Cercle Cité

Look up at the long stone panel above the balcony before you read anything else. It shows a woman handing over a document, with bishops on one side and a knight on the other. She is Countess Ermesinde, and the document is the charter that made Luxembourg a city in 1244 — carved here as the founding moment of the place you are standing in.

There was a restaurant on this site, called Beim Gréitchen. The city wanted something grander, and ran a design competition in 1902. It was won in 1904 by Pierre and Paul Funck, a father and son working together. Staff started moving into the neo-Baroque building in 1909 and it was formally opened in 1910.

Its strangest chapter came in 1952, when Luxembourg was handed the institutions of the new European Coal and Steel Community and had nowhere to put them. The Court of Justice — the ancestor of the court that still sits in Kirchberg — held its public hearings in this building, and went on doing so until 1969. It happened again, briefly, in 2020 and 2021, when the Chamber of Deputies needed a room large enough to sit apart in.

A full restoration ran from 2006 to 2011 and turned it into a conference and exhibition venue, now branded Cercle Cité. The cellars, once just cellars, hold exhibitions.