Bad Mergentheim's "stairway to heaven"

Last Sunday we had "Tag des offenen Denkmals"  - the day of the open (to the public) monuments.

So I had the chance to get some insights and outlooks one normally does not get in normal life.

First of all I had the opportunity to climb the scaffold of our cemetry chapel Michaelis.
There I had a very unique angle of view (I never had before and never will have in future) into direction of Bad Mergentheim's town center.

The castle of Mergentheim - you see the castle tower on the right side behind the red building, the left tower is the steeple of our parish church - was the residence of the Grand Masters and Deutschmeister of the German Teutonic Order from 1525-1809.

The unique Berwart staircase - a spiral staircase located between the west and north wing of the Deutschordensschloss (Teutonic Knights castle), constructed in 1574 and still famous today.

To watch to sun on the top of the stairway (to heaven?) you have to go inside the hollow core of the construction.

Or: you have to climb the staircase to its top - what is normally forbidden.

But not during our special guided day-of-the-open-monuments tour.

On your way to heaven - or at least on your way towards the sun you'll find a lot of different "Steinmetzzeichen" - stonemason's marks. Immortalized inside several of the staircase's stones.

Finally: on top of the castle tower - we had to climb more than another 100 dusty steps - you'll have a phantastic panorama view on Bad Mergentheim's town center.

This time the steeple of the parish church is right of the photo's center.
The cemetry chapel (with scaffold around) is in the green tree-covered area on the left section of the photo.

Have you ever been to Bad Mergentheim and to the stairway to heaven???