Cloisters
Cloister at Moissac (ca. 1100 AD)
Cloisters were a medieval kind of building that developed
out of Greek and then Roman peristyles.
A cloister is a courtyard garden inside a building. Around the sides of the courtyard there is a covered
walkway, with a waist-high wall between you and the garden in the middle. On top of the waist-high wall,
small columns hold up the roof of the walkway.
This is the cloister of Munster, in Bonn, Germany, which was built in the
1170's AD, in the time of Friedrich
Barbarossa. Munster means
"monastery", and the town was named after this church and its cloister, where the monks lived.
