Wander & Wonder Travel Newsletter

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Görlitz is the most eastern town at the very edge of Germany – a few meters further east and you’re in Poland.

Almost nobody outside Germany has heard of it, and yet it has more than 4,000 protected historic buildings - Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque, standing side by side in the same streets.

The reason is simple: it was never bombed.

Görlitz came through both world wars almost untouched.

So the whole town is still here.

And this week, the old town holds a three-day street festival.

It happens every summer, and it is always opened by two mayors shaking hands in the middle of the bridge – one on the German side, the other on the Polish side.

Read on to learn about:

🎬 The town that plays every other city in the movies

💶 The stranger who paid to rebuild it

⛪ The man who built Jerusalem in his back garden

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Destination of the Week

In 1945 the map of Europe was redrawn, and the new border ran straight through the town.

Everything west of the river stayed German. 

Everything east of it became Polish.

Today you can walk over the Old Town Bridge with a coffee in your hand and there is nothing there - no barrier, no passport, no guard.

In Görlitz, your exploration should start on the Untermarkt, the lower market square, which is one of the most complete medieval squares in Europe.

See if you can find the Whispering Arch – and whisper some secrets to your friends.

Don't Miss

As nothing was ever really destroyed in Görlitz, film crews love the city.

Around 100 films have been shot in Görlitz.

It has played New York, Paris, Berlin, and 1930s Budapest - often in the same year.

Locals call the place Görliwood.

The big one is the Görlitzer Warenhaus.

It is an Art Nouveau department store from 1913, with a huge glass-roofed hall and a grand staircase. 

The shop closed in 2009 and the building was heading for demolition.

Then Wes Anderson turned up and used it as the lobby of The Grand Budapest Hotel.

It’s usually empty, and it opens for guided tours only, so book ahead - but standing in that hall is the closest you will get to walking into the film.

Did You Know?

In 1995, the town of Görlitz received a bank transfer for one million German marks.

There was no name on it. Only an instruction: spend it on restoring the old town.

The following year, the same amount arrived again.

And the year after that.

It kept coming every single year for 21 years, and the money paid for the restoration of 1,572 buildings – it’s the reason the town looks the way it does.

And nobody knows who sent it.

The lawyer handling the transfers gave them a simple answer: if the name ever comes out, the money stops immediately.

Look closely at the restored houses and you will find small steel plaques on the walls.

That is how Görlitz says thank you to someone it has never met.

The Trendy Traveler Tip

In a quiet garden, there is a small copy of Jerusalem - the Holy Sepulchre.

In the 1460s, a young man from Görlitz got the neighbour’s daughter pregnant and refused to marry her.

The whole town talked, and his family name suffered.

So in 1465 he did what rich men did back then: he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to have his sins washed off.

And it worked.

He came home, married well, took over as mayor and became the richest merchant in town.

And then he built a scale copy of the holy sites of Jerusalem outside his own city - the tomb, the chapels, even a little stream standing in for the brook of Kidron.

Here is the twist: the original in Jerusalem was rebuilt and then badly damaged in a fire in 1808.

Which means this quiet German garden now holds the best surviving record of what the real one looked like.