Trier — the oldest city in Germany

OK, so, I know it’s been too long since my last post. For those of you who read the site regularly, my apologies. Since we just moved into our new house, it’s been a bit crazy, as you can probably imagine!
However, a couple weeks ago, we took our first “true” foray into the local culture with a trip to Trier, purported to be the oldest city in Germany. It was a provincial capital in the Roman Empire and the only city this far north. It’s a trip that’s offered to everyone when they arrive here. It’s a great way to get a guided perspective on the area and learn some basics and how to get around (we took a train into Trier).
Here is the gate of the city, Porta Nigra. It’s so called from the ages of fires that have blackened the stone. It was the city gate in Roman times.

This is our guide, Easter, who did a wonderful job showing us around the city.

You can see, she kept everyone raptly enthralled. 🙂

The market in the center of town had many great sights.

This couple was so cute.


This is the Jewish Alleyway. Before the war, there was a large Jewish population here. It hasn’t recovered.


This baroque sculpture shows that artists then certainly had a sense of humor. This piece survived both world wars (the second because the town dismantled it and brought it to the country to protect it from the bombing). If you look closely though, you’ll see behind the women, there are a couple monkeys doing very naughty things. Our friends here refer to it as the Dirty Monkey Fountain.

Although McDonald’s has invaded, there are rules (at least here) on how large the “Golden Arches” can be.

We ate lunch at an ancient restaurant. In fact, they recently excavated the basement. In doing so, they came across a huge number of priceless Roman artifacts. They have them on display in the restaurant. Included is this cookbook (although I don’t think it was actually excavated). Supposedly, this is the oldest printed cookbook in existence (printed, not written). It was printed in 1498 on a Guttenberg printing press and contains Roman recipes that are 2,000 years old! Also, every week, the restaurant cooks dishes made from recipes in here.

This relief was excavated.

Next, we visited a couple cathedrals.






Another interesting fact about Trier was that it was the seat of the Roman Emperor for a while. If you recall your European history, Constantine (who coincidentally made Christianity the state religion of Rome), was born and grew up here. This is an image of the building that was his throne room.

While the inside was completely gutted during the Middle Ages (nearly a whole village lived inside for a while), it’s now used as a protestant church.



That finished our tour of the historic city of Trier. We loved getting to visit someplace so fascinating and now, so close! It’s a taste of what’s to come for the next few years and we are excited!!
Until the next adventure…
–Jim