Shortly after we arrived in Tübingen, somebody told us that the oldest house in Tübingen was not too far away from where we live:

House that has been considered to be the oldest in Tübingen, built in 1323

I had blogged about that house last year, actually.

But when we took visitors by there to see this 1323 building in May 2012, there was a construction worker at the house across the street from this house. He claimed that there was an older house on another street in Tübingen. The other street is called Lange Gasse, and it is also near both our apartment building as well as the 1323 house.

However, the guy didn’t know which house on that street was the oldest house.  Unlike some other streets that are very short (including the one we live on), Lange Gasse is rather  long; the name literally means “long street”. So, without knowing which house was the oldest house, it took us a while to check out the houses to see if there were plaques to mark the construction date, etc. We hadn’t ever succeeded in finding anything along that street, but we kept it in the back of our mind to track down some day.

Then over the weekend, Chris happened to notice that a website talked about how the building at Lange Gasse #2 was really old and worthy of note. So, we figured that perhaps that was the building the guy had been talking about being the oldest house in Tübingen.

Here’s a photo I took of the houses along that street; the photo was taken from the top of the main cathedral on a sunny day last year.  The green arrow points to the roof of Lange Gasse #2, the red arrow points to the roof of our apartment building, and the pink arrow points to the roof of the building (above) built in 1323, just so you can see how relatively close all these buildings are:

Lange Gasse and surroundings, Tübingen

Lange Gasse #2 was the site of a bookstore, Osiander, that was founded back in the 1600s; that chain is still in business today, and still run of by the same family.  The bookstore at some point moved out of that building to the one next door (the pink one that has an entrance right off the main plaza). Here’s a view from street level of the bookstore today:

Osiander Bookstore (in the pink building)

But as impressive as all that information is, it still doesn’t solve the puzzle of the “oldest house in Tübingen” being on Lange Gasse, since Lange Gasse #2 was has been dated back to …. 1361/2. Which is, of course,  a generation or so after the 1323 building.

So, while it was fun to find out the information about Lange Gasse #2,  the search for the real “oldest house in Tübingen” continues…