Life and ruin, ecstasy and exitus, truth and delusion are in no other stimulant so close together as with saffron.

He perfumed the beds in which Zeus and Hera fathered new heavenly rulers, fueled human lust just as much, made Cleopatra the most seductive woman in antiquity and dyed the bath water of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (whose virility was legendary) golden yellow.

Saffron has always been so expensive and coveted that it has been falsified and cut like no other spice, which meant death in the Middle Ages – by burying it alive or burning it together with the adulterated goods.

Saffron also has the invaluable gift of dispelling melancholy and providing what old medical books call "a serene clouding of consciousness."

"Blossoms as precious as gold"

Jakob Strobel and Serra

deputy head of the feature section.

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We associate saffron with the Orient and the exotic, with "One Thousand and One Nights" and the splendor of ancient Persia, which gave the spice its name: the word zarparan, which means "blossoms as valuable as gold", was the inspiration for the name of saffron in almost all languages, and to this day Iran is by far the largest producer with a market share of ninety percent.

However, the latest research has shown without a doubt that saffron is not an oriental, but an occidental plant.

It originated four thousand years ago somewhere in Attica through a natural mutation of the autumn crocus.

The filaments of its flowers grew up to four centimeters long, three times longer than usual, and one day the Attic farmers must have understood the miraculous power hidden in these filaments - not only as a spice and aphrodisiac,

The Europeans did not want to leave such a treasure to the Arabs alone, who made saffron popular again in the West with the expansion of Islam to Sicily and Andalusia.

And so it was also cultivated in the Roman Empire of the German Nation, above all by the Saxon Elector Frederick the Wise, who lived up to his name because he recognized that the Altenburger Land in eastern Thuringia was the ideal breeding ground for Crocus sativus.

So Altenburg was rich and beautiful as the center of German saffron cultivation and the country in front of the city gates with the blooming crocus fields was called "Goldene Aue".

But this knowledge was also buried by the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War and was only freed from oblivion a few years ago.