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Volume 4 7 |
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A–Z |  |
PLEASURE COMBINED WITH BUSINESS IN THE SPREEWALD
| Every German can skate, the cold dry winters of northern Germany especially providing constant practice. This Wendish pleasant is skating to market on the frozen roads in the Spreewald, a marshy district about fifty miles south-east of Berlin, so covered with a network of tributaries of the Spree that some of the villages are only accessible by water in summer, and over the ice in winter |
SKATING AND SLEIGHING TO THE ICY VAULTS OF DEATH
| To people unfamiliar with the conditions in the Spreewald a scene like this may appear grotesque — top-hatted mourners on skates drawing a sledge containing a flower-decked coffin, and the mourners skating mournfully behind. For the Wendish peasants themselves, however, skates are an integral part of winter footwear, and skating and sleighing are the only means of locomotion and transport |