Story
The story of Brandenburg Gate
For almost three decades, the Berlin Wall blocked this gateway, turning it into a marker of a divided city. The Brandenburg Gate was built from 1788 to 1791 by order of King Frederick William II of Prussia, to designs by the royal architect Carl Gotthard Langhans, on the site of an older city gate where the road to Brandenburg an der Havel began.
Its model was the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis of Athens. Count the twelve fluted Doric columns, six on each side, forming five passageways; ordinary citizens were originally allowed to use only the outer ones.
Look up at the bronze quadriga by the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, and find the reliefs of the Labours of Hercules between the columns. The Wall fell in 1989, and since German reunification in 1990 the gate has stood as a symbol of European unity and peace.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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