Matt's Elitist JYA: Augsburg

It's picture time again, but first a little background on Augsburg. The city of Augsburg is really old - it was founded in 15 BC by the Romans, about a hundred or so years before Regensburg. Augsburg served as a Roman provincial capital and later grew into an important merchant city, becoming very wealthy. Unlike Regensburg, Augsburg managed to hold onto this prosperity, meaning the people could actually afford to replace their older medieval buildings with newer architectural styles. This growth and industry also made Augsburg worth bombing in WWII, the scars of this are most visible on the Augsburg Dom.

Looking at the Dom from the outside, it's pretty apparent that the building has been pieced back together - the building materials aren't uniform and the stark contrast between the white plaster and the stone statues shows what was salvaged from the wreckage and what is new.

In this picture you can see on the columns and arches red outlines which mark where the stones used to be - now it is made out of cement/plaster.

a statue in front of the Dom

These are a bunch of books from the 1500s in St. Anna Kirche. They have a museum with a bunch of Martin Luther related stuff there since Augsburg apparently was an important city in that whole situation. My knowledge on this subject is pretty lacking.

A view of the streets. Augsburg has streetcars instead of buses, hence the rails and electric cables. In addition to being a bigger city than Regensburg in general, Augsburg is also a lot more spacious.

This is one of several waterways that runs through the city. I'm pretty sure that they served as a sewer system in the earlier days, nowadays they just look cool.

Here we have the Rathaus (town hall)

Goldene Saal (Golden Hall), inside the Rathaus

the ceiling

a side room

This is the Fuggerei, the first "social settlement" in Europe. This self-contained community functions similarly to government subsidized housing (except it's privately owned) and was set up in the 1500s by a family of incredibly wealthy bankers/merchants by the name of Fugger to serve as housing for their impoverished workers. Annual rent was and is essentially free - the current residents pay 88 cents a year to live there.

This isn't a free ride, however, and there are pretty strict rules governing who can live in the Fuggerei and what they have to do to stay there. Some of the requirements are that residents have to be poor, Catholic, have a good reputation/clean record, and have to pray three times a day for the Fugger family (the brothers who set up the Fuggerei were very worried about their salvation).