The city of Würzburg is situated in the heart of Germany at the river Main. It is blessed with many historic monuments, such as the Baroque Residence or the medieval Old Main Bridge. Situated at the river upon a hill, we find the Marienburg castle with a magnificent view over the old town. In the background, we can spot vineyards as far as the eye can see, due to the region being an important agricultural center for wine.
The Cathedral of St.-Kilian in the city of Würzburg is dedicated to the holy figure of St. Kilian. The church is 105 meters long, and it is the fourth most prominent Roman Catholic clerical building in Germany.
In relation to other European nations, Germany is a big country with some exciting features. While the south of Germany is bordering with the Alps and is in parts quite mountainous, the north is a very different place. Not many know that the country lays ashore not to one large body of water but two. There is the quieter and more enclosed Baltic Sea in the east and the wider and more open Northern Sea in the west. At the shore, there are endless sand beaches and many quiet islands where you can relax with these unique, colorful beach chairs. The most exciting feature, though, is most probably the Wadden Sea (last three pictures). It is a kind of muddy place which is flooded twice a day and reaches at some points deep into the sea. The Wadden is one of the most diverse bio habitats on earth and home to many microorganisms because it is biologically very rich in nutrients. Also, it is home to the sandworm and many kinds of birds.
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Lübeck is a town in Northern Germany, once the significant capital of the Hanse, a union of merchants in the middle ages that dominated trade in the Baltic seas for many centuries. So, the city was also called the Queen of the Hanse, and its inhabitants used to be wealthy and influential. Many beautiful buildings, especially churches, were built in these blooming years. Lübeck is a beautiful and well-preserved historic inner town with a lot of water surrounding it, which makes for excellent perspectives. The photographs were shot in September 2019.
Hallig Hooge is also called the Queen of the Halligen. The Halligen are extraordinary islands in the Wadden region of northern Germany. They are not protected by dykes and are very low; the inhabitants are used to the islands being flooded 40-50 times per year. So to be safe and dry, the houses are built on so-called warften, little villages built on earth mounds. Hallig Hooge and its nature are truly extraordinary, a calm spot in the midst of a rough sea.
Central Europe is particularly rich in famous landmarks. Two of my favorite structures in this region are the Parliamentary Building in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, and the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. From an architectural perspective, these two buildings have little in common. While the Hungarian Parliament is a neo-gothic administrative building, grandeur in size and very unusual for a gothic building equipped with a beautiful red coppola, the TV Tower in Berlin was meant to showcase socialist architecture and technology and was easily seen from Western Berlin. As different as these buildings are, they both were planned as and turned, in fact, out to be landmarks of their respective hometowns – though in another way than the architects envisioned. Germany today is reunited again; many structures from socialist times were torn down, and the TV tower became a signature building of the reunited city and a piece of historic futurism. The parliamentary building in Budapest, on the other hand, is the legislative building of the independent republic of Hungary today, which emerged from the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I.
Michael Hoffman Photography 