Today on Monday Mysteries we take a look at a Pelican and her children and why they are engraved above an Apotheke doorway in downtown Tübingen.

The birds in question are on a plaque above a door of an Apotheke (“pharmacy”) in the Marktplatz here in Tübingen. The Marktplatz is the historic market square in the old city center, which you can view in this live webcam. (BTW, a link to that web cam is always available to the upper right from the home page of this blog.)

Anyway, the Apotheke in question is at the far end of the row of buildings on the left as you’re looking at the web cam image, in an old half-timbered style house. There has been an Apotheke in that building since 1569, when the duke of Württemberg first granted two brothers the right to open up a pharmacy in Tübingen.

Site of Apotheke in the Marktplatz, Tübingen since 1500s

Above the Apotheke’s doorway there is a plaque showing a pelican mother feeding her young.

Apotheke entrance with pelican plaque, Tübingen

Pelican and family, plaque, Tübingen

Some say that the reason for this plaque is tied to the use of the pelican as a Christian symbol. Pelican mothers are said to sacrifice themselves to feed their young, to the point where a pelican mom may nurture her young with her own blood if necessary. It’s said that a female pelican may even tear out bits of her own breast to feed her starving children, if she can’t find other food for them. She will do this as long as she can until she finally succumbs and dies.

Some variants of the legend talk about how originally the pelican mother actually killed her young, and then resurrected them with her own blood; this version of the story connects the blood sacrifice of the mother pelican to the “blood of Christ” in the Christian tradition.

But other versions of the story merely emphasize the pelican as a symbol of strength, hope, solace and Christian charity. It is this version that is usually pointed to to explain why the plaque is above the Apotheke door, the idea being that pharmacists use the pelican as the symbol of their profession, indicating that they adhere to these same values displayed by the mother pelican.

However, you don’t find the pelican above the door of every Apotheke in Germany, nor even above every Apotheke in Tübingen. So, according to that Geheimnis book I’m using as reference for many of these Monday Mysteries, once the family of the 2 brothers who started that first pharmacy in 1569 had died off, a family named Gmelin founded their own pharmacy in the same spot. One of the sons in that family, Johann Friedrich Gmelin, was both a doctor and a scientist. In the mid-1700s Johann Gmelin wrote about the classification of various types of pelicans.

So, it’s likely that Johann added the pelican plaque above the family business in the 1700s to symbolize his important scientific work. The fact that it fits with a Christian story might be apocryphal, although the two reasons for the scene on the plaque are not mutually exclusive, of course. But I actually think the pelican is feeding worms to her young, not blood, and that doesn’t fit with the Christian legend.

But that’s just my opinion. Remember, I never did see that chicken, either. 😉

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BTW, I found a few photos of what the inside of the current Apotheke looks like on this website. As you can see in those photos, the interior of the modern Apotheke building has fixtures that are updated, but still traditional in feel, very much in keeping with the buildings here in Tübingen.