Incense and Gunsmoke

When the building of the Badische Kommunale Landesbank (Bakola), constructed in 1954, was taken down in 2007 to make room for a modern shopping center, scientists started to search for traces of earlier settlements at the place that had always been within the inner city boundaries. 

Yesterday Dr. Jenisch, the director of the Bakola excavation, guided a group of the Breisgau Geschichtsverein (historical society) through an exhibition of charts documenting the archaeological findings and presented the artifacts he and his team had dug out at the former site of Freiburg's Dominican monastery.

The exhibition called Weihrauch und Pulverdampf (Incense and gun-smoke) is devoted to the former Dominican monastery and to the times when Freiburg was besieged in the 17th and 18th centuries by Swedish and French troops. The building within and close to the city walls was located near a vital access gate called Predigertor (preacher's gate). The monastery became famous when from 1236 to 1238, the great Albertus Magnus held the position of Lesemeister (lecturer).

Albertus Magnus' monument at the site of the Dominican monastery (Photo Wikipedia)

Hand grenades made from glass were among the most interesting artifacts found at the monastery site. The word grenade comes from pomegranate (Granatapfel) because the original grenades had such a form.

French hand grenades made from glass around 1740

For me, the term hand grenade bears some reminiscence of the 1970ies when we were building the Intersecting Storage Rings for protons at CERN. It became necessary to erect an old-fashioned water tower to ensure the pressure of water required in the magnet cooling circuits of the ISR. Soon my Anglo-American colleagues nicknamed the building the German hand grenade. For a long time, the stick hand grenade competed with the pineapple design called Eierhandgranate (egg hand grenade) in German.

Aerial view of the ISR ring structure with the German hand grenade in the back
close to the CERN fence (Photo CERN)

The glass hand grenades found in Freiburg are from 1745 and of French origin. They were used as explosives during the dismantling of Vauban's fortifications, but all did not detonate as planned. 

In battle, a grenadier (sic!), i.e., infantryman throwing a glass hand grenade, lived dangerously for the time between ignition and detonation was ill-defined, and many a man lost his life before he could fling the grenade at the enemy.

A "grenadier" - his shoulder bag full of hand grenades - ignites one.

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