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Thuringia
Area: 16 171,5 km2, population: 2 411 387 inhabitants, 1017 cities and municipalities
77% of the population live in towns with 2,000 or fewer inhabitants.

Thuringia shares borders with Bavaria (381 km), Saxony-Anhalt (296 km), Hessen (270 km), Saxony (265 km) and Lower Saxony (112 km). The highest point in Thuringia is the Grosse Beerberg at 983 m, the lowest point, at 114 m, is the Unstrut flood plain near Wiehe.
North to south, Thuringia stretches 160 km, and east to west 198 km.

Thuringia is a land of diversity. Predominantly Catholic Eichsfeld in the northwest, Frankish influences south of the Thuringian Forest, the "Tuscany of the East" north of Weimar – these are only three examples of regional differences within state borders. It's still quite evident today that, up until 1919, Thuringia was made up of seven different principalities and a Prussian administrative district. This "patchwork“ endowed the land with incomparable cultural riches.
If you click your way through Thuringia, you will come across many a surprise. Or did you already know that 193 towns in Thuringia boast one or more castles? That there was once a Thuringian kingdom, which came to an end in 531 when the Franks conquered Herminafrid, the last Thuringian king? That Jutta von Schwaben, wife of the Thuringian Landgrave Ludwig II, known as the Iron Count, was a half-sister of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, and that it was she who presided over the building of Runneburg Castle in Weissensee (County Sömmerda) in 1168 (featuring hot-air heating!)? That the seven-arched Werra Bridge near Creutzburg, built at the behest of Landgrave Ludwig IV in 1223, is the oldest Romanesque stone bridge north of the Main River? That at the end of the 17th century Thuringia was split up into over twenty states, including at one time ten Ernestine duchies and nine Reuss and four Schwarzburg principalities? That, as a result of these land divisions, some state borders ran right through cities, including Greiz, Kranichfeld, Neustadt am Rennweg and Ruhla? That Adam Ries' famous arithmetic textbook was printed for the first time in 1525 in Erfurt? That the first German academy – the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruitful Society), later Palmenorden (Order of the Palm) -- was founded in 1617 in Weimar? That the oldest baroque theatre in the world in which performances still take place is the Ekhof Theatre, in Castle Friedenstein in Gotha (built 1683)? That the first German territorial state to institute compulsory education was the Duchy of Sachsen-Gotha in 1642? Or that the first flag in Germany sporting the colors black, red and gold flies over the Wartburg as a memorial to the student meetings there in 1817? /From official website of Federal State Thuringia/

The picture, showing half-timbered houses in Schmalkalden (click on the map left), was scanned from negative.