The Fuggerei, Augsburg. Germany

A visit to the Fuggerei in Augsburg  - the world's oldest social housing complex still in use - is an unforgettable experience.  Afterwards you walk away with a head full of quiz night facts:

• Where can you live for a rent of 0.88 cents per year? - (providing you are a Catholic)
• Where did Mozart's grandfather live and work as a brick layer?
• Where is the oldest social housing complex still in use?

The walled housing complex of the Fuggerei is this place. It is situated within the city of Augsburg, Bavaria, and was founded in 1516 by Jakob Fugger the Younger - a member of the rich Fugger merchant and banking dynasty whose former power was so great they replaced the Medicis as Europe's leading bankers.  A map in the museum shows the trade routes of the Fugger enterprise. The Bahamas and Mogadishu figure. Jakob Fugger who had no children died one of the richest men ever to have lived. A Bill Gates of his age.

We arrived in Augsburg on 8th August, an auspicious day when the city was celebrating the Augsburger Hohes Friedenfest - a festival dating from 1650 and marking ecumenical reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. The sun shone on the central plaza of the city and inhabitants and visitors were celebrating the day in the customary way of bringing and sharing food with friends and strangers. On a podium stood religious leaders of the Catholic, Islamic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths.

​At the end of WWII the small community of Jews had completely vanished because of deportations, and it took four decades before the community regained its number.  The synagogue, which was originally dedicated in 1917 and burned and looted during Kristallnacht in 1938, was restored and reopened in 1985 and began holding regular services. The genteel summer occasion of the festival seemed like a veneer to such terrible history, and the religious leaders might well have mentioned the atrocities against the minority Jews, but did not.

I walked around and listened to the message being delivered by a protestant leader: God loves all. God sees all. God is all. The message was upbeat and the words wafted across the plaza with its low hum of conviviality. 

From there we headed off to the Fuggerei, about ten minutes away. The slide show above tells the rest ...