A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 28 November 2023 - T for statues, a walk and a cake

 Hello lovely girls! How are you all? 

I'm showing you another postcard today:

It comes to me from Germany. Someone called Stefan sent it to me and it is a detail of the Schlossbrücke (Palace Bridge) in Berlin.

I found some information on the website of A View On Ciies. The Schloßbrücke (Palace Bridge) was built in the early 1800s and led to the palace that was located on Museum Island. It is considered the most beautiful out of the numerous bridges in Berlin.

Situated at the eastern end of the Unter den Linden, the Palace Bridge was designed by Berlin’s foremost architect of the early nineteenth century, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Constructed over a western branch of the Spree River in 1824, the Palace Bridge replaced a wooden structure once known as “The Bridge of Dogs” because hunters gathered there with their animals before setting out on a hunt.

While the Palace Bridge itself is certainly beautiful, it is the artwork that accompanies the bridge that receives the most attention.

Atop the supporting pillars of the bridge are eight groups of figures fashioned from white Carrara marble, all sculpted between the years 1845-57. Eight different sculptors were chosen to create the masterpieces, following designs suggested by Schinkel himself. They show the development of a hero from early youth to manhood, and then to death on the battlefield and the taking of his body to Olympus.

Nike instructs the boy in heroic history – the boy is shown the names of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Frederick the Great (Emil Wolff, 1847).

The second one is the statue on my postcard: Pallas Athena teaches the boy the art of spear-throwing (Hermann Schievelbein, 1853);

The third statue shows  Athena, who arms the warrior for his first battle (Heinrich Möller, 1846-50);

• 
  
  
   Nike crowns the warrior (Friedrich Drake, 1857):

 the 5th statue the goddess Nike supporting a wounded warrior (Ludwig Wichmann, pre-1857));

But the sixth one is  Pallas Athena who leads the warrior in battle (Albert Wolff, 1853); 

• 
• The seventh shows The hero attacks the enemy, protected by Pallas Athena by his side (Gustav Bläser, 1854);
• 

  
  
  
• I have also got a photo of the last one (number 8) It is Iris, carrying the fallen hero to Mount Olympus (August Wredow, 1841-57).

The bridge was destroyed during the Second World War, but fortunately the statues had been dismantled and stored in a depot. After the war and the division of Berlin, the bridge ended up in East Berlin. The East German government had the bridge, which was renamed Marx-Engels-Brücke, restored in 1950 but without the statues, since the storage depot for the statues was located in West Berlin.

It wasn’t until 1981 before the statues were handed over in a deal between East and West. A renovation project was undertaken and by 1984, repairs were complete, and the figures were returned to their rightful places.

The stamp features the Überseequartier metro station:

Wikipedia says: Überseequartier is a station on the Hamburg U-Bahn line U4. The station was opened in November 2012  and is located in the Hamburg quarter of HafenCity, Germany. HafenCity is part of the borough of Hamburg-Mitte. The station code is "UR".

The stop was designed by the Netzwerkarchitekten architecture studio from Darmstadt. The walls are clad in blue ceramic-coated glass tiles that get darker the further down they go, recalling the undersea world. Silver-colored plates on the ceiling give the impression of a water surface. This underwater theme ties in nicely with the fact that the neighborhood is next to the harbor, and with the name of the stop, which translates as "Overseas Quarter", where the overseas part would provide the seafaring theme, and a playful interpretation of "over-seas" could see the neighborhood as over the sea and the metro station as below it and hence underwater...

The underwater impression is heightened by a sound installation where speakers broadcast underwater sounds such as waves and other marine noises, acoustically amplifying the visual impression.

What have I been doing?

On Saturday the local Women's Association organised a walk to highlight the fight against domestic violence. 

We put flowers by a small sculpture erected to remember Mery, a local woman who was killed by her husband.

At the end of the 5 km walk, we stopped by a small garden where we planted a conifer

and lots of winter pansies.

The flower bed laid out as a ribbon. And there was also a bench:

On Sunday, my Dutch friend Maaike came with me to my church:

She was lucky as after the service we had a little celebration: One of our ladies was retiring and had brought a cake.

We all had a piece and there were fruit juices too.

I should really have photographed the drinks as today is T for Tuesday, hosted by Elizabeth and Bluebeard. But I forgot, so here is a coffee (from last week):

I'll leave you with this one:

I collected a large parcel from the post office. I had to take the car as it was so big that I couldn't carry it home. What is it? I will tell you on Friday...

That's it. 

Happy T-Day all,

Hugs,

Lisca