Old town

Weimar's historic centre as a whole — how the city describes the footprint of its largest events, which spill across several squares at once.

About Old town

Some of what this town does will not fit on one square, and the city then names the whole centre as the venue. Weimar is small enough that this is not a figure of speech — the old town is the kind of place you cross on foot without planning to, on a street plan that is still essentially the medieval one.

The Christmas market as one long room

The Weimarer Weihnacht is the clearest case. The city advertises it on the obvious terms — lights strung across the centre by dusk, roasted almonds and Stollen, carols in the lanes — and in practice it runs from the market square across the Theaterplatz to the Herderplatz, each square with a different character, with one shopping Sunday somewhere in the middle of it.

And the Zwiebelmarkt, larger still

October's onion market does the same thing on a bigger scale: the town's largest festival, spread across the centre rather than confined to a site. For three days the old street plan stops being a heritage feature and goes back to being what it was built as — the place where everybody in the district turns up to buy things.