Sankt Gallen

2010-12-28

Today I went to see the Abbey library of St. Gallen. You aren't allowed to take photos so you will have to follow that link to see what it looks like, I didn't take any of my own. The photo shown is essentially the whole library, it is tiny and is much smaller than it looks in the photo.

Despite being much smaller than I was expecting, it looked incredible. They have different books open at any one time on the display tables depending on the theme, which was music this year. They had some older transcript styles that look nothing like the music pages of today. They also had the oldest book written in the German Language. I can't remember exactly but I think it was from the year 590 and you could tell it was incredibly old. The pages were falling apart and had pieces missing and holes in them.

In addition to all the old books and music scripts, there was a replica of the St. Galler Globus, the original is in Zürich. Despite being pretty inaccurate (Australia was a giant blob labelled New Guinea) it had all kinds of other things such as the constellations and a climate wheel, and I imagine would have been incredibly detailed for when it was made. Obviously I wasn't allowed to spin it, but playing with all the dials and wheel things would have been crazy if it was allowed.

Underneath the library in the basement there was another room that was part of the ticket I got, but it wasn't all that exciting. Lots of fragments of statues and stuff.

The actual church or Abbey (picture above), was one of the better one's I have seen. The roof was the same as in the library only on a massive scale. Considering how many church's I've seen now it's getting harder to find impressive ones, but this one is up there as one of the better ones.

I walked around the rest of the town for a bit after that, but there wasn't anything too exciting to do or see. I had planned to wait for my Gleis7 to kick in to avoid paying the 18sFr for the train home, but it started snowing and I had been everywhere so I left after only a few hours.

The old town of St. Gallen was really pretty, but nothing I hadn't seen already - but it was worth the train ride just to see the library.