Bern

• 1. Introduction

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  Bern sits at the heart of Switzerland, and yet it refuses the word "capital." The Swiss constitution designates it not as the nation's capital but as the seat of government - the Federal City. That careful legal distinction, settled on the 28th of November 1848, was itself a political calculation: the young Swiss federal state needed a home, and Zurich was too economically dominant, while Lucerne had fought on the losing side of a civil war just the year before. Bern, by contrast, was central, neutral, and had the support of the French-speaking cantons. So a city of modest size - one that would not pass 100,000 residents until the 1920s - became the address of Swiss democracy.

  Beneath the arcades of the old town, some 6 kilometres of covered walkways shield residents from rain and snow, forming one of the longest covered shopping promenades in Europe. Above those same streets, a medieval clock tower called the Zytglogge marks time with moving puppets. And somewhere in those sandstone lanes, between 1903 and 1905, a patent examiner named Albert Einstein worked out the theory of relativity in a flat at Kramgasse 49.

  How did a city founded in 1191 on a river peninsula become the political centre of a modern federal state? What does a place bear when it carries the weight of history without quite claiming the title that weight implies?

• 2. A City Named for a Bear

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  Berthold V, Duke of Zähringen, founded the medieval city in 1191, and the question of why he chose that name has never been fully resolved. The local legend holds that he vowed to name the settlement after the first animal he encountered on the hunt, and that animal was a bear - "bër" in Middle High German. For centuries, scholars preferred a different explanation: that the city took its name from Verona, the Italian city known as "Bern" in Middle High German at the time. Residents sometimes called it "Bern im Üechtland" precisely to distinguish it from that Italian namesake.

  The discovery of the Bern zinc tablet in the 1980s shifted the consensus again. The tablet carries the name Brenodor, meaning "dwelling of Breno," and points toward a Celtic toponym, possibly the word "berna" meaning "cleft." The site had been inhabited long before Berthold arrived. A Celtic oppidum stood on the Engehalbinsel peninsula north of the city, fortified from the second century BC, and thought to be one of the twelve oppida of the Helvetii that Julius Caesar mentioned in his writings. A Gallo-Roman settlement followed on the same ground.

  Whatever the etymology, the bear took hold as symbol. By at least the 1220s, the bear appeared on Bern's seal and coat of arms. The earliest written record of live bears kept in the Bärengraben - the city's famous bear pit - dates to the 1440s. Today four bears are kept in an open-air enclosure near the far end of the Nydeggbrücke, and two younger bears, a gift from the Russian president, reside at the Dählhölzli zoo.

• 3. From City-State to Federal City

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  In 1218, when Berthold died without an heir, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II made Bern a free imperial city through the document known as the Goldene Handfeste. That status gave the city a degree of self-governance that it would spend the next several centuries aggressively expanding. Bern joined the Swiss Confederacy in 1353 as its eighth canton, and then set about becoming the largest city-state north of the Alps.

  The conquest of Aargau came in 1415, and Vaud fell in 1536. By the 18th century, Bern's territory encompassed most of what are today both the canton of Bern and the canton of Vaud. The city also expanded physically westward along its river peninsula. The Zytglogge tower marked the city's western boundary from 1191 until 1256, when the Käfigturm took over that role until 1345, and the Christoffelturm held the position until 1622.

  A major fire in 1405 destroyed much of the original wooden city, and what replaced it was built in half-timber and then, progressively, in the local sandstone that gives the Old Town its characteristic warm-grey appearance. Despite repeated waves of plague across the 14th century, the city kept growing, fed largely by migration from the surrounding countryside.

  French troops occupied Bern in 1798 during the Revolutionary Wars, stripping away parts of its territory. The city recovered the Bernese Oberland by 1802, and the Congress of Vienna in 1814 added the Bernese Jura. When the Federal Assembly voted to seat the Swiss government in Bern on the 28th of November 1848, it was choosing a city that had already spent six centuries accumulating political weight.

• 4. The Old Town's Living Stone

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  In 1983, the historic centre of Bern - the Altstadt - was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The recognition was well-earned. The Zytglogge clock tower, with its elaborate mechanical figures, has kept time over the city since the 13th century. The Gothic Münster cathedral, begun in 1421, remains the tallest cathedral in Switzerland. The 15th-century town hall still functions as the seat of the City Council.

  Eleven Renaissance allegorical fountains stand along the streets of the Old Town. Nearly all of them, excluding the Zähringer fountain made by Hans Hiltbrand, are the work of a Fribourg master named Hans Gieng, who created them in the 16th century. One of the strangest is the Kindlifresserbrunnen - the Child Eater Fountain - which depicts a figure devouring a child and has been interpreted variously as a representation of a Jewish figure, the Greek god Chronos, or a carnival character designed to frighten disobedient children.

  The Federal Palace, built between 1857 and 1902, houses the national parliament, the government, and part of the federal administration. In front of it, the city's most recently inaugurated public fountain was opened on the 1st of August 2004. The Rose Garden, a rosarium on a hilltop converted from a former cemetery in 1913, offers a panoramic view over the medieval rooflines below. The Universal Postal Union, a body that coordinates global mail delivery, keeps its headquarters in Bern as well - a reminder that the city functions as far more than Switzerland's administrative address.

• 5. Science, Sport, and the Famous Resident

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  Albert Einstein lived at Kramgasse 49 from 1903 to 1905, working as a patent examiner while developing the ideas that produced his Annus Mirabilis papers. That flat is now the Einsteinhaus museum. His son Hans Albert Einstein was born in Bern in 1904 and later became a Swiss-American engineer and educator.

  Bern's connection to Nobel-level science extends beyond Einstein. Emil Theodor Kocher was born in the city in 1841 and received the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the thyroid gland. Anna Tumarkin, born in Russia in 1875, became the first woman to achieve the rank of full professor of philosophy at the University of Bern. The University itself occupies buildings mainly in the Länggasse quarter, and Bern also hosts a University of Applied Sciences and several vocational schools.

  On the sports side, the city hosted the 1954 FIFA World Cup Final at the Stadion Wankdorf, where West Germany defeated the Hungarian Golden Team 3-2 in what was widely considered an upset. That same stadium hosted matches for the 2008 UEFA European Championship. SC Bern's ice hockey team at the PostFinance Arena has led European hockey in attendance for more than a decade, and that arena hosted both the opening game and the final of the 2009 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship.

  Bern also once hosted the Swiss Grand Prix on the Bremgarten Circuit from 1950 to 1954, with motorcycle racing running from 1949 to 1954. Switzerland banned motorsports after the 1955 Le Mans disaster, but amended that ban in 2015 to allow electric racing, which led to the Swiss ePrix being held there in 2019. Among the notable people born in Bern, Rodolphe Lindt, born in 1855, founded the Lindt chocolate factory - a name that carried Bern's identity far beyond the city's borders.

• 6. A City of Layers

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  The geography of Bern is as layered as its history. The city lies on the Swiss plateau, slightly west of Switzerland's geographic centre and about 20 kilometres north of the Bernese Alps. The two nearest mountains are Gurten at 864 metres and Bantiger at 947 metres. The old city was built on a hilly peninsula looped by the river Aare, a major river of the Swiss Plateau, and when it outgrew that peninsula in the 19th century, bridges allowed expansion onto the surrounding terrain.

  The elevation difference between the lower inner-city districts along the Aare - Matte and Marzili - and the higher districts like Kirchenfeld and Länggasse reaches up to 60 metres. A funicular railway called the Marzilibahn connects the Marzili district to the Federal Palace. At 106 metres in length, it is the second shortest public railway in Europe, after the Zagreb funicular.

  Bern's central railway station, Bahnhof Bern, is the second busiest in Switzerland, handling 164,800 passengers per weekday in 2022. The Bern S-Bahn is Switzerland's second busiest rail network. More than half of the working population - 50.6 percent - uses public transport to commute, while about 20.6 percent use a private car. The city is also a net importer of workers, with roughly 5.7 workers entering for every one who leaves.

  The population has fluctuated considerably over the centuries: from about 5,000 residents in the 15th century, to about 12,000 by 1800, to above 60,000 by 1900, past 100,000 in the 1920s, and peaking at 165,000 in the 1960s before settling to around 142,349 as of September 2017. Of those residents, roughly 31 percent were foreign nationals, speaking a range of languages in a city whose official tongue is German and whose everyday speech is Bernese German, a variant of the Alemannic dialect of Swiss German.