Qualla: Upper Market Square (Görlitz)

Upper Market Square (Görlitz): Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Südstädter, CC BY-SA 3.0. On May Day 1946 up to ten thousand people filled the Obermarkt under a canopy of red flags, carrying banners that read Nie wieder Krieg - never again war. People standing close enough noticed that the flags were not new. Each one carried a darker circle at its centre, where a white disc and the swastika inside it had been removed. Görlitz had not made new flags. It had taken the old ones down from the attics, unpicked the middle, and hung them back up. Improvisation of that kind is more or less what this square has done since 1250, the year it was laid out along with the Lower Market at the far end of Brüderstraße. It is the largest open space in the old town, and almost every version of Germany has stood on these cobbles and addressed a crowd.

Image: Südstädter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Upper Market Square (Görlitz): Seven Hundred and Fifty-Four Carts

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (User:Alma), CC BY-SA 3.0. For most of its life the square did a plain job: it sold grain. A salt house stood in the middle of it from about 1407, and in 1535 it was converted into a cloth hall and dance floor, since until then only the town hall had anywhere for the better sort to dance. Grain came in fro...

Image: (User:Alma) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Upper Market Square (Görlitz): The Monk, the Defier and the Tower

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three buildings anchor the western end, and each has collected a nickname. The Dreifaltigkeitskirche began as a Franciscan monastery church, consecrated on 21 August 1245; its Gothic choir, built between 1371 and 1381, is the oldest Gothic work in Görlitz, and the bell turret abo...

Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Upper Market Square (Görlitz): Whoever Was in Charge Spoke Here

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ErwinMeier, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 9 November 1918 a crowd gathered outside the Kaisertrutz, then the main guardhouse, broke the military prisoners out and ran a red flag up the roof; the duty officers could not stop them. A decade later Paul von Hindenburg was greeted from private windows with the black-white-...

Image: ErwinMeier | CC BY-SA 4.0

Upper Market Square (Görlitz): House Number Fifteen

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manecke, CC BY-SA 3.0. The square's Jewish shopkeepers were stripped of their businesses under the programme the regime called Aryanisation. Jakob Abramowitz lost his menswear shop at No. 11, Paul Kafka his shoe shop on the Steinstraße corner, the Meirowsky brothers their clothing store at No. 7. Artur...

Image: Manecke | CC BY-SA 3.0

Upper Market Square (Görlitz): Two Hundred and Forty-Five Tenants

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. After the war the square held more residents than at any point in its history. The 1949/50 address book lists 245 tenants in 32 houses, several families to a flat, thirty-four people in one building alone. Many were refugees from Silesia; many others had walked a few hundred metr...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain