Marriage ditch
The Ehgraben , also called Reule or Reihe , was the narrow, undeveloped strip between the houses of the medieval cities. It was an open trench up to three meters wide that ran at the bottom of a narrow alley between the opposite backs of two rows of houses.
The front part of the word is Middle High German ê (we) 'law'; a moat was originally a "legally valid border ditch" or then "the drainage ditch determined by law between two rows of houses in a city into which the toilets are emptied".
history
The trenches were used to remove faeces ; At the back of the house were the exit bay , from which the faeces fell directly into the moat. Because of the “pestilential stench” of the moats, these rear walls were provided with as few windows as possible.
In the Middle Ages, sewage pits, graves and “streams” running above ground formed the drainage system of a city. Even if the individual moats sometimes merged with one another at a gradient to finally flow into the city moat or a watercourse, they only got rid of some of their liquid pollutants there. They therefore had to be evacuated from time to time. The cleaning of the ditches was done either by flushing or by covering with manure , which was then taken for agricultural use. How seldom this happened becomes clear from a description by the Nuremberg city architect Endres Tucher , a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer . In his master builder book it says:
“A row that gets between the judenheuser down to the Ledergass ... pis to the Newengass ... I cleared the Martini in the seventieth jar (1470) and gave it out ... two and twenty pfunt old. The rows had not been cleared in 18 years. "
Examples
Numerous examples of moats have been preserved in Zurich . One of them is designated as an archaeological window .
See also
- Traufgasse , a narrow alley leading to the street between two gable-end houses.
literature
- Ê-grave n . In: Schweizerisches Idiotikon , Volume II, Sp. 680.
- From the Schîssgruob to modern urban drainage. Using an unpublished manuscript by Hansruedi Steiner written by Martin Illi. Edited by Stadtentwässerung Zürich, Department of the Building Authority I. Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zürich 1987, ISBN 3-85823-173-8 .
Web links
- Ehgraben on the website of the City of Zurich (with explanation and outline sketch)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ê-grave n . In: Schweizerisches Idiotikon, Volume II, Sp. 680.
- ^ Giovanni Boccaccio : The Decameron . German by Albert Wesselski. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1999
- ↑ Leonardo Benevolo : The city in European history (= Beck'sche series. Bd. 4021). Beck, Munich 1993.
- ↑ Endres Tucher's master builder book for the city of Nuremberg (1464-1475) . With an introduction and factual comments by Friedrich von Weech , ed. by Matthias Lexer . Litterarischer Verein, Stuttgart 1862 (= library of the Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart . Volume 64), reprint Amsterdam 1968.