Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

A Journey to Sorbia, Part Two

19 August 2026 · 4 min read

Having now eaten, bellied filled, and drunk as a skunk, lady friend I continued to walk around, now determined to see as much as possible before the sun sets

This is the Bautzen town hall again, from the backside!

Walking around the cobblestone streets we came across what I thought was a Protestant relief, but is actually a funerary epitaph, likely to a burgher or nobleman who gave his life during the 30 Years War1, Bautzen was a hotbed of Protestantism and suffered much in the war

We kept making our way around the tight cobblestone streets and I found this corner to be quite beautiful, the red tipped building in the background is "Church of Our Lady" (Liebfrauenkirche) and it is the oldest church site in Bautzen, 1293!

This is, notably, a Catholic church and serves the Sorbians (Wends) of the town2! According to the Sorbs themselves the site of the church is far older3 and would draw Slavic christians from hundreds of miles. The city is divided by Saxon Protestants and Catholic Sorbs4

We made our way to the walls of the city and started to walk up them, I took this pretty photo overlooking the part of the town that surrounds the walls

Another picture showing off the architecture of the buildings, I was really enchanted by them

The interesting thing about this wall is that it was built originally in the 1200s but then HEAVILY upgraded due to Bautzen's involvement in the Hussite Wars5, and that is where the walls got their present form, like this picture, Hussite history!

Just another quaint scene, nothing too important

I really thought this town was beautiful and unique because of their usage of verticality... the big bridge here goes into the walled part of the city and below it rests the ungarrisoned part of town, quite lovely

More photographs from the walls of the city

Here's another view of the Catholic Church of the Sorbians, you could feel that it is a sacred and holy place, they chose the location of their Church well!

Onward and upward we went!

I really found this part of the wall so interesting, it clearly has at some points not been changed in over 500 years, just spectacular

This was an interesting photo to me, I took it because it was a unique view of the lack of zoning, it just felt so quaint, the kind of thing you would never see in an American town, look at the little farm, it is just a pottage, how pretty

Finally we made it to the top! At this point I was having heat stroke, drunk, and (as we will later find out) having the pre-symptoms to mild sodium poisoning, but, I am a cowboy, and I persist! The alcohol has not warn off, and day is still bright!

Well, despite this, I didn't take any pictures at this point, I was single minded trying to get to my car to drive to our hotel, but I did manage to walk past a historical bookstore, and took many photographs of books for future reference, hello past me, future me says thank you

That concludes this trip! Now, you may be thinking. Well, that wasn't that interesting, I didn't learn anything about Sorbians! Neither did I! It seemed to me, and I was told this by locals, that it was basically... kitsch at this point6, everyone speaks German7!

I awoke the next morning with salt poisoning and made myself throw up and drove to Potsdam, where I would be spending my final days in Europe, and that itself is a story for another day, but also affected me deeply.

I would love to return to Sorbia one day and meet some Sorbs properly, to see their side of things, and to meet some people who speak it fluently and keep these traditions alive8. Ultimately, Bautzen left me with many thoughts about Settler-Colonialism and Communism9

I found it horrific and sad what had been done to the Sorbian people10, and found it quite depressing that the only thing to truly wipe them out was simply... modernity11, they had fought valiantly for so many centuries, keeping their culture alive, one shot by modernity!

Looking around the town you don't get the sense you're in the homeland of the Sorbs, you get the feeling you're on a military garrison built by Saxons, who built it so fortified because of their fear of the Sorbians, who they wished to annihilate, and it seems, almost have

To be indigenous to a land is such a complex thing, but many people have become Sorbians upon their own land, I think there's a lot to learn from the history of Sorbs and Saxons, and we can apply those lessons and observations to our own lives, today

One day perhaps your culture will be nothing more than a kitsch holiday destination, your form of dress a clown costume, and your dish served to the palettes of the people who colonized you, that is the march of history, a people's fire can only be quenched12 when they let it be

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Saxony took over both Lusatias in 1623 as the price of backing the emperor against the Bohemian revolt. In the revolt of 1619 to 1620 the Catholic cathedral chapter at Bautzen was briefly expelled. Swedish troops devastated the town in 1634 and occupied it in 1639. source ↩
  2. For centuries the Liebfrauenkirche was chiefly the parish church of the Catholic Sorbs of the suburb and nearby villages. It is first documented with certainty in April 1293. The Hussites destroyed or damaged it in 1429, and it was reconsecrated in 1443. Bishop Schreiber made it a parish in 1926, but sent a German pastor in 1927, and the parish was dissolved in 1984. source ↩
  3. Tradition and many historians put the church's founding in the 11th century, and a chronicle points to 1240. A merchants' church is mentioned in the 1070s, and scholars have argued whether it was Liebfrauen or St Nicholas. A stone cross before the door marks the sermons of John Capistrano in 1453. source ↩
  4. The split is written into the cathedral. St Peter's has been shared by Catholics and Lutherans since 1524, the first such church in Germany, with a treaty of 1543 giving the choir to the Catholics and the nave to the Lutherans, divided by the rood screen. Each has its own organ. Sorbs were mostly Lutheran until the 20th century, and Protestant Sorbs were 86.9 percent in 1900. The Catholic core is what kept the language. source ↩
  5. The Hussites failed to take Bautzen in 1429 and again in 1431. Before the second siege the town burned the houses of its suburb to deny them cover, and in 1432 Bautzen and Zittau bought peace for 300 Schock Groschen. Bautzen was one of the six towns of the Upper Lusatian league of 1346, with Görlitz, Kamenz, Lauban, Löbau and Zittau. source ↩
  6. The East German state did promote Sorbian folk culture, with seven Sorbian culture festivals between 1966 and 1989, and Sorbian customs were entered in Germany's national register of intangible cultural heritage in 2014. A culture kept up as a festival is not the same as one kept up as the language of daily life. source ↩
  7. She is right about the town. About 10 percent of Bautzen's residents speak Upper Sorbian, and use is more common in the countryside. In 1868 a census footnote counted 2,579 Wends among 12,623 inhabitants, about one in five, though that was a different count. source ↩
  8. The best-known is the Easter riding of the Catholic Sorbs. On Easter Sunday about 1,500 men in 19th-century dress ride in nine processions between villages, singing in Sorbian to announce the Resurrection. The Sorbs of the Crostwitz area also start the ride from their church. Painted Easter eggs have been made there since the 17th century. source ↩
  9. Bautzen's name is tied to East Germany's repression as well. Bautzen I served as a Soviet special camp after the war, where more than 3,000 prisoners had died by 1956, and Bautzen II was a State Security prison from 1956 to 1989. source ↩
  10. Some Sorbs left rather than submit. In 1854 about 500 to 560 Wends led by Pastor Jan Kilian sailed for Texas, driven by pressure to Germanise and to join the Prussian state church, and founded Serbin in what is now Lee County. Their language there has faded, and the Texas Wendish Heritage Museum keeps the memory. source ↩
  11. Lignite mining did real harm to Sorbian villages. The Domowina says more than 130 Sorbian villages were demolished for lignite, while Peter Barker counts 71 destroyed and 42 partly destroyed, and the Grune Liga counts 136 villages in Lusatia partly or fully moved over a century. More than 2,000 people protested at Klitten in 1990. source ↩
  12. In Why I Wholly Reject Nationalism she holds that a folk simply is, a set of families sharing a language and customs, asking only for awareness and autonomy. That is the standard against which she measures Bautzen. ↩