In 1945, Soviet soldiers in the woods outside Zittau needed something to seal a makeshift sauna. They found a large sheet of painted linen, cut it into four, tacked it up, and afterwards left it lying in the forest. The linen measured 8.2 metres by 6.8 metres. It had been painted in 1472 with ninety fields in ten rows, running from the Creation to the Last Judgment, and for roughly two centuries it hung across St John's Church every Lent, screening the altar from the congregation. A spice and grain merchant named Jacob Gürtler had paid for it. Hermann Knobloch eventually recovered what was left; the Abegg Foundation in Switzerland restored the damaged but complete cloth in 1994 and 1995 at no charge; and since 1999 the Great Zittau Lenten Cloth has hung in a deconsecrated Gothic church in the middle of town, inside what the museum bills as the largest display case in the world.
Zittau could afford such a thing. The town grew out of a 12th-century Slavic settlement, entered the record in 1238 under the Latin name Sitavia, and belonged to the Bohemian duchy and later kingdom - in 1346, after the death of Duke Henry I of Jawor, it returned to the Bohemian Crown and joined the Six-City League of Upper Lusatia. Its nickname in those years was Die Reiche, the Rich, earned by an unusually high proportion of well-to-do citizens. The coat of arms still carries a Czech lion alongside a Silesian Piast eagle, which is a fair summary of a town that has been governed from several directions. Fires levelled much of it in 1359 and again in 1422. The wealth kept coming back, and so did the building.
Zittau sits on the Mandau, with the Lusatian Neisse touching its eastern edge and the two rivers joining in the southeast. Just south of that confluence, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic meet at a single point. The crossings are unusually intimate: a footbridge at Hartau leads into Hrádek nad Nisou, which German maps once called Grottau; a road bridge on Chopinstraße reaches Sieniawka, formerly Kleinschönau; another on Friedenstraße reaches Porajów, formerly Großporitsch. Border controls disappeared on 21 December 2007 when all three countries joined the Schengen Area. Even so, Zittau remains the only city along the whole Oder-Neisse line where several river bridges are still closed as international crossings, although both countries are inside Schengen. Some borders take longer to unlearn than others.
During the Second World War, Zittau held a Nazi prison and a labour camp, and the camp supplied forced labour to Phänomen Werke Gustav Hiller, a maker of trucks and motorcycles. The people marched to that assembly line had not chosen the war, the town or the work. Most of their names are not on any plaque; a memorial to the victims of Nazi Germany stands in the town, doing what it can. The factory itself carried on regardless of regime, becoming VEB Kraftfahrzeugwerk Phänomen after the war and, from 1957, VEB Robur-Werke Zittau, whose small trucks became a fixture of East German roads. Zittau had made the Nazi Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, an honorary citizen in 1933. The title was revoked in 1990.
The town hall is not what you expect on a Saxon market square. Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed it as an Italian palazzo, and it was built that way between 1840 and 1845, a piece of the Mediterranean set down on the Bohemian border. Nearby, the flower clock has been running since 1907 on the movement of an old tower clock, its face made of roughly 4,800 plants that are replanted three times a year. St John's Church was wrecked in 1757 by Austrian soldiers during the Seven Years' War and rebuilt over the seventy years that followed. The fountains keep their own chronology - Mars from 1585, the Green Fountain and the Samaritan Woman from 1679, Hercules from 1708, the Swan from 1710. In the former Franciscan monastery hangs the small Lenten cloth of 1573, fifteen square metres, one of only six of its Arma Christi type anywhere in the world.
The Zittau-Löbau line opened in 1848, making it one of the oldest railways in Germany, and trains still run from here to Dresden and straight through to Liberec. The better ride is narrow gauge: a steam railway climbs from the town into the sandstone Zittau Mountains, ending at the spa villages of Oybin and Jonsdorf, with four of its stations inside Zittau's own boundaries. About 25,000 people live here, and some 3,500 students attend the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences and the independent International Graduate School, Germany's smallest university, which draws from Poland and the Czech Republic. And immediately across the Neisse the ground falls away into the Turów coal mine - one of the largest artificial holes on the planet, big enough to be picked out from orbit, running along the town's eastern horizon like weather.
Zittau lies at 50.896 N, 14.807 E, in the Zittau Basin at the southeastern corner of Saxony, with the Zittau Mountains rising immediately to the south. Best viewed between 1,500 and 3,000 feet AGL. The navigation feature here is impossible to miss: the Turów opencast mine, a vast terraced pit immediately east across the Lusatian Neisse in Poland, with its power station plume alongside. Zittau itself sits just west of the mine, marked by the compact old town, the Mandau-Neisse confluence to the southeast, and the tripoint of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic a short distance further south. The forested sandstone ridges of the Zittau Mountains give hard relief to the south, and Ještěd's needle-topped summit stands about 12 nm south-southeast in clear air. Dresden (EDDC) is roughly 63 nm northwest and Prague (LKPR) about 80 nm south. Note that the airspace here is divided between three national FIRs within a few miles - plan crossings accordingly. Valley fog and winter inversions are common in the basin.