Berlin Museum Island

Berlin Museum Island: Where the Pergamon Altar Earns Its Own Visit

The Pergamon Museum contains a structure that has no equivalent in any other museum in the world: the Pergamon Altar, a 2nd-century BCE Greek monumental marble structure measuring 36 metres wide, transported from Pergamon in present-day Turkey by German archaeologists in the 1870s and 1880s and reassembled inside a purpose-built building on the Spree island. The altar’s frieze depicts the battle between the gods and giants in over 100 figures at nearly life size. You walk up actual ancient stairs and stand inside the thing. No photograph communicates what that is like.

Museum Island is five museums on a Spree River island in central Berlin, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. The complex was developed between 1830 and 1930 as a systematic project of cultural collection by the Prussian state and has been gradually restored since German reunification. Combined day passes cover all five museums for considerably less than individual entry; buy them online.

The Five Museums

The Pergamon Museum is the largest draw, with the Altar as its centrepiece alongside the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (glazed blue brick from 575 BCE, commissioned by Nebuchadnezzar II) and the Market Gate of Miletus (2nd-century CE Roman market gate). Allow 2 to 3 hours minimum.

The Neues Museum houses the Nefertiti bust, the 1345 BCE limestone portrait of the Egyptian queen that has been one of the most reproduced images in art history since it was excavated in 1912. The queue for the room is shorter in the morning. The museum also holds the Egyptian and Prehistoric collections; both are worth more time than the celebrity object allows visitors.

The Alte Nationalgalerie has 19th-century German and European painting and sculpture: Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic landscapes, Adolph Menzel’s documentary paintings of 19th-century Prussia, French Impressionists. The building itself (neo-classical columns, red sandstone) is part of the experience.

The Bode-Museum at the island’s northern tip covers Byzantine art, medieval sculpture, and Renaissance painting in a domed building at the Spree river fork. Rarely crowded.

The Altes Museum, the island’s oldest building (1830, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel), holds Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities in a neoclassical temple-style structure.

Practical Notes

Buy the Museum Island pass online in advance. Allow two days to do the complex properly; trying to see all five museums in one day is technically possible and practically compromising. The Pergamon Museum has specific timed-entry requirements for the main halls during peak season.

The walk from the museums to the Hackescher Markt neighbourhood is 10 minutes and has decent restaurants and cafes well separated from the tourist circuit around the island.