Despite my friend’s week long architectural tour was mainly focus on Southern Bavaria, certain addition, as demanded by a fussy World Heritage enthusiast, were located in Baden Württemberg, the three UNESCO listed churches on Reichenau Island. To reach the island we crossed Lake Constance twice, a ferry from Meerburg to Konstanz and another bridge to Reichenau. The island was lovely with many vegetable gardens and very well maintained bicycle lanes, Reichenau is well known destination for cyclists.

After had fine sandwiches for lunch from the popular shop opposite St. Georg Church, one of the three listed churches on the island, as other reviewers mentioned we also took a tour to see the medieval paintings of the church. The wall paintings were really nice, but I really enjoyed the wooden ceiling with medieval motif and overall Romanesque style of the whole church building. After that we drove to Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul. Despite its exterior of Romanesque, its interior surprisingly baroque with plain white wall with some cute baroque motif and fresco. The basilica was very well restored and looked really new, only the wall painting behind the altar that gave us a clue that this place was medieval structure. Then we went to the last of three UNESCO churches, Abbey Church of St Mary and Mark, also the biggest one on the island. The complex was a mix of Romanesque and Gothic. Its medieval wall paintings were located in Gothic part in order to see those paintings would need an extra ticket, but in my opinion the paintings were mediocre and possibly the most disappointed one.

All in all, Reichenau was indeed an underwhelming World Heritage Site, the survived medieval paintings of St. Georg Church and Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul were quite fine but nothing really impressive to see. The value of the island relied on its long history on religious community but nothing much left to the present and in my opinion, the survived three churches failed miserably to provide such outstanding universal value to the visitors. At least for architectural perspective it was quite interesting to note that three churches are different in terms of interior design, St. Georg is pure Romanesque, Basilica with Baroque and Abbey Church with Gothic, but again not a reason to make the trip worthwhile.