Porta Nigra

Interesting facts

Tree-ring dating of timber from the city wall, published in 2018, fixed the start of construction at 170 AD, after estimates had ranged from the 2nd to the 4th century.

About 7,200 sandstone blocks went into the gate, the largest of them weighing up to six tonnes.

Masons' marks cut into the stones, some upside down, record days of work and suggest the shell went up in only two to four years.

Most scholars now see the gate as a prestige building raised in peacetime and left unfinished for lack of money, rather than a defensive work.

The hermit Simeon is said to have had himself walled up inside the gate; after his death in 1035 he was buried on its ground floor.

In the later 18th century, masons carved Baroque ornaments and reliefs straight into the Roman sandstone of the upper church, and they survive today.

Trier's council proposed naming it the Wilhelmstor in 1822, but King Frederick William III himself suggested calling it simply the Roman gate.

A 12th-century chronicle fancifully explained the name black gate by the grief of warriors returning through it from lost battles.

In 2017 the Porta Nigra appeared on a German 2-euro commemorative coin for Rhineland-Palatinate, minted in some 30 million copies.

Why it is worth it

The Porta Nigra is the only survivor of the four gates that once closed the roughly rectangular circuit of Roman Trier, and today it is one of the best-preserved Roman city gates north of the Alps. It was raised in the late second century, after about 170 AD, from large blocks of grey sandstone. The "black gate" name is medieval: nobody recorded what the Romans called it, and the stone had long since turned dark with age and soot. Two four-storey towers, rounded on the side facing the open country, flank a double passage separated by a narrow inner courtyard.

Look closely at the north face and the gate turns out never to have been finished. The blocks were never dressed smooth, and the stubs left protruding would have made it impossible to hang the movable gates. The ragged holes all over the masonry are later damage: in the early Middle Ages people chiselled out the iron and lead clamps that held the stones together and carted off whatever else they could reuse.

What saved the building was a hermit. After 1028 the Greek monk Simeon lived as a hermit in the ruined gate; when he died and was canonised, the gate was converted into a double church, one above the other, with an apse added to the east tower and a monastery built alongside. In 1804 Napoleon ordered the church stripped away and the Roman gate restored — which is why the building now shows its Roman shape with a truncated Romanesque apse still attached to one side.

Visitors can climb through the gate, including its upper floors, and in summer a guide dressed as a centurion leads costumed tours. Traffic no longer passes through the gate, but fumes from the busy road alongside have darkened and damaged the stone, and a restoration is under way that is expected to last until 2028, so parts may be under scaffolding. The gate belongs to Trier's UNESCO World Heritage Site together with the cathedral, the Church of Our Lady and the city's other Roman monuments.

Getting there

The gate stands on Porta-Nigra-Platz at the northern edge of Trier's old town, about 600 m from the centre and roughly 700 m on foot from Trier Hauptbahnhof, which has hourly trains from Saarbrücken, Koblenz, Cologne, Mannheim and Luxembourg. The nearest airport is Luxembourg (LUX), about 35 km away; within Germany, Frankfurt-Hahn (HHN) is about 50 km as the crow flies and connected by shuttle buses. Luxembourg City is some 50 km by motorway.

Porta Nigra

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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