The amazing, incredible Kirchenburgs of Germany!

I’ve lived in Germany and Europe for a long time, but I never stop learning new things.

While driving aimlessly around the German countryside near Bamberg I was attracted to cathedral I spotted from a distance, nestled in a sleepy farming village of very few inhabitants but very many tractors:

It turns out this is no ordinary cathedral, but rather a magnificient example of something I had never heard about before, a Kirchenburg – roughly translated as “church fortress.”

You can certainly see it has a church:

But as you walk around, you see it is indeed a church squarely within a fortress:

And not only that, but it turns out this is the third largest such Kirchenberg in Germany!