A little history of Unterlinden former convent
And also
The tops
The convent nowadays houses the Middle-Ages and Renaissance museum. It was founded by two widows, Agnès de Mittelheim and Agnès de Herckenheim in the beginning of the 13th century. The name unter linden means "under the lime trees"...
But bandits threatened the convent, so the nuns decided to run away in 1232 towards Ufmühlen's old mill.
When peace was back, nuns came back to Colmar in 1252: they abandoned saint Augustin's rule for saint Dominique's one. The church and the convent's buildings were dedicated in 1269 by bishop Albert the Great.
A friar called Volmar, who also was an architect, raised the cloister between 1275 and 1289. The French Revolution entirely ruined our convent, in June 1792. The buildings were transformed into a museum in 1849.
Nowadays it houses the famous Issenheim triptych completed by Mathias Grünewald. This masterpiece was in Colmar before the French revolution, and it was brought in Munich in 1917; the Germans were forced to give it back to Colmar city in 1919, when France won the World War I...