UNESCO World Heritage Site Hanseatic City of Lübeck

Take a walk through “Große Petersgrube” and you will see all the architectural styles of Lübeck’s history. The cobbled street leading up from Obertrave to St. Peter’s is first mentioned in documents in 1285. It is the only completely preserved street in Lübeck. Today you can find a kaleidoscope of architectural diversity here with façades in Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and Classical style. The oldest house, number 13 – a former bakery – originates from the 14th century. There is a simple reason for this diversity. Not all residents of Lübeck could afford to change the architectural style of their façades to fit in with the latest trend over the course of centuries. Today, behind the façades of 22 listed houses, Große Petersgrube plays host to the renowned Lübeck University of Music, founded as a “music conservatory” in 1911 on the private initiative of a Lübeck music teacher and where today around 500 young students from around the world study the art of music-making, composing and conducting. Incidentally, Große Petersgrube became a movie star in 2008 when it featured as one of the outside locations where the new version of “Buddenbrooks” was shot, directed by Heinrich Breloer. Truly something to be seen!

The oldest chemist’s in Lübeck is Löwen-Apotheke which was founded in 1812 and is located in one of the oldest burgher houses in the Old Town. This partially Roman structure goes back to the time before the major fires of the 13th century. The wife of Emperor Charles IV resided in this building in 1375 when the imperial couple visited Lübeck. Visitors today are charmed by the whiff of alchemy in the chemist’s in which remedies are still mixed using centuries-old formulae. Take a look inside!

While performing excavation work on the site of today’s Academy of Music in 1984, digger driver Jürgen Köpsel found a unique collection of coins from the 16th century. The roughly 24,000 gold and silver coins had been hidden in the ground for more than 450 years. This major Lübeck coin hoard is like a snapshot from the business life of a merchant or shopkeeper. His change till holding the proceeds of the previous months contained coins which had been minted in around 84 different European mints. They illustrate the regions of the world which were already trading with Lübeck around 1530. The value of the collection was EUR 1.8 million (converted). The digger driver was rewarded with DM 250,000 for his find.

In the Middle Ages, the smallest room in the house was a cesspit in the rear courtyards. Here people sat on a wooden frame above a deep shaft and attended to their urgent business – sometimes socially in pairs, it seems, as a double seat with two holes was recently found during archaeological excavations in the founding district. It sounds curious but the stinking pit latrines of yesteryear – the best preserved in Northern Europe, by the way – are today real treasures for archaeologists as in these historical waste pits, they often discover valuable finds from long forgotten times which need to be preserved as part of the UNESCO World Heritage.

They ensure the preservation of the five famous Old Town churches: the craftsmen of Lübeck’s church construction workshop (Kirchenbauhütte), also known as the “keepers of the seven spires”. All important masonry and carpentry work at Lübeck’s Cathedral, St. Mary’s, St. Peter’s, St. Jacob’s and St. Giles’ are carried out by the church construction workshop. In doing so, it continues the centuries-old tradition of construction workshops from the times of the large, medieval cathedral construction sites. Concentrated architectural and craft knowledge was combined in one place for the first time. A successful concept that needs to be preserved. The UNESCO shares this opinion and declared Lübeck’s church construction workshop “intangible cultural heritage of mankind”. 

A total of 17 documents on the history of the Hanseatic League are now part of the international register of UNESCO's Memory of the World programme.

This is the result of an application submitted by the Hanseatic City of Lübeck in 2017, with the support of the German Commission for UNESCO in Bonn, and submitted to UNESCO in Paris in November 2021. In addition to the archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck, the state and city archives of Braunschweig, Bremen, Hamburg, Cologne and Stralsund as well as partner institutions in Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia and Poland participated in this joint application.

Unique documents and records will now be inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List: trade privileges and alliance treaties, minutes of Hanseatic meetings, customs lists from Hanseatic towns, merchants' letters from Hanseatic merchants and documents relating to the Hanseatic Kontors on the territory of present-day Europe. They illustrate the nature and history of the Hanseatic League, which shaped the history of northern Europe for over 600 years.