To see a series of large photos of ancient houses at Greifswald just click here! |
www.greifswald-infoweb.de |
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places of interest
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| Space for building
houses was scarce in the towns of the Middle Ages because a town wall
often limited the building grounds. For this reason the town and its
inhabitants were forced to build a lot of gabled houses close together
if they wanted as many people as possible to live inside the town walls.
Some of these space saving gabled houses of past times have been
preserved in the town centre of Greifswald. However, they are not only
space saving, but beautiful as well:
You can see my favourite gabled house at Knopfstraße near the market square. It is a red-painted building of the late Renaissance which was erected about 1600. Its beautiful gable decorated with scrolls and pilasters is still in its original state. Today the building houses the town´s library, but formerly it was a residential store house: There were once three store attics under the pointed saddle roof. The other parts of the building were used for working and living.
At the marketplace there are two gothic residential store houses dating from the 15th and 14th century: The house numbered 11 has got an extremely noteworthy decoration gable. It must have belonged to one of the richest merchants of Greifswald. The brick gable of the house numbered 13 is also interesting, but less decorated. At the fish market you can find the biggest residential store house of Greifswald. Its huge gable was rebuilt in neo-gothic style about 1860. Another interesting neo-gothic stepped gable is 300 m away at Lange Straße (Long Street). © Andreas Reuter |
