Trier: more than Marx's birthplace

German city also offers Roman ruins, a colorful history, and fine wines

Author: By Paul Langner, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 19, 1997

Page: M8

Section: Travel

Marx, of course, wrote Das Kapital and urged workers of all lands to unite because they had nothing to lose but their chains. He also was, briefly, the editor of the German newspaper Die Rheinische Zeitung until it was shut down, and from 1851 to 1862 he was the European correspondent of the New York Tribune.

The house where Marx was born on May 5, 1831, is prominently marked with a plaque, and there is a Karl Marx Strasse in town. But that's just one of the sites a visitor to this fine old city on the Mosel River can find.

Below ground, the city is a network of foundation walls that let the archeologist read its history of imperial splendor, succession of sackings, and rebirth as a center of power. City planners and private developers know that whenever they sink a shovel into the ground, they run into ``Roman problems.'' Nothing may be built on those ruins until archeologists have studied them. Sometimes they are preserved and nothing is built.

The city has been in continuous existence since it was founded about 15 BC by Emperor Augustus, and it has more Roman ruins and existing buildings than any other, save Rome.

No wonder, because Augustus meant it to be a second capital from which to govern the expanding empire north of the Alps, and he and his successors over the next 490 years made sure the city got superb public and administrative buildings.

Unfortunately, the city's fortunes were not an unbroken series of splendors. About 250 years after its founding at a time when the barbarians began to press on the Roman Empire, thinking it was weakening, two barbaric tribes, the Franks and the Alemans, sacked, pillaged, and burned Trier until practically no walls were left standing.

Among the exceptions is the emblem of Trier, the Porta Nigra, the former northern gate of the walled city whose sandstone blocks have become blackened in the 2,000 years it has stood.

But the Romans were not done yet. They punished those uncouth barbarians and rebuilt the city. Emperor Constantine I, the one who made the Roman Empire officially Christian, spared no expense in rebuilding the magnificent baths, the amphitheater, the administrative buildings, and the army barracks.

Among the buildings Constantine had erected is Trier's famous Basilika, a red-brick building of Spartan spareness, huge and empty and intended to be so.

The building is now the Evangelical Lutheran church. Where the altar now stands, that's where Constantine placed his throne. He would sit there flanked by the grim-faced Pretorian Guard, their spear points glinting, to receive the Frankish and Alemanic chieftains.

Those chieftains lived in wattle-and-mud huts in the area beyond the city walls, and the contrast between having to stoop to duck out his door opening and then having to stride the 200 feet from the Basilika door to the throne in a long hall under an 80-foot-high ceiling was intended to restore his perspective.

It worked. Constantine knew long before Carl von Clausewitz that in war the psychological is more important than the physical.

The modern visitor may, without too much effort, put himself into the frame of mind of the above-mentioned Barbaric chieftain by tarrying in the door and looking toward the altar. All the imagination needs to do is place the throne where the altar is and put fierce armed men in the place of the pews.

The cathedral, the Catholic church, within walking distance from the Basilika, is more opulent as befits the seat of an episcopal ruler who was also an elector of the Holy Roman Empire, that odd thing that tried for 1,000 years to pick up where the Roman Empire left off. In the Middle Ages, seven men got to elect the German emperor, and three of them were the archbishops of Trier, Mainz, and Koeln.

Before Trier got its eminence as the seat of an elector, it had to pass through two more devastations. In 475, with the Roman Empire a year from collapse, the Franks again sacked the city, and this time with impunity because no Roman soldier, unless he were a barbarian himself, could be found north of the Alps.

Next, after Trier had barely made it through the Dark Ages and had just gotten on its feet, Vikings rowed their long ships up the Rhine and the Mosel and sacked the place. It was not the last raid. French troops burned the place in the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, and in 1945, Allied bombers laid the city in ruins again.

This time the ctizens did not just rebuild atop the latest ruins. They cleared them away and looked underneath.

Digging through layers of ruins made by airmen, by Richelieu's soldiers, by Vikings, Franks, and Alemans, the archeologists found the foundations of a splendid Roman city. The ruins are now open to visitors, and their significance is described in loving detail in guidebooks published in four languages.

One ruin that had always been above ground is the Porta Nigra. It is a brooding, black structure with strong Roman arches that once held the small gate garrison. In the late 17th century, ingenious builders incorporated it into a Baroque church. Most of that structure has been removed.

Of course, Trier is more than ruins and Marx. It is no accident that it has been a continuing settlement for so long because its location in a large bend of the Mosel gives it not only room but afforded protection in the old days. Even when Augustus's surveyors arrived, they used the settlement of the Treveri, a Celtic tribe. The Treveri had to be defeated first, but the Romans honored the vanquished by naming the place Augusta Trevirorum. In time the name got shortened to Treveris, and eventually to Trier.

The Romans brought the grape from Italy, and even they would be astonished at how well it has fared here. The wines grown up and down the Mosel Valley are justly famous for their lightness and delicacy. It seems as if no patch of soil on the steep surrounding hills is without its vineyard, and it is a marvel that the soil, which must always be loosened, is not washed downhill.

It is also no accident that the citizens of Trier were so diligent about laying bare the Roman ruins. Tourists help make the city the thriving place it is, in addition to industry, research, and education.

There is no shortage of hotels, at least not off-season, when my wife and I prefer to travel. Among the bigger, but more expensive, ones in Trier is the former Hotel Porta Nigra, across the street from the monument. It is now called the Hotel Dorint.

There are also fine hotels in the hills above the Mosel Valley where guests may sit on a terrace overlooking city and river and sip the local vintage.