Scheunenviertel

Just outside the main village of Schlüsselburg, a district of Petershagen, the Scheunenviertel gathers twenty-six barns on a rise called Humbke. These barns have stood here since the seventeenth century, forming a panorama of the rural architecture of their time. The Thirty Years' War gave them their start.

Plundering troops and devastating fires in that war robbed villagers of the winter supplies they depended on. So the villagers moved their barns out of the village altogether and onto the Humbke. There the Weser's floods rarely reached the stores, and fire from the densely built village had little chance of spreading.

Centuries later, most of the barns are privately owned and continue to serve modern uses. One barn has been restored as an information centre, where the association Dat Schünenviertel tells how farming and community life once worked. From that rise you can read the logic at a glance: stores raised above the flood, village kept at a distance.