Quedlinburg

A settlement existed by the River Bode by the early 9th century, and Quedlinburg is first recorded as a town in 922, in a donation by King Henry the Fowler. Legend holds that Henry was offered the German crown here in 919, which earned the town the name "cradle of the German Reich". He was buried on the castle hill in 936, and his widow, Saint Matilda, founded a community of noblewomen there to pray for his memory; their granddaughter, another Matilda, became the first abbess. The Ottonian rulers kept a palace in the valley below the hill and held court here at Easter; in 973 Otto the Great received dukes from Poland and Bohemia and envoys from as far as Byzantium. In 994 Otto III granted market, toll and coinage rights.

The abbesses ruled Quedlinburg for more than eight centuries without taking the veil, and they were free to marry. The town joined the Hanseatic League in 1426, but in 1477 Abbess Hedwig, with the help of her Saxon brothers, crushed its bid for independence and forced it out of the league. Town and abbey became Lutheran in 1539, Saxony sold its rights to Brandenburg in 1697, and in 1802 the abbey was dissolved and Quedlinburg passed to Prussia.

In the 19th century the town grew rich on plant breeding and seed growing: before the First World War some 60 per cent of the world's flower seed came from its firms, and it was known as the flower town. The Nazis turned Henry I into a cult figure, and in 1945 an American soldier stole the church treasury, which only came back in 1993. Under East Germany much of the old town decayed, but it survived; the town lost a fifth of its population after 1990, and in 1994 the castle, church and old town became a World Heritage Site.

Quedlinburg's identity is its age. Since 2006 the town has called itself the "cradle of Germany", and the Romanesque churches of St Servatius, St Wiperti and St Mary on the Münzenberg are its stations on the Romanesque Road, a tourist route through Saxony-Anhalt. Beneath the castle hill the half-timbered houses span at least five centuries, from one of the oldest in Germany in the 14th century to Jugendstil villas built on seed-trade money around the edges of the old town.

The town has produced more than its share of notable people: the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, born here in 1724; Dorothea Erxleben, the first woman doctor of medicine in Germany; and Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, known as the father of German gymnastics. Lyonel Feininger's works are kept here thanks to Hermann Klumpp, a local Bauhaus student who saved them from the Nazis. Theodor Fontane set part of his novel Cécile in Quedlinburg and Thale.

The calendar is built around visitors and the church year: the Kaiserfrühling medieval spectacle at Easter and Whitsun, weekly summer concerts in the collegiate church, a heritage day when more than 70 normally closed monuments open and a flower fair is held in the Neustadt, and above all Advent in den Höfen, when private courtyards open across the old town. The Nordharzer Städtebundtheater plays in Quedlinburg and Halberstadt.

More than 24,000 people live in Quedlinburg, including Gernrode and Bad Suderode, which were incorporated in 2014. The population peaked at about 35,500 in 1950; after 1990 high unemployment and moving away cost the town a fifth of its residents, and by the end of 2024 almost a third of its people were over 65.

The seed firms, nationalised after 1945 and run by the state in East Germany, when Quedlinburg was called the seed capital of the Eastern bloc, were privatised or closed after 1990, but seed growing remains the town's agricultural speciality. Industry centres on construction firms that specialise in restoring old buildings, along with woodworking, metalworking, pharmaceuticals and printing, and services are dominated by tourism, with overnight stays peaking at Easter, from May to July, in September and October and in Advent.

The town was the seat of its own district until 2007. In autumn 1989 few towns of its size saw such large demonstrations, and after xenophobic attacks in the Neustadt in 1992 residents set up a prevention project, the Altstadtprojekt, that is still active.

Quedlinburg eats the cooking of the Harz and Saxony-Anhalt, served in the restaurants and cafés of half-timbered houses around the Markt, the Finkenherd and the lanes in between. Menus range from traditional German cooking to international cuisine. Local producers are known for pure rapeseed honey and other bee products, mustards and fine brandies distilled from regional fruit.

The mountains behind the town give their name to Harzer, a sour-milk cheese made from low-fat curd that originated in the Harz region. It is small and round or shaped into cylinders, usually flavoured with caraway, with white-mould and red-mould varieties, and has a distinctive strong smell and flavour; it is low in fat and rich in protein, and is usually eaten with bread.

The only beer still brewed in the town is Pubarschknall, from the Lüdde brewery, whose brewhouse also serves as a restaurant and bar. During Advent the courtyards open for food stalls and mulled wine.