Gendarmenmarkt

This is widely considered the most beautiful square in Berlin, and it's easy to see why. Two nearly identical domed churches face each other across a broad plaza with the Konzerthaus concert hall between them. It looks like it was designed as a single composition — and it was, sort of, though it took about two hundred years to finish.

The twin churches are the Französischer Dom and the Deutscher Dom — the French and German cathedrals. Neither is actually a cathedral; the word 'Dom' here refers to the domed towers added in the 1780s by Carl von Gontard, not to any ecclesiastical status. The French church was built in 1705 for Berlin's Huguenot community — French Protestants who fled religious persecution after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. At one point, one in five Berliners was of French Huguenot descent, which is why you'll find French surnames and French-influenced words scattered throughout Berlin's history.

The Konzerthaus in the centre was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1821, built on the ruins of a theatre that had burned down. Schinkel kept the original columns and worked them into his new design. In front stands a statue of Friedrich Schiller, which the Nazis removed in 1935 — they didn't approve of Schiller's ideas about freedom. It was returned after the war.

The square gets its name from the Gens d'Armes — a Prussian cavalry regiment that had its stables here in the eighteenth century. Soldiers and horses, not churches, came first.