February 11, 2026
Hogwarts IRL vs CTRL+S
Switzerland's Extraordinary Medieval Library
A 1,300‑year‑old book palace sparks a ‘visit vs digitize’ showdown
TLDR: A 1,300-year-old Baroque library in St Gallen dazzles with 160,000 manuscripts and mummies. Readers split between visiting in person and digitizing it for everyone, debating the magic of place versus online access.
Switzerland’s Abbey Library of St Gallen is basically real‑life Hogwarts: a Baroque dream of globes, frescoes, Egyptian mummies, and 160,000 manuscripts, including 2,100 medieval codices (400 older than year 1000). The Greek sign over the door even says “Healing place of the soul.” If you need receipts, here’s the Abbey Library of Saint Gall. But the community didn’t just swoon—commenters turned this into a mud‑wrestle over how we should love old knowledge.
One camp is pure romance: go there, feel it, smell the parchment. dgb23 confessed they’re “ashamed” they haven’t visited and now vow a pilgrimage, sparking a wave of travel FOMO and jokes about booking flights faster than you can whisper “Rococo.” The other camp is all‑caps practical: scan it, put it online, democratize it. WalterBright’s call to digitize lit the thread, with memes like “Hogwarts, but with Ctrl+S,” and quips about whether we’re “saving souls or saving PDFs.” Cue spicy back‑and‑forth: lovers of the magic of place vs champions of access for all. Some joked the mummies should get a photobooth too; others argued that turning priceless pages into pixels is the only way everyone gets to learn. High culture, high drama, zero chill.
Key Points
- •The Abbey Library of St Gallen is a Baroque hall in eastern Switzerland with continuous history spanning about 1,300 years.
- •The current library hall dates to 1767, succeeding an earlier medieval library tied to the abbey’s origins in the early 7th Century under Saint Gall.
- •The collection comprises about 160,000 manuscripts and early printed works, including more than 2,100 medieval codices, roughly 400 written before 1000.
- •The library features cabinets of curiosities and artifacts (globes, Egyptian mummies, items from Turkey and Indonesia) alongside texts across religious and secular disciplines.
- •A Greek inscription meaning “healing place of the soul” references an ancient library of Ramses II in Thebes, underscoring the site’s cultural symbolism.