Medieval cultural monuments

In the Middle Ages, pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela followed the Milky Way’s fine star trail in the night sky. The European model project “Starry Path/Chemin des étoiles” symbolically refers to this cosmic “signpost” of our ancestors and sees itself in the present as a large regional contribution to the careful valorization of the paths of the pilgrims of St. James in parts of Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, Lorraine and Alsace.

On their pilgrimages “to the end of the world” countless people created a network of paths that shaped the cultural-historical roots of Europe. Explore the lines of movement of these pilgrims and sense the special spirituality that nourished their strength and inspiration and that reverberates in the medieval building culture along the way to the present day.

The model project aims to symbolically scatter a “trail of stars” along the pilgrims’ routes in the project area with more than 350 visible examples of medieval building culture, which people can follow in their own individual way. This search for traces involuntarily emphasizes the special facets of the passing European cultural landscapes and the more than 1000-year-old culture of being on the road in the spirit of a pilgrimage.

On the interactive map the individual medieval cultural monuments are shown with a red dot. When you click on it, you will get the GPS position in a small window, a short art-historical information about the respective object with the medieval reference, under “i” the tourist contact person as well as, if applicable, the hint how many kilometers the medieval monument is located on foot off the officially marked paths.

If you look closely, you can discover stone scallop shells as waymarkers near numerous medieval cultural monuments. In the Saarpfalz district and the Saarbrücken region, stars and various ornaments made of field stones also invite you to pause. On the one hand, they refer to the significance of the stars in the Middle Ages, on the other hand, they are a poetic reminder of historical path fortifications or covers of the old church towers.

The trail signs are committed to the European network idea: On the one hand, the project links old cultural landscapes across borders in terms of culture and tourism. At the same time, the waymarkers uncover a “starry trail” of the medieval pilgrims of St. James and the building culture from that time. They thus recall the more than 1,000-year-old culture of traveling along these special paths.