ROOTS - not the movie - 7

     We start another day in Denmark. After a healthy breakfast we are off again, but this time we are going somewhere else. We are going to see Jungshoved Kirke (Jungshoved Church) where I was confirmed; we are going to see the last public school I attended, Jungshoved Skole; we are going to see the last place I lived in as a child before going to sea and we are going to see an old friend from school, and so on ....

      First we drive to Jungshoved Kirke and find it looking as it did when I was 14 / 15 years old. The attached link has quite a bit about the history and the architecture of the church, although the English is not the best and there are a few other links.
http://thyrashm.blogspot.com/2013/09/jungshoved-church-jungshoved-kirke.html
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=jungshoved+kirke&qpvt=jungshoved+kirke&FORM=IGRE
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vivede/2650262434/in/photostream/
http://www.tageo.com/index-e-da-v-12-d-m3809238.htm

Jungshoved Kirke with the graveyard surrounding it.

     This is the church in which I was confirmed together with my brother Max and our friends from school. Each Saturday for what seemed like an eternity we would have to go to the Praeste Gaard (The priests farm) for catechism classes. Since I was a Lutheran at the time we were taught Luther's Little Catechism so we could recite it in our sleep. For the Catholics out there, of which I am one now, this catechism was similar in structure and context to the Baltimore Catechism; that is to say we learned stock replies to stock questions, we just didn't learn the why of the answer.
      At the time of our confirmation we joked about how narrow the aisle in the nave was, and at that time pointed shoes were the in style (1960) and we were wondering if the aisle would be wide enough for us to turn around when it was time to leave the church. I know I have a group photo somewhere of the confirmation class but can't seem to find it; if I do, it will be posted here. Here are some photos from the inside of the church.

The Altar with a menorah and the motif of the "Last Supper"

 

 The pulpit - (Praedike Stolen) - the preaching "chair".

Norma is not preaching to me, she is posing.

 The pulpit with its beautiful woodcarvings, depicting the Evangelists

in this case Saint Matthew.

 Saint Mark

 Saint Lucas

Saint John

    
      Just outside of the church grounds and grave yard is a little hill and a moat. This was once the defenses of a large manor house called Jungshoved Castle, which is a bit misleading. It was apparently the source of defense of a fairly large section of that part of the country when raider would come in the cove from Sweden, but the defenses were also to keep the local citizens at bay, who at that time were serfs, which was much worse than being a share cropper or slave.

The cove outside the hill and moat, full of swans,

the National Bird of Denmark.

Is it a Swedish raiding party in the boat out on the water?

Someone enjoying lunch at a picnic table.

Norma by the information post and the Church and Praestegaard in the background.

 

     One of my memories from this hill is the celebration of Midsummer Fest, which is a big deal in Denmark, which is always celebrated on the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year and in Christian terms in honor of Saint Hans. Large bonfires are built and a witch is burned in effigy, a fair amount of beer is consumed while people picnic on the grounds. I was not able to find a direct link to the celebration at this location, but found a link for the same celebration in Skagen.



http://www.visitdenmark.nl/nl/denmark/midsummer-fest---sankt-hans-gdk640849
http://goscandinavia.about.com/od/annualeventstraditions/a/midsummerseve.htm

     We drive to the little village of Stenstrup and find that there is nobody home in the old farmhouse mom and dad rented before they built a house in Praestoe (Præstø), which by the way, if translated literally means "Priest Island".  Well, let us walk to the farm next door and see if there is anybody home there, the home Egon and Eleanor (their last name escapes me) and their 3 children, (2 boys and 1 girl). The children were a bit younger than I but we were good friends.
     When we entered the yard we found a little Vietnamese girl, about 5 or 6, playing. That was for some odd reason a bit surprising. We asked her, in Danish, if her parents were home and she said yes, her father was home and she calls in the door for him to come out. A man comes, looking just like his father did, and there is no doubt in my mind, so I say "You are Michael", and he said, yes I am. This is 2007 and I had not seen him since he was a little boy, in 1961, so a period of 46 years had passed. We talked about when we were children. He told me that his parents had both gone to their eternal rest. He had spent quite a bit of time in Vietnam and married a Vietnamese woman and brought her to Denmark where she learned Danish. Michael inherited the farm from his parents, but do not farm. All the land is leased out and all the animals are gone. He has his own business specializing in central heating.

Michael and his daughter who appears to be a bit shy.

 

     After visiting with Michael for a bit we take off for Jungshoved By, which is a stretch of the imagination. Jungshoved is another small village, but it did or does have a grocery store and did have a school. The school no longer functions as a public school but is used for the area population to take courses of enrichment. The links are in Danish so you will have to use Google or similar translater to figure out what is being said. Again we didn't take any pictures but did have one humorous incident.

We stopped at the little grocery store for some Danish Licorice (salmiak pastiller, salmiak staenger, piratos) http://www.nordiskimport.com/category/Licorice-and-Candy-3   and when it was time to pay I said to the young person at the counter, who could not be more than say 20 years old, "You keep remodeling this place and it is hard to find one's way around in here". He gave me kind of a "blank look" and said "What do you mean?", I replied, "When I was here last, in 1962, (way before this kid was born) the entrance was over there!"

http://jungshoved.net/

http://www.jungshoved.net/index.php?p=menu/side.php&menu=37

 

     Off to Praestoe (Præstø), the small city, but nevertheless a city, through the little villages of Oen (Island) Smidstrup and Lundegaarde. I always rode my bike this route when I worked at Nielsen d.y and efterfoelger, a true hardware which was almost at the corner of Adelgade and Torvegade. Right on the corner was a grocery store. Præstø is where my parents built a house after I went to sea, a house I got to visit a total of 5 times between what would have been early 1963 and 1989. After my mother died and my father could not longer care for himself the house was sold. I was tempted to go and knock on the door but decided not to, since the people now living there would probably say "Who?" when I told who I was. I regret that I didn't take any pictures, but then that house was never really home to me, it was the place where my parents and two younger brothers lived.

     We toured the town, including the cemetery where my parents ashes are, main street, the hardware store where I had a job after school for one year, and my favorite place, the little harbor. Again, we must have been unfocused because there are no pictures. At the little harbor we saw a nice 40 or so foot long sailboat from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and a couple sitting in the cockpit. I asked them, kind of jokingly if they had perhaps made a wrong turn to the right coming out of the Panama Canal and they laughed and said yes. He was Canadian but his wife was from a small town just outside of Præstø. Here are a few links to information about Præstø.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A6st%C3%B8
http://www.maplandia.com/denmark/storstrom/prasto/praesto/
http://www.visitmoen.com/ln-int/denmark/praesto-kirke-gdk615873
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3518259
Præstø is also know as Gøngernes By - the City of the Gønger, which was a group of Danish rebels that defended the eastern coast of Denmark against raiders from Sweden. Their chief was from Præstø.

     Now it is time to go along the coast of Praestoe fjord http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A6st%C3%B8_Fjord and have a quick look at Nysø Slot (Castle). http://www.panoramio.com/photo/64579899
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nys%C3%B8_(Pr%C3%A6st%C3%B8_Sogn)
Since we also drove by Lindersvold, which in my young age was a convalescent home for boys, and I was there twice, receiving all of its funding from the sale of Easter Seals, http://www.panoramio.com/photo/11146738  (in the photo on the link is the mainbuilding. To the right of entrance door was the apartment of the Headmaster, his wife and two lovely daughters. To the left was the large dining room. Upstairs were dormitories for the boys. In the wing to the left were classrooms and teacher apartments.) Later it became a school for troubled children of broken marriages, and now I do not know what it is.

     Those two stops out of the way we have to look at Vindbyholt Kro (Vindbyholt Inn) in the village of the same name, not including Kro. The earliest written reference to the village appears to be in 1387. The inn received its royal charter 1584 (almost 200 years before the American Colonies declared independence). It burned a number of times and was rebuilt in the original style. From what I can gather on the internet is that it is now closed and the buildings were sold at auction. With the kro gone a piece of Danish history is gone.
http://www.evas-postkort.dk/Faxe?ElmPhotoID=480560

      And now on to Faxe, the city of my birth and the home of a old friend from school,  Bent and his wife Anne. Bent and I became good friends and have remained in semi contact over the years. He was one  year ahead of me in school and completed school earlier but started working on a farm very near to where we lived so we kept up the contact. For the young people reading this post you have to remember this was long before cell phones, the internet, facebook, twitter, and other social media. In the village of Bregninge where I grew up there were probably less than ten homes with telephones; the carpenter shop had a phone, the school had a phone, the grocery coop had a phone, the kobmand forretning had a phone, the butcher shop had a phone, and a few of the farms. So in order to reach someone it was by mail or by, in my case, getting on the bicycle, to go see them. Later Bent went to work as an apprentice to learn the baking trade, but said he couldn't handle the flour dust and was tempted to eat his wages in the Danish pastry that was being made. Eventually he went to work for and retired from Faxe Bryggeri (Faxe Brewery).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxe_Bryggeri  http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=faxe+bryggeri&qpvt=faxe+bryggeri&FORM=IGRE
http://www.royalunibrew.com/Default.aspx?ID=222
Bent claims that he was never tempted to drink his wages in the good beer being brewed but didn't mind the discounts being offered to the employees.
     Over the years we would correspond from time to time, and each time I returned to Denmark we would make met just to catch up. In 1975, in 1989 and now in 2007. We find the house and have a great time just talking and once again catching up.

     First a few links to Faxe, also spelled Fakse, is a very old town. The name means "horse mane" in Old Norse. I know there is a very old school building in Faxe, dating to sometime in the early to mid 1500's but I can't find link to it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxe_Church

     Then it is off together to sightsee; first to Faxe Kalkbrud, a very large limestone quarry, which I only saw once as a child on a school trip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1atiY58FeE
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37257005@N07/3435639764/in/photostream/
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.321544274585479.76424.250685108338063&type=3

Norma at one of the " blue lagoons" that resulted with groundwater

seeping into the quarry pits.

 

    From Faxe Kalkbrud we are off to Stevns Klint which is a cliff on the Baltic with a church, or the remains of a church, at the edge. A large piece of the church plunged into the Baltic in 1928 when a piece of the cliff collapsed.



http://stevnsklint.org/



http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=stevns+klint&qpvt=stevns+klint&FORM=IGRE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevns_Municipality
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fremsley/1196745054/in/photostream/
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=stevns+klint+kirke&qpvt=stevns+klint+kirke&FORM=IGRE
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clairepearse/8502875783/
The link below this line has some before and after photos.
http://www.bibliotek.stevns.dk/Kulturliv/Det-store-skred-paa-Stevns-Klint-fredag-den-16-marts-1928/Billeder-af-Hoejerup-Kirke-foer-og-efter-det-store-skred.aspx
Here are our photos from the same location;

The "balcony" to the right is out over the cliff.

What fell down the cliffs during the collapse was

the sanctuary area.

We are enjoying the view in what used to be the sanctuary.

The rescued remains of the altar piece.

The upper portion of the altar piece.

The hymn on the day that the end of the church fell down the cliffs.

Mosaics or wall decorations from the Catholic period.

The nave of the church looking out into space.

Notice the curve worn in the floor over the centuries.

The intricately carved entrance door.

Again the curve worn into the stone floor.

The steps leading to the bottom of Stevns Klint.

The end of the church building right on the edge.

Anne, Norma and Bent on the step of Stevns Klint.

Norma looking out over the Baltic.

At the waters edge at Stevns Klint.

 

     Once again it is late in the day and we should go somewhere for dinner and of course we do.

A neat little restaurant I can't remember where but the view is fantastic; one can see Sweden and the bridge that goes to Sweden, so I am going out on a limb here and say that it must have been "Restaurant Udsigten" (Restaurant the View) located at Kystvejen 238, Stroeby 4671, Denmark, but I could be wrong.

 

 The food is superb as is the beer, the Danes are as good as the Germans when it comes to beer making. The company is the greatest.

Bent and Anne

Yours truly and Norma

After dinner in the court yard of the restaurant.

 

 

     The time has come to head back to Frank and Lone's house, and we are worried that they may be thinking we are only using their house as a "pit stop", a place to sleep and hang our clothes. Since the last few days have been very busy we have to do nothing tomorrow and spend the day with them.

 

Another fantastic day has come to a close. More to follow in the next post.