France · Old Town
Colmar
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Colmar is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Musée Unterlinden 1,500 points
The north end of your circuit, on a square of its own. It was a convent before it was anything else, and the cloister is still in there: fifty-four twin arches round a garden, and the best spot on this whole circuit to sit down. Then it went and ate the public baths next door. I like a building with an appetite.
Collégiale Saint-Martin 500 points
The square out front is named for a cathedral, and there is no cathedral. The title was true for eleven years around the Revolution, when Colmar briefly had a bishop of its own, and the name simply stayed. It fills a whole side of that square, so you will be going round it whether you meant to or not. My favourite sort of obstacle.
Maison Pfister 500 points
It is at the point where the Rue des Marchands bends, and you will find it by the people who have all stopped in the middle of the road. Look up. Then keep going up, because the good half is the upper one and almost everybody quits at eye level.
Musée Bartholdi 500 points
A house on the Rue des Marchands, and the part I would not skip is the courtyard. Standing in the middle of it is a bronze group called the Great Supports of the World, set up in 1902 and one of the last pieces he ever made.
Ancienne douane (Koïfhus) 250 points
It closes the south end of your circuit, on the square that carries its name. Walk round it rather than past it: a wooden loggia sits on stone columns, and along the north building somebody carved human masks onto the windows. I could look at those all afternoon, and I have.
Église des Dominicains 250 points
On a square of its own, and from outside it is a plain box with a steep roof and next to nothing on the face of it. That is deliberate. Go in and you will find out what the plainness was saving up for. Next door, the old convent is a library holding more than a thousand manuscripts, the oldest of them written before anybody had written down the name Colmar.
Église Saint-Matthieu 250 points
The far east end of the level, and the reason your circuit runs so far out along the Grand'Rue. A restoration at the end of the 1990s gave it back its shine and an acoustic good enough that the town's music festival plays in it every year. Come while a concert is on and you get the lot at once.
Hôtel de Ville de Colmar 250 points
Number 48 on the Rue des Clefs, with the Place de la Mairie out front. Over the door, in the triangle at the top, the arms of the town are carved into the stone. Go and look at them: that is the thing I could not fit onto a button.
Name origin
Why it is called Colmar.
Colmar is Latin for a dovecote. The first time this place is written down at all, in 823, it is the fisc of Columbarium: a royal farm of barns, stables, a kitchen, a bakehouse, a poultry yard and one pigeon loft. Colombes and Coulommiers come off the same word. A whole town ended up named after the smallest shed on the property.
Sources: www.tourisme-colmar.com
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Colmar sits just off the big water on purpose. The Roman camp stood nearer the Ill, over at Horbourg, and the Ill kept flooding what was around it, so under the Franks the working centre moved west onto drier ground, onto the fertile loess and river silt. What runs through the middle here is the small one, the Lauch, with houses lined up along both banks. The proper harbour had to go two kilometres north, at the point where the Ill is finally deep enough to carry a boat.
Sources: www.tourisme-colmar.com, www.tourisme-colmar.com, www.colmar.fr
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Nobody founded Colmar. The crown was nomadic: it moved from estate to estate and ate what it found there, and this estate was one of the stops. Then the wording changes. From 1226 the documents no longer call it a domain, they call it a city, a rank Frederick II had granted a few years earlier. Four hundred years to get from one line in somebody else's deed to a rank of its own. I have waited longer for less.
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 823–1226
The Frankish crown, in person. Colmar begins as one of the emperor's own farms, and the court kept coming back to eat it: Charles the Fat called the great men of the empire together here in January 883 and did it again the following February. Around 965 the estate was divided and given away, the upper half to a monastery in what is now Switzerland, the lower half to the bishop of Constance. Nobody asked the farm.
Sources: www.tourisme-colmar.com
- 1226–1679
The Empire, at a distance. As an imperial city Colmar answered to an emperor who was rarely nearby and otherwise ran itself. Rudolf of Habsburg handed it its communal liberties in 1278; by 1360 the government of the town sat with its burghers and their guilds; in 1376 it won the right to strike its own coin. In 1648 the treaty of Münster sent the French administration back out again and confirmed that Colmar still answered to nobody nearer than the emperor. That held for another thirty-one years.
- 1679–1871
France. The treaty of Nijmegen made Colmar a French royal town in 1679, and the crown then got to work on the details. From 1680 the town's own offices had to be shared evenly between the two confessions, although Protestants were still about two thirds of the people living here. That is what being governed from a very long way off looks like from underneath.
- 1871–1918
The German Empire. The treaty of Frankfurt of 10 May 1871 made Alsace German. Colmar stayed the head town of its department but now took its orders from a provincial government in Strasbourg, and from 1883 French was out of the official papers altogether. The name over the door did not change. Everything printed under it did.
Sources: www.tourisme-colmar.com
- 1918–
France again. French soldiers came into Colmar on 18 November 1918, and the town put the date on a square you will walk across. I have now watched this place change hands often enough to see the pattern. The flags change. The gables do not.
The emblem
What the shield means.
The icon is a house with a steep gable, and that is a substitution. Colmar's own shield carries a gold Kolben laid across a field split red and green, and the heralds are fairly sure it is up there for the sound of it rather than the shape: Kolben in German, Columbaria in Latin, near enough for a town seal in 1214. Now try drawing that at the size of a thumbnail. What you actually walk past all day here is timber framing and a pointed gable, so that is what went on the button.
Sources: www.colmar.fr, www.colmar.fr
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The shape of this level is a ring that is not there any more. Between 1216 and 1220 the imperial provost Woelflin of Haguenau put the first one round Colmar: two kilometres long, seven to eight metres high, holding nineteen hectares. It had three gates, and you will walk over all three. One stood where the Rue des Boulangers is, one at the Place des Six Montagnes Noires, one on the Grand'Rue. The masonry went piece by piece across the 1700s and 1800s as the town spread out, and a scrap of it is still standing at the Montagne Verte.
Sources: lpc.colmar.tv
The prettiest part of Colmar is the wet part, and it was a working one. Fish caught in the town's own channels were sold along the Quai de la Poissonnerie right through the Middle Ages. Round from there, in the Krutenau, the houses face each other in two rows across the Lauch, which is how that stretch got the name Petite Venise; the people living in them were vine growers, market gardeners and boatmen. A fire took about forty houses out of the fishmongers' quarter in 1706, and the timber framing everybody photographs there now was only brought back into daylight between 1978 and 1981.
Sources: www.colmar.fr
Colmar is the capital of nothing and owns a courthouse the size of one. In 1698 the highest court in Alsace was moved here, and what it was handed was the medieval hall on the Grand'Rue the burghers had been using as their own town hall. By 1771 that had been rebuilt into a palace, and underneath it sit two vaulted chapels stacked one above the other, left from the Augustinian friars who had the ground first. The Rue des Augustins runs along one side of it. The Rue du Conseil Souverain is two minutes off. A town this size does not name streets after a law court unless the law court was the largest thing in it.
Sources: pop.culture.gouv.fr, www.tourisme-colmar.com
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Rue
- The plain word for a street, and here it usually names whoever worked in it. Rue des Boulangers the bakers, Rue des Serruriers the locksmiths, Rue des Tourneurs the turners, Rue des Tisserands the weavers, Rue des Tripiers the tripe dressers. I can read a whole trade directory just by walking.
- Boulevard
- The ring road, and the edge of this level. Boulevard Saint-Pierre, Boulevard du Champ de Mars, Boulevard du Général Leclerc. When you hit one of these you are at the outer rim of the Old Town and the dots stop. Nothing out there for me.
- Place
- A square, generally named after whatever was sold or stood on it. Place du Marché aux Fruits, Place de l'Ancienne Douane, Place des Dominicains, Place de l'École. Naming a square after fruit is exactly the right instinct.
- Passage
- A way cut through a block rather than round it. Passage Saint-Martin, Passage de la Tour Verte, Passage du Niderhoff, and Passage Monoprix, which is named after a supermarket and has dots on it all the same.
- Cour
- A courtyard that counts as a street. Cour Waldner-Stephan, Cour des Seigneurs de Hattstatt, and one that is simply called Cour. Easy to walk straight past, and every one of them has dots down it.
- -hof
- German bones under the French names. Hof is a yard. Weinhof, Rue Schaefferhof, Passage du Niderhoff. Alsace never picked one language, and the street signs gave up asking it to.
- de la Truite
- Colmar puts animals on the corners. Rue de la Truite the trout, Rue du Canard the duck, Rue de la Cigogne the stork, Rue de la Corneille the crow, Rue de l'Ours the bear, Rue du Mouton the sheep, Rue de la Grenouillère the frog pond. Two of those are lunch.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 115streets
- 1,130dots
- 17.7km of street
- 22.9km on foot
- 6.5hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.