My Regensburg Year Part 12: July 2025

This was it. Our last month. The plan was to spend one week in Poland and in the other three I would finish my book. Only one of those things was going to happen.

First: Poland. This was one of my wife’s must-haves. She has long been interested in the fate of Warsaw in World War II and in the atrocities that took place in Auschwitz. There was no way we were going to miss an opportunity to get to Poland before we left Europe. We arranged to spend three days in Warsaw and four in Krakow. Fortuitously, my officemate Agata Deptula was a Warsaw native and helped us with our itinerary. One thing she said we absolutely must do: get some Jagodzianki (blueberry buns, currently in season). And we did!

Warsaw was somewhat of a surprise. It has little in the way of “old town,” since much of the city was destroyed by the Nazis. What looks old is due to reconstruction; most of the city is quite modern. The main sites we took in were the POLIN Museum documenting the history of Jews in Poland, the Marie Currie Museum (it was radiant; heh…heh, mmm), and the Nubian exhibit at the National Museum. The exhibit includes wall paintings from the eighth-century Faras Cathedral, displayed in a reconstruction of the cathedral’s original structure. Only one of the paintings, however, had any connection with apocryphal traditions: an image of Mary’s mother Anna, with Mary in her arms, and flanked by two angels.

Krakow was much more our speed. Like Regensburg, it had no strategic value during the war, so much of its medieval architecture is still intact. We spent time in the former Jewish quarter and the Jewish ghetto area. Nearby stands the Oscar Schindler Museum where we were treated to an excellent tour of the main exhibition on World War II Poland leading up to Schindler’s story. We also took a trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau. We have been to other former concentration camps, including Dachau near Munich in October. These other camps are far better curated but we weren’t there to be dazzled by photographs and videos. We were there to feel the enormity of the space and connect with what we know of the history of what happened there. Our final night in Krakow was somewhat more jovial. We bought tickets to a folk dinner in which we ate Polish cuisine while watching a troupe perform traditional dances and songs. We were warned that the troupe would try to get the audience involved, and sure enough, I was pulled on the dance floor. I think this was my wife’s favorite experience of the entire year: watching me in such discomfort. As she recorded me awkwardly spinning around the dance floor, I mouthed to her “When will this nightmare be over?”

We had one week left in Regensburg before we headed home. We spent our time relaxing, revisiting some favorite places in town, and saying goodbye to friends. We hosted a pizza party at the Beyond Canon offices for the entire group of researchers and admin staff and set aside two nights to have dinner with our closest friends: flatmates Roxanne, Sam, and Florian, who we met in Oslo before coming to Regensburg and spent many evenings together having drinks, dinner, and ice cream, and Scott and Dani Robertson and their four-year-old Thekla, who we just kinda clicked with from our first dinner at their place just a few days after we arrived in town. So we ended our time in Regensburg how it began, over food with good conversation and much laughter.

Now about that book. I did come to Regensburg to do some work. And no, I did not finish the book, but it will be done soon enough. I started a final polishing of the completed chapters, which I might submit early; that will leave me with two partial chapters to write in August and September (fingers crossed). But the book was not the only work I did in Regensburg. Networking is important, and I met and talked shop with some excellent scholars, including Jörg Frey, Emanuela Valeriani, Luc Bulundwe, Christa Müller-Kessler, Sible de Blaauw, and Garrick Allen. And I added several presentations to my CV:

“(Too Far) Beyond Canon: Has the Re-defining of ‘Christian Apocrypha’ Lost Its Way?” (at Beyond Canon)

“‘And the Rest’: Apocryphal Tales of Disciples, Evangelists, and Other Saints” (at Beyond Canon)

 “The Dossier on Thecla: Texts, Artifacts, and Holy Sites” (for NASSCAL’s First Fridays workshop)

“Playing with Children: The Origins of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (an invited paper at the University of Erlangen-Nüremberg)

“Apocryphal Texts and Traditions about Longinus the Centurion” (at the Apocrypha 2025 workshop in Oslo)

“‘Such Infant Stammerings’: Paratextual Features in the Greek Manuscript Tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (invited paper at the University of Glasgow)

I certainly would have accomplished more had we stayed in Regensburg the whole time and put my nose to the grindstone, but what’s the fun in that? It turns out we visited 50 cities in 15 countries over the year. There are some places we wish we had spent more time in and some we didn’t get to, but we can’t complain too much. We feel incredibly privileged to have had this opportunity. Now it’s back to doing “real work,” including teaching and administration (I am taking over the role of Religious Studies Program Co-ordinator at a very turbulent time for the humanities at York University), and other projects that I had hoped to be free to start work on when the book was completed. We also are settling into life in Canada again and arranging visits with friends and family. Oh, and we are adopting two cats (well, once the jet lag wears off and we can trust ourselves to make a good decision about which cats will share our home). As expected, we are sad to say goodbye to Regensburg but happy to be home.

As for the future: I have one more sabbatical year before retirement. I guess I should start planning that now. Let’s see, where haven’t we gone yet?