The history of the Altstadthuus

Step into history as you enter this captivating house

The elephant hunt of Murten, 1866

‍
In 1866, the American circus Bell & Myers made a guest appearance in Murten. After a bull elephant killed its keeper, it rampaged through the town. He had to be killed with the help of a cannon brought specially from the armory of Fribourg. Since then, the town hall alley is also called "Elephant alley". The skeleton is in the Natural History Museum in Bern.

House fire 1897

A fire in the night of January 3 to 4, 1897 destroyed the barn of the master builder Sebastiano Orlandi, the protective roof of the ring wall and that of the "shot tower" in the town. As the owner of the curtain wall and the tower, the town granted Orlandi a building concession for a new building only on the condition that no new window openings were broken into the curtain wall and that the battlement remained unchanged. The tower was also given to Orlandi only conditionally for use.