Quedlinburg, Germany: UNESCO half-timbered town and cradle of the German kingdom

In the year 919, at the foot of the castle hill in Quedlinburg, the Saxon duke Henry the Fowler is said to have been offered the German crown, founding the Ottonian dynasty and with it the first German kingdom. That deep imperial past, on the north-eastern edge of the Harz mountains in Saxony-Anhalt, gives this town of some 28,000 people a weight far beyond its size.

What visitors remember, though, is the timber. Quedlinburg counts around 2,000 half-timbered houses spread over roughly 80 hectares, spanning eight centuries of carpentry from the Gothic period to Art Nouveau - one of the largest preserved historic centres in Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994.

Where royalty was crowned and buried

Henry I died in 936 and was laid to rest on the castle hill, where his widow Mathilde founded a women's abbey for daughters of the high nobility. The Romanesque Collegiate Church of St. Servatius that crowns the sandstone cliff ranks among the masterpieces of the style, and its treasury preserves a celebrated collection of medieval goldwork and manuscripts. Beside it stands a Renaissance castle, now a museum, and below in the town the market square holds the town hall and a stone Roland figure, the medieval emblem of civic freedom.

A picture book of timber framing

Many of the most ornate facades date from a building boom between roughly 1620 and 1720, when the town recovered after the Thirty Years' War. Winding lanes connect quieter corners and the small Romanesque church of St. Wiperti, more than a thousand years old. Quedlinburg sits about 50 kilometres south-west of Magdeburg and lies close to the narrow-gauge Harz steam railway network; its Advent tradition of opening private courtyards, "Advent in den Höfen", fills the timber streets each December.