Barbarathermen

I was a bit surprised to see the city center of Trier to have only a handful of Roman monuments. It turns out that some of the important ones are in the outskirts. This means that I would have a lot of walking to do. I would have imagined that everything would all be in one place but for some reason it isn’t. Maybe some of them are long gone leaving only the far away ones intact. Anyway, I thought that I should start heading for one of the major ones – Barbarathermen or Barbara Baths.

As you might guess from the name the Barbarathermen is a place for bathing. It might be hard to imagine how ancient civilizations would be so civilized as to have a sophisticated system for cleaning themselves. I always imagined that they probably only went to the nearby river to bathe. But it seems the ancient Romans are way more advanced than that. The Barbarathermen is a public bath for the people of Trier. Apparently, there is large one – Forum baths, near the center but I completely missed it. Once the Forum baths became too small for the use of the city, the Romans built another one on the outskirts near a suburb called Saint Barbara, thus it was called the Barbarathermen or Barbara Baths.

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