You know those trips when you head to a city for one thing, and one thing only? Yeah, this was that type of trip. I’m sure Berlin is a wonderful city, but William and I only had eyes for the Pergamon Museum which closed after our visit to do renovations for 14 years.

Darling told us about the Pergamon museum closing and how it housed the Ishtar Gate, so we did a short trip up to Berlin as soon as we could. Taking the train from Kaiserslautern, it took close to six hours to get to Berlin, which William slept through as he’d had to work the night shift before. Arriving on Monday, we dropped our items off at the hostel and immediately took off towards the museum. 

Despite William and I loving history, archeology, and museums, we had not tracked that the famous Ishtar Gate from Babylonia was located in Berlin. Built in 569 BC by the order of King Nebuchadnezzar II, the gate is huge. Standing over 46 feet tall today and covered in stars and lions. The lions symbolize the goddess of war, Ishtar, where it gets it’s name. Other animals include a now-extinct ancestor of cattle and the Mušḫuššu, the national deity and chief god’s dragon. The gate was excavated by a German archeological team led by Robert Koldewey from 1899 to 1914, pieces of the gate were smuggled out of Iraq in coal barrels and taken to Berlin. There, in the 1930s, a complete reconstruction of the Ishtar gate was done within the Pergamon Museum.

One of my favorite parts of the gate is how life like the lions actually look! So often in Europe when you see older paintings of lions, it is clear the person who did the painting had never seen a lion themselves or even met someone who had. To put it mildly, historical lion paintings in Europe are almost always extremely, comically wrong. The lions on the Ishtar Gate have no such issues. Despite being sculpted onto clay tiles, these lions are very lifelike and upon seeing them you just know that the artisans not only knew of lions but had seen them up close and personal.

We spent close to an hour walking around the gate, looking at the details both in how it was reconstructed in the 1930s and how it had been constructed in the first place in the 500s BC.

The museum is now closed for renovations, with various parts of its collection either available online to see, sent to museums in other countries, or exhibited in other museums within Berlin. Check out this website to learn more.

I’m going to be honest, I’m glad they’re renovating the museum. While the exhibits were good, they weren’t great. They had the information, were organized well, and had cool light shows which detailed how the artifacts would have looked when they were painted in their heyday, but parts felt as if they hadn’t been updated since the 1990s. While that may not seem like a huge deal with dealing with artifacts that are over 2,000 years old, we learn so much every year from new archeological digs and historians about our past that not keeping a museum up to date can leave you with incorrect or misplaced information. Plus the club music in the clothing section (something about the clothing they used being for parties?) was a little off-putting.

After seeing what we had come to see, William and I headed to the river to grab some food and beer, and discuss what we’d seen. The next day, we woke up and left for the train station to quickly get back Kaiserslautern–William had to go to work that same day! It was a whirlwind trip, but I’m so glad we did it.