Welcome to the Florinsmarkt, which has a resident I want you to meet at once. Look up at the tall merchant’s house with a clock on its facade. Do you see the metal face beneath it? Keep watching it. Its eyes are rolling. Back and forth, back and forth, in time with the pendulum. And every hour and the half hour, it does something ruder. It sticks out its tongue at you. The locals call it the Augenroller, meaning the eye roller. It is high up and small, so if you cannot make out its features, swipe through the photos tab to see what I mean. A quick search online will also give a closer look at this clock. And here is the tale they tell about it. Nearly five hundred years ago, there was a robber knight named Johann Lutter von Kobern, a nobleman who had fallen on hard times and taken to the highways, robbing travellers, until the city caught him and condemned him to death. On the day of his execution, he was dragged through Koblenz on a cart toward the scaffold. And as he passed, he rolled his eyes wildly and stuck out his tongue at the jeering crowd, and cursed the city, swearing it would suffer misfortune unless it remembered him forever. So, the legend says, the city put his rolling eyes and his lolling tongue up on this clock, and there he mocks them still. It is a wonderful story. Now let me be honest, the way I always will be. The robber knight was real, and he really was executed here. That part is solid history. But whether this face is actually him, nobody can prove. The face was described here long ago with no name attached to it at all, and the tale of the cursing knight only turns up much later. So it may well be that the grinning face came first, and the story was invented afterward to explain it. The one you are watching is not even the medieval original. That was wrecked in the Allied air raids that flattened this square during the Second World War, and this simpler successor was mounted on the rebuilt house. The house itself was the merchants' and dance hall, built about six hundred years ago, with goods traded in the cool cellar and grand feasts held in the hall above. And just beside it stood the seat of the town's magistrates, where officials checked that every merchant's weights and coins were honest. A pillory once stood out front, and locals will tell you that cheats were tied to it and pelted with rotten fruit by their neighbours. Justice, medieval style, with an audience. Now, turn around and walk up to that church across the square with an even stranger past.