Market & Town Hall @museum.de

Geese, ducks and chickens were still running around loose in the Dornburg market square just over a century ago. The evidence is right there in old photographs.

Back then, the market looked very different. A large part of the open space was taken up by a long fire pond – a body of water that could be used for firefighting. On the higher ground to the east, a war memorial looked out over the area.

The Dornburg market only took on its current form when it was redesigned following an archaeological dig in 2011 and 2012 – though the new layout is based on what the market may have looked like in the early modern period. Today, the entire group of houses overlooking the square is protected as a site of historical interest.

Dornburg was first described as a “town” in 1343, when it was granted the right to hold a market. That meant there could now be regular weekly markets and cattle markets, adding to the little town's appeal. On the 9th of July 1717, a major fire destroyed large parts of Dornburg. During the years that followed the fire, the church of St. James on the other side of the square was rebuilt, and the houses that now surround the market square were erected along with the town hall.

The Town Hall, with its slate-clad clock tower, housed the local authority until 2008, when Dornburg merged with neighbouring Camburg. Above the main entrance, you can see Dornburg’s coat of arms, which features a mendicant friar above a band of waves.

It’s a reference to the name of the town’s church: the church of Saint James. In the 10th century, the Apostle James was popular in Dornburg. There’s mention of a palace chapel dedicated to St. James as early as 971, during the Ottonian period. To this day, St. James is venerated in Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, and there’s an extensive network of pilgrimage routes that leads there. Who knows, perhaps some of those pilgrims actually set out from Dornburg.