About this place
Standing on the eastern edge of the Alter Markt, the Altes Rathaus is the ceremonial heart of Magdeburg, a city that shaped municipal law across medieval Europe. Citizens first turned a merchants' hall here into a town hall around 1244, an early and defiant statement of self government. Fire, war, and the catastrophic sack of 1631 repeatedly reduced the building to ruins, yet each time it rose again. The present structure, completed in 1698 with a Dutch influenced Baroque design, was itself gutted during the Second World War and painstakingly rebuilt in the 1950s. Only the vaulted Gothic Ratskeller in the cellar, now a restaurant, survives from the medieval original, a quiet link to the merchants and councillors who once bargained and ruled beneath these very stones.
Key facts
- 1698 year — The present Baroque town hall was completed after Tilly's army razed its medieval predecessor
- 1240 circa — The Magdeburg Rider before it is the first freestanding equestrian monument north of the Alps
- 30 years — Otto von Guericke governed from this town hall as mayor from 1646 to 1676
📍 Alter Markt 6, 39104, Magdeburg