You Might Think That,

walking into this room,

you were entering the most pompously adorned room at Versailles, but you would be wrong, you would be walking into Bautzner Straße 79, in Dresden, Germany, a cheese shop called Pfunds Molkerei, it is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the German city, with over 500,000 tourists stopping by every year, photograph Jerzy Strzelecki/Wikimedia Commons,

the whole place is decorated with ceramic tiles produced by Villeroy & Boch and hand-painted in the Neo-Renaissance style by local artists, in 1998, Pfunds Molkerei was awarded the title of “World’s Most Beautiful Dairy Shop” by Guinness Records,

the history of Pfunds Molkerei can be traced back to 1879, when German farmer Paul Pfund moved from Reinholdshain to Dresden with his six cows and just as many pigs. He set up a small dairy business on Görlitzer Straße, where it was possible for passers-by to observe how the cows were milked and how the milk was prepared for sale. The following year, Paul’s brother, the actor Friedrich Pfund, joined the business and together they founded the Dresdner Gebrüder Pfund dairy, 

Pfunds Molkerei miraculously survived the Dresden bombings of World War 2, and continued operating until 1978. It was only in 1995 that the dairy shop once again opened its doors, since then, the awe-inspiring shop has become a globally-recognized landmark of Dresden, and no I will not mention the Monty Python cheeses sketch!