What is a 13th century road doing under the Berlin asphalt?

The grain of the wood is still visible on the boards lined up in the gaping hole. On a strip of 50 meters, the bowels of Berlin reveal a perfectly preserved medieval path.

A road that leads to the origins of the city

Before the eyes of passers-by, 700 years of history are revealed under Stralauer Straße. The road under the road, composed of simple wooden planks, contrasts with the modernity of the neighboring Fernsehturm. Through this piece of history of 50 meters, it is the creation of the city which appears.

60,000 BC, present-day Germany is encased in ice. The Vistulian glaciation, the last in Europe, advanced its glaciers to the northeast of the country. However, man has already left his first traces there, found several thousand years later by archaeologists. Thus, cut flints and various bone tools attest to the human presence at that time, around the area in which Berlin is located.

The ice cliffs then withdrew around 18,000 BC, opening up a wide valley, that of Warsaw-Berlin. In its slow retreat, the ice left behind a landscape of rocky debris through which a river gradually made its way. For the first time, the Spree crosses these plains which have today become the banks of a metropolis. The watercourse, full of resources, then pushes the first populations of hunter-fishermen to settle in the 9th millennium BC.

Later, during the 6th century BC, Germanic tribes became more numerous in the region. However, a radical change in the climate in the 4th century forced them to flee, abandoning their sites and their villages. Two centuries later, the first Slavic tribes seized abandoned places to settle in the surroundings of present-day Berlin.

This Slavic advance was however stemmed in 1157, when the German prince Albrecht the Bear inflicted a crushing defeat on the Slavic prince Jaxa of Copnic. From this victory was born the march of Brandenburg, a state of the Holy Germanic Empire which is actively organizing a colonization policy. The Slavic peoples are thus assimilated for the most part, by language as well as by religion.

Several villages are thus born between the plateaus of Teltow and Barnim. The soil of the region nevertheless remains unstable, due to its turbulent geological past. The Ice Age has left a marshy terrain that is difficult to navigate. The settled populations still manage to bring out of the ground neighborhoods whose names are not unknown to Berliners in 2022. Between 1197 and 1244 the neighborhoods of Spandau, Köpenick, Cölln and Berlin are thus mentioned, although their existence is surely anterior.

Berlin then merged with Cölln and continued to grow over the years and centuries to become the German capital that we know today. It is shaped by a complex and rich history to be discovered in more detail in the BerlinZEIT exhibition to be discovered at the Märkisches Museum.

A witness to history soon to be destroyed?

This road, which would have been built in the 13th century, was therefore used to move on a humid terrain made unstable by millennia of geological phenomena. This witness to the history of those who could be called the first Berliners has therefore resurfaced to provide some additional keys to understanding the period.

6 meters wide, the wooden planks come to the surface after more than 700 years buried. The geology, cause of the construction of the road is also the cause of its extraordinary preservation. A thick layer of peat – a fossil plant material that comes from damp places – has in fact protected the work from the onslaught of time.

Unearthed for the installation of gas pipes and power lines, this medieval road, preserved at a depth of 2.50 meters, could be destroyed. Modern works do not wait for the constructions of yesterday and the wooden planks will therefore be sawn for the most part and destroyed. The museums represent the only chance for this road to be exposed to the public in the long term, but they still have to be interested.

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