Where witches fly

Over the years I've collected quite a bit of of more-or-less interesting trivia about the Harz mountains of Germany, where my ancestors lived. Today I've been poking around in some of my old family history docs,  and gathered these for your edification -

Where witches fly
The highest peak in the Harz is the Brocken (1142m) known far and wide as the home of the Harzhexen (Harz witches). The witches, mounted on their wooden brooms, sweep across the sky above the Harz to their landing ground on the Brocken.

Long after the introduction of Christianity, the Brocken was the scene of pagan festivities on the Witches Sabbath, on April 30th each year. The witches were said to dance with the Devil until midnight, when the May King would arrive to clean them out. This was also an ancient Norse festival, for the god Odin married Freya on the last night of April.
Pagan beliefs survived in the Harz, perhaps due to isolation, longer than in any other part of Germany. The early Catholic priests tried to fit the festivities into the Christian calendar by renaming the feast ‘Walpurgisnacht’ after St. Walpurga, who was born on the 1st of May.

 The legends of the Brocken have inspired several musicians and writers, most notably Goethe’s ‘Faust’.  Walpurgis Night festivities continue to the present day, with parties and fireworks, not unlike the American tradition of Halloween, and many of the witches have landed in local tourist shops, hoping to emigrate to warmer climes.

Neanderthal Man was named for remains found in the Neander River valley at Dusseldorf, about 100 miles from Bad Grund.

Harz Roller is the name of a breed of domestic canary bred in the Upper Harz mountains of Germany. The birds were bred in the Upper Harz between Lautenthal and Sankt Andreasberg in the middle of the 19th century and achieved European-wide fame. Since 2001 there has been a Harz Roller Museum in Sankt Andreasberg.

By patient breeding a breed of canary was able to be produced that had a very pleasant, melodious song, full of variety and delivered with an apparently closed beak.

The breeding and sale of this popular breed of canary was an important secondary occupation for the mining folk as was the making of cages for the birds. Especially in the second half of the 19th century the business for these canaries boomed. In contrast to widespread legend, the birds were not used in the mines to indicate the presence of oxygen, they were too valuable for that. The Harz miners used captured wild birds for that purpose.


Miners in the Harz wore a kind of leather apron across their backs. Called an arse leather, the apron was thought to protect the kidneys, and kept their trousers dry, and cleaner.

Kate Greenaway illustration

Hameln (of Pied Piper fame).....is about 50 miles west of Lautenthal.  The Pied Piper of Hamelin (German: Rattenfänger von Hameln) is the subject of a legend concerning the departure or death of a great many children from the town of Hamelin (Hameln), Lower Saxony, Germany, in the Middle Ages.
The earliest references describe a piper, dressed in pied (multicolored) clothing, leading the children away from the town never to return.
In the 16th century the story was expanded into a full narrative, in which the piper is a rat-catcher hired by the town to lure rats away with his magic pipe. When the citizenry refuses to pay for this service, he retaliates by turning his magic on their children, leading them away as he had the rats. This version of the story spread as a fairy tale. This version has also appeared in the writings of, among others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning.

early Bobbin lace

Lacemaking "Here lies Barbara Uttmann, died, 14 Jan. 1575, whose invention of lace in 1561 made her the benefactress of the Harz Mountains."  In fact, Frau Uttmann, wife of a rich mining overseer, didn't actually invent lace, but learnt the skill from a Flemish exile.
 According to legend, bobbin lacemaking came to the German Erzgebirge in around 1560 because a refugee from Brabant found a room in the house of the family Uttmann in Annaberg. She is said to have had her lace pillow with her and to have taught Frau Uttmann how to make bobbin lace. Barbara Uttmann is then said to have introduced bobbin lacemaking into the Erzgebirge and invented the bolster-shaped lace pillow which is typically used there. Until the advent of machine-made lace, bobbin lacemaking a source of income for many women in the Harz villages.

 The Lichtenstein Cave  is an archaeological site about 10 miles to the south of Bad Grund. The cave is 115 metres long and was discovered in 1972. Finds include the skeletal remains of 21 females and 19 males from the Bronze Age, about 3000 years old. In addition, about 100 bronze objects (ear, arm and finger rings, bracelets) and ceramic parts from the Urnfield Culture were found.
 DNA tests on 300 local inhabitants showed that 40 of them were descendants of these Bronze Age people.
The Lichtenstein site is closed to the public, but the Museum am Berg at Bad Grund has an exhibition about 'the oldest family in the world'.  In addition the museum looks at life in the Bronze Age and displays a number of artefacts from the period.

Jam it in a jar!

Our foremothers made jam in prodigious quantities. All the farm produce that couldn’t be immediately consumed was preserved in some way – by pickling, salting or jam-making. Jam was particularly useful, as well as delicious. A slice or two of bread and jam is a wonderful ‘filler’ at the end of a meal. Before you shudder, bear in mind that those hard-working people consumed far more calories to get them through the day than we, in more sedentary times, would need. Farming meant hard physical labour, not just for parents, but for any child old enough to contribute.


My copy of the Barossa Cookery Book, (first published c.1917) gives awesome quantities in some of the recipes, like this one for Melon Jam – 24 pounds of melon, 20 pounds of sugar, ½ pound preserved ginger….it must have been a big preserving pan!
 I’m told that some women made large batches like this in the copper…

 Jam-making had to be done when the fruit was ripe, usually the hottest time of the year, and was done on a wood fired stove. Somebody had to keep a close eye on the pan for several hours, to make sure it didn’t burn – burnt jam is horrible.
Often a task for one of the children, the consequences of inattention were dire – fruit and firewood were free, but sugar – and preserving pans – had to be bought.
Almost anything could be made into jam, and there were many ingenious ways to stretch out the fruit. Carrot jam relied on a few oranges or lemons to add flavour; the addition of lemon or ginger made the bland pie-melon more appetising. Pie melons were a staple crop back then, for actual pies as well as jam. Very easy to grow, and HUGE in size.
 Quince jam, apricot jam, peach jam, fig jam, grape jam, and gallons of plum jam – well-stocked pantry shelves were a source of justifiable pride to the thrifty housewife.
Cheek by jowl with the jam would be jars of pickles and chutney, and bottles of sauce and relish – all valued to dress up the ubiquitous mutton that turned up at nearly every meal. Vegetables, especially beans, could be salted in earthenware jars.

 I still have the patent bean slicer my mother used – it clamped to the table like a mincer – and remember helping to salt beans. Mum knew full well that the beans didn’t have too many vitamins left by the time the salt was soaked out of them, but what can you do when the garden is full of beans?
Another nutritionally dodgy habit was the custom of adding a pinch of soda to the saucepan when cooking peas or beans – it keeps them looking nice and green, but destroys most of their vitamin content in the process. We know better now.
I loathed green beans as a child, with good reason. String beans, as they were called then, have a long fibrous strip running down each side of the pod. Unless they were carefully ‘topped and tailed’, peeling off the strings in the process, they were disgusting to eat!
Modern plant breeding seems to have eliminated the stringy bits, and now I love them.

The advent of Fowlers Vacola Bottling outfits was a welcome addition to food preserving. Joseph Fowler had begun with a fruit bottling business in his Melbourne backyard, and by 1915 had formed the company of J. Fowler & Co., producing home bottling kits. These comprised a stove-top sterilizer, glass bottles, rubber rings, tin lids, clips, and a thermometer.

At first Fowler sold his kits door-to-door from the back of a cart. During the Depression Fowlers Kits became a household name, and in 1934 Fowlers was registered as a public company. Housewives all over the country were encouraged to bottle their own produce by ‘Mrs B. Thrifty’ in the Fowlers ads.

Almost everything was preserved in the glass bottles, which were vacuum sealed by heating on the wood stove. Mum preserved rabbit and chicken meat, all kinds of vegies, even mushrooms, and fruit in a thick sugar syrup.

‘Bottling’ quickly became an art form – there were competitions at local and State Agricultural Shows for the most decorative jars, and some women spent hours arranging carefully cut portions of carrot and parsnip in rows.Then botulism was discovered, and the dangers of preserving vegetables outweighed the benefits.
When I had a family to feed I used to make lots of jam, but the need passed until more recently, when I had a market stall and sold homemade jam – and very popular it was too.

For a while I enjoyed making all kinds of jams and jellies, relishes too. I got sick of it in the end, yet it was a far more pleasant process than it used to be, with a gas stove, and a freezer, so fruit could be stored for cooler weather.

I still make jam now and then, not too much, because I don’t need the extra calories, but when you have a lovely crop of quinces or figs, what’s a girl to do?