The hundred and six
Mocking, demonic, animal faces — every look finds new ones.
francois from Strasbourg, france — CC BY 2.0 · Kent Wang from Barcelona, Spain — CC BY-SA 2.0 · © Ralph Hammann - Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Morio60 — CC BY-SA 2.0
No document explains — readings run from envy-warding charms to loud commercial advertising to sheer sculptural excess in Europe's mascaron fashion of the day. The mystery is half the draw: every visitor leaves with a theory, which may have been the point all along.
A known Alsatian institution (starred on and off with seasons) for a booked special occasion — not a passing walk lunch. For daily reality: the winstubs around the collegiate and Little Venice at half price and double simplicity.
The ideal walking order: Heads first (near Unterlinden), then the collegiate and square, then Pfister and Schongauer on Rue des Marchands, ending at the Koïfhus towards Little Venice — five architecture gems in one sweet kilometre.
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A hundred and six heads stare from one façade: the House of Heads (1609), Colmar's late-Renaissance showpiece, built by a merchant who wanted an unforgettable front and had carvers cover it with strange masks and faces — mocking, demonic, animal — climbing to the stepped gable. Atop stands a bronze Alsatian cooper raising his cup — Bartholdi's addition (yes, him again) of 1902, when the building housed the town's wine exchange — completing the alliance: a wine-trade house with weird heads crowned by a wine-server. Today it is a fine hotel and restaurant, the façade belonging to the street: a ten-minute stand counting what heads you can (you will fail before a hundred) on the street bearing its name, three minutes from the Unterlinden museum.
Mocking, demonic, animal faces — every look finds new ones.
The bronze wine-server atop the gable — the city son's recurring signature.
1609: the last pre-Thirty Years' War extravagance — and the oddest.
19 Rue des Têtes, 68000 Colmar