Bishop’s Tower

The Bishop’s Tower, or Bishop’s Castle, is an archaeological site in the historic city center of Hamburg, containing the oldest known remains of a stone building in the city. It includes the foundations of a circular tower and a well, originally believed to represent the 11th-century stone residence of Archbishop Adalbrand of Bremen. Later finds, however, disproved this theory and it is now considered to be part of a 12th-century defensive structure. The tower’s foundation is a stone circle of boulders with an outer diameter of 19 metres (62 ft) and an inner diameter of 11 metres (36 ft). The majority of these stones have a diameter of 1 metre (3.3 ft) or more. On the west side was a water well with a depth of 4 metres (13 ft), a diameter of 4.4 metres (14 ft), and was made of field stones roughly 50 centimetres (20 in) in diameter. A showroom was built for the tower’s foundations and other artifacts in early 1969 in the basement of the newly completed community center (and later commercial building). After demolition in 2008 for the construction of the St. Petri-Hof building, the showroom was redesigned as a branch of the Hamburg Archaeological Museum. It is now freely accessible to visitors through a commercial bakery on the ground floor, which has also set up a café amidst the tower’s foundations.