Qualla: Moldauhafen

Moldauhafen: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marek Blahuš, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2028 a lease expires in Hamburg, and with it the last working fragment of the Treaty of Versailles. On the island of Kleiner Grasbrook, across the Elbe from the city centre, roughly 30,000 square metres of quay have belonged — first by treaty, then by ordinary contract — to a country with no coastline at all. The dock is the Moldauhafen, German for Vltava harbour. Its north quay is the Prager Ufer and its south quay the Melniker Ufer, named for Prague and for Mělník, the town where the Vltava runs into the Elbe. Everything about the arrangement is an accident of 1919 that nobody has quite got round to ending.

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Image: Marek Blahuš | CC BY-SA 3.0

Moldauhafen: Articles 363 and 364

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 2.5. The Treaty of Versailles ran to hundreds of articles, and two of them concerned narrow slices of German dockland. Article 363 required Germany to lease areas in the ports of Hamburg and Stettin to Czechoslovakia for ninety-nine years, under free-zone rules that let goods pass str...

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Image: Daniel Schwen | CC BY-SA 2.5

Moldauhafen: A Basin Dug in 1887

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfordian Kissuth on geo.hlipp.de, CC BY-SA 2.0. The ground itself is unremarkable, which is part of the pleasure of it. The Moldauhafen was excavated in 1887 as one more rectangle of water in a port already full of them, and it lay inside the Hamburg free port, a customs-free enclave. Beside it, the Saalehafen forms part of th...

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Image: Oxfordian Kissuth on geo.hlipp.de | CC BY-SA 2.0

Moldauhafen: Sugar, Coal, Glass, Malt

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johannes Mejer, Public domain. For a few decades it did exactly what it had been designed to do. In 1937 alone, 2,010 inland vessels arrived in Hamburg from Czechoslovakia with a combined carrying capacity of more than 1.5 million tonnes. Out went sugar and coal, grain and timber, glassware, ironware, cellulos...

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Image: Johannes Mejer | Public domain

Moldauhafen: The Contract That Outlived Its Treaty

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Arpingstone at English Wikipedia., Public domain. Versailles lapsed after the Second World War; the lease did not. Stripped of its treaty foundation, it simply became a private contract between the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, as landowner, and its tenant — an unglamorous afterlife for a clause drafted at the Paris peace ...

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Image: The original uploader was Arpingstone at English Wikipedia. | Public domain

Moldauhafen: Grasbrook, 2028

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jo.Fruechtnicht, CC BY-SA 4.0. What replaces the dock is already drawn. The Moldauhafen and the ground around it are to become part of Grasbrook, a new Hamburg district mixing housing and workplaces, and a U4 underground station is planned to span the basin north to south. Hamburgers were invited to name it in...

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Image: Jo.Fruechtnicht | CC BY-SA 4.0