You are planning a trip to Berlin and you put the Pergamon Museum at the top of the list: the Ishtar Gate, the Pergamon Altar. Then you tried to buy a ticket and could not find a single one.
It is not your fault and the website is not broken: the Pergamon Museum is closed. It shut completely on 23 October 2023 and it will not reopen for years.
I know that is bad news, especially if you built the trip around that visit. The good news is that part of those collections can still be seen two hundred metres away, and that Museum Island has four other houses open that are worth the journey on their own.
Shall we go through exactly what is closed, what reopens and when?
Let’s go!
Read also: Visiting Berlin: what to see and Museum Island
When the Pergamon Museum reopens
The dates, since they are why you are here:
- Total closure: since 23 October 2023.
- Partial reopening of the north wing: scheduled for 4 June 2027. The Pergamon Altar, the Market Gate of Miletus, the Classical Antiquities collection and the redesigned Museum of Islamic Art will be visible again.
- South wing: not before roughly 2037, with some scenarios pushing it further out.
Yes, you read that correctly. The renovation is split into phases and the second one is enormous: it means rebuilding the foundations of a 1930s building put up on marshy ground, while holding up ancient monuments that weigh hundreds of tonnes and cannot be moved.
And the Ishtar Gate?
Here comes the part that stings most: the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way of Babylon are in the south wing. The Mshatta facade and the Aleppo Room stay shut with them. Which means that wall of blue brick with its lions and dragons, the image that made the Pergamon Museum famous worldwide, will not be visible before the 2030s.
If that was the reason for your trip, better to know now and rearrange.
What you can still see: the Panorama
The thing almost nobody knows, and the thing that saves the trip, is that part of the collection has moved into a temporary building directly opposite the closed museum.
It is called Pergamonmuseum. Das Panorama and it is built around a work by the artist Yadegar Asisi: a thirty-metre-high circular panorama reconstructing the city of Pergamon in the year AD 129. You step inside, the light shifts to simulate the passage from day to night, and you find yourself in the city as it would have been.
It is not only stagecraft, though. The same building displays eighty original sculptures from the Classical Antiquities collection, including most of the Telephos Frieze, which came from the Pergamon Altar itself.
Is it worth it?
If you go expecting the altar, no: the altar is not there. If you go knowing you will see a monumental reconstruction plus a core of originals, yes, and it is the only way you have until 2027 of getting close to that material.
Practical details for the Panorama (checked):
- Where: Kupfergraben 2, Berlin, opposite the Pergamon Museum
- Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 - 18.00, Thursdays until 20.00
- Ticket: 12 euros, concessions 6 euros, free under 18
The island’s other four museums are all open
This is the point that puts the trip back together. Museum Island is not the Pergamon Museum: it is a complex of five museums, and the other four are running normally.
- The Neues Museum is the one I would recommend first. It holds the bust of Nefertiti, far smaller and far more striking in person than photographs suggest, and the building itself is a masterpiece: David Chipperfield rebuilt it leaving the wounds of the war visible instead of erasing them.
- The Alte Nationalgalerie gathers the German nineteenth century, and it is where you meet Caspar David Friedrich.
- The Bode Museum, on the tip of the island, has a collection of sculpture from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century in which, quite simply, there is never anybody.
- The Altes Museum keeps the rest of the classical antiquities, in Schinkel’s neoclassical building that opens onto the Lustgarten.
How should you organise it?
If you have a day on the island, the combined ticket is almost always better value than separate entries, and most versions of it include the Panorama too. You can book the Museum Island combined ticket and pick your date.
Off the island: where to go if you wanted the Pergamon
If the Pergamon Museum appealed to you for ancient art and monumental displays, Berlin has two other places that repay the effort.
The Gemäldegalerie is not on Museum Island but at the Kulturforum, and it is one of the most important old master collections in Europe: Vermeer, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Raphael. It is also, chronically, one of the least visited relative to its quality, which means empty rooms in front of masterpieces.
For a different Berlin, the twentieth-century city of memory, there are still the Reichstag building with Norman Foster’s dome, free to visit with a booking, and the Memorial Church, left broken by the bombing as a monument against war.
In short, what to do now
If your trip is in the next few months: give up on the Pergamon Museum, add the Panorama if Pergamon interests you, and build your day on the island around the Neues Museum.
If you can choose when to come: from June 2027 you get the Pergamon Altar and the Market Gate of Miletus back, which are two thirds of why that museum was famous.
If the Ishtar Gate was your dream: pencil it in for a trip a very long way off, or take comfort in the fact that Berlin still has plenty left to see.
Want to build the rest of the itinerary? You will find all the city guides on the page dedicated to Berlin.
