Pergamon Museum

On the island of museums, one great museum holds whole ancient buildings, reassembled indoors at full scale: a towering gate, a vast facade, a tiled processional way glowing blue. This is the Pergamon Museum, the most visited museum in the city and one of the great archaeological collections of the world.

The museum was built in the early twentieth century specifically to house enormous ancient structures excavated by archaeologists, so rather than small objects in cases, it offers entire monuments, rebuilt stone by stone inside its halls.

Its treasures come from the ancient Greek, Near Eastern, and Islamic worlds, the finds of an age of great European excavation, and their scale, full-size gates and walls, is what sets the museum apart.

Among the most famous is a great gate from ancient Babylon, faced in brilliant blue glazed tiles patterned with animals, reassembled to its towering original height, so you walk beneath it as ancient processions once did.

Other halls hold a monumental ancient market gate and a wealth of art from the Islamic world, so the museum carries you across the ancient and medieval Middle East within a single visit.

The museum's centrepiece, a great altar that gave the museum its name, has at times been closed for long restoration, so it is worth checking what is on display before a visit, as major sections open and close over the years.

The scale of the reassembled monuments is genuinely awe-inspiring, and standing beneath the blue gate or before a towering facade is unlike anything in an ordinary gallery, the reason the museum draws such crowds.

As with the acquisition of so many great antiquities in that era, the presence of these monuments far from their origins raises real questions, which the museum and its visitors increasingly weigh alongside the wonder.

The museum sits among the cluster of great collections on the island, recognised together as a World Heritage Site, so it pairs naturally with the other museums there for those with the appetite and time.

It is hugely popular, so booking a timed ticket ahead is essential, especially in summer, and even then the famous halls can be busy, so an early slot helps.

Stand beneath the blue glazed gate of an ancient city, reassembled indoors to its full height, and the reach of the ancient world, and of the age that dug it up, comes home. When you step back out onto the island, the river and the other great museums wait all around.