Fotoeins Fotografie

Fotoeins Friday: Erfurter Anger (Erfurt Commons)

By HL fotoeins on 24 Jul 2015

With over 200 thousand residents, Erfurt is the capital city for the state of Thuringia (Landeshauptstadt Thüringens), and is included in the Historic Highlights of Germany. The city’s central square is the Anger with its first mention traced to a document in 1196. Anger develops over centuries as the town’s trading centre for wine, wool, wheat, and woad. Woad (“Waid” in German) is a source for blue dye after the plant is collected, dried, pulverized, and fermented. By the second-half of the 17th-century, Erfurt is a centre of woad trade and production; Anger is also known as the “woad commons” or “Weidt Anger”, “Waidanger”, “Waydanger”. Today, Anger has evolved into the present-day commercial hub of consumer activity, with Germain chain stores Karstadt (department), Saturn (electronics), and REWE (food) in “Anger 1”.

“Anger” is a German noun (m, der) representing an open common space in a small town (i.e., ‘village green or common’). The German word for anger is Zorn (m) or Wut (f). Confusion and similarity of words in English and German is an example of a “false friend”.

My thanks to Germany Tourism, Thüringen Tourismus, and the Erfurt Tourism and Marketing Board for supporting and providing access to places and activities, and to Mercure Hotel Erfurt Altstadt for their warm hospitality. I made these photos on 26 and 29 April 2015. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotopress at fotoeins.com as http://wp.me/p1BIdT-6Z4.