23

Heavenly hyperboles

When a commemorative coin was issued in 1990, shortly before the fall of the GDR and showing the Magdeburg Hyparschale, no one knew that this remarkable building would have to be closed just seven years later because of danger of collapse. It fared like many dilapidated buildings of the vanished country, but fortunately better than some of its siblings. The large restaurant “Ahornblatt” in Berlin’s Gertraudenstraße, for example, was demolished despite the protection of historical monuments and the outrage of the local population. This outcome was only narrowly avoided in Magdeburg. Therefore, after no investor could be found, many rescuers from politics, civil society, architecture chairs and the creative industry set out to preserve the solitaire.

The multi-purpose hall, which was part of an ensemble of exhibition buildings and is the largest hypershell still in existence, was built in 1969 according to a design by Ulrich Müther, famous not only in Eastern Germany for spectacular roof constructions. The Magdeburg version also does without supporting pillars and the shell roof, formed by four double-curved surfaces called hyperbolic paraboloids, seems to float above the translucent surfaces. In former times, it was enthusiastically used for trade fairs, concerts and other events, and that is exactly what it should be able to do again. With a flexible interior construction of inserted gallery levels and accessible bridges, it will, if everything works out, become again a shining pearl of the architectural concept “Neues Bauen” in Magdeburg.

22

נס גדול היה שם (“A great miracle happened there”)

The dark end of the year is illuminated by holidays where hope and light play an important role. While Christians prepare for Christmas, Jews around the world commemorate the victorious uprising against Greek-Syrian rule and the rededication of the Second Temple, as recorded in the Talmud and Flavius Josephus. Beginning on the 25th of Kislev, the third month of the Jewish year, Hanukkah or Festival of Lights lasts for eight days and also commemorates the Miracle of Oil that is said to have occurred in the year 3597 (164 BC).

When the Temple in Jerusalem had to be cleansed of all paganism after the victory, only a little remnant of consecrated oil was found. The production of new oil took eight days, but the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum in the inner area of the sanctuary, was never allowed to go out. Miraculously, the small remnant burned for the entire eight days, and so every night at Hanukkah, another candle is lit on a special candelabrum that has eight arms. Sometimes a ninth holds a candle called a “servant”, which is used to light the others.

Hanukkah is a family celebration, with services, visits, games and gifts, and of course special foods prepared with oil like latkes, a kind of potato pancake, or doughnuts called sufganiot. In Magdeburg, a public Hanukkah candelabrum was set up for the first time in 2017. The picture here shows a window in the mourning hall at the Israelite cemetery in Sudenburg.

xx

21

Under the eyes of six dancing horses

When the Press Ball for the German Theatre Exhibition opened on 28 May 1927, the city fathers were still hoping that this event would make waves internationally. The world rubbed its eyes at what this provincial city in central German had put together.

An entire ensemble consisting of a concert hall, a big gate, an observation tower and an experimental stage had been built, an unprecedented advertising campaign accompanied the event, and the elite of German stage was invited. Alfred Kerr, Eduard Künneke, Heinrich George and Walter Hasenclever came, as did the Moscow Meyerhold Theatre. Fritz Busch conducted the opening concert and praised the fantastic acoustics of the new Stadthalle. Klaus and Erika Mann showed their scandalous “Revue zu Vieren” with Pamela Wedekind and Gustav Gründgens, Mary Wigman, Oskar Schlemmer and Anna Pavlovna took part in the dancers’ congress.

The exhibition, which lasted four and a half months, made Magdeburg the cultural capital of the world for a blink, at the price of a deficit of 441,000 Reichsmarks and the reward of a highly regarded supra-regional exhibition venue. At the end of World War II, everything sank into rubble. Later, the SED leadership decided to rebuild the Stadthalle, unfortunately not really true to the original, which has been modernised for a few years now and is an integral part of Magdeburg’s cultural life.

20

The way up and the way down are one and the same

Even if you’ve heard it differently: In a labyrinth like the one in Chartres, you can’t go wrong. If you follow the path and the many bends, you often have the impression, you are no longer moving towards the centre but, on the contrary, are moving away from it. As in real life, you have to stop, turn around and continue. Labyrinths are often rites of passage, a meditation on the way in and back out.

Christian labyrinths like the one near Magdeburg Cathedral were to be found especially in the medieval cathedrals of northern France, the most famous being that of Chartres, giving its name to many that followed. They were placed on the aisle to the altar and became later a substitute for a pilgrimage if someone could not afford to go to Jerusalem. Chronicles tell us that following the Easter Vigil, bishops and clergymen walked down the path in a kind of dance, symbolising redemption and the victory of life over death.

“I dance oh Lord, if you’re leading me,” wrote the great mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, who lived in the city for a long time as a beguine. Anyone who wants to can follow her dance today, outside Magdeburg Cathedral and along a path 287 metres long, across 47,000 mosaic stones made of shell limestone to the six-petalled rose in the center, standing for paradise and salvation.

19

The Captain and the Girl

The so called Trumpeter books were known to every child in Eastern Germany. Handy and thin, they helped primary school students to enjoy reading, and everything from fairy tales and child-friendly classics to socialist propaganda literature was on offer. Number 75 was called “Kathrin’s Thursday” , in it the author Gotthold Gloger told a story that happened in Magdeburg.

On the morning of 13 March 1969, Igor Belikov, an air force officer from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, set off from his barracks in Zerbst for the district town. Too early for his doctor’s appointment, he strolled through the city centre, where a crowd of people made him stop in front of an apartment building. On the fifth floor, a four-year-old girl was hanging from the window ledge with only one hand. The captain rushed over, tore off his coat and caught the child at the last second.

As it turned out, the mother had been waiting in line at the house’s freshly delivered delicatessen while the child had climbed onto the window ledge and quickly lost her grip.
Despite the fact that the GDR leadership did not miss this propagandistic coup, Captain Belikov was held in high esteem by the population and continued to visit the city even after 1989. Today, a bronze sculpture by Heinrich Apel commemorates the event. The famous saving coat can be seen on its back.

18

Puppets on a string

Puppet theatres exist all over the world, and so do puppeteer dynasties. One of the most famous in Germany was the Schichtl family, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Originally from southern Germany, generations of Schichtls performed at fairs and fairgrounds and travelled with their elaborately designed theatre tents all over the country. At the beginning of the 20th century, Xaver Schichtl, one of the most famous puppeteers of his time, arrived in Magdeburg.

Here he set up a workshop, performed near the cathedral and, for the first time, at schools. Later, he rented a vaulted cellar in Prälatenstraße, where fairy tales for children and plays for adults were performed at weekends. Every year, just in time for the Christmas market, young and old flocked to the cathedral square and Schichtl’s large stage to be enchanted by jugglers, a tamer and his huge dog, Russian musicians and Chinese dancers. Some puppets were so complex that they were led by up to six players. Unforgettable were performances with the magic glasses, an illusion in 3D, which was spectacular and unique at that time.

Because of the war, the Schichtls went back to southern Germany. But the puppet theatre had established itself in Magdeburg and today Schichtl’s figurines can be admired, along with other wonderful showpieces, in the Figurine Play Collection at the Villa P.

17

The colourful city

Russian-blue façades, set off with rich red, next to fiery chrome oxide green over yellow and black: the expressionist ensemble on Otto-Richter-Strasse in Magdeburg Sudenburg divided opinions early on. But not only with these orgies in strong colours, which go back to a concept by the architect Bruno Taut, Magdeburg was famous as a city of new Bauhaus architecture.

The prelude has been the construction of the garden city colony Reform around 1910, and even here Taut set strong accents. Things really took off in 1919 with the founding of the Bauhaus and the election of Hermann Beims as mayor. Beims had to alleviate the housing shortage of the post-war period, appointed Taut as city building councillor and brought architects of the avant-garde to Magdeburg. According to Taut’s general development plan, colourful metropolitan housing estates were built, with new street structure and flats generously designed for this time. Green spaces, children’s playgrounds and good air were part of the so-called outdoor living space concept.

Solitaires such as the no longer preserved Barasch House on Breite Weg with its spectacular painted façade, interestingly shaped street furniture such as the newspaper kiosks on Strombrücke and Breite Weg, but also street clocks or advertising boards: everything followed the concept of new colourfulness. Unfortunately, much of it can only be seen in photographs today, but what has been preserved still bears witness to an important era of innovative urban development.

16

A jester in town

When Till Eulenspiegel first came to Magdeburg, his reputation preceded him. And so the citizens of Magdeburg wanted to experience something quite extraordinary. He promised them he would fly down from the town hall’s spire, went up, waved his arms and let the citizens marvel at him open-mouthed. But then he laughed at them, called them fools and hurriedly left the city.

Perhaps some people took the event to heart over time. In any case, today he is commemorated at three places in the city. First, of course, at the Eulenspiegel Fountain on the Old Market Square, which was created by the well-known artist Heinrich Apel in 1970. He also made a bronze door at the town hall, on which scenes from the town’s history are depicted in the style of medieval predecessors, including the aforementioned flying event. A third figure can be found on the back of the Roland monument, where the jester secretly mocks the noble but stiff dignity of the Carolingian hero.

Art work by Heinrich Apel, who has worked in the city since 1959 and was also employed as a restorer at the cathedral, can be found all over Magdeburg. Fountains, sculptures, but also funny doorknobs at the cathedral, the Liebfrauenkloster and the church of St. Sebastian have since shaped the city. If you like, you can go on a discovery tour on the Heinrich Apel hiking trail.

15

The House of the Golden Sun

It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that street names and proper house numbers were established in Prussia. This was a relief for everyone, as before there were no house numbers, but streets that often changed their names as they went by. This led to the development of so-called house signs in the middle ages, which were placed above the entrance and gave the buildings their names. Conveniently, they could also be used to advertise inns and workshops.

And so in Magdeburg, in addition to quite normal house signs such as “The Green Fir” or “The Black Raven”, we find that of a bathhouse, not quite cleverly called “The Hard Bench”. A colleague managed better and named his house “The Naked Maid”. The whole town became a picture book, with a bewildering number of eagles, lions or crowns. The only way to stand out was with oddities difficult to understand today, such as the brewery “The Golden Leg” or the house “The White Knee”.

“The Golden Sun” also belonged to a brewer. Among others, its house sign can be seen today in a passageway at the Old Market, others were embedded in new houses there during the early reconstruction phase after World War II.

14

Even the stones were full of mercy

There she sits in the porch of St. John’s Church, silent, with her head bowing low under the city crown: the Mourning Magdeburg, a replica of a figure accompanying the Luther monument in Worms, which came to the city in 1906 as a gift from the factory owner Eugen Polte. Affliction and suffering envelop her like her cloak, the lowered sword in her right hand blunt – an allegory of the Protestant city’s fate: the virgin bride, which refused the Catholic emperor and his general Tilly during the Thirty Years’ War and had to atone bitterly for this in the so called Magdeburg Wedding. Twenty thousand people did not survive the three-day massacre in May 1631, which was unprecedented even in this unprecedented war.

St John’s Church like the whole city was looted and burnt down by the rampaging soldiery. The city did not recover for a long time and never regained its former greatness. But by 1696 St. John’s Church had been rebuilt and remained intact until another inferno reduced it again to rubble, this time on 16 January 1945. Amidst this rubble, the motherly statue, which had remained undamaged, mourned anew for her children. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that St. John’s Church was restored by a committed citizenry to its former glory, with newly designed stained glass windows by the Dresden artist Max Uhlig.

13

A new tango and a glass of liqueur

This song by Magdeburg born Willy Rosen, who was one of the best-known entertainers of the golden twenties, was certainly played in the city’s many cafés and dance halls. Magdeburg, which had been booming since the nineteenth century, was a hotspot of amusement. There were huge halls such as the Admirals-Palast or the Central-Halle and an immense number of pubs with and without dancing. It was impossible to stop at every restaurant and have a drink in one day, from Hasselbach Square to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz.

There was room for up to 12,000 people at open-air events in Herrenkrug on the edge of town, and people visited the racecourse or the Circus Blumenfeld. In the heyday of Ufa, 75,000 Magdeburgers went to cinemas like the “Panorama” or the “Clou-Lichtspiele” every week. There were five on the main boulevard Breite Weg alone, and said to have been 33 in the whole city, where you could see stars like Henny Porten, who also was born there.

At the end of the war, everything was fallen to pieces, Willy Rosen and the Blumenfelds murdered in the camps, the etablissements destroyed and people preoccupied with surviving. The opening of the soon extremely popular Café Prag in 1948 was a cautious new beginning on the long road back to normality.

12

Gruson’s exotic passion

Round as a ball, it can grow to over a metre in hight and its many sharp-spined ribs bear pretty sun-yellow flowers on the top, after which the Echinocactus grusonii is also called the golden ball cactus. One of the most popular indoor cacti it is also associated with Magdeburg, as one can learn from the Latin name.

Gruson stands for the engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist Hermann Gruson, who was instrumental in Magdeburg’s industrial rise in the 19th century. Born into a prominent Huguenot family, he joined August Borsig after studying natural sciences in Berlin. There he learned not only everything about mechanical engineering but also something about Borsig’s passion for exotic plants: an influence for life.

With Gruson’s invention of a special chilled casting, the Grusonwerke founded in Magdeburg became one of the most important locations of the German armaments industry. In addition, the entrepreneur was intensively involved in tropical botany and amassed an extensive collection of exotic plants; the cactus collection was one of the most important in the world. In his will, he donated greenhouses and plants to his native city under the condition they should be accessible to all Magdeburg residents. This donation and a large sum for their upkeep gave the city a wonderful urban oasis, today called Gruson’s Greenhouses. On the occasion of his 200th birthday in 2021, Gruson’s magnificent grave was restored and can be visited at the Südfriedhof cemetery.

11

The holy guardian at the emperor’s tomb

Magdeburg Cathedral counts over thirty images of Mauritius. No wonder, since he was Otto I’s favourite saint. His lance, which is said to have contained a nail from Christ’s cross, was decisive in the final expulsion of the Hungarians at the battle on the Lechfeld. Mauritius, an early martyr and leader of the Theban Legion, promptly became the patron saint of the German emperors, the whole empire and the archbishopric of Magdeburg, while the lance became the oldest of the imperial regalia.

The most impressive image of the saint can be found in the high choir. The sculpture, made around 1240, is considered the first realistic representation of a black African north of the Alps. Its breathtaking vividness suggests that the sculptor must have known dark-skinned people. It is possible, since both Arabs and Africans belonged to the Sicilian Court of Frederick of Hohenstaufen. Chronicles report that in 1235 the Emperor was accompanied to the Hoftag (Court Day) in Mainz by black musicians and soldiers, who aroused great fascination.

The sculpture of the Saint, which was found in 1834 in a crate in the choir chapel, is only preserved in parts. In the Cathedral Museum, a replica created by means of a 3D printer shows how stunning and magical the original, in golden chain mail with sword, shield, flag and lance, must have looked.

10

Of elks and unicorns

Wild boars, raccoons and wolves are now more or less common on the outskirts of towns and cities. But the fact that a full-grown elk was sighted near Magdeburg in September 2021, far from its northern home, caused astonishment and posed a mystery. After all, the only known elk from Magdeburg was the magnificent double-shoveler in the Natural History Museum.
At least the elk at Magdeburg Kreuzhorst was a real animal, just as many real fossils, especially from Saxony-Anhalt’s natural habitat, are preserved and on display in the collections. With one exception.

In 1663, the abbess of Quedlinburg received a strange gift: a large skull, several bones and a long horn had been found during gypsum mining on land belonging to the monastery. A few years later, Otto von Guericke, a natural scientist and diplomat from Magdeburg, tried his hand at reconstructing the skeleton, which had supposedly been broken during salvage operations. Or was it Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, who later drew and described it, who first tinkered with the lost wonder animal? That we do not know.
The legendary creature however is most likely an extremely imaginative composition of the tusk of a narwhal, the skull of a woolly rhinoceros and the bones of a woolly mammoth. A unique specimen, this Unicorn.

9

There were already more lively tones spitting in my head

This is what the young Telemann wrote, frightened by the unimaginative stiffness of his organ teacher. And he looked around for a new one, despite the fact that his widowed mother and her advisors were highly displeased with the boy’s interests. After all, music did not seem to build a really good livelihood for the fatherless boy.

When Telemann was born in Magdeburg in 1681, the city was slowly recovering after war and plague. The pastor’s son attended the Altstädter Schule, one of the first Latin schools in Germany, and began to study music as an autodidact at an early age. Magdeburg gave him a lot of basic knowledge: French, for example, which he learned from the immigrant Huguenots. And the love of German poetry, which was imparted to him by the rector of the cathedral school to which Georg Philipp later transferred.

As a precaution, the boy is said to have presented his first compositions to the public under a pseudonym, such as the opera Sigismundus at the age of twelve, in which he also took part and “presented even my hero rather defiantly.” This was finally too much for his mother and she sent him to Zellerfeld. But it was already too late and Telemann was on his way to becoming a busy and famous composer of the German Baroque.

8

In good and in bad times

The bells of all the old town churches rang out when Otto von Guericke was buried in St. John’s Church in June 1684. For more than 83 years, he had devoted his life to the service of the city of his birth, as a lawyer, councillor and fortress builder, diplomat, treasurer and mayor. So it was no coincidence that the grateful citizenry gave him a state funeral.

Looking at his lifetime, it is almost unbelievable, what the ingenious natural scientist and tireless advocate of is hometown had squeezed into it. He liked to combine diplomatic missions, which took him to the negotiating table for the Peace of Westphalia or to the Imperial Diet in Regensburg, with demonstrations of physical experiments that astonished high and low and inscribed Magdeburg in the annals of science.

He excelled in astronomy, electricity and cosmology, built the Magdeburg weather man, a ten-metre-high barometer, at the city’s town hall and invented the piston pump and a travelling air pump. The full-scale city map he made in 1632 was still used after the Second World War.
And of course the most legendary experiment of all: The participants of the Doctors’ Conference were able to experience in a Magdeburg park just how spectacular it must have been to the amazed onlookers at the time when twelve strong horses were unable to pull the famous hemispheres apart, even in 2006.

7

Bridges of Magdeburg

Bridges often shape the face of a city and its history. A bridge near Magdeburg is first mentioned in July 1275, when it gave way during a procession and collapsed. Three hundred people are said to have died as a result. At that time, what is now the Old Elbe was still the main branch of the river.

Many bridges crossed the Elbe over the course of time, such as the Long Bridge, which was destroyed by Tilly’s troops in the religious wars, and nearby the Short Bridge, which repeatedly lost piers due to icy conditions. Hundred years later the wooden Strom Bridge was replaced by an iron structure. Another one called Zollbrücke, were customs duties had to be payed, is adorned with four allegorical figures.

Many of these bridges fell victim to the demolition frenzy shortly before the end of World War II. So did the Hubbrücke, which can be seen here. Originally built in 1848 as a single-track railway bridge, it had to be rebuilt and raised several times because of the increasing height and width of the ships. Today it has been decommissioned as a technical monument and can only be crossed by pedestrians. On the other hand, all kinds of festivities can take place on it, not least the White Bridge Dinner, but also weddings, where the bride and groom romantically exchange their vows with a breathtaking view over the river.

6

The Calvinists’ Colony

Although French names are not entirely rare in Magdeburg, few people today know that the city was once home to the second largest Huguenot colony on German soil. After the Potsdam Edict of 1685, which welcomed French religious refugees to Prussia, Magdeburg was the first stop for Reformed French and Walloons from southern Germany who sought safety here from the troops of the Catholic Sun King.

Around 3,500 Huguenots were granted permission by the Prussian Elector to have their own jurisdiction, administration and even civil guard, as well as the freedom to practise their faith and all kinds of economic privileges. In return, they were to bring the old town, still devastated by war, to new prosperity. The Calvinists were quite poor at first, working as stocking weavers or glove makers. They were also viewed with suspicion by the Lutheran locals, not only because they were regarded as foreigners and heretics, but also because, unusually, it was often the women who headed the household.

One of the churches assigned to them was that of the former Augustinian monastery, where Martin Luther had once preached. Today it is known as the Wallonerkirche (Walloon Church) and from its spire a Christmas tree shines over the city during Advent. The Huguenots became a blessing to Magdeburg. The Coquis, Guischards and Grusons built sugar refineries, faience factories and iron foundries and brought prosperity and prestige to the city.

5

320 tons of shipping history

When the “Württemberg”, the last side wheel tug on the river Elbe, set off on her farewell voyage to Czechoslovakia in April 1974, she had covered 800,000 km and transported two billion tonne-kilometres in over sixty years. Built in 1908/1909 in Roßlau/Saxonia, the ship towed barges between Hamburg and Ústí nad Labem for the shipping lines Neue Deutsch-Böhmische-Elbeschiffahrt Dresden and, after its expropriation in 1947, for the VEB Binnenreederei Berlin.

Side-wheel tugs could pull up to ten barges behind them, weighing between 700 and 1,300 tonnes. Sometimes even two tugs were harnessed in front of the convoy. As they only had a draught of about one metre, they were ideally suited for navigation on the Elbe. Older people may still remember the barges that transported salt from Schönebeck to Neštěmice and were loaded with hard coal on the way back to Magdeburg.

On her farewell tour, hundreds of spectators watched in every old shipping town along the Elbe to wave a last farewell to the Württemberg; in Dresden there are said to have been as many as thousands. Today the steamer is moored at Magdeburg’s Rotehorn Park, refitted as a museum ship and restored to its original 1909 condition. In addition to the boiler and engine room, it also has an exhibition on the history of Elbe shipping.

4

Paradise with raspberry ice cream

Architecture is the third skin of the human being, after the natural skin and clothing, said Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Perhaps this conviction is also the reason why the artist called for the “creative moulding” of contemporary architecture in an angry manifesto. Everything is subject to the pathogenic line that traps people in modern rented accommodation like rabbits in caged constructions and thus robs them of all individuality and creative possibilities, he raged there.

The same cannot be said of the Hundertwasser house on Magdeburg’s cathedral square. The so called Green Citadel knows no straight lines or sharp corners. Instead, the residents have a so called window right that allows them to individually design their immediate surroundings; and a tree obligation, to care for the total of over 170 green specimens peering out of, as it were, dancing windows, actually welcomed them as tenants just like their human neighbourhood.

In the midst of the modern inner-city development, the Hundertwasser house looks like an enchanted fairy-tale castle doused in raspberry ice cream, its towers bearing golden spheres above green roofs, like onions: for the artist the fruit of paradise he wanted to build for the people of Magdeburg with his last work.

3

„Auf die Fürbitte meiner lieben Editha hin“

The illiterate Emperor Otto I had this inscribed on many a document, as a sign of love for his first wife, whom he mourned – quite unusually for his time and office – for six years and wished to be buried next to her.

Editha or Eadgyth of Wessex, as she was actually called, had been sent to the court of the Saxon king Henry in a double pack with a younger sister and “laps full of gold”. Son Otto could choose between the two granddaughters of Alfred the Great, and the seventeen-year-old decided so quickly that the chronicles spoke of love at first sight.

Editha, who was educated and had grown up in a much more modern household than the one of the Liudolfinger, quickly won the hearts of the city folks by her generosity, her charm, her graceful character and a truly regal appearance. So great has been the effect of this affection through the centuries that even today the people of Magdeburg are more closely attached to the princess than to her husband.

The Emperor is said to have even learned to read after her much too early death and had the anniversary of her death celebrated as an annual memorial day. Like her favourite city, which now regularly hosts an Editha festival.

2

The Monastery of Our Lady

When you enter the monasterial cloister, it opens up to the inner courtyard with more than 32 arcades. Many of the columns dividing the arches are round, some are quadrangular or polygonal. They bear a rich selection of differently shaped capitals, adorned with a variety of foliage, palmettes and rosettes, often with cube capitals so typical of the Magdeburg Romanesque style.

When Archbishop Gero founded a collegiate monastery in Magdeburg around 1017, he could not have imagined how the blessings and perils of monasterial architecture would be experienced there for the next thousand years. Despite various alterations and extensions and many a destruction by fire and war, this place was carried through time like a miracle and became the oldest surviving building in the city.

Today the Monastery of Our Lady is an exquisite cultural centre, in which Romanesque and Gothic style meets modernity, with enchanting architectural details of many periods, the Museum of New Art and a wonderful concert hall.

1

The Mighty Maiden

“A castle with two pointed towers, an open gate and a raised portcullis; between the towers a Magd (maiden) holding a wreath in her raised right hand.”

You can read this in heraldry books and obviously the Magd, Middle High German for maiden or virgin, is reflected in the name of the city. But does she really?

Legend tells us of a border castle Julius Caesar had built on the river Elbe. And of a nearby village where the commander donated a temple to the virgin goddess Diana. The town was named Parthenopolis after this place of worship, which means “maiden town”. Unfortunately for the story, Caesar never got beyond the Rhine.

Linguists suspect that the older name Magadoburg, common at the time of Charlemagne, could mean “mighty castle”. What we do know is that as early as 1244, the first town seal we have shows a virgin on a rampart between two towers. The wreath as a sign of her virginity was soon added, as were the raised portcullis and the wide-open gates. Their welcoming gesture has brought the city great wealth and great suffering. Today it has become a friendly sign of a new, open urbanity.