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Photo: Photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Main square of the city. Full of stores with the old Post Office building.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
The name could be translated as "merchants' bridge"
A bridge with houses built on either side, mostly used for shops. Once this style of bridge was rather common in medieval European cities. However, in many cities such bridges were abandoned due to fire safety concerns or fell victim to the demands of car culture. It is by far Erfurt's most iconic landmark.
Right at the Wenigemarkt or behind the Krämerbrücke beside the river you can have a beautiful look at the old houses standing on the 'bridge'.
Join a historical city tour organised by the Tourist Information to have better and entertaining insight into the long lasting history of the town.
ritual bath
A Mikveh is a ritual bath fed by "living" water (in this case a nearby river, which however had much more water in the Middle Ages than it does now). This Mikveh was in use during the same time as the Old Synagogue and is attested in tax records as early as the 13th century. Those same tax records also attest the surrounding area as densely populated by both Jews and Christians. The Mikveh was damaged during the 1349 pogrom but used again after 1354. Following the 1453 expulsion of the Jewish community the mikveh fell into disuse and was converted into a cellar which was subsequently forgotten about. Only in the 2000s were archeological excavations undertaken to unearth this part of Erfurt's Jewish history and it opened as a museum in 2011. Not all questions that science can answer have yet been answered about this site and research is ongoing. You can see down into the Mikveh through a glass window outside the guided tours.
with its Burgerhouses and town hall.
Oldest surviving European synagogue, today a museum that has an impressive collection of 14th century Jewish jewelry. The synagogue was in use as such until the 1349 pogrom and was converted to a warehouse afterwards. This "forgetfulness" of its history proved a serendipitous blessing in disguise as the Nazis never knew or cared enough about this part of Jewish history to destroy it in the same way they destroyed Jewish lives and heritage elsewhere. It was only in the 1980s that people started to care about this building again and after reunification, the Erfurt city council bought up the building and restored it to its current state, turning it into a museum.