the Portal

Many thanks to Chris McCroskey, one of the prodigious Squeejee.com developers who brought us TweetCongress, for stopping by to identify my latest “mystery” portal view. It feels a little as if Elvis passed through the old blog site this afternoon!

But back to the bridge. There’s a story here, about one of Switzerland’s most picturesque landmarks and an hour that changed everything.

The Kapell-Brücke, auf Luzern der Schweiz, is one of two oldest wooden bridges in Switzerland. It dates back to the 14th century, and is every bit as beautiful, no matter the time of day or quality of light.

Here’s a view of the bridge from the opposite direction, facing into the mountains:

photo courtesy of http://travelguide.all-about-switzerland.info

The Water Tower you see above has been used over the years as a dungeon, a treasury vault, and lately  a meeting space. All along the bridge, under the eaves, are a series of very old paintings — which further set the Lucerne bridges apart from most others in Europe. Originally, there were 110 of them, dating back to 1611.

In August 1993, in the space of less than an hour, the Kapell-Brücke burned. The better part of the bridge, except for water tower, pillars and bridgehead went up in smoke — to include 85 priceless paintings. Luzerners awoke the next morning to this:

Since 1993, the bridge has been rebuilt, though only 25 of the paintings survived. Despite assurances the bridge has been “fully restored,” I have to wonder if the were able to reconjure the  “magic” of the place as well.