Notes

If you ever visit the medieval town of Goslar, Germany, there are many sights that you can find in leaflets and mentioned on city tours and the like, but also a few that are decidedly non-obvious, such as the parking deck of Karstadt, the largest store in the historic town centre. It’s not very interesting as parking decks go, but it offers a beautiful view of Goslar’s skyline and the Harz mountains, here looking the south-west.

The huge church is the market church (Marktkirche in german), one of the four remaining large churches in the old town. The fifth would have been the cathedral (you would have seen it in the background to the left here) which got torn down in the 19th century. It’s a parking lot today. The five formed a cross when seen from above, which was thought to mirror Jerusalem, showing the importance Goslar’s planners thought the town would have.

To the right and further in the back is the imperial palace (Kaiserpfalz), where the king/emperor of the Holy Roman Emperor of German Nation would reside when he, lacking a proper capital, made Goslar his seat of operations for a few months before moving on (because his large court would have drained all the town’s supplies). Both buildings date to the 11th century and are hence among the oldest buildings in the town at all. The market church, by the way, is about the place where a large fire in the 19th century stopped which destroyed many historic buildings in the east of Goslar. You can see that the buildings in the foreground are very geometric, straight and with right angles, which historic buildings generally aren’t. And hey, parking deck.

In the background, on the left, you can see the Rammels mountain (or possibly Rammel’s, while there are legends nobody truly knows where the german name Rammelsberg came from), which was mined for an ore that included copper, zinc, lead and others from 968 to 1988 and was the source of the town’s wealth in medieval times. It’s mine is now a museum. The red roof belongs to the Maltermeister Tower (Maltermeisterturm), once among the oldest mining facilities, now a restaurant that is a frequent goal for by senior’s residences’ excursions (but it still offers a nice panorama of the city).