Bavaria · Old Town
Regensburg
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Regensburg 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 Sankt Peter 1,500 points
You will keep meeting it. Half the streets on this level are aimed at it, and it appears at the end of them without warning, several sizes larger than the lane prepared you for. Come at it out of a narrow one rather than across the open. This is the one I do not save for later.
Altes Rathaus 500 points
Stand back on the square and count the windows along the front. They go in fours, all the way along, except the last group before the big portal, which has three. The portal came later and swallowed the fourth one whole. It is still in there, facing a wall.
Historische Wurstkuchl 500 points
The smallest house on the waterfront: one low room, a chimney, and a doorway you have to stoop at. Most days there is a queue outside, and it moves. Join it. Standing about is something I am extremely good at.
Porta praetoria 500 points
Two arches set into a wall behind the Dom, with the pavement in front of them sunk to the level they were built at. Everybody else walks past above them without a glance. Go down and put a hand on the blocks.
Schloss St. Emmeram 500 points
The south-west corner of the level belongs to one household, and you will work that out from the wall: it runs and runs along the Fürst-Anselm-Allee and hardly ever offers a door. Stay with it as far as the Emmeramsplatz and go in under the arch. A whole quarter, shut away, and the gate open.
Dreieinigkeitskirche 250 points
Push the door open. Inside is like nowhere else in this town: white walls, timber galleries on three sides, and every bench pointed at the pulpit instead of the altar. Built for listening. Then find the way up.
Eiserne Brücke 250 points
It carries you off the shore and onto the island. Stop halfway and look back. The whole waterfront lines up at once, and there is nowhere in the town itself you can stand far enough away to get that.
Herz Jesu 250 points
The western edge of the level. It announces itself from a long way off: a great blunt block where everything around it is small and crooked. Walk round the back and look at the tower. It was never completed, and it has stood like that for close to a hundred years.
Herzogspark 250 points
The far west end of the walk, and the only place on it that gives underfoot. Big trees, a fountain, and a bastion of 1525 sitting in among them with nothing left to do. Every other course today is masonry. This one is the salad.
Historisches Museum 250 points
This is where the birth certificate is kept. A carved slab, turned up by accident a hundred years ago, which lets this town date itself to the year. Very few towns can. Outside, a square most walkers are past before they notice it.
Jesuitenplatz 250 points
A small square with almost nothing on it, one street away from the noise. Two minutes here and the lane you came out of sounds a long way off. Between two heavy courses, I like a plain one.
Ostentor 250 points
The far eastern end of the walk, and the last gate left standing on this side. Traffic squeezes under it one lane at a time. Turn round once you are out: from the far side it is a different building altogether.
Name origin
Why it is called Regensburg.
A small river called the Regen comes into the Danube just east of the Old Town, and the Roman fort here was named after it: the castle on the Regen. Before the Romans there was a Celtic name, Radasbona, and nobody kept it. By the sixth century the place was being called Reganespurc. Say that for fourteen hundred years and it wears down to Regensburg. I like a name you can still see the wear on.
Sources: www.regensburg.de, www.regensburg.de
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
The Danube comes up out of Bavaria, reaches its most northerly point right here, and bends away south-east again. The Regen arrives from the north at the same bend. Two rivers and a land route all have to settle their business inside the same few hundred metres, and whoever sat on that stretch took a share of everything that went through it: Italy in one direction, Bohemia and Russia and Byzantium in the other. A good place to put a town. For a rock, an outstanding one.
Sources: www.regensburg.de, www.regensburg.de
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Not here, and not at the first attempt. About a hundred years before the town you are walking, the Romans put a small post out at Kumpfmühl, south-west of this ground, to keep an eye on the river frontier. Around the year 80. Nothing of it stands above ground now: it is an entry in the heritage register with two roads, two burial grounds and a farm attached. The town proper started later and larger, on the ground under your shoes.
Sources: www.regensburg.de, www.regensburg.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 184
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 80-350
Rome, and for longer than it looks. A small post watched the river from about the year 80, and a century later the garrison was multiplied and stayed. From the first half of the third century the frontier grew unquiet, troop numbers fell, and civilians moved into the buildings that emptied, for the walls around them. By the middle of the fourth century the Roman machinery had stopped working and the people here were left to themselves. Hardly anyone left. They simply stopped being Roman.
Sources: www.regensburg.de, www.regensburg.de
- 500-788
The dukes. From the sixth century the old camp, by then called Reganespurc, was the residence of the Agilolfing dukes and the first capital Bavaria had. In 739 Boniface founded the diocese here. In 788 Charlemagne removed Tassilo III, the last of the family, from office, and the line ended. The palace quarter they left behind is still readable in the street plan, between the Alte Kapelle, the Dom and Niedermünster.
Sources: www.regensburg.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
- 1245-1803
The townspeople, and they had to argue for it. Lordship over the town belonged to the bishop and had been in dispute for generations when, in 1245, Emperor Frederick II granted the town the right to set a mayor and a council of its own. That made it a free imperial city, and it stayed one until 1803. It also made a town hall necessary, which is why there is one, and why it is where it is.
Sources: www.regensburg.de, www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.regensburg.de
- 1810-
Bavaria. The free imperial city ended in 1803, and what was left became the ecclesiastical principality of Regensburg under Karl Theodor von Dalberg. In 1810 Napoleon made Dalberg hand it over to the newly formed Kingdom of Bavaria, and Regensburg became the capital of a Bavarian district that took its name from the same little river the city did. It has been Bavarian ever since. After everything that came before, that counts as settled.
Sources: www.regensburg.de
The emblem
What the shield means.
Two silver keys crossed on a red field. They are Peter's keys, and Peter is patron of both the city and its Dom. The picture came out of the seals: the oldest of them, on a charter of 1211, shows him enthroned with one heavy key over his shoulder and a book in his other hand, and the arms grew out of that. The city archive puts the earliest arms on a stone tablet of 1320, cut to mark the start of the wall along the Danube. No beast, no bird, just the ironmongery, which I find restful.
Sources: srv19.regensburg.de, www.regensburg.de
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The camp wall never went away. People built on it, into it and around it, and the heritage register now lists it house by house: a remnant in the east cellar wall on Erhardigasse, its line running through the inside of a house of 1833 at Am Peterstor, standing masonry in a house Unter den Schwibbögen. It is holding up shops and flats today. No old stone I know of is better employed.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 51, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 17, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 145
The bridge over the Danube went up between 1135 and 1146: fifteen barrel-vaulted arches of Danube limestone and green sandstone, the roadway rising slightly towards the middle. The city calls it the building marvel of the Middle Ages and says later bridges were built in its image, Prague's Charles Bridge among them. Everything Regensburg became, it became because it owned this way over the water.
Look up on the Watmarkt. Two towers stand there seven storeys tall, wedged into the block like everything else: the Baumburger Turm, whose timbers date it to 1276/77, and the Bräunelturm, probably a hundred years older again. Trading families built them to be seen over the roofs, and the heritage register calls this density of them unique. There is a good deal more building above the shop signs here than the shop signs admit to.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 154, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 155, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1, www.regensburg.de
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Gasse
- The plain word for a street here, and the ending you will meet most: Adlergasse, Glockengasse, Kramgasse, Tändlergasse, Pfauengasse. Count the names that end in it and you have most of the level.
- Gäßchen / Gässel
- The same thing, smaller, and said the Bavarian way: Rehgäßchen, Spatzengäßchen, Taubengäßchen, Kuhgässel, Röhrlgässel. One of them is called Gäßchen ohne End, a little lane without an end. That is a promise, and I intend to hold it to that.
- Markt
- A market square, named after what stood on it. Watmarkt sold cloth, Krauterermarkt herbs, Kohlenmarkt coal, Fischmarkt fish, Alter Kornmarkt grain. Say what you are selling and the address writes itself.
- Hof
- A walled yard behind a gate, and in this town usually somebody's town house: Am Brixener Hof, Am Königshof, Fechthof, Schulhof. Bishops from seven dioceses and a long list of counts each kept one here, and the yards are still there behind the doors.
- Rote-, Weiße-, Goldene-
- Before house numbers a house had a sign, and the street took its name off the sign: Rote-Hahnen-Gasse, Weiße-Lilien-Straße, Goldene-Bären-Straße, Blaue-Stern-Gasse, Schwarze-Bären-Straße. A colour and an animal will find an address faster than a number will.
- Tor
- A gate. Am Peterstor and Am Prebrunntor are addresses sitting on the line of the old fortification, and the gates they are named after are not there any more. The names went on pointing at them anyway.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 203streets
- 1,927dots
- 31.2km of street
- 40.0km on foot
- 11.4hours 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.