Erfurt

Erfurt grew up beside a ford over the Gera and enters the record in 742, when Saint Boniface wrote to Pope Zachary that he had founded a diocese "in a place called Erphesfurt". For much of the Middle Ages the archbishops of Mainz were its overlords, but the town won a council in 1217, built a town hall in 1275 and prospered on the trade routes and above all on woad, the blue dye plant that made the Thuringian woad towns rich. By the 15th century it had some 20,000 people and was one of the largest cities in Germany. Its Jewish community, founded in the 11th century, was massacred and expelled during the Black Death persecutions of 1349; a second community was dissolved by the council in 1454.

The university, founded in 1379, became a centre of Renaissance humanism, and Martin Luther studied there from 1501 before entering the Augustinian monastery in 1505. Trade declined, Mainz built the Petersberg citadel from 1665 to control the city, and plague killed more than half the population in 1683. Erfurt passed to Prussia in 1802, became a principality under Napoleon from 1806 and hosted the Congress of Erfurt, where he met Tsar Alexander I, in 1808. Industry arrived with the railway in 1847, and the population grew to 130,000 by 1914.

The Nazis destroyed the new synagogue in 1938, and the local firm Topf and Sons supplied crematoria to concentration camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Under East Germany the old centre decayed while prefabricated estates rose on the edges, and in 1970 Willy Brandt and Willi Stoph met here in the first meeting of the two German heads of government. Since 1990 Erfurt has been the capital of Thuringia; the university was refounded in 1994, the old town restored, and in 2023 its medieval Jewish sites were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Erfurt's identity is built on its medieval inheritance. Luther's monastery is a working church and conference centre, and in the cathedral where he was ordained the Maria Gloriosa is always the first bell in Erfurt to ring, with every other church bell joining later. The Old Synagogue, the mikveh by the river and the Stone House, a house of about 1250 that had Jewish owners, became in 2023 the second Jewish heritage site in Germany on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and the New Synagogue of 1952 was the only one built in East Germany.

Bach's parents married in the Kaufmannskirche on the Anger, and the city keeps up a music and theatre scene larger than its size: the Theater Erfurt and the Erfurt Philharmonic, and every summer the DomStufen festival, which uses the cathedral steps as a stage. The Krämerbrückenfest in June is Thuringia's largest old-town festival, and the Christmas market on the Domplatz draws around two million visitors. The children's television channel KiKA is based here.

Sport has a long local history: the cycling track, opened in 1885, is the oldest velodrome still in use in the world, and the city has a sports boarding school for young talents in athletics, swimming, ice skating and football. Like the rest of eastern Germany, Erfurt is largely secular, and most people belong to no church.

About 217,000 people lived in Erfurt, the capital and largest city of Thuringia, in December 2025. The population fell after reunification to 200,000 in 2002 and has grown again since. Foreigners make up only a small share of residents, as in most cities of the former East Germany.

The capital's role sustains a large public sector, including the state parliament and ministries and the Federal Labour Court. Its central location on the motorway junction of the A4 and A71 has made it a hub of distribution centres, and the economy also rests on horticulture, microelectronics, the trade fair, the university, the university of applied sciences and the media, with KiKA and the MDR broadcaster.

Most people live outside the medieval core: in the Gründerzeit districts that ring it, among the villas of the south-west, in the large prefabricated estates built between 1970 and 1990 in the north and south-east, and in the many villages incorporated during the 20th century, which mostly keep a rural character. In 2024 the Christian Democrat Andreas Horn was elected mayor, succeeding the Social Democrat Andreas Bausewein, mayor since 2006.

Erfurt's best-known speciality is the Thüringer Rostbratwurst, a thin, spiced sausage some 15 to 20 centimetres long, grilled on the squares of the old town; a 1404 account entry from Arnstadt is the first known mention of the Thuringian bratwurst. Beside it stand Thuringian dumplings, made from a mixture of raw and boiled potatoes; potato dumplings of this kind are often filled with a crouton.

The city's long history as a market for the farmland of the Thuringian Basin shows in its horticulture, and the egapark keeps that tradition alive. Restaurants in the old town serve Thuringian home cooking in historic houses around the Fischmarkt, the Wenigemarkt and Michaelisstraße, while the Krämerbrücke's ground-floor shops sell local food specialities and wine.

Michaelisstraße and the lanes of the Latin Quarter are where students and residents go for beer and late evenings, and the Christmas market fills the Domplatz below the cathedral each Advent.