Today on Monday Mysteries we look at a white window that appears to be the odd-one-out in the white house on the Marktplatz in Tübingen.

To set the stage here’s a look at some of the buildings on the Marktplatz, the central square in Tübingen:

Note that the buildings all date to the medieval period, but they have all been nicely restored. Each building has its own color theme for the walls, the wood, and the windows, which provides a nice visual symmetry for each when you see the buildings together. For example, the tan and brown building on the left has brown window frames on all the windows; the red and white building on the right has white window frames on all the windows.

But then there’s the white building in between those two. All of the window frames in that building are brown, except for one in the middle row on the right. This white window is very unusual, as you don’t normally see just one window with a distinct color frame in these houses; the color schemes are usually all or nothing.

So, what’s going on here?

And no, it’s not just that they ran out of the brown paint or materials and had to put in a white frame in that one window in the white building when the refurbished it. 😉  No, it turns out that there’s a perfectly logical explanation — or at least, a good legend — to go with it.

You see, back when these houses were built, in the 15th-16th century, the families who built them were rich.  As times and fortunes changed, though, the family in the white house lost all their money.  Suddenly, that family had trouble making ends meet, and as a result had no food to feed their children; the family in the red house, however, had money to spare.

So, the families in those two houses agreed to an unusual barter. In exchange for a room in the white house, the family in the red house gave the family in the white house some bread.

Now, there are two versions of this tale:  one suggests this bread donation happened daily; a more miserly version suggests that the white house got only a single loaf of bread from the red house in exchange for giving up the entire room in their house. In any case, according to the book I got about the secrets of Tübingen, the room in the white house that now has the white framed window was given to the owners of the red house in exchange for bread of some type.

BTW, there is apparently another story, though, for how the room in the white house with the white framed window came to be owned by the red house:

Supposedly, the owner of the first house lost a card game to the owner of the other house. He didn’t have the money to pay, so he lost ownership of the room. The room was sealed off and a new door made from the second house, so it can only be entered from the second house. And so it remains this way today.
—from the blog Brad Goes to Germany

[Note: I don’t know Brad, I just randomly found his website. Brad’s other stories about things in Tübingen match stories in my own guide books, but I haven’t run across his version of the white room story before. Chris and I have heard variations on the bread story from locals, but not the gambling one. However, it is another good story. ]

In any case, the reallocation of the ownership of the room in the white house was permanent and official. To this day, the room with the white frame around it in the white house belongs to the red house, not to the white house, and you can tell that because it has a white framed window, like the rest of the red house’s windows.

BTW, neither the bread nor the gambling debt story would explain why there is a big ornate iron lamp that hangs between the white window in the white house and the nearest window in the red house:

And here’s another thought that occurred to me as I inserted the photos into this blog post today: I realized that if it is truly the case that the white framed window in the white house belongs to the red house, why is it only the window frame that was important to be made into the same color as the windows in the red house? Shouldn’t the shutter color matter, too? Or is it just that the window frames are paid for by the room owner, but the shutters are paid for by the building owner?

Ah well, that’s the nature of some Monday Mysteries: they resolve one question,  but raise issues that lead to new questions. Questions which, for the moment at least, will have to remain a mystery on this particular Monday.