Pergamon Museum Berlin

The Pergamon Museum (Pergamonmuseum) occupies a monumental neoclassical building on Museum Island (Museumsinsel) in the historic centre of Berlin, completed in 1930 to house oversized architectural antiquities that could not be accommodated in the city's existing museums. The collection's founding piece is the Pergamon Altar, a massive Hellenistic structure from the ancient city of Pergamon in what is now western Turkey, excavated under Carl Humann in the 1870s and reassembled in Berlin. The altar dates from approximately 180–160 BCE and is celebrated for its Gigantomachy frieze, a continuous sculptural band 113 metres long depicting the battle of Olympian gods and earth-born giants, considered one of the finest surviving works of ancient monumental sculpture. The Market Gate of Miletus, a Roman civic structure from around 120 CE, was reassembled in the museum's main hall after excavation in southwestern Turkey and subsequent earthquake damage in 1895. The Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built under Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BCE and reconstructed from excavated glazed brick fragments, dominates the Near Eastern Antiquities section with its deep cobalt-blue and gold animal reliefs of lions, bulls, and dragons. The Pergamon Museum entered a major structural renovation in 2023 that is expected to continue until approximately 2037; during this renovation the Pergamon Altar hall is inaccessible, but the Ishtar Gate and the reconstructed Processional Way of Babylon remain on view in the Vorderasiatisches Museum wing, which continues to operate. Museum Island itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Pergamon is one of five world-class museums clustered on the island, all connected by an archaeological promenade.