Photos

As I wrote earlier the history of Thuringia is quite complicated. Now I try to summarize it briefly - or rather to pick a few stones out of the mosaic.

Though Thuringians appear in documents already in 480, and they lived in their own kingdom until 531, the first ruler dynasty arouse 1024 (according to other sources 1030 or even later) with Louis the Bearded. His son (at least according to the not very reliable Reinhardsbrunner Chronik), Louis the Jumper, was a fabulous figure of the Thuringian history. A legend tells he might have escaped from the soldiers of the emperors by jumping over the Saale river - therefore his name. (According other source he jumped from the tower of a castle into the river so as to escape the execution he was sentenced because of a murder. The modern historians with much less phantasy suggest there was no kind of jump but a huge sum of ransom.) He built Wartburg, an eminent place of the German culture and history. (I know three versions. According to the most popular one Louis told the mount: "Warte Berg, du wirst meine Burg tragen!") It was this castle where St.Elizabeth (by the way the daugther of the Hungarian King Andrew II.) lived and helped poor and ill, where tha famous "Sängerkrieg" (contest of minnesängers = medieval poets and singers like Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide) took place (once again: according legends - but it is a fact that Wartburg was a centre of the German poetry in the early 13th century).

After the extinction of the reigning Ludowingian line of counts in 1247 and the War of the Thuringian Succession (1247–64), the western half became independent under the name of Hesse, never to become a part of Thuringia again. Most of the remaining Thuringia came under the rule of the Wettin dynasty of the nearby Margravate of Meißen, the nucleus of the later duchy and kingdom of Saxony, and remained so for almost seven centuries. With the division of the house of Wettin in 1485, Thuringia went to the senior Ernestine branch of the family, which subsequently subdivided the area into a number of smaller states, according to the Saxon tradition of dividing inheritance amongst male heirs. These were the Saxon Duchies, consisting, among others, of the states of Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Jena, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg, and Saxe-Gotha; Thuringia became merely a geographical concept. (And this may be the origin of the not really high reputation of Saxons among Thuringians.)

In 1920, during the Weimar Republic that followed World War I, the small states merged into one state, called Thuringia; only Saxe-Coburg voted to join Bavaria instead. Weimar became the new capital of Thuringia.

On the picture, scanned from negative, you can see half-timbered houses of Schmalkalden (click on the map left.)