Wednesday Search Challenge: (Sept 28, 2011) What's with all the steeples?

It's been a busy couple of weeks.  I'm on a crazy / whacky travel schedule that has me visiting Boston, New York, Prague, Zurich, Hamburg, Warsaw, Dublin and London all in 2 weeks.  Why?  I'm teaching LOTS of classes and giving a fair number of press briefings. 


But I spent a day-and-a-half in Prague, which was intriguing.  It's a lovely city that seems drenched in its past, celebrating music, the arts and some remarkably inventive (and wonderful) cooking.  


On one of my runs through the city, I did an early morning jog past the Tyn Cathedral in the old town section of Prague.  It has a VERY distinctive pair of towers, each of which has a number of sub-towers, a kind of mini-steeple-ette off of the main body of the tower.  

The search question for this week:  Why so many steeples on each tower of the Tyn Church?  More specifically: Why did these 16th century builders want to make 9 steeples per tower?  Seems really difficult and expensive, so I'm willing to bet they had a reason.  Maybe it was symbolic (but symbolic of what?), maybe the architect was just really into steeples... 


Here's a close-up: 

Warning: this isn't easy.  I still don't know the answer (and I've spent at least 2 hours on this).  But maybe you'll have some insight that I haven't had yet.  If so, please write a comment in the comments below and let us all know! 


Search on!