Minden

I thought it would be good to talk a little bit about the town where I live in Germany. Minden is a small town of about 80,000 people, in the very top corner of North Rhein-Westphalia, almost in Lower Saxony. Like most places in Europe, it’s very old. The town was first founded in 798 AD, they think though that settlers have lived in this area for over 2000 years. I was talking to my roommate about her trip to Philadelphia and she was telling me how she kept going places and people would say things like, “This bell is over 200 years old,” and she would think “Is that all?” The oldest building here in Minden is the Catholic Dom.

There’s been a church in this location since the town’s inception. It’s burned down a lot, though so this one is only 800 years old, although it was bombed during WWII and part of it had to be rebuilt. An interesting fact about Minden is that it’s mostly Protestant. There are eight churches in the Altstadt, and this is the only Catholic one. Apparently this church originally had two steeples, kind of like the Dom in Cologne, but later they decided they preferred a more subtle look, and took them down.

Many buildings in the Altstadt are older as well, although a lot of the facades have been rebuilt to reflect architectural trends, during the Renaissance, for example. Here are a few pictures of the shopping district downtown. I took these during the special “Go Shopping on Sunday” day, so there was a lot going on. There aren’t normally people in costume dancing in the street, sadly.

Here’s a picture taken from the outside of the Altstadt, where you can still see the old city wall. Minden is located right on the Weser River, which flows north from Minden through Bremen and to the North Sea.