Qualla: Templin

Templin: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doris Antony, Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1735 Templin burned down in under four hours. When the smoke cleared, almost nothing was left inside the fortifications - a chapel, a few houses - but the fortifications themselves stood untouched, along with all three gates and the powder tower. That accident of fire is why Templin still has one of the most complete medieval town walls in northern Germany: 1,735 metres of fieldstone, up to seven metres high, with fifty of the original fifty-four wall houses surviving. The length in metres happens to match the year the town inside it burned. What you walk through today is an eighteenth-century town on deliberately widened streets, wrapped in a fourteenth-century ring.

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Image: Doris Antony, Berlin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Templin: The Ring and the Gates

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Molgreen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The wall took roughly a century to build, from about 1300 to about 1400, and it was built the way everything in the Uckermark was built - out of the granite boulders the ice age left lying in the fields, split and stacked. Three gate towers still carry traffic: the Berliner Tor, ...

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Image: Molgreen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Templin: Treaty Town

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dguendel, CC BY 4.0. Templin first appears in writing in 1270, as Templyn, in a deed of the Bishop of Brandenburg, and it was being called a town by 1314 under Margrave Waldemar. Three years later it gave its name to a peace. The Treaty of Templin, concluded on 25 November 1317, ended the long and ex...

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Image: Dguendel | CC BY 4.0

Templin: The Soldier Buried at St George's

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Global Fish, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the spring of 1813, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Friedland enlisted in the Prussian 9th Infantry Regiment under the name August Luebeck. Friederike Krueger fought at Grossbeeren that August and at Dennewitz on 6 September, where shrapnel tore into her and she was promote...

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Image: Global Fish | CC BY-SA 3.0

Templin: The Pastor's Daughter

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis C. Krüger / Jan - Peter Wagner, CC BY-SA 3.0. Horst Kasner, a Protestant pastor who had already left Hamburg for East Germany in 1954, moved his family to Templin in 1957 to run a pastoral college at the Waldhof, on the edge of town. His daughter Angela, then three, grew up here, went to school here, and left for Leipzig to ...

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Image: Dennis C. Krüger / Jan - Peter Wagner | CC BY-SA 3.0

Templin: Brine, Pines and a Soviet Runway

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doris Antony, Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Templin covers 379 square kilometres, which makes it the second-largest town in Brandenburg by area and one of the largest in Germany, and about 15,500 people live in it. The arithmetic of that is mostly forest and water: lakes left by the ice, pine and beech running south into t...

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Image: Doris Antony, Berlin | CC BY-SA 4.0