Strasbourg: A Cathedral, a Clock and a Little France

Jerry Griffis

4 days ago

4 min read

On December 4, 2021 we spent a day in Strasbourg, the largest city in Alsace, sitting on the French bank of the Rhine just across from Germany. It was a wet, gray day, but the city was dressed for Christmas and we walked until after dark.

Where We Walked

The old center of Strasbourg is an island. The river Ill splits around it, and the island is called the Grande Île, literally "Big Island." The whole historic center, including the cathedral, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988, and in 2017 the listing was extended to include the German-built Neustadt ("new town") district next to it. Our pins on the map below cluster in three places: the cathedral, the canals of Petite France in the west, and the squares and streets in between.

A satellite map of central Strasbourg with numbered pins showing where our photos were taken

The city's story starts with the Romans. The camp of Argentoratum, a name that comes from a Gaulish word tied to silver, was first mentioned in 12 BC. The modern name is Germanic: Strasbourg means roughly "town of the roads," a crossroads town. In 842 the Oaths of Strasbourg were sworn here, one of the oldest texts written in an early form of both French and German, which fits a city that has gone back and forth between the two ever since. It became a free imperial city in 1262 after its citizens rebelled against their bishop, Louis XIV's armies annexed it in 1681, it was German from 1871 to 1918, and it has been French again since. Today it is the seat of the Council of Europe and of the European Parliament.

A pedestrian street in Strasbourg's old town with Christmas decorations overhead

The river Ill with a bridge and city buildings on a gray day

Ethan under an umbrella in front of a large wooden door on a wet street

That is Ethan under the umbrella, in front of the doors on the other side of the street. He thought it was fun to be a lone traveler, so he walked over there on his own.

A half-timbered house decorated for Christmas next to a market stall

Petite France

The most photogenic corner of the island is Petite France ("Little France"), and the name has nothing to do with being patriotic. In 1503 a hospice for incurable patients opened there, founded by Gaspard Hofmeister for soldiers of the French king Charles VIII who had caught syphilis during the Italian Wars. Syphilis was known as the "French disease," so locals called the building "Zum Französel," something like "at the little French one." By 1795 the building was being called La Petite France, and the name spread to the whole district. Later the area was home to tanners, millers and fishermen, and the tanneries smelled bad enough that it was not a desirable place to live. The tanners' houses were built with open space under the roof so the wind could dry the hides hung there, and the Maison des Tanneurs ("Tanners' House"), built in 1572 as the headquarters of the Tanners' Guild, still stands in the quarter and is now a restaurant.

The Barrage Vauban, the long arched dam and covered bridge across the river Ill

Just upstream is the Barrage Vauban, a defensive dam built at the end of the 17th century as part of the fortifications of the military engineer Vauban.

A mossy stone wall in the foreground, with half-timbered houses along the canal beyond

The medieval towers of the Ponts Couverts rising above the trees and houses

The towers are the Ponts Couverts ("Covered Bridges"), a defensive structure of three bridges and four towers across the channels of the Ill. They have not actually been covered since the 18th century.

Half-timbered houses along a canal in Petite France

A timber-framed restaurant built out over the water in Petite France, with the sign Au Pont St Martin, in the evening light

The timber-framed building built out over the water carries the sign Au Pont St Martin, a restaurant, and it is one of the classic postcard views of the quarter.

The Cathedral

Nobody can miss the cathedral. Notre-Dame de Strasbourg (the Germans call it the Münster, from the Latin word for monastery) was started in 1015 by Bishop Werner after an earlier church burned in 1002. Work picked up again in 1190 and finished in 1439, and the west façade, with its enormous rose window, went up between 1275 and 1399. Erwin von Steinbach led the work from 1277 until his death in 1318, and his son and grandson carried on. Only one tower was ever finished, which is why the cathedral looks lopsided. That single spire is 142 meters (466 feet) tall and was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874. It is still the tallest surviving structure built entirely in the Middle Ages.

The west façade and spire of Strasbourg Cathedral in pink sandstone

The cathedral has had a rough few centuries. During the French Revolution 215 statues on the portals were smashed and it was declared a "Temple of Reason" in 1793, and in 1870 a German shell bent the cross on the spire. In World War II the stained glass was packed into 74 cases and hidden in a salt mine, and Allied bombing damaged the building on August 11, 1944.

The long vaulted nave of Strasbourg Cathedral with visitors walking through

Large tapestries hanging between the arches of the cathedral nave

The tapestries hanging in the nave are a series of fourteen about the life of the Virgin Mary. Cardinal Richelieu commissioned them for Notre-Dame de Paris, and they were woven in Paris between 1638 and 1657. The cathedral chapter bought them in 1739, and they hang in the arcades during Advent, which is exactly when we were there.

The side of Strasbourg Cathedral at dusk

The side of the cathedral at dusk with a lit window

The astronomical clock inside Strasbourg Cathedral

The astronomical clock is one of the great sights inside, and we watched it perform. There have been three clocks. The first, built in 1352 to 1354, had a gilded mechanical rooster that is believed to be the oldest automaton in the world. The second was designed by the mathematician Christian Herlin, begun in 1547 and completed under Conrad Dasypodius in 1574, and it stopped around 1788. The one you see today was built by Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué, who finished it in the early 1840s.

The show runs daily at 12:30. Figures of the four ages of life, a child, a teenager, an adult and an old man, parade past Death, while higher up Christ and the apostles process past and a life-size rooster crows three times. The clock also shows the positions of the planets, the Sun and the Moon, predicts eclipses, and has a perpetual Gregorian calendar. It even keeps two times: the gold hands show solar time and the silver hands show Central European Time.

Strasbourg After Dark

Strasbourg's Christmas market is called the Christkindelsmärik, Alsatian for "little Christ-child market," and it goes back to 1570. After dark the streets filled with people and lights.