Kottbusser Tor: The Heart of Turkish Berlin
Why is it significant?
Stand under the elevated tracks at Kottbusser Tor and take it all in: a roaring roundabout, a yellow train clattering overhead, and a vast concrete housing block from the 1970s straddling Adalbertstraße on stilts. Below it, shops sell gold, phones, baklava and wedding dresses.
Key Facts
| Place | Kottbusser Tor: The Heart of Turkish Berlin |
|---|---|
| Address | Kottbusser Tor, 10999 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.49900, 13.41830 |
| Part of Walk | Berlin Kreuzberg: Street Art, Punk Clubs & the Landwehrkanal |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand under the elevated tracks at Kottbusser Tor and take it all in: a roaring roundabout, a yellow train clattering overhead, and a vast concrete housing block from the 1970s straddling Adalbertstraße on stilts. Below it, shops sell gold, phones, baklava and wedding dresses. It is loud and far from pretty, and it is the beating heart of Turkish Berlin.
The name comes from the Kottbusser Tor, a gate in the old customs wall on the road to Cottbus. But the modern story of this place begins in 1961, the same year the Wall went up, when West Germany signed a recruitment agreement with Turkey. Workers came for the factories and building sites, many expecting to stay only a few years. They stayed for good.
Kreuzberg was where they found flats: run-down tenements by the Wall that nobody else wanted, many of them slated for demolition. Families moved in and opened grocers, tea houses and prayer rooms in back courtyards, and by the 1970s people were calling the area Little Istanbul. Berlin also claims the modern döner kebab, sold in flatbread to hungry workers in the early 1970s... though Istanbul, understandably, has opinions about that.
The concrete giant, the Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum, went up in the early 1970s, in an age of bulldozer planning, and for years it was a byword for neglect. In 2012 tenants, many of them Turkish-German pensioners, built a small wooden protest hut on the square against rising rents, and called it Gecekondu, the Turkish word for a house built overnight. Berlin's fight over housing has been unusually loud ever since.
The line rumbling above your head is the U1, part of Berlin's very first U-Bahn, opened in 1902, and the station platform is one of the best places to watch the square swirl. Now walk south down Kottbusser Damm to the canal bridge, and to the market on the far bank.