Schrannenhalle: Iron, Glass and Grain
Why is it significant?
In front of you stretches a long hall of cast iron and glass, with slender columns and rows of arched windows. It looks more like a small railway station than a market... and that was exactly the fashion of the age that built it. A Schranne is a grain market.
Key Facts
| Place | Schrannenhalle: Iron, Glass and Grain |
|---|---|
| Address | Viktualienmarkt 15, 80331 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.13430, 11.57450 |
| Part of Walk | Salt, Beer and Pretzels: A Food Lover's Walk Through Munich's Old Town |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you stretches a long hall of cast iron and glass, with slender columns and rows of arched windows. It looks more like a small railway station than a market... and that was exactly the fashion of the age that built it.
A Schranne is a grain market. For centuries, Munich's grain was traded in the open on the main square, which was called the Schrannenplatz. Only in 1854 was it renamed Marienplatz, after the column of the Virgin in its centre. When the trade outgrew the square, King Maximilian the Second had a modern hall built here, in the early 1850s, in the same years that London was marvelling at its Crystal Palace of iron and glass.
Grain was never just a commodity. It was bread, and bread was politics. In bad years the price of a sack of grain could decide whether a family ate, and whether a city stayed calm. That is also the quiet logic behind the purity law you heard about at the Augustiner: wheat and rye for bread first, beer second.
And bread brings us to the Brezn, the Bavarian pretzel with its glossy brown skin. Munich tells a lovely legend about it. In 1839, the story goes, a baker at a royal coffee house brushed his pretzels by mistake with the lye used for cleaning instead of sugar water. He baked them anyway, and out came the dark, salty crust we know today. Historians shrug... lye pretzels are probably older. But Munich likes its version, and so will you once you have tried one warm.
The hall itself had a hard twentieth century. Much of it was lost to fire and demolition, and for decades it seemed gone for good. A surviving section of the ironwork was restored and put back up at the start of this century, and today it is a food hall again, which feels like justice. Now walk a few steps east, towards the tall blue-and-white striped pole rising above the market stalls.