Wintherthur Church

It’s not Winterthur – sorry about that – but one of the dozens and dozens of small villages that surround Winterthur and whose names are too numerous to mention: Elsau, Seuzach, Rätterchen . . . I’ve been to all of them so many times that their names and their sights blend into homogenous obscurity. Some of them were named in a time when people had no education – such as the Swiss Dorf named, appropriately enough, Dorf . And some of them dating back eons, when Switzerland was home to enclaves of Neanderthal humans with their massive jaws and presumably unique language, and the names of the villages are linguistic remnants of that pre-paleolithic time gone by – such as the village named Thaa.

This one is a bit different:

It’s different because the clockface on the church is red, not blue. I have a theory – unconfirmed until now – that the overwhelming majority of churches in North Central Switzerland were outfitted with new – and blue – clockfaces at about the same time. Clockfaces on churches that are demonstrably older are universally orange-red in color.