It's easy, when confronted with the glossy marketing and the detailed itineraries, to forget that sea- and ocean-going cruises are weather dependent. You'll only be following that seductive itinerary if your ship can safely get in to the promised port. High winds in the Baltic scuppered three of the ten destinations we'd been planning on: Gdansk in Poland and Skagen and Bornholm in Copenhagen. While we were deeply disappointed, particularly in the loss of the medieval treasures of the first, the benefit was an additional and totally unexpected day in Rostock.
We were probably the only people on the ship to be excited by this.
Rostock isn't the kind of place that turns up on sightseeing wish lists. I suspect many people outside of Germany would struggle to find it on a map. It doesn't even show up on Viking Cruises' official itinerary for our trip, which instead lists that well-known port city of Berlin ... roughly three hours by bus or train from the coast. But if you're putting together an itinerary for a bunch of Americans trying to pack as many big highlights into their trip as possible, then moving them from Rostock's port of Warnemünde is the most efficient way to get from a cruise ship to the German capital. In my opinion, it's not really fair on the cruisers, who spent roughly six hours of a 10 hour day in transit, or on Rostock, which is a lovely town that deserves to be better known.
Admittedly, we had a vested interest. The Bencards were a prominent family here. There's a street named after one of them, another was mayor around 200 years ago, and one of the mayor's younger grandsons set off to Denmark in the mid-19th century to seek his fortune and found the branch of the family from which my husband descends. Rostock, for us, was a chance to bring family tales and historic documents to life.
Rostock is a beautiful place, its pastel-coloured buildings, fanciful gables, moulded terracotta decorations and towering red brick churches radiating cheerfulness under bright sun and pure blue skies. You don't need family roots here to appreciate the charm of the place. It was at its most powerful in the high Middle Ages and Renaissance, when its status as leading commercial city in the Hanseatic league made it extremely rich. Merchants splashed out on civic and residential architecture to show off their wealth. That legacy still shines through, despite a bad 20th century on the losing side of two world wars and 46 years under communist rule. For a city that existed and thrived because of the win triumphs of capitalism and multi-national trading, the last must have been particularly awful.
Fortunately, restorers have been hard at work since Unification as money, commerce and capitalism has returned to the city. There is still a slight feeling of otherness compared to "the West" ... more rubbish, more graffiti and more soulless, brutalist apartment blocks on the city's fringes than you see in the former West Germany ... but today's city centre has eviscerated the bad times and feels prosperous. The main market square is lined on three sides with majestic gabled buildings, including an almost-frivolous pink and white town hall distinguished by seven spires on brick arches coming out of its otherwise baroque exterior. There's a fabulous restaurant in the Ratskeller here where you can get local classics. More later on that. One corner of the square is free of buildings (no doubt the effect of that terrible 20th century), opening up a view over part of the old town and the spire of the Petrikirche, one of Rostock's three impressive medieval red-brick churches.
With all that medieval commerce came a cosmopolitan attitude and one of Europe's oldest universities, still one of Germany's best. The university buildings add architectural glamour and variety to the city, particularly the main building behind the "fountain of joy". Its exuberant decoration features a wealth of moulded terracotta geegawgery reminiscent of London's Victoria and Albert museum but even more lavish. There's a beautiful green space between the fountain and the building, another park carved out from the grounds of an old abbey behind, a walk along the medieval town walls, and a collection of other beautiful academic and commercial buildings.
The area inside the old town walls slopes down to a little valley with a stream in it. (The stream's been contained into a watercourse in the centre of a road called Grubenstraße.) While most of the obvious tourist sites are in the 2/3rds of the land to the west of this, if you have time the eastern third offers a very pleasant stroll. This part is almost entirely residential, with tree-lined streets of charming houses and gracious apartment buildings running between Petrikirche and Nicholaikirche. People here put benches in front of their homes, seemingly inviting people to pause and admire the views. The only discordant note is a disturbing number of "stumbling stones", the small memorial plaques the German government awards when properties were proven to have housed people whose lives were destroyed by the holocaust. Rostock was, sadly, more enthusiastic in its Naziism than the average German city. Thus those benches are also a thoughtful, meditative place to think on those stones.
Petrikirche, forming the northern pole of this neighbourhood, is an austere example of a Northern German Lutheran church. It's all clean lines and unadorned whitewash except for some modern stained glass windows and the models of sailing ships hanging from the ceilings to give thanks for successful voyages. For a couple of euro you can take a blessedly convenient elevator up to the base of the spire for fantastic views of Rostock. At the southern pole of the neighbourhood, Nicholaikirche has been converted to apartments. It's fascinating to see their windows cut into the peaked roof. If we'd been ready to pause there, the Likörfabrik cafe looked fantastic. It's in an old liquor factory, just down the hill from the church, next to that little stream and enjoying a fantastic view of the old city walls from an outside patio full of happy and affluent locals enjoying Sunday brunch.
We'd always planned to explore Rostock rather than take the cruise's offered excursion to Berlin. Honestly, I'm confident we had a better day than the hundreds who sat in buses for hours to race past Berlin's key sites. And the benefit of a second day for us was an excursion to Schwerin Castle, another little-known destination that deserves more respect. I'll move on to that in my next story.
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