Thuringia (Thüringen) is the green heart of Germany — a small state of about two million people tucked in the centre of the country, dominated by the dark, rolling Thuringian Forest. For travellers, it has an almost unfair concentration of cultural sites for its size. This is where Luther translated the New Testament into German, where Bach was born and first played the organ, where Goethe and Schiller wrote side by side, and where Bauhaus was founded. It is also where, in 1937, the Nazis built Buchenwald, a short tram ride from the house where Goethe had once entertained Napoleon.
The Thuringian Forest runs in a long ridge along the south of the state — nearly 200 km of beech and spruce woods laced with the famous long-distance footpath, the Rennsteig, which has been walked by pilgrims and students for centuries. North of the forest, the land opens into a patchwork of wheat fields and small, photogenic towns: a legacy of the 17th century, when Thuringia was divided into more than twenty separate duchies, each with its own court, castle, and residenz. There are said to be nearly 200 castles in a state smaller than Belgium's Flanders.
Weimar is the obvious cultural capital — the small courtly town that became the crucible of German high culture, and later the namesake of Germany's first republic. Erfurt, the state capital, is the largest city and the best-preserved of the medieval merchant towns, with its cathedral hill and the extraordinary Krämerbrücke — a footbridge lined with shops. Eisenach sits below the Wartburg, the fortress where Luther hid after the Diet of Worms. Jena is the university town, home to Zeiss optics and a lively student population. Smaller places — Naumburg (just over the border in Saxony-Anhalt but historically linked) for its cathedral, Oberhof for winter sports, Gera, Greiz, Ilmenau, Sonneberg — fill in the rest.
