Augsburg Churches

I had more than the usual cultural/historical interest in Augsburg. In the 1730s Salzburg Emigration, many Protestant families, including the Scheraus family, went first to Augsburg for a bit before traveling on to Savannah and the New World. I had read somewhere that Augsburg was the most Catholic of German cities at the time and have always been curious as to why their exile began there, of all places. As with most things, it's a lot more complicated than that, beginning with the Peace of Augsburg, 1555, which guaranteed peaceful co-existence of Protestants and Catholics for a time. Well, anyway, we visited a couple of churches in Augsburg.

Augsburg cathedral

In the courtyard, a relief of Roman textile merchants, found
in excavation around the church

Interior, nave and simple rib vaulting; I'll never understand
how that little can hold up the ceiling and roof

As we walked in, organ practice was
underway, and continued

What was most striking about this church
was that it still had much of its painted
walls intact, including this puppy at
the west end, which was at least 40 feet high

More painted interior

Nice windows too, some very old

And a Mary tympanum on the north side

After the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the Catholics built a
church for the Protestants, a gesture, I suppose; it actually
adjoins the Catholic church, the gray structure in the
center there; kind of Counter-Reformation Baroque, I
suppose, but what the hey...

Interior of St. Ulrich's, now an Evangelical Lutheran church

Offering box my ancestors might have used;
I tossed in a few coins for the effort