Our one and half days in Dresden were dreary and cold, but I am really glad we went. At each of the stops on our road trip, I tried to have one must-do activity to buttress the stop, otherwise we were free to be as active or as lazy as we wanted. In Dresden, the main activity was an appointment at the Historiches Grunes Gewolbe— the Historic Green Vault. I purchased our tickets in advance online, and we had to enter within a 15 minute window (entry is staggered to prevent the vault from getting overcrowded).
The Green Vault is a progression of opulent rooms, stuffed to the gills with Saxon Baroque treasure. Each room has a slightly different theme, such as an Amber Room, Ivory Room, Hall of Precious Objects, and the Jewel Room. Fortunately, the ticket included an audio guide which would walk you around the highlights of each room– otherwise, there was so much to look at and take in I probably would have just shut down. As it was, by the time we got to the jewel room, I was pretty over it. And when you have hundreds of magnificent and exceedingly rare gems packed into one room, it kind of takes away the wonder and meaningfulness of any one piece. The sheer volume of pieces made me wonder if these pieces had any sentimental value for the royals at all, or whether they were each just another of many collected without any real emotion behind them.
One of the oddest rooms was the “Hall of Precious Objects” which was full of ornate “things” (with no practical purpose whatsoever, apart from sitting on shelves) made of gems, crystals, sea-snail shells, and ostrich eggs. The ivory room was full of small human figures and various vessels, carved so finely they looked like miniature marble statues– but made of course of ivory. The Heraldry Room was full of copper-and-bronze coats of arms, which were originally shaped as rectangles, but the Green Vault was heavily damaged during World War II and many of the coats of arms were almost entirely destroyed. I appreciated that the museum didn’t undertake to restore them (as almost everything else in Dresden)– they salvaged what they could, many still perfectly intact, others not– hung them up, and carried on.
Apart from our tour of the Green Vault, we spent the bulk of our time walking around the old town of Dresden, tinkering with our cameras and photographing old buildings. I bought some linzer cookie cutters at a baking shop, we trolled some of the smaller Christmas markets but determined the main market is really the best. The historic core of Dresden is very small– all of it is located within a less than square mile area, in my estimation– and a nice mix of the old buildings restored to their full splendor and new, modern streets.
This is the dome of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady). The original Frauenkirche was destroyed during the bombing, but as this Wikipedia page explains, ultimately it was the extreme heat generated by the bombing, and not a direct hit, that led to its destruction. Rebuilding started in 1994 using as many of the original stones as possible (they had been saved for nearly 50 years!) and was completed in 2005.
