6

Across the desert into the Pergamon Museum

In the year 1887 there are birds, griffins, grapes on their way to the Museum Island. They are now travelling on the tracks of the Hedjaz railway whose construction almost caused the destruction of this delicately decorated desert castle. Now this railway is the means to transport its ornate facade from Mschatta in today’s Jordan to Berlin.
“We have to have this, what ever it costs!” Emperor WIlhelm II is reported to have said. The Ottoman sultan, anxious to foster the Ottoman-German relations,
presented the facade to the Emperor. Today you are welcome to admire it in the Pergamon Museum.