Cloisters

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Cloister at Moissac (ca. 1100 AD)

MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE
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CLOISTERS

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 1170s 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.