Found: The Oldest Public Library in Germany – Atlas Obscura

Niches in the walls hinted at the building’s past. (Photo courtesy of Roman-German Museum in Cologne)

This story has been carried by several news sources in the last few weeks, and I thought it interesting enough to post it too. This is the opening part of the news about the fascinating discovery; find the rest at the link below.

Cologne is one of Germany’s oldest cities, founded at the beginning of the first millennium as a Roman colony, and it’s the sort of place where if you dig into the ground, you can find something spectacular. In 2017, a Protestant church was working to build a community center and unearthed a set of ancient walls, which dated back to the city’s Roman era.

The building had been large enough to have some notable purpose, but archaeologists initially weren’t sure what that might be. They had discovered niches in the walls that seemed too small for statues. But when they compared those features with other Roman-era buildings, they were convinced they knew what the building had been used for.

It had been a library, the oldest identified in Germany.

Source: Found: The Oldest Public Library in Germany – Atlas Obscura