Marburg audiotours

Marburg survived the 18th century architecturally because it could not afford to modernize. While other German cities tore down their medieval quarters to build in the fashionable baroque and neoclassical styles, Marburg lacked the funds and stayed Gothic. The consequence is one of the most coherent medieval streetscapes in Germany: half-timbered houses stacked up the hill from the Lahn River to the Landgrave's castle at the top, with the Elisabethkirche, one of the first purely Gothic churches north of the Alps, anchoring the lower town.

Elizabeth of Hungary chose Marburg as her home in 1228 when she was widowed at 20, doing welfare work among the sick and poor on the slopes below the castle.

She died in 1231 and was canonized four years later; the pilgrimage church built in her memory became the Elisabethkirche, completed in the late 13th century. The Brothers Grimm studied at Marburg's university and collected their fairy tales in the surrounding countryside. The university itself, founded in 1527, is the oldest Protestant-founded university in continuous existence.