Sankt Gallen Abbey, Switzerland
In the early 7th century, the Irish monk St. Gall established a hermitage made up of simple cells on the spot where Sankt Gallen’s baroque abbey church stands today. St. Othmar later built the first church on the spot where St. Gall died, founding a Benedictine abbey. Protected by emperors and kings and led by dedicated abbots, St. Gall developed into a European center of learning and worship. For centuries, the abbey built its fame on the three pillars of liturgy, art and science, experiencing its heyday in the 9th and 10th centuries. The medieval library and the archive still contain precious works from this period. The library holds more than 2000 manuscripts of which some 400 are more than one thousand years old. The most famous ones are the Folchart Psalter and the Golden Psaltery.
