Saalfeld

Saalfeld glows from below. Beneath the town, a medieval alum-slate mine abandoned for centuries transformed itself in the dark: mineral waters painted the galleries in ochres, ambers and blues, growing curtains and gardens of stone, until the reopened workings were christened the Feengrotten — the Fairy Grottoes, certified the most colourful cave grottoes in the world, a subterranean fairyland that has enchanted visitors since 1914 and remains Thuringia's most magical address.

Above ground the town earns its old title, "the stone chronicle of Thuringia": four medieval gates, the town hall's Renaissance gables, the Johanniskirche's late-Gothic hall, and the former Franciscan friary holding the town museum, all recording a thousand years at the Saale crossing where the dukes of Saxe-Saalfeld kept their Baroque residence.

Here, too, fell one of music's lost hopes. In the battle of Saalfeld on 10 October 1806, days before Jena, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia was killed — soldier, romantic, and a composer-pianist of real gift, admired by Beethoven, who dedicated his Third Piano Concerto to him; a memorial marks where Prussia lost its most musical prince. The town's gentler exports followed: Saalfeld chocolate sweetened the GDR decades, and the Thuringian Forest rises at the door with the Hohenwarte reservoir's fjord-like windings. Below, always, the grottoes keep their slow, patient illumination — Saalfeld's argument that even darkness, given time, turns to colour.