Bavaria · Old Town
Passau
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Passau 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.
Dom St. Stephan 1,500 points
The white one at the top of the hill, on the square the bishops arranged their whole quarter around. From May to October, at noon, every day but Sundays and holidays, something starts in here. I am not telling you what. Main course.
Mariahilf 500 points
High on the hill across the Inn. You can pick out its two towers from almost anywhere on the peninsula, which is rather the point of putting a church up there. From the terrace the entire Old Town is laid out below you like a plate.
Pfarrkirche Sankt Paul 500 points
It stands over the old cattle market, which is my kind of address. Come up the big open stair on the west side, not in from the square. The pointed tower cap is how you find it from anywhere on the hill.
Veste Oberhaus 500 points
On a wedge of rock across the river, right where the Ilz comes in. It is a proper climb and there is no way around that. From the top the whole peninsula is in front of you, tip and all. This is the one I chew slowly.
Alte Residenz 250 points
It fills a whole block behind the Dom and gives the lane almost nothing. Two courtyards are hiding in there. I like a building that keeps the good part inside. So does a pastry.
Altes Rathaus 250 points
I approve of the square out front. It was a fish market first, which is the correct order of priorities. Inside, the great hall is painted end to end with scenes from the town, and the carillon in the tower rings twice a day.
Dreiflüsseeck 250 points
The pointed end of the Old Town, where the peninsula simply runs out. Stand at the railing and look down. The Inn and the Ilz come in from opposite sides and neither one gives way. I save this bite for last, on purpose.
Prinzregent-Luitpold-Brücke 250 points
Your way across to the north bank. Stop in the middle and turn around: from here you see the peninsula from the side, all at once. Then keep going, because a bridge is the chewiest thing I eat all day.
Severinstor 250 points
You do not look at this one. You walk under it. A gate with a road still running through it is my favourite kind of leftover.
Name origin
Why it is called Passau.
Passau is a Roman word that got chewed. The camp on this tongue of land was called Batavis, after soldiers who came here from Batavia on the lower Rhine. Batavis wore down to Pazzawe, and Pazzawe wore down to Passau. Names get eaten too. It just takes longer than a lane.
Sources: www.roemermuseum.passau.de, www.geku.uni-passau.de p. 28
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Look at the shape of it. The Old Town is a narrow spur of rock: the Inn down one side, the Danube down the other, steep drops on three sides. Both rivers have carried boats for as long as anyone can say. Whoever stood up here saw everything coming and took a cut of it. That is more or less how I pick a lane, too.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1, www.roemermuseum.passau.de
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Around the middle of the first century the Danube became the northern edge of the Roman empire, and an edge needs watching. A small camp went up here to do the watching. So the founding date says less about this rock than about a line somebody drew a long way upstream.
Sources: www.roemermuseum.passau.de, www.limesstrasse.de p. 2
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 50–488
Rome. The Danube here was the northern edge of the empire for the best part of five hundred years, and this tongue of land held a camp for most of it. Then the border moved, the order came to go back to Italy, and everybody went.
Sources: www.limesstrasse.de p. 2, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1, www.geku.uni-passau.de p. 28
- 1217–1803
The bishops, and not only in church. Between 1217 and 1220 the emperor enfeoffed Bishop Ulrich II with the county in the Ilzgau, and a charter of 1220 let bishops across the empire build principalities out of their own land. From then on the men in the Dom ruled here as imperial princes. It held until 1803. The citizens down the hill spent a good part of those centuries arguing about who was allowed to hold the town seal.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, hdbg.eu
- 1803–
Bavaria. The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 dissolved the prince-bishopric, and after some wrangling over who got which piece, the territory went to Bavaria in 1805/06. The bishops kept their diocese. Everything else changed hands.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 4
The emblem
What the shield means.
A red wolf, up on its hind legs, on a silver field. It is not the city's own animal. Passau took it off the prince-bishopric's shield, which is a confident thing to do with the arms of the man you are arguing with. The wolf turns up as the town's own sign in a book of arms from around 1402, and by about 1460 nobody was reading it as the bishop's any more.
Sources: hdbg.eu
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
People have been living on this peninsula for close to seven thousand years. The oldest traces are Middle Neolithic, roughly 4900 to 4500 BC, and somebody has been here on and off ever since.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
Two devastating fires, in 1662 and 1680, decided what the Old Town looks like now. Italian artists were called in to put the Dom and the bishops' buildings back together, and they brought the Italian late baroque with them. Building rules arrived at the same time: shingle roofs out, trough roofs behind raised fire walls in. That is why so many roofs here look flat from the lane.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 3, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 4
Four lanes came through all of that with their medieval shape intact: Höllgasse, Steiningergasse, Kleine Messergasse and Pfaffengasse. Houses packed tight, and courtyards hiding behind them, some with galleries. All four are in this Old Town.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 4
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Gasse
- A lane, and the ordinary word for a street here. Count the names ending in -gasse and you have most of the Old Town.
- Gäßchen
- The same thing, smaller. Passau also says Gassl and Gaßl for it, which is the same shrug in Bavarian.
- Stiege
- A stair that counts as a street. Ballhausstiege, Hofstiege, Schlosserstiege, Wallfahrtsstiege. Steps have dots on them too.
- Lände
- The bank where boats tied up and unloaded. Obere and Untere Donaulände are the two long ones along the water.
- Winkel
- A corner you cannot walk through. Heuwinkel, Klosterwinkel, Bratfischwinkel: go in, look, come back out.
- Ort
- Not the ordinary word for a place. Here it means the point, the sharp eastern end of the peninsula. Ort, and Ortspitze beyond it.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 84streets
- 967dots
- 15.4km of street
- 20.2km on foot
- 5.8hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
- Regensburg
- Munich
- 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.