My Regensburg Year Part 11: June 2025
Most of our penultimate month in Regensburg was spent outside of the city. At my request, we flew over to Ireland, chiefly to see a favourite band of mine: the Waterboys. Yes, I could probably see them somewhere else (it turns out they will be in Toronto in September) but there’s a certain allure to seeing a band play their hometown (of sorts; singer Mike Scott lives there now and the band’s best years were based there; I don’t think any of the rest of the current bandmembers are even Irish) and it gave us an excuse to go to Ireland. We spent most of our time in Dublin, which, frankly, was uninspiring. I enjoyed seeing Trinity College and the Chester-Beatty papyri, watching a few traditional performers at the Temple Bar district, and grabbing a slice of Victoria Sponge at Marks and Spencer, but otherwise Dublin seemed very much like any other large city. Far more interesting were Belfast, where we took a Cab Tour to see sites connected to the Troubles and a bus to the Giant’s Causeway, and our two bus tours to the Cliffs of Moher and Galway, and to Kilkenny and Glendalough (which included a stop at a sheep farm to watch sheep dog training and cuddle some lambs). The bottom line: we enjoyed our time outside of Dublin much more than Dublin itself.
Our second stop was a visit to Bratislava to visit my friend and sometime collaborator Slavomír Céplö . Slavomír and I actually met via this blog when a post I wrote back in 2008 about the Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver started up a conversation that led us to work together on a critical edition of the text. Slavomir’s linguistic abilities are phenomenal (name a language, he knows it), so I have benefitted much from our friendship over the years (I’d like to think I have brought something to the relationship also). Slavomír and his fiancé Breanna showed us around the city for a few days and while there, we took a one-day side trip to Budapest.
Right from Bratislava we went to Oslo for a workshop hosted by Hugo Lundhaug for his Apocrypha Storyworlds project. The project is now winding down so this was their last gathering. One of the outcomes of the project is a database of all Coptic apocrypha—a whopping 291 texts—that will soon be made public. I was present at the last Oslo workshop in 2024, so my wife and I were more interested in socializing this time than seeing the sites. Mind you, many of us at the event came from Regensburg, so it felt almost like “home.” I did meet a few new people, including Liv Ingeborg Lied, fellow Canadian immigrate Tuomas Rasimus, and Junia Kattrup, who told me she reads my blog (hi Junia!).
We were all asked to present on any topic related to our work, so I took out a chunk of material from my Anchor Bible project on texts and traditions about Longinus the centurion (discussed in this previous post). Audience members noted a few other texts that mention Longinus, though not by name; I will see if I need to add these to the chapter. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any notes about the workshop papers, convinced that I would easily remember them. The ones that stood out for me, as a sucker for manuscripts, were Sam Cook’s summary of his forthcoming monograph on the library of the Monastery of Macarius and Joanna Hypszer’s overview of apocrypha copied in Touton. Also of interest was Gesa Schenke’s discussion of P. Köln inv. 3221, a fourth-century copy of the Acts of Andrew and Philemon; she is preparing a long-awaited edition of this important manuscript—the earliest we have of any of the Coptic apocryphal acts.
The remainder of the month was spent in town catching up on work and preparing for a temporary move. Somehow, and this is probably my fault, our residency cards, and our accommodations were set to expire at the end of June instead of July. We managed to extend our residency without too much trouble and the project are putting us up at a B and B for the month. Some friends helped us cart everything to the new place, which is in a much quieter neighborhood (the bar directly outside the Gasthaus has made for some very noisy and smoky evenings). The only other memorable event in Regensburg was Bürgerfest, a bi-annual music, food, and crafts festival with stages set up across the city (in our own walk through the city we came across 10, but there was probably double that many). I have not seen the city this busy. We stopped and listened to some performers, most of whom played covers in English (I heard some Taylor Swift, some American roots rock, and some oldies). The only band we made an effort to see was Just Like Abba and, well, they were enough like Abba. They pulled off the look and sound of the band well.
We have one more month to go in Regensburg and we will actually be spending most of that time in the city. As the time for leaving approaches we are looking forward to going home and seeing family and friends again but also thinking about how much we will miss the city and the friends we have made here.