Bavaria · Old Town
Munich
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Munich 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.
Frauenkirche 1,500 points
Big, blunt and made of brick, and you can see it from most of my lanes. That was the point of building it that way. Inside, the trick is not to look up first. Look down at what is under your feet just after you come in from the square, and give it a moment.
Marienplatz 500 points
The middle of everything, and the place all my lanes lean towards. Do not just cross it. Stand still, face the long front with all the little stone figures on it, and catch the right minute. Then the wall gets going.
Theatinerkirche St. Kajetan 500 points
You notice the colour before anything else. It is the yellow one at the top of the shopping street, with two slim fronts and a dome behind them, and the yellow is no accident. If it is open, go in: everything in there is white, and it is the loudest white I know.
Viktualienmarkt 500 points
A whole square that has never stopped selling food, which is why I take it personally. Everything is arranged in a ring, and the good part is whatever the ring is arranged around. This is also the one spot in the Old Town where sitting down is part of the plan.
Alter Hof 250 points
The oldest thing on this walk that you can simply stroll into, and almost nobody does. It hides one turn off the busy lanes: a quiet yard, a crooked oriel stuck on a corner, a rider in bronze out front. Go in and read what is fixed to the wall.
Isartor 250 points
The eastern one, and the only one still wearing its whole outfit: a squat middle block, a walled forecourt, and two slim ones holding the corners. Come at it from within, down the wide old street that runs towards the water, and watch it grow. The fresco in the forecourt is worth the stop.
little ART - Münchner Künstlerhaus 250 points
It sits at the north-west edge, where the ring bends, and looks like a Renaissance town hall that took a wrong turning. Somebody built it as a clubhouse for one particular crowd, and the scrolled gable says loudly which one. There is a courtyard behind it too.
Sendlinger Tor 250 points
The southern one, and the friendliest of the pair still on their feet. Traffic goes around it and you still walk straight under the arch, which is my favourite kind of leftover. Look up at what flanks the opening before you pass. There is arithmetic hiding up there.
Name origin
Why it is called Munich.
München means at the monks. The name is built on munich, the medieval word for a monk, and the town has read it that way since the Middle Ages: the oldest seal it still has, from 1239, is a monk's head under a hood. So a city of this size is named after the quiet neighbours who got here first. Being early is the only skill I have.
Sources: stadt.muenchen.de, hdbg.eu
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
No rock, no harbour, no bend in a river. Munich is here because of a crossing, and the crossing is the one thing this walk does not contain. In 1156 Henry the Lion put a bridge over the Isar and pulled the salt traffic onto it, and everything else grew around the money that came off it. The river runs a few hundred metres past your eastern edge, where the Ludwigsbrücke stands today with tablets from the 1890s claiming the spot for that first bridge. Your edge is the old line of the defences, which is why it draws such a tidy ring. What you do get is the road to the river: the Tal runs dead east from the middle to the Isartor, whose address is Tal 50. Everything that ever crossed came down this street first, and a street nobody can avoid gets walked smooth.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 18, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 526, stadtgeschichte-muenchen.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 808
Why then
When the first stone went down.
1158 is the official year, and it comes out of a quarrel. The place turns up on parchment for the first time as forum apud Munichen, the market at Munichen, in a settlement between the Bishop of Freising and Henry the Lion, argued out in front of the emperor at Augsburg. So this city's birth certificate is somebody else's paperwork about a bridge. Nothing gets written down until there is money on the table.
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1158–1180
Henry the Lion, a Welf duke, who is on this page mostly because he built the bridge and then took a cut of everything that crossed it. In 1180 the duchy went to another family, and the market he had started carried on without him. That is the usual order of things. The street outlasts the man who put it there.
- 1180–1918
The Wittelsbachs, for seven hundred and thirty-eight years: dukes, then electors, then kings. From 1255 the place stopped being only a market and was built up as a ruler's seat, and in 1806 it woke up as the capital of a brand new kingdom. One family, one town, longer than most countries have been countries. I did not move in that time either, but nobody built me a Residenz.
Sources: stadt.muenchen.de
- 1918–
In 1918 the monarchy ended, Bavaria was proclaimed a republic, and the name that stuck was Freistaat Bayern. Munich has been its capital ever since, which makes this Old Town the working middle of a state, not a museum. The rulers on this page changed their titles four times. The paving did not.
Sources: stadt.muenchen.de
The emblem
What the shield means.
A monk on a silver field: black habit with a gold hem, red shoes, a red book in the left hand, the right hand raised. He has been the city's arms since 1304, and a hooded monk's head sat in the seals before that, in 1239 and 1268. The red book is the town's oath book or its book of law, kept as a red-bound manuscript of 1365. Not a sword, then. A rulebook. From the eighteenth century onwards the drawings got rounder and softer until the monk was read as a child, and since 1727 he has been called the Münchner Kindl.
Sources: hdbg.eu
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The Old Town comes in four quarters, and the cut is medieval: Graggenau in the north-east, Kreuzviertel in the north-west, Hackenviertel in the south-west, Angerviertel in the south-east. Each one still looks like itself, so the walk changes flavour four times without ever leaving the ring. The Tal was a fifth quarter of its own for a while, until the neighbours on either side split it between them.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 18
The plots here were laid out long and deep, so people cut ways straight through them: a door on one street, daylight on the next. Munich has done this since the Middle Ages and never stopped, which is why so many of the names you are about to collect end in Passage. Half of them you would walk past without a glance. Doors count too. Go through.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 18
The ground plan under your feet is the old one, and it survived on purpose. The Old Town was badly damaged in the Second World War, and the council decided early to put it back in broadly the shape it had, filling the gaps and keeping the old plot lines. Among Germany's big cities no other kept a historic centre this large. Then in 1972 the two streets across the middle, Neuhauser Straße and Kaufingerstraße, were handed over to people on foot. Somebody served me a main course with the traffic taken off it.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 20, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 21, stadt.muenchen.de
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Passage
- A way through a block: in from one street, out on the next, sometimes roofed, sometimes just a courtyard with two openings. Munich counts them as streets, so they have dots on them.
- Hof
- A courtyard, and a whole address by itself. Maffeihof, Perusahof, Viscardihof, Schäfflerhof: an opening in a facade, a yard behind it, and most people walking past the opening.
- Tal
- Not a valley you would ever notice. It is the wide old street running east towards the water, and for a while it was a quarter of its own rather than part of anybody else's.
- Anger
- The common green a village kept for its animals. Oberanger and Unterer Anger remember one that stopped being green a very long time ago.
- Graben
- A ditch, and a receipt for water that used to run in the open here. Färbergraben, Hofgraben: the town streams were built over one after another, and the names stayed put.
- Markt
- What was sold there, in one word. Rindermarkt, Roßmarkt: the goods used to arrive on their own legs, which is more than can be said for the goods today.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 152streets
- 1,837dots
- 28.2km of street
- 36.1km on foot
- 10.3hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
- Regensburg
- Passau
- Nuremberg
- Bamberg
- Heidelberg
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.