***Note: As it wasn’t permitted to use photography within the museum, I took quite a few photos Hamburg and I will present them here so you can get an understanding of how the city looked.****

For my second museum journal I will talk about the Hamburg history museum. The extensiveness and shear length of the self guided tour was quite long. I spent over five hours inside of the museum learning all that I can about Hamburg’s history. Beginning shortly before the middle ages Hamburg was a very small city back then. In fact, it wasn’t even until the boom of the shipping industry , using Hamburg as a port, that really accelerated it’s growth. The city was small even during the Reformation period.

View from the top of the Michaelkirshe [ St. Michael’s Church]

However, shortly after the Reformation Hamburg began to be attacked by pirates from their port side. Hamburg recognized this and began to build up their defenses along their sea-side coast. I find this really fascinating as the actions of the plunderers caused a major change in the city. Once the city recognized its great shipping potential it began to suddenly flourish. This is what made Hamburg extremely wealthy, and placed them on the map! Due to trade laws that were established between countries, for a while, most of Europe’s imported goods would be traveling through Hamburg.

Hamburger Rathaus [ Hamburg’s town hall]

Another remarkable memory from the visit to the museum was the talk of Hamburg’s churches. Hamburg has several large churches, among them the Michealskirche, each created its own militia to protect the church. It appeared that during those times a family would “belong” to a church. This means the family would attend that church, make decisions in their community with the church community and be protected by their militia.

Inside the Michaelkirshe [ St. Michael’s Church]

This really speaks to how much of an influence that religion had in shaping Europe, as is evident by the thousands of churches which are scattered across each country. Hamburg was truly an incredible city and just being able to walk once through that museum gave me deeper understanding of European culture and change.

On a semi unrelated note I found some Swans swimming around the Rathausplatz: