Nikolaikirche: Where Berlin Began

Why is it significant?

Walk around the church until you face its west front, and crouch down a little: the lowest courses of the wall are rough grey fieldstone, granite boulders dragged here by glaciers and stacked by medieval masons. Above them rises brick, and above the brick, two slender spires.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk around the church until you face its west front, and crouch down a little: the lowest courses of the wall are rough grey fieldstone, granite boulders dragged here by glaciers and stacked by medieval masons. Above them rises brick, and above the brick, two slender spires. You are looking at the oldest church in Berlin, the Nikolaikirche.

Building began around 1230, when Berlin was a small trading town on one bank of the Spree and its twin, Cölln, sat on the island opposite. The church grew into a Gothic hall in the fifteenth century, but here is the twist: those two famous spires, the very symbol of old Berlin, are not medieval at all. They were added in the 1870s, during a restoration, when the Prussian capital wanted its oldest church to look properly ancient.

In the seventeenth century the pastor here was Paul Gerhardt, one of the greatest hymn writers in the German language. If you have ever heard Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, you have heard his words in the chorale O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. But Gerhardt was a stubborn Lutheran, and his ruler, the Great Elector, belonged to the Calvinist faith of the Hohenzollern court. When the Elector ordered the clergy to stop attacking each other's doctrines and to sign a pledge, Gerhardt refused... and in 1666 he lost his post. Faith against crown, in the city's oldest pulpit.

The church has another claim to fame. In 1809, after Prussia's reforms gave its towns a measure of self-government, Berlin's first elected city council gathered here. Then came 1945, and almost the whole quarter was flattened. What you see around you is largely a creation of the 1980s: for Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987, East German planners rebuilt the Nikolaiviertel as a picture-book old town, partly from prefabricated concrete panels dressed up with gables.

So the old quarter is younger than many of the tower blocks at Alexanderplatz... and the medieval church wears spires from the age of the Kaiser. Berlin has always been good at inventing its own past. Now walk west down to the river, cross the Rathausbrücke, and follow the long baroque wall ahead of you round to its western end.