The only a part of recent city to survive centuries of fires and wars, the narrow, sinuous Deichstrasse offers a way of the city's past. designed long before the 19th-century warehouses and 21st-century harborside complexes, the road could be a read into the city's Hansa past. The federation was a medieval association of freelance port cities and merchants on the Baltic and North Atlantic from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, and even into the nineteenth century.