Photograph of the week: Hildesheim, Germany

The town square of Hildesheim, Germany, is the poster child for, well, poster perfect (or picture-postcard perfect as the saying goes).

Home to beautiful half-timbered buildings, a magical, magnificent Market Square, two UNESCO World Cultural Heritage-listed Romanesque churches, and fantastic you-have-to-see-them-to-believe-them Egyptian Antiquities in the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim is definitely worthy of its bucket list status for travellers the world over. Making this picturesque place all the more impressive though? The fact that on March 22, 1945, almost all of Hildesheim’s old town, including the town square and the building pictured here, was destroyed in an Allied air raid.

Named Knochenhaueramtshaus (or the Butchers’ Guildhall), the building pictured on the left is easily the most photographed of all of Hildesheim’s famed half-timbered houses. First built on the Historic Market Place in 1529, the original burned down,…