Our Saturday outings will be over soon. We’ve seen so many interesting places in the last year and a half. Today our first stop, about an hour away was a Roman Villa called Haselburg. It was out in the country surrounded by fields and woods. The villa dates back to 200 A.D.
From Wikipedia:
The Roman Villa Haselburg was a manor house (so-called villa rustica ) from the time of the settlement of the Odenwald by the Romans . The complex, which is largely visible after archaeological excavations, is located near the village of Hummetroth near Höchst in the Odenwald in Hesse and is designed as an open-air museum and is freely accessible.
The villa rustica “Haselburg” is one of several hundred known estates from the Roman period in Hesse. It is the largest known and most extensively researched complex of its kind to date.
(There’s a lot more info there.)
The site has been excavated and most of what we saw was reconstruction of the foundation stones, 1-3 feet high. You could walk in and around these foundations. There was a main house, a bath house with a toilet and warm and cold bath areas, an area for servants, and a living area. Separate from the house was a Jupiter Sanctuary that once had a 10 meter high pillar in the middle of it. Parts of that pillar were found. The villa owner would’ve overseen the farms around it in this area.
It was cold there. Puddles in the ground were frozen and the grass was icy. 32 degrees. We wandered around and read the descriptions, spending about 30 min there. Then we continued on to Breuberg, a fortress castle big and solid, high on a mountain top.
There is a Visitor’s Center that’s open in the summertime.
Here’s how the villa was laid out:
Here’s a model of how they got their fresh water:
The garden area behind the living area:
This is the main part of the villa, the living area:
Under-the-floor heating:
The toilet and bathing area:
The pillar to Jupiter was in this sanctuary area:
This is really old stuff. And it’s really amazing that it still exists.
Our Frankfurt Germany Mission 