--how you get to church if you live in
The Middle of Nowhere, Denmark

The Museum is set up around a huge collection of old sunken viking ships that were found twenty or thirty years ago.  They have all the bits of the ships that they found set up on forms so you can see kind of what they looked like.

The museum also had a series of little dioramas that depicted different things.  This set shows what typical Danish life was like in the viking era.

A large section of the museum was devoted to attacks on the Danes by the Norwegians.  Apparently they didn't get along.  This is the picture that introduced the exhibit.  They don't sugar coat history.  Below is a map of the attack..

There were, according to the exhibit, 108 war ships and 13 cargo ships that took part in the particular attack they were highlighting.  This shows the kinds of weapons that were probably on board the ship.  It looks like they were loaded for bear.  (Or for VIKINGS!  Ha!)

On the left is a diorama of the Danes lighting the signal fires to warn of the incoming Norwegians.

On the left they are skuttling a ship in the harbor to make it more difficult for the Norwegians to get in.  Below you can see the advancing Norwegian hordes.

They had a loom set up with information about the special way they wove woolen sails so that they stood up well to the weather and did not warp.
They also wove clothing.  And the museum had clothes available to try on so that you could look like an authentic Viking.  And, while Jael could have probably fit in the children's sizes, they had some cloaks and things which looked like they were sized for adult men.

Jael checking out the possibilities.  

Jael preparing to deal with some Norwegians. 

Jael beside a replica warship.  The room was set up with a video screen, which was showing a film about some guys who had lived on a replica ship for a couple of months.  There were two ships in the room that you could climb around on and which served as displays and as seating for people watching the film.  

You can see people watching the movie on the left.  I liked the picture because the still of the movie shows the Danish flag flying prettily.

On the right you can see some of the stuff that would have been brought with on a voyage.  The manikin is wearing the outfit of a monk and, if you look closely, you can see the head of a polar bear rug!

They had a display on burial rituals.  It wasn't the prettiest thing.  Abive is a picture of an actual grave.  The guy on the left was the dead Dane.  The skeleton on the right was a decapitated woman, probably a slave, who was killed specifically to be buried with him.  The other picture is an artists rendition of the burial preparations.  The horse looks unamused.

The Viking Museum Port area

The outside work-area where they work on building new replica old ships.

They even had specimens of all of the old varieties of trees that would have been used in old-fashioned ship-building, along with information about what they were used for and why.  There were at least a dozen different trees here, valued for different properties: growing tall and straight quickly, for masts, being flexible but strong and durable in water for the ships sides, etc. 

Royal Copenhagen

Jael and I planned to go see the royal places in Copenhagen.  We sort of did, but not really.  It was really cold.  And then it was really cold and really rainy.  We kept planning on taking a walking tour through the Royal Copenhagen area (especially since it is really close to the Kastilette and other places where we went) but we kept putting it off until it was a little warmer, or until we were less tired, or until our socks were dry.  And it never happened.

We did see a part of what would have been on our Royal Copenhagen tour if we had taken it.  While we were waiting for a tram on Saturday (the first day we were in town), we saw Rosenborg Castle.  Rosenborg Castle is where they have the Danish Treasury and what is supposed to be a pretty good museum, as well.  When we went by, we were too late to actually go in but we did see it from the outside of the gates.  Besides the palace and the Treasury, there is a huge garden area where people can wander around and eat lunch and stuff.  If you click here, and then click on the tab that says "The Castle", you can go through a virtual tour of the different floors of the castle, with information about the history and events of the castle.

We waited, for about 20 minutes in the cold, at the little red star.  It was okay in the sunshine but the tram we needed  left from a stop that was entirely in the shade.  It was while we were here that I took this picture of Jael looking really cold.  You can see a part of the Rosenborg Gardens in the background.  On the map above, the Rosenborg Castle grounds, are circled in the big green circle.



Another thing that we didn't see was that just behind where we were standing (in the yellow diamond) was a Reformed Church.  It is actually a French Huguenot church, so that would have been fun to look at a little more closely.  This picture is from Google Maps Street-view (hey, it's not all evil).  It's awfully pretty.

Rosenborg Castle

Rosenborg Castle

The blue circle in the map above is around the Marble Church.  It is where the Queen and the royal family go to church when they are in town so that probably would have been fun to do but it would have been awkward not knowing when we were supposed to sing or stand or leave or anything.  The Marble Church is named because it was supposed to be completely covered with marble, including the outside of the dome but they ran out of money and just went with the copper dome instead.  It still is really pretty, though.  

We saw the Marble church.  Kind of.  You can just see the faint green of the dome against the faint blue of the sky, there through the trees.

If you want to see an inside view of the church, you can go here, where you can see an interactive 360 degree picture of the interior.  If you go here you can find out all about the history and construction of the church, together with "under construction" images.  If you go here you can click through pictures of the church.  And, if you click here, you can see a page about some of the famous churches of Copenhagen, including the Marble Church.  We also saw the first church that is shown on that page, the Church of our Savior.  We saw it a couple of different times but always while we were riding through town on a bus or something, so we never got a picture of it.  You can walk up to the top of the tower on that exterior stair and that really sounded awful in any case.  If we had gotten a chance to go there, my plan was to send Jael to the top with my camera so I could put up the pictures and pretend that I had gone to the top but I guess I was saved from that little deception by time constraints.

The orange hexagon is around Amalienborg Square.  The square itself is actually an octagon but they didn't have an octagon in Paint so I had to go with the hexagon.  Amalienborg Square has four different royal palaces.  The Queen and her husband live in one and the Crown Prince and his family live in another.  I don't know who exactly live in the other two.  The palaces were private residences until the former royal palace burned down and the royal family (a hundred years or so ago) eminent domain-ed them.  If you go here and click on the "Palace" tab, you can see the official site about the palace.  If you go here, you can see more about the history of each of the palaces, along with a lot of pictures of famous people who lived in them.  If you go here you can see something about the royal guards who stand guard all the time, in big fuzzy hats, like the English royal guard.  And if you go here, you can see the 360 degree view of the whole square.  Note that you can see the Marble Church in the background.

And that is the other famous super famous bit of Copenhagen that everybody who goes there sees that we did not see.  But it was really cold.  And we were awfully tired.  And our socks were wet.