The Best of Eastern Europe

Before the rest of the day, a walk out onto Museum Island, the cluster of grand nineteenth-century museums set on an island in the Spree. We took most of them in from outside, and stepped into one.

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With a free day before the tour, a self-guided morning at the Deutsches Technikmuseum, aircraft, locomotives, and hands-on exhibits across its sprawling halls.

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Berlin's Museum of Natural History, home to the world's tallest mounted dinosaur skeleton. It didn't quite win us over, though, hence only a couple of photos.

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Met the Tour Director and traveling companions over a welcome dinner at the hotel.

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A guided walk through Berlin's twentieth-century history, roughly in this order: a marker tracing the line of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Topographie des Terrors beside a surviving stretch of the Wall, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. That memorial sits directly across from the deliberately unmarked site of the Führerbunker, said to be a quiet, pointed slight against Hitler. From there to the Brandenburg Gate, and finally the Kurfürstendamm. The Reichstag stayed out of reach behind a city event, and the State Opera House slipped past without a photo.

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Out to Potsdam: the House of the Wannsee Conference, the gardens of Sanssouci Palace, the Dutch Quarter and the Alexandrowka Russian colony, and the Glienicke Brücke, the Cold War 'Bridge of Spies.'

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A break in Poznań, one of Poland's oldest cities, to wander the colourful Old Market Square, where the Town Hall clock's mechanical goats butt heads at noon.

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A guided walk through the rebuilt medieval Stare Miasto and the Cathedral of St. John, on into the New Town and past the city's great memorials to the Warsaw Uprising and the Ghetto Heroes.

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An evening Chopin recital by Prof. Maciej Poliszewski at the Fryderyk Concert Hall, a program running from the G minor Ballade and the Op. 41 Mazurkas to the “Heroic” Polonaise.

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On the drive south from Warsaw, a stop at the Jasna Góra monastery, Poland's great pilgrimage site, home to the Black Madonna.

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Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camps. Between 1940 and 1945 at least 1.3 million people were deported here and roughly 1.1 million were murdered, about nine in ten of them Jews, along with Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. Coming here is not sightseeing. It is a place to stand with the people who were taken here, and to hold on to what it asks of anyone who comes: that this was carried out by a modern state and ordinary people, within living memory, and that remembering it honestly is part of how it is kept from happening again. Visiting was one of the reasons I chose this route. It was the most important day of the trip, and the hardest. A note on the photographs that follow: some are hard to look at. Inside several of the buildings we were asked not to take pictures, out of respect for the dead, and those rooms are not shown here.

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Down 136 metres into a UNESCO-listed labyrinth carved entirely from salt, tunnels, a subterranean lake, and the astonishing Chapel of St. Kinga, salt from chandelier to altarpiece.

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A guided walk through the old town. The extreme heat that day trimmed the route: the planned walk through Kazimierz, Kraków's old Jewish quarter, was dropped. We spent the time instead in St. Mary's Basilica on the Main Market Square, under its blue star-painted vault and before the great carved altarpiece of Veit Stoss, with a stop across the river at the Ghetto Heroes Square in Podgórze.

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An optional evening out at a country tavern: a Polish dinner of hearty traditional dishes and wine, with a costumed troupe playing folk and polka tunes and dancing between the courses.

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Three countries in a day: a scenic pause at the alpine ski resort of Donovaly, near two national parks, on the way from Poland into Hungary.

An evening cruise down the Danube with a Hungarian buffet, past Margaret Island, the Parliament, Castle Hill with Fishermen's Bastion, the Royal Palace, and the Citadel on Gellért Hill.

A guided tour taking in Heroes' Square and a panoramic view of Fishermen's Bastion.

A taste of Unicum, Hungary's celebrated herbal liqueur, straight from the barrel at the House of Unicum.

A drive along the grand Ringstrasse with photo stops at the Hofburg Palace and Heldenplatz, and a visit to St. Stephen's Cathedral and its Romanesque Giant's Door.

Museums, shops, and Viennese coffee-house culture, a kaffee und kuchen in one of the city's elegant cafés.

A three-course dinner of Viennese specialties followed by arias, waltzes and polkas from Strauss, Lehár, and Mozart in one of Europe's prettiest concert halls.

A light lunch on the UNESCO-listed triangular market square of Telč, amid pastel Renaissance and Baroque townhouses, on the scenic drive through Moravia and Bohemia.

An evening walk through the lit-up Old Town, a Czech beer in a local tavern, and a crossing of the 14th-century Charles Bridge for the view of Prague Castle.

A guided tour to the Astronomical Clock and the Hradčany Castle grounds.

A guided culinary walk through three local eateries, savory to sweet, finishing with a traditional kolache.

On the final leg back to Berlin, a stop in Dresden for the Baroque courtyard of the Zwinger Palace, then a farewell dinner in the city where it all began.

The tour ended after breakfast, auf Wiedersehen, Berlin.