The founder of the city (then a monastic monastery), according to one version, is considered to be an Irish monk-traveler named Gallus, who settled here in 612. One day in the forest he met a bear and was very frightened, but he spoke to him, and, oddly enough, the bear understood him. According to rumors, this bear is on the ancient sculpture depicting St. Gall and standing at the entrance to the library. In the 8th century, a follower of the founding father named Otmar founded a school of scribes and translators in the monastery; in the 9th century, Abbot Gozbert founded a library, which immortalized his name and glorified the monastery.
The plan preserved in the abbey library is a design for an ideal Benedictine monastery, which was presented to Abbot Gotzbert in 820. The monastery church located in the center was presented in the form of a temple with two apses, but during construction only one apse was built. This is a three-nave basilica, the interior of which is divided into separate chapels, four in each of the three naves. At the church there was a chapter hall, a sacristy, a library, a scriptorium, and a reception room. Adjoining it was a square cloister, around which there was a dormitory, refectory, dressing room, kitchens, and baths. On the other side of the temple there was the abbot's house, a school for the laity, and a house for distinguished guests. On the territory of the abbey there was also a smaller church, which was adjoined on both sides by two square cloisters, next to one of which there was a hospital, a room for storing medicinal herbs. On the other side of the second cloister there is a cemetery and a vegetable garden. On the territory of the abbey there were poultry yards, stables, cowsheds, pigsties, breweries, servants' houses, workshops, mills, etc.
In 1755-1768 The medieval buildings of the abbey were demolished and a grandiose baroque temple rose in their place.
It is thanks to the expressive cathedral and the ancient library, where among the many volumes about 2 thousand manuscripts are stored, each of which is 1 thousand years old or more, that the abbey is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
From the station there is a travel agency right across the road. Then in a straight line and to the left, the landmark is funny statues of bears, but if they are not there at the time you visit St. Gallen, then you will still understand where to go - to where the spiers of the cathedral soar high into the sky.
In front of the monastery is the Gothic Protestant Church of St. Lawrence (there was a church on this site back in the 9th century), everything inside is strict, as if in defiance of its neighbor - the cathedral, in which the late Baroque blooms in full bloom. The church and the cathedral seem to still be separated from each other by a tall wall that once separated the Protestant city and the Catholic abbey.
The cathedral is surrounded by spacious lawns with emerald grass, on which young people lie imposingly. Ah – the famous library was closed for renovations! Its buildings are shrouded in a construction net and surrounded by forests. But we do not despair, and go around the abbey. What remains from the medieval city are fragments of walls, wide gates with narrow loopholes, and even a powerful bastion tower. When we pass through the gates, a sigh of admiration involuntarily escapes us: how good the cathedral is!
It was planned and built at the end of the 18th century, and the residence of the local bishop has been located next to it since then and to this day. Inside there is space and gilding, large-scale painting, elaborate carvings, in general, everything that a person needed to feel small and insignificant. Perhaps the Cathedral of Saint-Galen, the Cathedral of St. Urus in Solothurn, and another church in Lucerne (about it in due time) can be compared with Roman masterpieces of the Baroque, because they are masterpieces.
The monastery buildings with the baroque library hall are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
What is the famous monastery of St. Gall you will find out in this article.
What is the monastery of St. Gall famous for?
The Monastery of St. Gall is located in the Swiss city of St. Gallen. In the Middle Ages it was one of the largest Benedictine monasteries in Europe. It was founded in 613 by St. Gall, an Irish disciple of St. Columbana.
1. He became famous for being “the perfect example of a large monastery.” It was a kind of religious center, whose influence spread throughout Europe.
2. Famous for his library. Some books are 1000 years old or more. There are more than 160 thousand books, 1650 incunambula, 2100 manuscripts of the 8th-15th centuries, including one of the most famous epic works of mankind - the medieval German manuscript “The Song of the Nibelungs”, written by an unknown author in the 12th-13th centuries. Only 50,000 books are available for tourists to view, and the remaining books, due to their age, require a constant microclimate.
In the room where 50,000 books are displayed on the shelves, you can admire... the most real mummies brought by archaeologists from Egypt. The people whose bodies were embalmed and eventually ended up in the library of the Monastery of St. Gall passed away almost 3,000 years ago.
3. The monastery was organized and the art school which had a great influence. The students from this school and their work were held in high esteem. The monastery also played a major political and cultural role in that region.
4. Life in the monastery proceeded as it usually does in such places. Prayers, services, rest, meetings in the monastery. Relations with residents developed in different ways. Basically, it was good, since the monastery was a monastery where one could study art. Although there were various uprisings, during which they wanted to destroy the monastery. Due to the fame of the monastery, many donations flocked to it.
ST GALLEN HOUSE
Before the establishment of the monastery, this area was harsh and wild. Here stretched a dense primeval forest, the sounds of human speech were not heard in the Alpine valleys, and no one threw a net into the noisy waters of Steimakh. The first to come to this deserted corner of the Alps were educated Irish missionaries who sought to spread Christianity everywhere. They left their island and dispersed through France to different parts of the then barbaric Western Europe. Saint Gallen was one of these peaceful missionaries.
Monastery Church of Saint Gallen
He arrived here with his comrade, consecrated this place, placed a cross made of tree branches in the ground, and hung on it a box with relics that he had brought with him. A humble but energetic and dedicated people came to the wild desert area. Work began to boil, and soon everything around was transformed. The same mountains, the same valley and the same rapid streams, but all this was illuminated by the light of the faith of Christ. Soon, rumors about the life and exploits of the missionaries who settled here attracted people to them, and the area began to be quickly populated. The new church became the center of the colony.
But the monastery began to develop only 100 years after the death of St. Gallen, when the charter of St. Benedict of Nursia was introduced into it. Other pious influences also contributed to the pious organization of the monastery. Thus, all the abbots of Saint-Gallen sought to attract fresh forces from Britain, Germany, and Italy to the monastery. Abbot Otmar, for example, after the introduction of the Rule of St. Benedict, established a school in the monastery.
At first, the Saint-Gallen monastery was dependent on the Bishop of Constance, in whose diocese it was located. But the monastery energetically fought for its independence, and under the reign of Abbot Grimaldi it was obtained. Under the same abbot, the monastery library was significantly enlarged, which entailed the further development of the monastery school. Monastic science reached its highest degree of development under Abbot Solomon, whose reign lasted 30 years (890–920).
There were two schools in Saint-Gallen, as in most medieval monasteries: internal and external. The first was intended exclusively for those persons who subsequently became monks. Its building was adjacent to the monastery church on one side, the school premises were located around a wide courtyard, but between them and the courtyard there was a covered gallery stretching on all sides. This church was intended for students of the internal school. At some distance from the school buildings there was a kitchen and a bathhouse with four boilers, a hearth and two benches. On the other side of the school church was the monastery hospital.
The outer school was located on the other side - between the abbot's chambers and the hotel for noble visitors. It was surrounded by a fence, on which was written a curious inscription: “This fence constrains the desires of students,” that is, it was supposed to help increase attention and deepen into the subject being studied.
The basis of medieval teaching was the seven so-called liberal arts, but first students had to take an elementary course. They began to learn from the age of 7, before the start of classes a prayer was read: “Give this slave a mind suitable for learning, so that he will succeed in external sciences (secular. - N.I.), and would be worthy of acquiring the ability to understand eternal science (theology).”
The elementary course included: psalter (Latin), writing, church singing, church notation and a grammar course. To teach students to read, they used small boards or pieces of paper on which letters were arranged in alphabetical order. When the students mastered the alphabet, they moved on to studying the psalter, written in large letters. At the same time, they tried to ensure that students read without the slightest errors; If errors occurred while reading, the students were punished.
When mastering writing, they first learned to write on wax-coated tablets; after them they moved on to parchment, on which they wrote with pen and ink. For bad writing, as well as for bad reading and for mistakes in church singing, the offender was punished corporally. One of the medieval poems said:
If you don't want to write well,
I'll mark your back with whips,
So that you sing to me a lamentable song:
Corporal punishment was considered necessary in teaching, and even St. Benedict's "rule of monastic life" recognized this necessity. Students were usually beaten on the hands or back, and in some monasteries there was even a custom of flogging students at Christmas, apparently in remembrance of the beating of infants by King Herod. In the Saint-Gallen monastery in the first half of the 10th century. There was even a tragic incident.
They decided to punish several students, and one of them was sent to the attic for rods. But he, instead of fulfilling the order, pulled out a log along the way from the burning stove and placed it under the very roof of the building. When the beams caught fire, he ran downstairs and began screaming about the fire. They could not put out the fire, and almost the entire monastery burned down.
Having taught the students to read and write in Latin, they began to study the elementary course of grammar, that is, they taught the students to distinguish parts of speech, inflection and conjugation. At the same time, they tried to ensure that students conducted everyday conversations in Latin. For this purpose, teachers compiled small dictionaries and phrase books. In accordance with the texts of the phrase books, scenes were played out in which a monk, a peasant, a hunter, a fisherman, a cook, etc. alternately participated. Each of them answered questions regarding his occupation and named his household items.
When the students acquired some skills in the Latin language, they were forced to memorize the psalms. Only after this came the teaching of the seven liberal arts, which the medieval monastic schools inherited from imperial Rome: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. One of the medieval authors compared the seven liberal arts with seven steps by which the human spirit rises to wisdom. If there were a sufficient number of teachers in the monastery schools, these sciences were studied simultaneously; if there were not enough teachers, only some of the listed subjects were studied.
The most important of all secular sciences was grammar, which at that time was of much greater importance than in subsequent centuries. In addition to what she is currently studying, it included reading and detailed interpretation of the works of various authors, as well as stylistics, metrics and partly rhetoric. In Saint-Gallen, as in some other cultural centers, students became acquainted with the works of Cicero and Quintilian, and regarding judicial eloquence, they studied the monuments of Roman law.
Medieval geometry was more likely to correspond to geography, since it provided a description of the Earth and information about it. The students’ favorite reading was the so-called “physiologists,” which talked about real and fantastic animals, as well as rare stones and trees. The Physiologists, which contained a lot of religious, mystical and symbolic content, were translated into all languages and sometimes presented in poetry. The study of astronomy in monastic schools was based on Ptolemy's position on the movement of the Sun around the Earth. At night, when the sky shone with stars, the students and their teacher observed the movement of the luminaries in different parts of the firmament. It should be noted that in general the teaching of astronomy pursued a purely practical goal - an explanation of the church calendar, determining the time of Easter, etc.
Rome left the medieval schools a legacy of suitable manuals. Particularly famous was the work of Marcus Terence Varro, in which (in addition to the seven liberal arts) medicine and architecture were also mentioned. Following the model of Roman manuals, monastic schools compiled their own manuals.
In a separate wing, which adjoined the cathedral church of the monastery, there was a library and a scriptorium - a room for copying manuscripts. On the wall of the scriptorium there was an inscription: “Let only the one who writes the sayings of the Holy Law or the Holy Fathers, gifted with reason and piety, sit here. Let everyone beware of saying anything frivolous here; Because of frivolous conversation, the hand is mistaken. Diligently collect essays in which no lies have crept in, so that the writer’s hand moves along a safe path. It is a wonderful occupation to write sacred books, and a sure reward awaits the writer!”
Students of internal schools were considered the complete property of the monastery; they obeyed all the rules to which monks obeyed, and from a very young age they became accustomed to monastic life. It should be noted that the discipline in schools was excellent. In 911, St. Gallen was visited by the German king Conrad I, who was greeted with appropriate pomp. Wanting to pamper the students (and maybe test them!), he took out a gold coin and gave it to one of them. But the student began to refuse, because the students were forbidden to accept anything from visitors. Then the king put a coin in his mouth, but the student spat it out and screamed loudly. After some time, Conrad I began to throw apples at the students, but they did not pay attention to them. After living in St. Gallen for three days, the king was satisfied with the pupils and ordered that these three days become annual days of rest.
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