Beyond the Rococo terraces, Potsdam keeps a harder record: a Slavic village named in 993, a Bohemian weavers' quarter, a Stasi cell block and a bridge where agents were traded. Three days following that thread, from medieval brick to the Cold War.
Set in the Baroque Altes Rathaus and the adjoining Knobelsdorffhaus on the Alter Markt, the city museum traces Potsdam from its first written mention as the Slavic settlement Poztupimi in 993 through to 1989. Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00.
Schinkel's domed church of 1837 replaced a Gothic predecessor destroyed by fire in 1795. The square around it holds the 1753 Knobelsdorff obelisk and the rebuilt Altes Rathaus crowned by its gilded Atlas figure.
The Marstall is Potsdam's oldest surviving secular building: a 1685 orangery converted into royal stables by Knobelsdorff in 1746. It now houses the film museum documenting Babelsberg studio history from 1912. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
The village of Bornstedt was recorded in 1179; Persius and Stüler rebuilt its church in Italianate style for Frederick William IV in 1856. The walled cemetery holds the graves of Peter Joseph Lenné, Ludwig Persius and Emil Rathenau.
A Baroque townhouse used as a Nazi hereditary health court, then a Soviet and later Stasi remand prison until 1989. Cells, the exercise yard and interrogation rooms survive largely unaltered. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
Three agent exchanges crossed this 1907 steel bridge between 1962 and 1986, beginning with Francis Gary Powers and Rudolf Abel. A colour change in the roadway still marks where the GDR border ran across mid-span.
From 1945 to 1991 this 1916 parish house served as the remand prison of Soviet counter-intelligence, later the KGB, in the closed military town. Graffiti scratched into cell walls by prisoners is preserved. Tue–Sun 14:00–18:00.
Persius built this Italianate church on the Havel shore in 1844. From 1961 to 1989 it stood inside the border strip, its free-standing campanile used as a GDR watchtower while the nave was left to decay; restoration followed 1989.
Thirteen log houses laid out as a St Andrew's cross, built in 1826 by Frederick William III for Russian military singers stranded after the Napoleonic wars. UNESCO-listed; the museum occupies house no. 2 with its original interiors.
Raised in 1755 to a design personally approved by Frederick the Great, the Nauener Tor is the earliest neo-Gothic structure on the European mainland, its round towers lifted from English pattern books decades before the style spread.
Frederick the Great settled Bohemian Protestant weavers here from 1751. Around 180 single-storey weaver cottages survive on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße and around Weberplatz, framed by the Friedrichskirche of 1753.
Potsdam's Brandenburg Gate was built in 1770 to mark victory in the Seven Years' War, eighteen years before Berlin's. It carries two different façades: Gontard's on the city side, Unger's facing the road out west.