Brandenburg Gate

Brandenburg Gate (German, Brandenburger Tor), an 18th-century city gateway in the historic centre of the German capital, Berlin.

The Brandenburg Gate, named after the province in which Berlin stands, was built between 1788 and 1791 to a Neo-Classical design by the architect Carl Gotthard von Langhans, who modelled it on the Propylaea, the ceremonial entrance to the Acropolis in Athens. The sculptor Gottfried Schadow decorated it with a number of reliefs and with the Quadriga, a statue of Victory as a winged woman driving a chariot drawn by four horses, which was placed on its flat top in 1794.

Standing on Pariser Platz at the western end of the avenue Unter den Linden, and therefore near many public buildings and foreign embassies, the Brandenburg Gate was often a location for ceremonies, parades, and demonstrations, as well as for battles between soldiers and revolutionary fighters in 1848 and 1919. After World War II it stood just inside the Soviet-occupied sector of the city and was closed when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Following the collapse of the Communist regime in East Berlin in November 1989 it was reopened on December 22, only to be closed again during 1990 so that it could be cleaned and repaired for the celebrations of its bicentenary in 1991.