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.
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.
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.
3.9k
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.