Good Friday in an Empty City
We reached Freiburg on Good Friday, and the city was holding its breath. Holy Week on the German side of the Rhine is taken seriously — Good Friday and Easter Sunday most of all. Shops and restaurants close, and people stay home or go to church. Walking the old town that morning, the streets belonged to a handful of tourists. Everyone else was indoors.
The planning
Easter weekend shaped the whole day. On the German side, Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday are spent at home or at church, and almost everything closes for the holiday. So the plan was simple: walk the city while it was quiet and let the cathedral be the destination. One day later and one border over, Strasbourg would be packed with people enjoying the same holiday — the French side celebrates in the streets. Same river, two entirely different towns.
The gear
Fujifilm X100T, 23mm fixed lens — the small-town walk camera, on the day built for walking.
What went wrong
Nothing worth reporting. A quiet holiday in a quiet city.
The shot that came out
The canal runs through the old town, and standing in it is a monster. An alligator statue, jaws up, half-submerged where the current breaks around it. Every German town seems to have a version of this story: parents told their children that if they misbehaved, the canal monster would come for them. Freiburg’s parents had been warning kids about a monster that didn’t exist — so eventually the city put one in the canal. The warning became literal. It’s the best kind of civic joke: official enough to be permanent, dark enough to keep working on children three hundred years later.
The cathedral spire carries a grudge. The noble who commissioned the cathedral had a purser — a paymaster — who withheld the workers’ wages. The architect got even the medieval way: he carved the purser’s wife as a gargoyle and set her on the tower, with the water coming out of her backside. She has been up there ever since, spouting at the city that shorted the workers. Other tellings blame the city council and a nameless stonemason, and leave the wife out of it entirely — but as the Irish say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. The purser’s wife stays.
And the cathedral is a copy. The Freiburg cathedral was built from the same plans as the cathedral in Strasbourg — an exact match, both rising from the same drawings. That coincidence turned deadly during WWII: Allied pilots used the twin spires as waypoints on their bombing runs, and one group, certain they were over Strasbourg, bombed part of France instead of Germany. Two identical towers, one border, and a navigation error written in stone.
After lunch, back aboard at Breisach — the boat docks there while the coach runs to Freiburg — I walked up into Breisach itself to scout photographs and painting subjects. It was Good Friday, and the town was filling with people arriving for church services. I found the scene above and thought it looked like a fun one to paint. As I worked, a family gathered nearby, talking among themselves. Their kids wandered over to see what I was doing and stood watching for a while.
That happened again and again as the cruise went on — except it wasn’t just locals. The other passengers started coming over to look at what I was painting, then seeking me out to see the paintings themselves. The painting, it turned out, got me adopted by the whole ship.
What I learned
- The stories are in the stone. A monster dropped into a canal and an architect’s revenge on a tower — none of it appears in the guidebook summary, and all of it is better than the architecture alone. Ask what the locals were laughing about when they built it.
- A closed city is a gift. Good Friday emptied the streets, and for one morning the old town belonged to whoever showed up. The crowds in Strasbourg the next day were the price of the party.
Coming next: Strasbourg
Camera: Fujifilm X100T
Lens: 23mm fixed
Exposure:
Tracker:
Location: Freiburg, Germany
Captured: April 3, 2026
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