Spielzeugmuseum Trier (Toy museum)

The private and small Toy Museum of Trier is really fascinating, not only for kids. You can admire toys of more than 200 years. Toys are reflecting former times in many aspects: our personal story as well as the history of our society. In the museum you will see simple wooden toys of the 18th and 19th century, the first playcars with the industrialization at the turn of the century, more refined mechanics in the fifties, armies of tin soldiers, dolls, stuffed animals, toys from the Third Reich, a complete zoo, wind-up and electric trains and of course the computer and startreck more..

type:	Hotspots
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address:	Nagelstraße 4-5, 54290 Trier
openings:	april to october, daily: 11 til 17; november to march, daily: 12 til 16; monday closed.
tel:	+49 (0) 651 7 58 50

Freilichtmuseum Roscheider Hof (Open Air museum)

Inside the Hunsruck village
photo by: Helge Klaus Rieder

This open air museum, located 6 km outside Trier in Konz, presents the folk culture of the European Saar-Lor-Lux regio. Really great for children, they will discover how people in the Moselle region lived 200 years ago: how schoolrooms looked like, how dentists worked in former days, what people bought or produced, what kind of animals they had and how a farmhouse looked like etc. In 2005 a famous collection of pewter figures has been opened. There is also a 4000 square meter indoor-exhibition. The museum is open whole the year.

type:	Hotspots
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email:	info@RoscheiderHof.de
address:	Roscheider Hof e.V. , D-54329 Konz,
url:	www.RoscheiderHof.de
tel:	+49-6501-92710

Hauptmarkt (Main Market)

Hauptmarkt (Main market)
photo by: Adam Paronto

The center of the city for nearly 2000 years: with Market Cross, 958 and St. Peter's Fountain, 1595; Gothic church of St. Gangolf 14th/15th century, steeple from 1507. The Steipe, a councillors' banqueting house, was built in 15th century, the Red House, 1684.

After the Viking destruction of 882, the archbishop moved the market from the river to the present site, the Market Cross still commemorates this event from 958. The original of the cross is in the Municipal Museum; the column shaft is a recycled granite column from the Roman Cathedral. Trier contains only a few more..

type:	general
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Porta Nigra

Porta Nigra

Roman city gate the 2nd cent., sandstone blocks held together by iron clamps: from the 11th to the 18th century two-storied church of which the Romanesque apse is still preserved.

The gate itself dates back to a time (about A.D. 180) when the Romans often erected public buildings of huge stone blocks (here, the biggest weigh up to six metric tons). The slabs were cut by bronze saws powered by mill wheels (some cutting traces are still visible) and put together without mortar. Instead, two stones each were held together horizontally by iron clamps whose bent ends were embedded more..

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Konstantinbasilika or Palastaula

Roman imperial palace, 4th cent., later administrative centre of the electors. Today Protestant church. The Roman so called “Basilika” is built of Roman bricks and has been a part of Emperor Konstantin's palace. The Romans wanted the architecture to express the magnificence and might of the emperor, and the hall is the largest surviving single-room structure from Roman times, 27 m (90 ft) wide, 33 m (108 ft) high, and 67 m (220 ft) long - with an adjoining hall outside even 75 m (250 ft). This depth is magnified by an optical illusion - both the windows of the apse as well as more..

type:	general
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Judengasse

The old jewish quarter is one of the oldest streets in Germany. You will find it shortly before the market, Jews' Alley (Judengasse) on the right leads into the former medieval Jewish Quarter. Locally produced weights with Hebrew inscriptions show that there were Jews in Trier as early as the first or second century. Starting with the eleventh century, we have records of a Jewish community in Trier, and in 1235 four Jews had four houses built on the left of the later Judengasse. The cellars are still the original ones; in the Pub "Abwärts", you can still see the walled-up more..

type:	Synagogues
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Dom (Roman Catholic Cathedral)

Dom Picture
photo by: Goutham Kumar

Roman central structure: 4th century. Romanesque west facade: 11th century. East choir: 12th century. Cloisters: 13th century. Holy Robe Chapel: 1716.

Trier’s cathedral: 100 meters from the market is one of the oldest and most impressive roman cathedrals in Germany. On the ride hand you can visite the Liebfrauen Church in pure gothic style.

The present Cathedral stands on top of a former Constantinian Palace. After Constantine's last visit to Trier in A.D. 328/9, the palace was leveled in 330 and replaced by the largest Christian church in Antiquity, about four more..

type:	Churches
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Amphitheatre

amphitheatre

Ruin of Roman arena for fights of gladiators and animals, built about AD 100, the ranks could hold 20.000 spectators.

Beyond the medieval city wall lies the Roman Amphitheater. Here were conducted cruel combats of animals and gladiators, popular public entertainment. When you enter the premises (fee) you walk through the ruins of the entrance gate. This was used as a quarry in the Middle Ages. The arena itself is surrounded by a protecting wall with openings for animal cages. The stone seats above were dismantled in the 13th century, but the Amphitheater has retained more..

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St. Paulin

This formerly collegiate church is one of the famoust baroque churches in Western Germany. It has been built in the middle of the 18th century and has been a parish church since 1804. A single-aisled baroque-rococo church, begun in 1734 and built to plans by Johannes Seitz and Balthasar Neumann, it boasts of magnificent ceiling paintings done in 1743 by C. T. Scheffler. The ceiling shows four scenes with cross motifs and two scenes from the life of Paulinus, the Trier bishop exiled in 353. The canopied Marian (Immaculata) altar was sculpted by Ferdinand Tietz. The burial altar of more..

type:	Churches
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St. Gangolf Church

The Catherdral from the Marktplaz.
photo by: Ryan Leach

Between the 10th and the 12th centuries, the Trier archbishops, the lords spiritual, had also become lords temporal and, of course, had the church with the highest towers in town, namely the Cathedral - the left steeple still shows the original height. The city church outside the walled Bishop's Close, St. Gangolf (on market place), was lower and humbler until, in 1507, a rich widow named Mathilde donated money to the city to have two tower stories with larger windows added. The bishop had to follow suit, but he had money enough only for the south tower that still shows the more..

type:	Churches
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Römerbrücke und Moselkrahn (Roman bridge and Moselle cranes )

The pilings of the Römerbrücke (Roman Bridge) from A.D. 144-152 (the arches and roadway are from the 18th century) are deeply embedded in the bedrock underneath the river gravel. They were built with huge stone blocks held together with iron clamps as in the Porta Nigra (the Roman clamps are invisible inside the pilings; the visible clamps are from later times). This time, the black color is genuine: the stone is mostly basalt from the Eifel mountains. On March 2, 1945, General Patton's tanks captured the bridge so quickly that it was not blown up - the more..

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Karl-Marx-Haus (Karl Marx Birthhouse)

Karl Marx Museum in the birthplace of the founder of modern socialism. Is more a museum about early 19th century living rather than communism or something like that. It may come as a surprise that Karl Marx was not born in an industrial city but in Trier, which at that time (May 5, 1818) had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. The other surprise may be that the birthplace, today's Karl Marx Museum (Karl-Marx-Haus, fee), is not to be found in Karl-Marx-Strasse but Brückenstrasse 12 (the first section was not renamed in order to keep the historical address).

The house is one more..

type:	Museums
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address:	Brückenstrasse 10
openings:	+49 – 651 - 43011

Roman Baths

Going to the baths was an important part of Roman life, and, besides some smaller private baths, Trier had three large public baths: the newly discovered Forum Baths, the Barbara Baths, and the Imperial Baths, the latter two being the largest baths outside Rome.

People bathed naked (not always separately), could engage in sports, sit in cold and hot baths, swim, get a massage, have the body hair removed by tweezers or wax, and be cleaned with the help of scrapers, pumice stone, or fermented urine. They could relax, gamble, do business, go to the hairdresser's, libraries, more..

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Liebfrauenkirche (Church of Our Lady)

First Gothic church in Germany (1235-1260), erected on the side of a Roman church. The south part of the Roman double church was torn down around 1200 and completely replaced by the Early Gothic Church of Our Lady (Liebfrauen). Nothing above the surface is Roman any more, but there are extensive excavations (not open to the public) underneath the church and several of the Gothic pillars stand on top of Roman column foundations. The medieval church, however, was no longer a long, three-aisled structure, but a church-in-the-round, whose cross-shaped vaulting with four more..

type:	Churches
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Rheinisches Landesmuseum

The Archaeological Museum (Landesmuseum, fee) near the Imperial Baths has the richest collection of Roman finds in Germany; it is so rich, in fact, that only a small part of the collection can be exhibited. You will find art and artefacts from prehistoric, Roman, early Christian and medieval periods.

The inner courtyard, used as a storage place for sarcophagi, columns, capitels, paving stones, and building blocks is in itself worth looking at, if only because of the painted replica of the 23 m (76 ft) Igel Column (Igeler Säule, a Roman burial monument; the original is 8 more..

type:	Museums
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address:	Weimarer Allee 1
tel:	+49 – 651 – 9774 - 0

Simeonstift

Simeonstift

Adjoining the Porta Nigra is the 11th century Simeons's College (Simeonstift), residence of priests who read mass in the two churches of St. Simeon (Porta Nigra). The building has a unique two-storied cloister around the courtyard (Brunnenhof) and contains today a restaurant and the Municipal Musum (fee) with the Coptic, medieval, and early modern collections; some statues are exhibited in the south wing of the cloister (upper story), whose floor still rests on the original oak beam floor from 1060.

type:	general
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University Archaeological Collection

The University (Archäologische Original- und Abgußsammlung des archäologischen Institut der Universität Trier, Trier-Tarforst) owns a collection of plaster replicas of Greek and Roman statues and a growing collection of originals from Italy and Egypt (no fee).

type:	Museums
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Domschatzkammer (Cathedral Treasury)

Entrance from the interior of the cathedral. The Cathedral Treasury (Domschatzkammer, fee) does not represent a museum but a collection of religious artefacts from over the centuries which could still be employed in church services: twelfth-century censors, baroque monstrances, croziers from seven centuries, to name a few.

The most prized object, and one of the oldest, is the St. Andrew portable altar from the tenth century, an oaken shrine covered with ivory plates, enamel and gold filigree work and containing the sole of St. Andrew's Sandal. Even older are the Holy Nail more..

type:	Museums
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address:	Cathedral / Dom
tel:	+49 – 651 - 75801

Städtisches Museum Simeonstift

The Municipal Museum (Städtisches Museum, fee), located in the Simeon's College next to the Porta Nigra shows documents regarding the development of the city of Trier: Sculptures and paintings from the Middle Ages to Romanticism and Realism. Every now and then they offer exhibitions of contemporary art. The museum houses several collections from Trier's medieval and early modern eras, plus several outstanding donations: for example, the Schunck Collection of paintings from the Renaissance to the twentieth century and a collection of Coptic textiles dating from the third to the more..

type:	Museums
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address:	Porta Nigra Place
tel:	+49 – 651 – 718 2449

Irminenkloster (Irminen monastery )

Of the four former convents and monasteries (Mutterhaus der Borromäerinnen, a hospital today; St. Irminen, a home for senior citizens; Katharinenkloster, a technical school; St. Martin, a student dormitory), St. Irminen is the most interesting. The original convent was built into the ruins of a Roman granary in 640 so that even today there are Roman walls up to a height of 7.5 m/25 ft and a medieval wine cellar with a Roman Wall.

type:	Monasteries
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