Potsdam’s Alter Markt was once ranked among Europe’s loveliest squares. Then, on 14 April 1945, British bombers flattened most of it. What stands here now is largely a careful copy, with a few genuine survivors. The Fortuna Gate took eighteen detonations to demolish in 1960, on East Germany’s orders. Rebuilt in 2001, it retains one original piece: the head of the goddess Minerva, found in the rubble.

The obelisk has been quietly rewritten too. Its Communist-era restorers swapped the kings’ faces for architects, so Knobelsdorff gazes down and Frederick II does not. None of Potsdam’s obelisks is Egyptian, incidentally. Pompeii’s rediscovery simply made fake antiquities fashionable.

VoiceMap’s self-guided audio tours use the square to explain how Potsdam’s baroque heart was erased and rebuilt, tracing who wanted it gone, who paid to bring it back, and why Nicolai Church, designed by three of the architects on that obelisk, survived.