March 30: Museum Day in Berlin

On a cold and rainy day in Berlin, we only made it to two museums – but what museums they were! We first visited the Pergamon Museum, which had amazing artefacts from Miletus and Priene and Magnesia, all places we visited in Turkey. We also saw the famous Ishtar Gate of Babylon, and many other things that brought back memories of other trips. Although the weather is not what we had hoped for, we both agree that this museum alone would be worth the trip to Germany. It is astounding to see so many actual buildings inside a museum!

After a brief cup of coffee to get off our feet, we went to the Neuse Museum, where we were blown away by the head of Nefertiti, which is one of the most famous statues in the world. Normally, when I see something very famous, there is a little part of me that is disappointed, but this amazing statue is even more spectacular than I could have imagined. One is not permitted to photograph this statue, so I include the picture from their own website.

Ian finds that his 30 year old German Language studies are returning, slowly, and erratically. 

This evening the sunshine fooled us into thinking that it might be nicer out, so we headed out to see the Brandenburg and the Reichstag. There was a demonstration going on close to the Reichstag so we started walking toward our hotel, and walked right into the middle of the demonstration!

Nefertiti is one of the few artefacts one is not allowed to photograph in the Berlin Museums, so I include this picture from the Neues Museum Website.

The Pergamon Museum is devoted to the history of the Ancient Near East. We first dreamed of going to see it when the lady who owned our hotel in Bergama, Turkey, told us about visiting the site and being very sad that the wonderful objects of Pergamon, her home town, were so far away. We have some sympathy for the fact that so much is here in Berlin: when we were visiting Bergama we learned that much of the marble had been burned in the lime kilns to make fertilizer, and it was, in fact, a German road engineer who started petitioning the German government to move the main objects to Germany. I really wanted to see the Alter of Zeus, and that is why we planned to come here, so you can imagine my horror on learning that the Alter is closed to the public – until 2020!

However, there is still much to see here that we did not expect, and it quite exceeded our expectations. Can you imagine a museum large enough to hold the gates to Babylon, entire buildings, and even the façade of a palace? This museum does just that.

We were very glad to have a timed entry to the Pergamon Museum when we saw the lineups outside. When walking in one is first met with the famous Ishtar gate, which is the main gate of Ancient Babylon. The gates are made up of glazed bricks, most blue, with dragons and lions and cows. Even with the scaffolding of the reconstruction around us, they were magnificent.

A section of the Ishtar gate -- the entry to Babylon.



One walks through the Ishtar gates and finds oneself in the “Miletus Hall.” Ian and I were in Miletus three years ago, and it was a beautiful ruin. We admired the theatre and walked through swampy green fields to a long stoa, and saw of course, the remains of the baths, but it was hard to see it as a city. Here, in this hall, is the entrance to the market, paid for by a moneychanger, and it is a large as the library at Ephesus, or so it seemed to us. In the middle of the Hall is a wonderful mosaic of Orpheus. Opposite the gate is another huge structure, with a balcony, once part of a mausoleum complex in Rome. We were especially impressed by an acanthus frieze with amazingly deep relief. We also appreciated the scale model of Miletus locate on the balcony, as we got a much clearer picture of what we had been looking at when on site in Turkey.

A section of the Orpheus mosaic floor. You can't walk on it, of course! A section (less than half!) of the Miletus Gate. The back wall. This section was purchased on the open market, before people were doing many official digs. A happy camper!

A scale model of the town of Miletus. I wish we had this when we were looking at the ruins in Turkey -- also on a cold windy day, as I recall.

We were very impressed by the high relief of the carving on this marble frieze. It's even more impressive at eye level, when you realize just how deep it was -- and before power tools!

We were very impressed by the high relief of the carving on this marble frieze. It's even more impressive at eye level, when you realize just how deep it was -- and before power tools!

The rest of the Greek and Roman building section is closed for renovation and the other Greek and Roman artefacts are in the Altus museum, but I include this “Barbie Doll” votive offering we saw. The open wing of the first floor contains the museum of the Ancient Near East, including exhibits from Mesopotamia, Babylon, and Iraq. It is a wonderful overview of the very earliest civilizations, and before we knew it, another hour had sped by.

Like many of the stone monuments of Mesopotamia, the pigments of the paint that may have covered them are long gone, and so they don’t make too impressive a photo.  I like this one, though!

The top floor of the Pergamon Museum is devoted to Islamic artefacts.  Much of this again reminded us of Istanbul – the Ethnographic museum, this time.  However, here there was again a lot to amaze us, including the outer walls of a place from Jordan, the Mshatta Palace Façade.

This ivory box and horn are exquisite.  They come from Sicily, where the Saracens were in power for almost 200 years.

This “picture frame” is also made of ivory, and was originally used to frame an important book.

We were especially impressed by this wooden ceiling, originally painted, from a viewtower in the Alhambra Palace in Spain. 

You can see the detail better here.

This is the carved sandstone façade of the Mshatta Palace, in what is now Jordan.  When a railway was being built nearby, Kaiser Whilhelm himself supported moving a section of it to Germany.  I mean, not physically supported . . . 

Ian is included here for size comparison.  The facade is the bigger of the two.

We were going to look for a place to get lunch, but decided to see if we could get into the Neues Museum early, and we went to the café there for much-needed coffee and a chance to get off our feet.

Ian, in the foliage of the Neues Museum café.

The Neues Museum does the “prehistory” of Germany, briefly does the Roman contact period, then switches to Egypt. Along the way there are a few documents and “collections”, as this museum originally housed all of the classical art.

Neanderthals are named after the valley in Germany where they were first discovered.  This face was recreated in 2009 based on a skull displayed nearby.  This is a boy of about 11 – he still has some of his “milkteeth”.  This skull proved that Neanderthals ritually bured their dead, and were probably not too different in appearance from us.  Of course, another room nearby had four dioramas made in the 1960s that showed where, exactly, we got all of our “wrong” ideas about Neanderthals from – Museums!

Two Roman pieces of art, found in Germany:   

A terra cotta head.  The black marks are from fire damage during World War II.

This is a closeup of a silver statue that was thrown into a river as on offering.  It is very near lifesize, and is kept in a gallery here because the gallery was built especialluy for this statue.  I can't believe the detail that still exists in the hair!  The poor guy's hands are missing, as is hte silver tray he used to hold. He was pretty much the Roman Equivalent to a butler dog statue.

A gallery in the Neues Museum.

The Egyptian artefacts are especially good here.  I watched a special on “Treasures of Egyptian Art” right before we left, so I was thrilled to see “The Berlin Green Head”.  On the special they pointed out that the head showed an “actual individual” and so was an early example of portraiture.  On our audioguide they said that his features were too regular and it was an example of idealized art.  It was much smaller than I had imagined.

We walked back to our hotel, stopping for milchkaffee and cheescake, and had a wee rest before heading out to see the Brandenburg Gate.  It had stopped raining, and the Brandenburg Gate – about a 20 minute walk from our hotel, was beautiful.  Afterward we planned to walk to the Recihstag, but were deterred by the police cars that we had seen blocking traffic along our route, and by the sounds of demonstration coming from the Reichstag.  Ian and I have had bad experiences of demonstrations in the past, so decided to walk back.  We turned around, headed down the street and around the corner, and right into the demonstrators walking towards us.  However, it seemed to be a sanctioned demonstration, as the police were walking right out in front.

We had a nice Italian Meal and were thrilled when the waiter greeted us in Italian, so we went straight into Italian (with which I am more comfortable than with German), only to find that he was Croation, and “Ciao” and “prego” were his best two words.

Back to our hotel to spend a fruitless few hours working on my computer – it was doing 167 updates and was unusable – and so to bed.