Moments from Pergamon Museum

The Pergamon holds some of the most staggering feats of archaeological reconstruction anywhere, entire ancient monuments, the Pergamon Altar itself, the brilliant blue glazed-brick Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the Market Gate of Miletus, rebuilt at full scale inside its galleries rather than represented by fragments or models. That scale of ambition has a cost: the building closed its north wing, including the Pergamon Altar, back in 2014 for structural repairs, and in 2023 the museum closed entirely for a sweeping renovation currently scheduled to keep it shut until June 2027.

If you're planning a Berlin trip before then, the Pergamon itself will not be open, so check the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin's current information for which pieces, the Ishtar Gate and Market Gate among them, have been relocated or made viewable elsewhere on Museum Island during the closure, some major elements have been kept accessible through temporary arrangements even while the main building work continues. It's a useful case study, when it does reopen, in just how enormous and slow-moving the conservation of monumental ancient architecture actually is, this is not a museum that can simply patch a wall and reopen the following season.