Pergamon & Neues Museums

I feel like my daily blog-post density has been growing since the weekend! Oh well. Shorter posts are better than one really really long post, right?

Lizzie and I got up super-early on Sunday morning and made our way from the Friedrichstraße Bahnhof to Museuminsel (or Museum Island), where we had been told to check out the Pergamon Museum. Listen up: THIS MUSEUM IS NOT TO BE MISSED!!! We got to the museum about 10 minutes before it opened and were already in a line. Luckily we found somewhere to get breakfast, which is apparently not an easy task on a Sunday morning in Germany. This is the first thing you see when you walk in:

All of what you see is original stonework of the Altar from the sacrificial temple at Pergamon, now located in western Turkey. The German archaeologist, Carl Humman, excavated and literally lifted (or stole) all of the altar and brought it back to Germany in a real-life Carmen San Diego story! If any part of it is missing or not original, it is because the piece could either not be found or the museum has the original in storage!

You walk up the steps of the Altar and in what would have been the sacrificial altar is now a room with bas relief sculptures telling the story of Telephos. He unknowingly married his mother, in what I'm sure is a store-brand, lesser-graphic version of Oedipus Rex. (Telephos figured it out before things went too far!).

In the next room over are façades from other Grecian Temples, tile mosaics, and marketplaces, each fully reconstructed from original building materials.

Carmen can now check "Grecian Temples" off her checklist. Next up? Oh, hey Miletus of Turkey. Nice marketplace you have there. Mind if I...take it?

Yup. Just like the Pergamon Altar, the museum also holds the original Turkish entryway to its seaside town of Miletus, all brought back and reconstructed in the Museum. Amazingly, not much of the museum's collection was damaged during WWII! The walls of the museum are 3m thick, I think, and designed to keep flying shrapnel from damaging the collections. The Gates of the Marketplace at Miletus did experience some water damage from a leaking roof during the war, though.

"Turkish Marketplace Gates"....check! Next on the list. How does Babylon sound this time of year? Done and done. The museum also houses the Ishtar Gates which beautifully decorated and lined the streets of ancient Babylon on the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq. The tiled lions were designed to spark fear in all of those who passed by. (I just realized I don't have any photos of the lions, though. It's okay because I'm going back on Thursday!).

Oh, by the way. Wikipedia says that the gate you can see in the museum is the smaller of two gates at either end of the processional-way of ancient Babylon. The other, larger gate, was too big to fit into the museum space, so it is just hanging out in storage.

Another cool exhibit they had was ancient statuary from Tell Halaf, a site in what is now northeast Syria.

The cool thing about this exhibit is that during WWII, the museum in West Berlin at which these statues had been on display was bombed and a fire set the building ablaze. The flames got so hot that all of the limestone and marble statuary pretty much melted and was completely destroyed and the statues made of basaltic volcanic rocks just blasted into thousands of chunks. Curators though these would never be pieced together again, but many of the statues have since been completely organized and jigsawed back together again!

I found out the museum has free admission on Thursday night, which is good because Lizzie and I apparently missed an entire wing of the building that has some more pretty spectacular stolen goods!

Our Kombicartes (multiple-museum passes) also got us into the Neues Museum next door, which is also fantastic, but our stomachs were grumbling by this point and all I really wanted to see was the bust of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti which is exclusively on display there. This is the extremely recognizable Sun Queen, married to the Pharaoh, Akhenaten.

(photo from arthistoryspot.com)

Photos were not allowed in the Nefertiti room and we really just rushed through the rest of the museum. Again, we were hungry and just didn't have time to wade through the hundreds of small antiquities dating from the Ice Age to the Roman Empire. Would be cool to go back and check out sometime else.

I thought I'd get all the way through our Sunday together in this post, but I got lost in the details again. Sorry! More to come tomorrow!

Here is the entire photo set from my trip: