Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom)
The grand domed Protestant cathedral that rises over the Lustgarten, built in 1905 as a Hohenzollern court church. Beneath its soaring dome lie a royal crypt of nearly a hundred coffins and a viewing gallery looking out across the city's rooftops.
About this place
Completed in 1905 on the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Berliner Dom was conceived as a Protestant answer to St. Peter's in Rome, a statement of imperial confidence carved in High-Renaissance and Baroque-Revival stone. Architect Julius Raschdorff piled dome upon dome and crowned the whole with a copper cupola, while inside the great Sauer organ with its 7,269 pipes and a marble pulpit set the scene for Hohenzollern weddings, baptisms and funerals. The basement holds the Hohenzollern crypt, one of Europe's most important dynastic tombs, with around 94 coffins and sarcophagi of Prussian royalty spanning three centuries. The cathedral was gutted in the war when a bomb pierced the dome in 1944, and the East German state long debated tearing it down before reconstruction finally began in the 1970s and the building reopened in 1993. Today you can climb to the dome gallery for one of the finest panoramas in Berlin.
Key facts
- 1905 year — The present cathedral was inaugurated on 27 February under Kaiser Wilhelm II
- 94 coffins — Members of the House of Hohenzollern rest in the crypt below
- 267 steps — Lead up to the dome gallery and its panorama over central Berlin
📍 Am Lustgarten, 10178, Berlin