Out walking

 Well, we are restricted, but not imprisoned, so we try to get out and take a nice walk around town every day or so.   Yesterday there was a high wind alert, so we stayed inside like good little doo-bees.  The wind didn't blow, though.  Today it is a bit windy, but we were bundled up.  Tonight will be the first freeze of the year - low of 28 predicted.  Tomorrow night is supposed to be 21, but I suspect this is kind of what winters will be here.  Highs chilly, lows hovering around freezing.  It snows, but I haven't seen any photos of significant amounts.  Mostly, it rains.

    So, I took some cellphone photos.  First, a door.  There are tons of interesting doors around here.  

This an ordinary building, but it dates back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire days.  Very interesting.

This four-pool fountain is in a popular square just outside the palace.  Behind it you can see windows through the city wall.  There is a closer view below.

This dates back even farther than the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The Turks tried to invade Europe starting in about the 1100's or so.  The Yugoslavian countries mostly stopped them.  Maribor was a major crossing point of the Drava River, and so the City of Maribor was built as a fortress.  This is a part of the Palace.  It was built as part of the Old City Wall, and is just about the only piece of it left.  There are some older walls along the riverbank that might also be parts of it..  From the different-colored stone, I expect this was the back gate at one time.  But the window is clearly defensive and gives a hint of the 4-5 feet thick walls.

These are old windows from the courtyard into the cellar of the palace, and even they are defensive, because the palace doubled as the reboubt, or last place of defense.  But these windows were inside the walls.  The low, grey wall bottom-left in this photo is the where the main wall continued across town.

This is the well in the same courtyard.  It's hard to see, but the pulley for lifting buckets out of the well is still there.

I took this photo just to show how the outside walls of the fortress sloped.  Difficult for troops to climb.  It was never conquered while the big artillery was trebuches and fighting was almost all done with bows and swords.  Of course, once big cannons were built, this kind of fortress became obsolete.

Here is a Christmas display in the window of a shop in the Center of Maribor.  Pretty up-scale stuff, but the shop is closed by COVID restrictions.  We still think (and the shop owner clearly agrees) that the intent of government is to clamp down hard now so they can loosen it as Christmas approaches.

This is an Advent tree, for counting down the days until Christmas.  Advent calendars in various forms are very popular here.  In this one, each day you open a drawer and take out a little ornament to hang on the hooks on the ceramic tree.  Very clever.