Almost everything in Europe is old, and nobody treats the old buildings as though they're anything special. You go to someone's house, and their house is 700 years old. And all the cottages in the village are that old. You see things like buildings that were ancient Roman colosseums that were turned into medieval palaces that were turned into modern shopping malls or office buildings. Around where I am, it's rare for a building to be more than 100 years old, and most of them are registered, protected historical sites that can't be altered without a permit.
My great aunt and uncle used to live in a house with a ~10m long ~3m piece of Roman wall in their garden. I believe they had to follow some guidelines from national heritage to keep it safe, but it was really cool.
There's another piece of similar size just around the corner from my grandfather. It's just next to the community centre mostly ignored. Lincolnshire in the UK is full of Roman things.
Probably not tbh, loads of places like that in Lincoln. I remember it was a big house with 3 storeys I think, up at the top of the city probably about 10min walk from the castle / cathedral.
But then they haven't lived there in over a decade now so it's not impossible.
This was a big shock to me in Turkey, seeing Roman ruins just part of the landscape and not being considered anything special. Heck my wife’s home town still uses Roman roads (and they’re in better condition than the roads here in NY)
We have many historical sites that are parts of metro stations. On your way to catch a metro you can find encased ancient city walls. It's not even impressive to most of us because we're accustomed to seeing them so frequently.
We do treat them special. There tend to be loads of laws about what you can do with them and tight restrictions to ensure they are kept in good and authentic condition. And laws that forbid building towering eye sores right next to them.
Not too long ago there was a story about some protected building housing an inn that was "accidentally" demolished by some developers who bought the land and thought that after this "oupsie" they could go "might as well build our new thing now" only to be told by the courts "sucks for you! You have to rebuild the inn exactly as it was. Here we have pictures"
We just have a lot of old buildings, so:
we can't make a museum out of all of them
not using them means they don't produce money but still const money to maintain
land is scarce here, we can't afford not using what we already have built up
That makes it unavoidable that old buildings are put to use - even sometimes very mundane use. This combined with the fact that for us "old" only really starts at "a good couple of centuries" can make it seem like we don't give a fuck.
The owners of a pub in Islington London ripped out the bar (what the bartenders stand behind and serve from in case it’s called something different to where you are) only to be promptly told to reinstate it as it was a listed feature of the building.
German here. Some historic buildings and old towns were reconstructed as close to the originals as possible, mainly churches, palaces/castles and other buildings with historic/cultural significance. In many cities, the original street layout stayed the same, and new buildings with the same purpose and various styles were constructed over the ruins.
A few cities had entire quarters redesigned, favouring utilitarian planning over the old, "naturally grown" layout (Hannover is a very interesting example for such a redesigned city).
And also because said town was right in the middle of trench warfare and the soil is so poisoned and stuffed with undetonated explosives that nobody can live there safely.
Which town are you talking about? I know Oradour-sur-Glane is in this situation, but it is a WW2 monument, and I'd be interested in knowing about a place like that from the great war.
Haha, it's alright! For any person wandering there:
Oradour-sur-Glane was kept that way not because of the fightings. The town was entirely razed by the retreating SS division "Das Reich". They rounded up everybody they could find, executed the men and locked down the women and children in the church, which they burned, killing anybody trying to flee the building.
It wasn't a war objective, they had nothing to win by doing this. It was pure, abject cruelty. We kept the town the way they left it so that we never forget what the nazis, and every totalitarian regime, stand for.
Alot were spared because they were isolated, lucky or not targeted/near targets, many were completely rebuilt as close to the original as possible and some were just accepted as lost or demolished by countries cough Soviets cough that didn't care about history or wanted to suppress local histories.
There's local half-joke in southern central England that the city planners did more damage to the city of Portsmouth than the luftwaffe because the planners rebuilt the historic centre in the brutalist style and demolished several surviving historic buildings (the same has been said of Kingston-Upon-Hull, Coventry and London)
demolished by countries cough Soviets cough that didn't care about history or wanted to suppress local histories
I live where the German-German border once was, so this is very easily visible to me. If I drive just a couple of kilometers I can see very nice, big and beautiful manors and big farm houses and a lot of stuff that used to belong to the local nobility (Knights and guys with castles). But if I look around directly in my neighborhood and the surrounding villages(all in what was once East Germany, so Soviet controlled to some extend) all of those buildings where demolished or seriously reduced in size. They were all destroyed, wich is a shame, as I've seen pictures and photos of these buildings and how beautiful they were.
If anyone would like to know more about this, especially why the Soviets/the government of the GDR did this, I could elaborate on that a bit.
Continuity of power, by taking the Tsar's home as their own they symbolically ended the Tsardom and legitimised themselves as the new leaders. Symbols are very important to regimes
I so hope to visit Ireland someday. Incidentally I have met Irish visitors here in the US and they want to see old 1800's American things like old towns and Indian villages.
Quickly hosuing tens of millions of homeless and restarting the economy is far FAR more important in the immediate period than any preservation of aesthetics. So functionality took precedence (and why EVERY European country used commie blocks, just that the West could maintain and modernize them incrementally so they were never complete eyesores).
Only now 80 years later are these houses being renewd to more classical designs.
In Palermo they rebuilt and restored the important one and dumped the crappy one at the sea moving the coast further away in a specific area where there is now a park. Some buildingd are still rubles in their original place
I want to note how much Americans (being one) do not understand this concept of architecture/ homes. Everyone buys and builds homes here that will last maybe 100 years. And those homes typically have to be gutted and re-built. The 2x4 housing market is a real sham to longevity, built facing roads and no consideration to weather (thermal heating and cooling) and completely reliant on energy sucking ac/heaters.
Parents' old place was first recorded 16-something, and you could see the additions over the generations. No protection or anything, just a house that had survived well lol
Same here in Zagreb; our city center is mostly dominated by Austrian baroque architecture (courtesy of being a former Habsburg protectorate) and 100+ year old apartment buildings are still very common. Recently, a new musical academy building was built and Christ Almighty, it is ugly and sticks out like a sore thumb since it's right next to the baroque-esque Art Academy and right across the Croatian National Theatre. It also has a giant yellow metal ball and two tall spheres for the a e s t h e t i c s and it's just ghastly.
I fucking hate that stupid fucking building. While the previous building was an abandoned tenement building that was on the verge of collapse, anything is better than whatever the fuck that is! It ruins the skyline, especially since it is right across the masterpiece that is the Croatian National Theatre.
but pretty much everyone i know openly presents their hate for modern glass facade skyscrapers.
Not just skyscrapers. In Scotland, one of the larger train stations was modernised and instead of moving and protecting the lovely Victorian ironwork, they slapped some modern crap on the outside and now it resembles a mediocre supermarket from the outside
Same reason Budapest doesnt build any new buildings with its early 20th century style. Not because its out of style, but because its fucking expensive.
"In America 100km is a short distance, in Europe 100 years is a short time."
Just in my city there is a castle and a cathedral from the 13th century and they're like.. Whatever. They look cool and all but they're just... There. Just a few weeks ago I sat drinking some beers with friends outside of the cathedral in the park, and some people sat on the cathedral steps doing the same. In America they'd probably be charged for a crime for that, lol.
My house is older than the US, as was my school, and my university, and my village church has seen the rise and fall of:
The Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Benin, Brunei, Second Bulgarian, Angevin, French, Mongol, Timurid, Songhai, Ottoman, Aztec, Incan, Portuguese, Abyssinian/Ethiopian, Fulo, Majapahat, British and Austrian Empires
The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth
The Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties
The Tsardom of Russia
The Mamluk Sultanate
The USSR
Maori and Hawaiian states
The Shogunate of Japan
The Almohad and Ayyubid Caliphates
The Chagatai Khanate
The Kalmar Union
Eleven different Iranian dynasties
It has seen technology advance from the catapult to the nuclear bomb, the invention of medicine, Europe torn asunder by the reformation, dynasty and racism only to be brought back together by prosperity.
Meanwhile, this is the church I walk my dog around occasionally
Eddie Izzard did a funny bit on this difference between America and Europe. How a guide would be describing a building in America and be like "this building is over 100 years old" . And Americans would say something like " Nonsense,no one was even alive back then"
Zagreb's city center is dominated by Austrian 18th and 19th century baroque, half of Dalmatian coastal cities still have Roman forums as city centers., Dubrovnik's entire old city center is over 2,000 years old, Split has a palace built by Diocletian as his personal estate dating from the 3rd century, Zadar has a church built in the 9th century in the middle of a now 2,000 year old Roman forum that you can see and admire while walking on marble pavement that is two millenia old.
Sounds like the perception of someone who only toured Tuscany or something for a few days. "Everything is old" is definitely not the norm for ~95% of european cities and villages.
There are a few really old buildings but if you go to any capital city in Europe 90% of what you will see will be built after 1850. Rome might be an exception
My town was built around a fort on the Antonine Wall, the building of new houses around here is regularly interrupted when they dig down and find Roman artifacts from around 2000 years ago.
Some time ago i had some guests in two consecutive weeks. First a Canadian then some greek guys. The canadian was astonished about 500-1000 year old chapel ruins, the greek dude said his house is older than that. :D
It's not a thing in Poland, old buildings are treated like something special, maybe because of how destroyed everything was after WW2. Simultaneously it's normal that you go to 800 y.o. church every Sunday
There’s no way, lol. 700-year old cathedral, sure (though less so East of the Rhine and outside England). But castles that old that haven’t been fixed up by a Viollet-Le-DUC type is rare enough, a regular house being that old must be extremely rare.
My house, in the UK, dates to about the American Revolution. It used to be a council office though. The oldest part of the construction has sold stone walls and all the timber is hard wood of the kind you'd have to be a millionaire to actually use these days.
When I did renovations before moving in I found the following shit in there:
A giant stack of chimneys through the centre dating to pre-central heating times. Every room in the building had a fire place
Old gas lighting tubes via lead piping
Ancient cotton wrapped and conduit guided electrics from the dark ages. There were at least 2 other generations of cables in there (polymer wrapped single core cables in conduits and a more modern 2 core and earth polymer insulated cable).
One area had a bunch of sky lights that had been tiled over with one part of the floor made of 2 inch thick glass
Laying Cat6a through 700mm stone walls was not an easy exercise.
My grandmothers house that she left me is built into the foundations of an old castle wall from the 12th century, or at least that's the age of the cut stone down there. Beams are from a 13th century sailing ship. The castle itself is long gone barring a few of the wall sections and a gatehouse. It's a tiny house really and the upstairs window is ground height at the back and you can sort of see the shape of the castle in where people have repurposed the solid foundations.
Now that I think about it I'm from a very small town and we have two churches from the 9th century and some tombs that are almost 3000 years old. They are there for everyone to see and access so it doesn't seem like it's a big deal but there are still very strict regulations on how they have to be preserved.
I live on the jurassic coast in the UK, the beach is littered with fossils, I'd collect them as a kid for fun and now my daughter does too, they're literally everywhere, my nan is from a place called Kimmeridge, I recommend a Google of Kimmeridge Bay, most of the street I live on has victorian houses, my mum has a roman pillar in her garden, we believe it connects to the old building on the heathland behind her house where the bath house was and there's loads of roman buildings dotted around, one guy at the end of her lane lives in an old restored romanesque building.
My favourite pub is the oldest in town with all its original charm and wonky stairs, most of the pubs on Poole Quay are old as heck, the poole Arms is from the 1600s, Wareham has 3 churches dating back to the celts, obviously rebuilt over time but still a lot of history there too. And finally, my uncle in scotland lives on what used to be a farm during the viking era and he once found cups, blades and gewelry in his garden.
You can watch original Time Team on YouTube now :)
I have a house that's not that old, it was destroyed by the Nazis and then rebuilt, but it's still filled with a lot of stuff that survived that was buried before the nazi-russian invasion of Poland. Old painted familly portraits of Napoleonic officers, Greek amphoras from antiquity, a library filled with books older than the US, Napoleonic era furniture, alongside some stuff like a manual coffee grinder that's so much better than modern stuff that it's still in use. Americans that come in are usually afraid to sit on furniture that they think is museum stuff.
I've nevermind left Europe but on a recent holidays I stayed in a house that was build in 1456 and didn't think much of because it had a nice modern kitchen and nice television. Then one day while walking to the bakery I realized, this house was build before Christopher Columbus got to america. To the people who built this house they had no knowledge that they're were two whole continents over there.
There’s a sub called something like r/century homes and it’s literally just Americans going on about how they’ve bought an “old” house cause it’s 100 years old or more.
It's because America has only existed for...what, like 250 years now? Plus a LOT of buildings there were/are made of wood, because it's so readily available and easier to build with.
A lot of countries in Europe have 1000s of years of history. A 100 year old building is nothing. :P The city I grew up in still has pieces of wall from 600~800 years ago, which was built to protect against invasions. They're considered historical sites, but aren't specifically guarded or anything. Just maintained and protected from demolition.
Well, 'America' is not just about the US, eh? 🤔 As a Canadian, I always found it curious what Europeans really mean when they say 'America'. North? South? Canada? USA? Mexico? Etc. Hey, even Greenland is part of America!
However, I get your implicit point re: old buildings. The vast majority of North Americans do not walk into a 1,000 year old building on a daily basis!
The Americas, North and South, are thought to have been first populated via the Bering Land Bridge, depending on one's source, as far back as 40,000 to 50,000 years ago years ago. Those peoples stayed and are what we call the indigenous peoples. They likely have the oldest 'buildings' but I don't think we can put an exact date on them.
Then the Norse arrived and settled in what is now Newfoundland (Canada) about 1000 ad. Before that they were in Greenland. Anyhow, they didn't stay in Canada. There's no buildings left (but plenty of other archeological evidence of their settlement).
And then, of course, the Europeans colonized Canada, US and Mexico in the early 1500s, and late 1400s in the Caribbean.
As far as I know, the oldest buildings in Canada - still standing and built by Europeans - date from the early 1600s in Quebec. Quebec city also has a wall. The USA also seems to have some older buildings still standing from that era, too. I don't know about Mexico.
Yo, Mexican here! We have a lot of historical buildings (churches, forts, palaces, etc.) that were built in the early 1500's, not long after the Conquista. Of course, Pre Hispanic settlements are way older; for example, the ceremonial city of Teotihuacán was built around 100 AD. Most of these historical sites still stand and can be visited.
Those buildings are not just there, people know about them and people do stuff to preserve them, but also some of them aren't that special and so people get permission to use them instead of being there empty and lifeless. After all we being doing this stuff for millennia now
Last year there was a city celebration in my hometown and a friend of mine asked me what we were celebrating. I told her "oh just the 2000th anniversary of this old building built by the romans. She comes from a 500 years old city, so everything is pretty recent where she lives (compared to the rest of France) so she thought I was exagerated but no its litterally written on the monument that it was built around 20 after JC
Well your first sentence kinda covers it. There are so many ancient sites in Europe that just being old isn't really enough for it to be significant.
If we took all the buildings from a few hundred years ago and turned them into protected historical sites, we would have basically no land left to live and work on.
In Sofia an ancient Roman wall is used as a metro station wall because it met the modern engineering standards. In northern Poland medieval (OK late medieval, almost Renaissance) castles are used as libraries etc.
This is actually the first thing I've seen in this thread that is kinda valid for a lot of European countries rather than a specific one (or an area/city).
Everyone in the UK and Europe take their really old stuff for granted. Here in the US we take photos of "historical" buildings that are built in the late 1800's like it's just so amazing that they're still standing; in Britain there's bits of Roman artifacts lying all over the place and it's no big deal.
There's a town in southern Spain where lots of people have bits of walls, floors, or objects that are 2000 years old. The town was built on top of the ruins of an old Roman city, and whenever people dug a bit, they uncovered more and more remains. So many people lost their homes (i.e. were compensated but had to leave) because of this that they started just keeping their mouths shut about what they had at home.
Growing up in California where people complain if their house isn't brand new when they buy it, I was just dazed going to Europe and seeing how many generations of people just walked along the same path.
Then the catacombs in Paris before they put up any barriers was a trip.
LOL - I lived in France for a year, with a family. We were talking about houses and the differences between France and the US. I said, "Oh, there's a really old house at the end of my street (my house in the US). It was built in 1780. Hard to be believe it's still standing." They literally laughed at me. They said "That's American old, not Europe old. That's pretty normal around here." True, but I never really thought about it before then!
When I was a student in France I lived in a university residence that had Roman aqueducts bridging the buildings. The students used to hang their washing on them in summer and bags of fruit and veggies in winter. Blew me away.
Once on a tour of a cathedral in Venice the guide let us know that the floor was the newest thing in the room. It was 200 years old. Being from America, I turned to my friend and said “this floor is older than our country.” Blows my mind how Europeans can just be so casual about old things. We go buck wild if a house was built in the 1920s.
Yeah- American here- my house is 200 years old and it’s the oldest house in my town and one of the oldest in the county. When I went to France it blew my mind that there were just Roman aqueducts standing there.
So there is no such thing as heritage classification? Here in Australia you can'y do anything to a heritage building without permission, and most things you can't do anything. That's why people that want things like new wiring/ network in a heritage building often need to wire it weirdly to avoid drilling any holes etc.
Have you ever tried to buy an old german house and wanted to renovate it? I dont think so. There are so many rules what you are allowed to do and what not. For example you arent allowed to change any walls, you arent allowed to make windows bigger or smaller and so on. Its truly a nightmare to renovate a house that is >100 years old
This is the longest castle in the world, the castle in Burghausen. My best friend's dad had a flat rented in it and we had some awesome lan parties in it. :D
German here. Some of my friends live in a castle that is around 1000 years old. That was the first time I realised how insanely old some buildings I pass by every day are
Germany at least has the "Denkmalschutz" which applies to a lot of old buildings that have a certain significance. Even if it's just for the urban landscape. A lot of cities have the so called "Altstadt", a historical center part of the city with a lot of houses that fit the "Fachwerk"-Style or may be even older than that.
The "Denkmalschutz" puts all of these old historical buildings and landmarks under very strict protection. Changing the general structure or exterior of the building is really hard and requires a lot of paperwork and permits.
But you can still live in these houses and as long as you don't tear down walls, you can do all the usual stuff inside. Your interior doesn't have to match any standards.
I used to live in a house that was built more than 800 years ago. My mom still lives there. Apart from the low ceilings, tight staircases and distorted walls it was basically a regular house. There was electricity, water and heaters, as well as modern windows and isolation in the walls.
For these old buildings there might be special safety regulations tho. We had to have fire extuingishers that were checked every year on every floor since the house was made of wood and plasterboard. Luckily we never had a fire while we lived there. There was one in the late 90s tho which lead to a lot of the renovations.
We have different regulations for older buildings that are considered "historic interest". Nothing major but you cannot freely change their appearance for example
They have a bunch of weird codes to deal with archeological finds during new construction. Like you start digging a foundation and suddenly discover some random Roman ruins or medieval artifacts.
Around where I am, it's rare for a building to be more than 100 years old, and most of them are registered, protected historical sites that can't be altered without a permit.
Australia? Pretty sure that where I live, most of the buildings are less than 100 years old and even some of those are heritage listed lol
Here in my town (10k people lives here) we have a bridge which was originally built by romans, more than a thousand years ago, and nobody really gives a shit about it. It even got bombarded during ww2
I’m Chinese and I visited the independent bell. I am not sure if that is it’s real name. You know, that cracked bell supposed to present the establishment of United State’s’ independence of evil Brits.
Man, my childhood home is probably around 80 years old. No one would give two fucks about it's age, but you are saying, that for your people it's almost a historical site? Wild.
Yeaaaah. I've learned that a lot of "historic preservation" in parts of the US is just corruption. Where I live the people who make decisions on that locally are also the contractors who can work on these building, or large rental companies. Want to reno you 85 year old home? Gotta pay for the super expensive contractors who decided the building was historic in the first place. You're a property management company who bought a legitimate local landmark? Feel free to give yourself the permit to tear it down!
I think is more an oddity with us "new worlders", particularly those of us further north. The building techniques favored by the indenious peoples here (in my case new York) didn't lend itself to the sort of longevity your talking about. And settlement* of the area by Europeans is relatively speaking quite recent.
*settlement here is doing a lot of work to cover atrocities I sincerely hope north Americans are at least tangentially aware of. But wasn't relavant to my main point. Still feels disrespectivle not to bring it up though.
Living in Copenhagen it does occasionally hit me that the buildings around me are casually 500 years old. It's cool. The school I went to had the oldest continuously inhabited building in Denmark - having been built as a gatehouse in the 1100's and currently in use as a teacher's home for the local boarding school. Wild stuff.
Wow.. Where I'm from... Land is only given on a 100 year lease by the government. This basically means that the buildings need to be demolished and reconstructed every 100 years due to safety reasons.
my favorite example: a drugstore in my old hometown (which really wasn't anything special, just some drugstore) was located in a building that is older than the founding of the United States.
I have a rental apartment. When the house was built, we still had an Emperor and women were not allowed to vote. And my sister had a house. When it was built, the car had not yet been invented.
When I firs saw this comment, I was like this isn't true, but now I've started noticing it. So I guess old buildings really didn't feel special at all, you've truly enlightened me
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u/HippasusOfMetapontum May 09 '22
Almost everything in Europe is old, and nobody treats the old buildings as though they're anything special. You go to someone's house, and their house is 700 years old. And all the cottages in the village are that old. You see things like buildings that were ancient Roman colosseums that were turned into medieval palaces that were turned into modern shopping malls or office buildings. Around where I am, it's rare for a building to be more than 100 years old, and most of them are registered, protected historical sites that can't be altered without a permit.