Tourist Attractions in Nordhausen

In the Markt of Nordhausen is the three-story Old Town Hall (1360; rebuilt in Late Renaissance style 1610; restored after 1945), with an arcade on the ground floor and a staircase tower topped by a double lantern.

On the west side is a figure of Roland (1717), a symbol of municipal authority since at least 1411, on the east side a memorial (by J. von Woyski) to the victims of air raids on the town in 1945.

Of Nordhausen's few surviving burghers' houses, the most interesting are a half-timbered house of 1500 at Barfüsserstrasse 6, one of the finest secular buildings in the town; the Finkenburg, a Gothic half-timbered building (c. 1550) on the Wassertreppe; and a half-timbered house of Lower Saxon type (c. 1550) at Domstrasse 12.

At Alexander-Puschkin-Strasse 31 in Nordhausen is the Meyenburg Museum (local finds of the prehistoric and early historical periods, results of research on the old town, furniture, porcelain, tomb brasses and coins; small ethnographic collection).

The parish church of St Blaise (15th c.) in Nordhausen, a Late Gothic hall-church with groined vaulting, has a Late Romanesque west work with two octagonal towers; fine pulpit of 1592.

The Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Nordhausen, founded by Queen Mathilde in 962 as the church of a nunnery which in 1220 was converted by the Emperor Frederick II into a house of secular canons, is a Gothic hall-church (14thC.) with reticulated vaulting (16th C.) and octagonal pillars. It has a finely furnished interior, with a Baroque high altar (1726), 14th and 15th C grave-slabs and a tabernacle of 1455.

Nordhausen has preserved considerable stretches of its old town walls, built from 1180 onwards and extended in the 14th and 15th centuries.