WEIMAR tourist attractions

Weimar is one of the most important places on the cultural map of Germany. The city of poets, writers, philosophers and composers, as well as the place where the Bauhaus was born, the current that changed the face of architecture forever, is today also a thriving tourist center. The multitude of museums, preserved classicist architecture and artistic aura meant that its monuments were entered on the UNESCO list.

Although Weimar was founded in the 9th century, it gained its greatest importance only at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Wettins, who ruled the city, were well-known patrons of culture, and they took care of such famous artists as Goethe, Schiller, Liszt and Bach. The city also went down in history as the place where the constitution of 1919 was signed, changing the system of Germany from empire to republic. From the name of the city, the country was commonly known as the Weimar Republic.

Classicist Weimar and its monuments are attractions primarily for people who like visiting monuments and museums. The central point of the city is the Market Square with picturesque tenement houses and the nearby Theater Square. Visitors are attracted by the Tiefurt Castle and Park surrounded by gardens as well as the Belvedere Castle with the Orangery. The relationship with the Wettin family is remembered in the Weimar Royal Crypt, while other most important monuments are inseparably connected with the development of culture in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A modern place on the map of German cultural monuments is occupied by the classicist Duchess Anna Amalia Library. Hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts from the period from the Middle Ages to the 19th century have been collected here. They include such gems as the manuscripts of Goethe's works, the Martin Luther Bible or the Carolingian Gospel Book. There are also mementoes of celebrities that inhabited Weimar in its heyday. These are: Schiller House, Goethe House and Garden, Liszt House and Goethe-designed Roman House.

The second period of Weimar's cultural heyday fell on the interwar period. The painters and architects Henry van de Velde, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Walter Gropius, who were the founders of the Bauhaus, one of the leading trends in the architecture of the 20th century, came here. Mementoes of the creators of this movement can be seen in the Bauhaus Museum, and today the Bauhaus University they founded also operates.

Weimar's attractions also include other museums such as the Weimar House, the German Bee Museum, the Goethe National Museum, the Museum of Prehistory and Early History of Thuringia, the New Weimar Museum, the Weimar Railway Museum, and the City Museum. The Buchenwald Memorial, located on the outskirts of the city, is of a completely different character and is commemorated by the concentration camp operating here in 1937-1945.