In which I completely lose track of my students

25.05.13

The tour continues.  Wikipedia now tells me that the fortress is properly called Hohensalzburg Castle in English.  Here's a view from a window that overlooks the interior open areas of the fortress.

This is the Salzburger Stier, or Salzburg Bull.  It's a mechanical pipe organ of some sort that appears to be run on a rotating cylinder that selects what notes are played.  Its name comes from its sound.

At this point, the tour is wrapping up and we were heading downstairs.  I was taking my time so I could get clear pictures and by the time I exited the stairwell, all my students had managed to disappear on me.

Little window in the stair tower.  Spiral staircases in castles twist counterclockwise when viewed from above.  This makes it easier to strike someone coming up the stairs with your statistically dominant right hand, while they have to use their left hand or risk striking the center pillar of the staircase when trying to strike upwards.

Now I'm back out in the open having lost my group.  I decided to visit the museum and preserved rooms.

Little play area for kids.  Austria seems to have pretty fun playgrounds in general and good amounts of them.

A shrine of some sort.

Here we see the coat of arms of Prince-Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach, who I think of as Mr. Turnip.  The inscription talks about what was built in 1496, if I'm reading the old numbers correctly.

Here something else was built by Mr. Turnip.

I first found my way into a room which housed the remains of a Roman chapel.  This picture shows a hypothetical reconstruction of the room.

Below are remains of mosaics.

In the Roman chapel room, there was a screen which rotated through 3D models of the castle at different periods of construction.  Pictured below is the original little hill fort.

Hello, Mr. Turnip.

After the Roman chapel I went upstairs to visit the museum and the fancy rooms.

On the way I encountered an interesting little side exhibit about a woman who traveled the world in the 19th century.

The lines are her various journeys.

There were no extant photographs, so a performance artist built a dress out of maps with important locations marked with flags and took a portrait.  It turns out the performance artist is the great great etc grand niece or something of the original.

The castle museum had some nice dioramas that showed the types of technology people used to build castles.

Here's a shot out the window of the tower I was standing on earlier during the tour.

A big model of the castle made of porcelain from the 30s.

This shows the horse drawn crank that pulled the rail car up the hill to supply the fort with freight.

Here's the tunnel to the upper fortress.  I don't believe this is the same track that we came up in, there was another funicular that I found on the walk down later.

There was also a museum devoted to the local infantry regiment.

I found the embroidery on the parade gear interesting.

This is their marching music, I was curious if Mom could read it.

This regiment fought against the Italians during WWI.

I finally stumbled across the fancy rooms.  The ceiling is studded with gold.

This room is also used for concerts.

The massive beam in the middle of the ceiling is decorated with various coats of arms.

The ceiling is supported by giant marble pillars.

Some of the coats of arms belong to what are now German states.

This was the Golden Hall, which was richly decorated.  The benches would have been covered with cushions and the lower part of the wall that is currently plain wood would have been covered with tapestries.

This is the stove.  It's another faience stove that would have been accessed from a different room.

This is an early artist's interpretation of a pineapple, possibly having never seen a pineapple.

This is the bedchamber.

Complete with fancy indoor plumbing.