Now I’ve been to a lot of museums in my life, but hands down, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin is one of the most impressive museums that I’ve ever been to. I can’t believe it’s taken me this many visits to Berlin to finally visit the Pergamon. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life sometimes thinking about how I was able to see the Ishtar Gate inside a museum.
The Pergamon is one of Berlin’s most visited museums and more than a million people walk through its doors every year and it’s completely easy to see why. And that main reason for me was the Ishtar Gate.
The Gate was the 8th Gate to the inner city of Babylon; it was built in 575 BCE by order of King Nebuchadnezzar II. The Gate, being part of the Walls of Babylon was one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. After it was excavated in the 1930s, it was rebuilt, brick by brick, inside the Pergamon Museum. It’s the stunning and massive, blue bricked structure in my photos below.
Other stunning parts of the museum were the Architecture of Antiquity collection and the Art of Islamic Cultures collection.
The Pergamon Altar and the famous entrance to the North Wing of the building are currently closed due to renovations and the project is not expected to be fully completed until 2026. But even without access to the Pergamon Altar, it is still worth the admission price.
Everything in the Pergamon is about ancient history. It has all come from other countries and the museum is somewhat insightful in acknowledging the fact that the artefacts aren’t German in origin and should, probably, belong elsewhere. What I found incredible interesting was this quote from Alexander Conze, who was one of the excavators of the Pergamon Altar, “We were not insensitive to what it meant to wrest the remains of a great monument from its native soil, and bring them to a place where we would never be able to offer them the light and the surroundings for which they were created and in which they once had their full effect. but we did save them from ever more complete destruction.” That quote is from 1912 and it’s still highly timely and debatable.
Your ticket to the Pergamon Museum also includes your entrance into the Pergamon Panorama, which is a short walk away from the museum itself. I didn’t know anything about the Panorama and I had pretty low expectations. I don’t want to spoil any surprises but the Panorama is absolutely amazing.
We had to queue for nearly an hour to buy tickets on the day to get into the museum. However, if you had purchased tickets online ahead of time, there was a separate queue for those folks and it seemed lightning quick. Learn from my mistakes and do that instead.
The Pergamon Museum is located at Bodestraße 1-3, 10178 Berlin. Tickets are €19
Have you visited the Pergamon Museum before?
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