Saint Ulrich

Today the four of us walked up to St Ulrich’s Castle, which overlooks the town of Ribeauville. It was a two hour climb up a delightful mule track through vines at the lower levels, then a forest of large oaks and chestnuts higher up.

The castle was the fortified residence of the Lords Ribeaupierre between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.  As times became safer and Ribeauville was fortified they moved down to the town itself.

We had bought sandwiches and macaroons in town before the climb, and had a pleasant picnic lunch under the walls of the castle before walking down to the town again in the early afternoon.

It is named St Ulrich’s castle because one of the early chatelaines dedicated the chapel in the castle to the saint.  St Ulrich was an eleventh century German bishop who was revered for his sanctity and simple pure life, so it is a little incongruous to see that in the present town there are bars and restaurants named after him.

One miracle attributed to St Ulrich was that after dining with a nobleman on a Thursday he gave one of his own servants a piece of meat to take home and eat. When the fellow opened the package the next day, a Friday, the meat had turned into a fish.  So all religious images of St Ulrich have him as a saintly man with a fish tucked under his arm. The commercial images of St Ulrich on the bar and restaurant walls have him as a jolly fat man holding a beer stein, Friar Tuckish.

St Ulrich was so revered for his piety that when a group of lower clergy decided that it would be nice to do away with the practice of celibacy they “found” a letter supposedly written by the Saint several centuries earlier in favour of marriage for priests.  The church hierarchy promptly declared the letter a forgery.