Neumünster Abbey

Down here in the Grund, right by the river, this building has lived several very different lives. Benedictine monks began it in 1606, after their old abbey up on the Altmünster plateau was destroyed — hence "new münster," new monastery. Louis XIV's siege of 1684 flattened it; what you see was rebuilt from 1688 and extended in 1720.

Then the French Revolution arrived, and like most religious institutions in territories France controlled, the abbey was seized and its monks dispersed. What happened next is the part that sticks with people: the building became a prison, then briefly an orphanage until a gunpowder explosion wrecked it in 1807, then a Prussian military hospital — and from 1869 to 1985 the state prison, for well over a century. During the Second World War the Germans filled it with members of the resistance. One of them was the sculptor Lucien Wercollier, whose bronze of a seated prisoner now stands at the national resistance memorial across town.

It stopped being a prison in 1985. Rather than let a building with that much history sit empty, Luxembourg restored it over ten years, from 1994 to 2004, and reopened it in May 2004 as a cultural centre — concerts, exhibitions, public events, a deliberate turn from confinement to openness. Within a year Bulgaria and Romania signed their treaty of accession to the European Union in these rooms. Walk into the courtyard and you can still feel the shape of the old monastery in the stone arches and the quiet enclosed space, even with a very different life going on inside now.

It's one of the best examples in the city of a building that changed with Luxembourg's history instead of being erased by it.