There are, of course, more historical sights in Trier than those mentioned below. Among these are attractive street ensembles such as Glockenstrasse, the painstakingly restored Krahnenstrasse, or the Zurlauben water front, but especially the complete Cathedral Close with the narrow passageways between houses for the members of the cathedral chapter: high walls built of recycled Roman material, elaborate gates, coats of arms, Latin inscriptions, and buildings from eight centuries.

Trier has 94 churches and chapels; besides those already mentioned there are others worth seeing such as St. Antonius (13th century), the former Jesuit Church (Jesuitenkirche, 13th century), or St. Irminen (18th century). The whole area around the Jesuitenkirche is an ensemble in itself with the Jesuit burial crypt where the Jesuit poet Friedrich Spee was buried in 1635 (key at the porter's), the 18th century University Graduation Hall (Promotionsaula), the former Jesuit School from 1610 (where Karl Marx finished in 1835), and the Diocesan Archives (Bistumsarchiv) with the old church records providing visitors with information about their ancestors.

Porta Nigra
Roman city gate the 2nd cent., sandstone blocks held together by iron clamps: from the 11th to the 18th century two-storied church of which the Romanesque apse is still preserved.

The gate itself dates back to a time (about A.D. 180) when the Romans often erected public buildings of huge stone blocks (here, the biggest weigh up to six metric tons). The slabs were cut by bronze saws powered by mill wheels (some cutting traces are still visible) and put together without mortar. Instead, two stones each were held together horizontally by iron clamps whose bent ends were embedded in corresponding holes by molten lead. One clamp is visible inside the gate near the eastern spiral staircase; rust traces can be seen in many holes on the outside because in the Middle Ages people chiseled these holes to retrieve the metal for recycling.

The stone blocks were spared a recycling because of the Greek monk Simeon, who had himself walled up in the eastern tower as a hermit after 1028. After his death in 1034/5, he was buried inside the gate and made a saint. In his honor, two churches were built into the gate (torn down 1804-1819). The upper story of the eastern tower was razed - the only real damage to the stone gate, whose name, "Black Gate," is medieval and goes back to the black pollution patina on the gray sandstone. Inside , traces of the double church, Roman stone masons' marks, and date inscriptions are visible. You can climb up - for a small fee - and have a look over the city and the vineyards around.
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Hauptmarkt (Main Market)
The center of the city for nearly 2000 years: with Market Cross, 958 and St. Peter's Fountain, 1595; Gothic church of St. Gangolf 14th/15th century, steeple from 1507. The Steipe, a councillors' banqueting house, was built in 15th century, the Red House, 1684.

After the Viking destruction of 882, the archbishop moved the market from the river to the present site, the Market Cross still commemorates this event from 958. The original of the cross is in the Municipal Museum; the column shaft is a recycled granite column from the Roman Cathedral. Trier contains only a few half-timbered houses - the Roman tradition of erecting stone buildings never really died out here, if only for the fact that Roman stone material was available for recycling everywhere.

The Main Market became the center of medieval Trier with market (for over a thousand years now), with the pillary (reconstructed on the south end of the market), the official city yardstick (reconstruction) at the Steipe, the city council's banqueting house, with immediate access to the city church St. Gangolf (through the little baroque gate on the south side, the church itself is completely surrounded by stalls and houses), access to the Cathedral, to the Jewish Quarter as well as to six streets altogether. The Market Fountain from 1595 shows St. Peter, the patron saint of the Cathedral as well as the city, standing on top, surrounded by the four cardinal virtues of good city government, Justice, Strength, Temperance, and Wisdom (originals in the Municipal Museum), but also by monsters and frolicking monkeys. The fountain, just like the Cathedral and the parish and guild church St. Gangolf as well the Steipe, are all rooted in the 300-year struggle for supremacy in the city.

Judengasse

The old jewish quarter is one of the oldest streets in Germany. You will find it shortly before the market, Jews' Alley (Judengasse) on the right leads into the former medieval Jewish Quarter. Locally produced weights with Hebrew inscriptions show that there were Jews in Trier as early as the first or second century. Starting with the eleventh century, we have records of a Jewish community in Trier, and in 1235 four Jews had four houses built on the left of the later Judengasse. The cellars are still the original ones; in the Pub "Abwärts", you can still see the walled-up entrance to a flight tunnel leading to the Cathedral Close.

The Jews were expelled from Trier in 1418. Many Jews went east; Yiddish has preserved traces of Trier Middle High German up to today. When the Jews were called back after 1600, they settled in different parts of the city. After the Holocaust of the Nazi era, the Jewish community in Trier is quite small (the New Synagogue is located in Kaiserstrasse).

Konstantinbasilika or Palastaula
Roman imperial palace, 4th cent., later administrative centre of the electors. Today Protestant church. The Roman so called “Basilika” is built of Roman bricks and has been a part of Emperor Konstantin's palace. The Romans wanted the architecture to express the magnificence and might of the emperor, and the hall is the largest surviving single-room structure from Roman times, 27 m (90 ft) wide, 33 m (108 ft) high, and 67 m (220 ft) long - with an adjoining hall outside even 75 m (250 ft). This depth is magnified by an optical illusion - both the windows of the apse as well as the niches underneath become progressively smaller towards the middle, thus enhancing the impression of length.

The Roman building was embellished by colorful marble inlay, mosaics, and statues and was made comfortable by a hollow-floor heating system, but all this splendor and technology were destroyed (in the 5th century) by the Germanic Franks, who built a settlement inside the roofless ruin. Later on, the archbishop used it as his administrative center and it was enlarged by three palace wings (see “Kurfürstliches Palais”) after 1614. Since the middle of the 19th century, the “Basilika” has been used as the first and oldest Protestant church in Catholic Trier with a splendid organ answered by a seven-second echo.

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Kurfürstliches Palais (Electoral palace)
Former palace of the archbishop. East and north wing, Red Tower and St. Peter's Portal built in Renaissance Style during the 17th century. The Baroque south wing was remodeled 1757-1761 by J. Seitz, sculptures by Friedrich Tietz. Today the building hosts the seat of the district government. The park nearby (Palastgarten) leads to the Roman Imperial Baths and as well to the Landesmuseum.
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Simeonstift
Adjoining the Porta Nigra is the 11th century Simeons's College (Simeonstift), residence of priests who read mass in the two churches of St. Simeon (Porta Nigra). The building has a unique two-storied cloister around the courtyard (Brunnenhof) and contains today a restaurant and the Municipal Musum (fee) with the Coptic, medieval, and early modern collections; some statues are exhibited in the south wing of the cloister (upper story), whose floor still rests on the original oak beam floor from 1060.

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Dreikönigshaus (House of the Three Magi)
Walking along Simeonstrasse you will notice a unusual building (a Romanesque residential tower), the House of the Three Magi (Dreikönigenhaus), built around 1230 when Trier's medieval city wall was not yet finished. Each house had to defend itself and the entrance was the "window" on the right, accessible only by ladder or wooden staircase that could be pulled up (Trier still has six such Romanesque residential towers, the Frankenturm/Dietrichstrasse 5 from around 1100 being the oldest). The doors level with the street are modern; there is a café inside, Graham Greene's bakery in The Name of Action; the color scheme of the house, however, is the recreation of considerable original remains.

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Address: Simeonstrasse 19

Roman Baths
Going to the baths was an important part of Roman life, and, besides some smaller private baths, Trier had three large public baths: the newly discovered Forum Baths, the Barbara Baths, and the Imperial Baths, the latter two being the largest baths outside Rome.

People bathed naked (not always separately), could engage in sports, sit in cold and hot baths, swim, get a massage, have the body hair removed by tweezers or wax, and be cleaned with the help of scrapers, pumice stone, or fermented urine. They could relax, gamble, do business, go to the hairdresser's, libraries, reciting rooms, or pubs.

Kaiserthermen (Imperial Baths)

Ruins of the 4th century. Roman bath with hot water bath, cold water bath and sports grounds. Preserved are the masonry of the hot water baths and extensive cellar area.

When you enter the Imperial Baths (Kaiserthermen, fee) you will first come to the hot water bath (large enough for present-day theater and opera performances complete with stage, orchestra, and 650 seats). The incoming cold water was heated in altogether six boiler rooms, four of which are visible in the 19m (62 ft) high ruins which later served as a part of the medieval city wall. The 40° C/104° F hot water was then conducted into the three semicircular pools for the bathers. A hollow-floor heating system heated the pool floors as well as the rectangular central part of the vaulted hall. You can descend from here into the underground service tunnels and then continue to the cold water bath. The sports grounds are located outside the enclosed facilities.

Thermen am Forum (Forum Baths)

Continuing towards the Moselle along Kaiserstrasse, the visitor passes the site of the Roman Forum (no longer visible today) near which the Forum Baths were found in 1987. Excavations for an underground parking garage brought to light the remains of a bath from around A.D. 100 underneath air-raid shelters from the Second World War, the remains of a seventeenth century Capucinian monastery, former vineyards, and two old cemeteries. The two hot-water baths, a surprisingly well preserved cold-water bath, hollow-floor heating systems, sewer canals, and massive walls on deep foundations are accessible as a combination of excavations and museum.

Barbarathermen (Barbara Baths)

Roman baths dating from 2nd century, You will find them in Südallee 48, next to the Modern Jewish Synagogue (built in 1957).

The Barbara Baths (fee) were built in the second century as the then largest Roman baths. The extensive ruins were used as a castle in the Middle Ages, then torn down and recycled as building material until the remains were used for constructing the Jesuit College in 1610. Only the foundations and the subterranean service tunnels have survived, but the technical details of the sewer systems, the furnaces, the pools, and the heating system can be studied better than in the other two baths. Although only one third of the original facility has been excavated, a tour of the passageways takes a surprisingly long time.

Amphitheatre
Ruin of Roman arena for fights of gladiators and animals, built about AD 100, the ranks could hold 20.000 spectators.

Beyond the medieval city wall lies the Roman Amphitheater. Here were conducted cruel combats of animals and gladiators, popular public entertainment. When you enter the premises (fee) you walk through the ruins of the entrance gate. This was used as a quarry in the Middle Ages. The arena itself is surrounded by a protecting wall with openings for animal cages. The stone seats above were dismantled in the 13th century, but the Amphitheater has retained crystal-clear acoustics and is used for occasional open-air concerts today. Underneath the arena is a vast cellar where, in Roman times, prisoners sentenced to death (ad bestias, to the beasts!) were kept alongside exotic wild animals like African lions or Asian tigers. A moveable platform took them up to the arena for the final show-down.

In the vicinity of the Amphitheater is the site of the former chariot racing course, a structure that was compared to the Roman Circus Maximus in a description from 310. Nothing is visible of this racing course except a seemingly unmotivated curve in the street at the St. Agritius Church, a curve marking the former turning-point of the circus.

Trier's three Roman baths lie on the same axis because they were fed by the same 13 km (8 mile) long aqueduct reaching the city near the Amphitheater; they also used the same sewer system that still partially runs underneath the modern city, accessible, however, only through a private basement.

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Römerbrücke und Moselkrahn (Roman bridge and Moselle cranes )
The pilings of the Römerbrücke (Roman Bridge) from A.D. 144-152 (the arches and roadway are from the 18th century) are deeply embedded in the bedrock underneath the river gravel. They were built with huge stone blocks held together with iron clamps as in the Porta Nigra (the Roman clamps are invisible inside the pilings; the visible clamps are from later times). This time, the black color is genuine: the stone is mostly basalt from the Eifel mountains. On March 2, 1945, General Patton's tanks captured the bridge so quickly that it was not blown up - the (empty) charge chambers are still visible from the up-river side of the bridge.

The way down the Moselle takes the visitor back to the Porta Nigra. The street is a high water dam from the 1920's; it follows the former Roman as well as the medieval city wall. The river bank was, of course, harbor and docking area both in Roman and medieval times. A first indication is a crane from 1774 with the same technology as the one further downriver from 1413: a cylindrical structure mounted by a moveable roof driven by a central oak beam, a huge treadmill inside the cylinder, operating the pulleys on the two loading arms. The mechanism was used until the beginning of the 20th century and is kept operational; it can be seen through the small windows.