Thuringia Travel Guide

Contents
1. Introduction 2. History 3. Tourist Map 4. Places to Visit

Aerial view of Weimar's City Palace.

Introduction

With a land area of 16,172 km² and 2.2 million inhabitants, Thuringia (Thüringen in German) is the smallest and second least populous state of former East Germany. Its capital is Erfurt.

The state's most famous city is undeniably Weimar. Capital of Germany between 1919 and 1933, it was the place where the nation's first democratic constitution was signed after WWI. From 1772 to 1805, a cultural and literary movement known as Weimar Classicism attempted to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical and Enlightenment ideas, with writers Goethe and Schiller as their most famous representatives. Weimar was also the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement, founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, with artists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lyonel Feininger teaching in Weimar's Bauhaus School.

With the Hainich National Park and the Thuringian Forest taking up most of the west and south of the state, Thuringia has earned the nickname of 'green heart of Germany'. The country's most famous hiking trail, the Rennsteig, runs through the Thuringian Forest and Thuringian Highland, and marks the traditional boundary between the medieval Duchy of Franconia with the Landgraviate of Thuringia.

The winter sports centre and health resort of Oberhof has held many European and World Luge Championships. Germany has won more Winter Olympics gold medals than any other country in the last 20 years, and half of Germany's gold medals have been won by Thuringian athletes.

The illustrious royal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to which belongs the British and Belgian royal families, and the former royal families of Portugal and Bulgaria, originated in the so-called Saxon duchies of Thuringia. With the division of the House of Wettin in 1485, Thuringia went to the senior Ernestine branch of the family, which subsequently subdivided the area into a number of smaller states, according to the Saxon tradition of dividing inheritance amongst male heirs. Among them were the states of Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Jena, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg, and Saxe-Gotha, named after the Thuringian towns in which each was based. Note that Coburg, now in Bavaria, was a Thuringian town until 1920.

History of Thuringia

Early Origins and Medieval Development

Thuringia's history stretches back to ancient times, with the region taking its name from the Thuringii, a Germanic tribe that occupied the area around 300 CE. The Germanic Thuringians first appeared after approximately 350 AD and were conquered by the Huns in the second quarter of the 5th century. By 500 CE, they had established a large kingdom stretching from the Harz mountains to the Danube. This expansive realm came to an abrupt end in 531 AD when their king, Irminfrid, was defeated at Burgscheidungen on the Unstrut River by the Frankish kings Theodoric I and Chlotar I, reducing their territory to the Harz mountains and Thuringian Forest region under Frankish rule. The Frankish Duchy of Thuringia was formally established around 631 AD by King Dagobert I. During the early 8th century, the duchy was divided into countships to reassert royal authority, and St. Boniface converted the Thuringians to Christianity. In 908, the Thuringian March, a frontier district established by Charlemagne against the Slavs, was seized by Otto, duke of Saxony, whose son Henry I later halted a Magyar invasion at Riade in 933.

The Wettin Dynasty and Religious Transformation

Thuringia became a landgraviate in 1130 CE when the grandson of Louis the Bearded of the Ludowing family was made landgrave by King Lothar II. After the extinction of the reigning Ludowingian line in 1247 and the subsequent War of the Thuringian Succession (1247-1264), the western half broke away to become independent Hesse. Most of the remaining territory came under the rule of the Wettin dynasty through Henry III (the Illustrious), margrave of Meissen, who invested his son Albert with Thuringia in 1265. The Wettins would control Thuringia for centuries, and with the division of the house of Wettin in 1485, the region went to the senior Ernestine branch, which subdivided it into numerous smaller states known as the "Saxon duchies," including Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Jena, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg, and Saxe-Gotha. Thuringia embraced the Protestant Reformation, with Roman Catholicism being suppressed as early as 1520. Churches and monasteries were largely destroyed, particularly during the German Peasants' War of 1525, and Catholic priests were driven away. The Catholic faith only survived in the Eichsfeld district, ruled by the Archbishop of Mainz, and to a small degree in Erfurt.

Modern State Formation and 20th Century Upheavals

The modern state of Thuringia was established in 1920 during the Weimar Republic through the merger of seven Thuringian free states: Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Gotha, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, and the People's State of Reuss. Weimar became the capital of this newly unified state, which covered 11,763 square kilometres. However, the borders remained complex, with Erfurt still attached to the Prussian province of Saxony and various enclaves scattered throughout the region. After World War II, Thuringia fell under Soviet occupation and became part of East Germany, with rationalised frontiers and Erfurt as the new capital. In 1952, the East German government dissolved the state system, dividing Thuringia between the districts (Bezirke) of Erfurt, Suhl, Gera, Halle, and Leipzig. The state was formally dissolved in December 1958. Following German reunification, Thuringia was reconstituted as a federal state in 1990 with boundaries similar to its post-World War II predecessor, formed from the former East German districts of Suhl, Erfurt, and Gera, plus small parts of the Leipzig and Halle districts.