Echternach: A Merry-go-round of the Passing Time

From prehistory's flint arrows to the illuminated biblical manuscripts and the impetuous polka of Whit Tuesday to the year 2000 with its electronic components from Japan: this is the itinerary through time as proposed by this town of a population of hardly 5,000 in wintertime but of 15,000 in summertime as a result of summer's migratory influx.
Being an ancient site, Echternach presents a whole range of human evidence. From the Stone Age to the nylon fashion, from religious times to our secularised universe, from the age of the believers to the centuries of the idle, the magic of this place integrates the signs of the passing time, amasses the stones of memory and preserves its natural and architectural heritage. Being a real open-air museum set in a verdant scenery, half town, half village, Echternach unfolds its identity in a varied
picture: a Roman villa with a mosaic, Merovingian vestiges, a Romanesque basilica, civilian Gothic, Medieval city walls, a cave dweller's hermitage, on abbey palace of a classical symmetry embellished with rococo ornaments, grotesque figures and a mythological statuary, a fanciful pentagonal pavilion in the style of Louis XV, a musical air petrified in the sculptured sandstone and the wrought iron, paving stones of another age, a French garden laid out in the 20th century, enclosures of provincial appearance, orchard-lined slopes, sourish chimes, a lugubrious great bell, sheep grazing on the slopes, and post-modern buildings as a result of the damage caused by the Battle of the Ardennes. Narcissist, a cradle of the Christian Occident in contact with the Orient, the former Benedictine monastery, which had been founded in 698 by the Anglo-Saxon monk Willibrord from Ireland, hosts today a secondary school that ponders over the future of mankind and an abbey museum that reflects on a prestigious past. "Adorable small town, tourism would have invented you unless you had been invented before it", the Luxembourgish writer Marcel Noppeney states. Echternach excels in staging the stratigraphy of its past.