Abbey of Saint Gall
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How it came to be
According to tradition, around 612 the Irish monk Gallus, a disciple of Saint Columbanus, set up a hermitage here. In the eighth century Otmar, a local Alemannic priest, founded the abbey as its first abbot and received the Rule of Saint Benedict from Pepin.
Around 820 to 830, under Abbot Gozbert, a drawing of an ideal monastery was dedicated to him. Five sewn sheets of parchment, 113 by 78 centimetres, show the ground plans of 40 buildings; it was never built, but it survives in the library as the earliest known architectural plan drawn on parchment. When Magyar raids threatened between 924 and 933, the books were taken to Reichenau for safety. Wiborada, who died in 926, became in 1047 the first woman canonised by the Holy See.
From 1755 to 1768 the abbey was rebuilt in Baroque style, with a church designed by Peter Thumb. The abbey was later secularised, and its church became a cathedral. The library holds more than 160,000 books, including 2,100 handwritten ones, about 400 of them over a thousand years old. The site was inscribed in 1983.
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