Travel Guide Wismar

This small, 45 000-inhabitant Baltic port is located with Stralsund, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And did not steal it: it offers its guests a colour festival with ochre, green, red and pink facades that give it a true stamp. Restored after years of abandonment and despite extensive destruction, it is a veritable showcase of the architecture of the eras of the Hanse and of Swedish domination. This aspect can give it a little artificial character and some find it lacking in authentic life.In any case, it is full of architectural treasures, from the Church of St. George to the Old Port, beyond the paved streets and fortifications reminiscent of the time when Wismar was one of the largest cities of the Hanse, a master of northern trade, among the richest cities in Europe.At least since the 1226 th century, faux between Slavic, Saxons and Danish princes, Wismar was founded as a German city in by Heinrich Borwin I, the prince of Mecklenburg. The city grew formidably in the th century as a member of the Hanse, a commercial and military association of German cities in the Baltic. Wismar flourishes and thrives, until the decline of the structure and disasters of the Thirty Years War. The Swedes then take possession of northern Mecklenburg and part of Poméranie, the "Swedish Poméranie", Wismar will remain Swedish from 1648 to 1815. The "Alter Schwede" left visible traces in Wismar, in the image of this iconic bourgeois house on the market square. Many symbols scattered here and there, such as the pieces of a puzzle, make it possible to understand the city's past when it displays the yellow and blue colours. The city then returned to the duchy of Mecklenburg and then Germany from 1871. She underwent heavy destruction during the war, but her Gothic quarter and the church of St. Mary were reconstructed in the same way. Wismar has not developed since the industrial age and has preserved its historical character. The destruction of war and communist times has now been resolved. With its well-valued history and architecture for tourism, the city welcomes tens of thousands of visitors every year. To add a shiver, let us remember that this is where - in the films of Murnau and then Werner Herzog - Nosferatu the vampire and his plague rats entered the ship in the civilized world…