Most of Neukölln is younger than it looks. Rixdorf is older than all of it — a Bohemian-Protestant refugee village from 1737, still cobbled, still arranged around a square with a smithy on it, and improbably intact behind the shopping street. This is the short walk that finds it, then drops into a baroque garden nobody warns you about.
Come off Karl-Marx-Straße and within minutes the cobbles start at Richardplatz: the square, the old forge, the Dorf — the village. Wander the Böhmisches Dorf streets behind it, the low houses built for the Bohemian Brethren, then duck into the Comenius-Garten, a walled philosophical garden that feels like a secret because it mostly is.
The ending is the trick. Körnerpark sits a full storey below street level, a sunken neo-baroque garden in an old gravel pit — fountains, an orangery café, terraces of planting. You're standing at the railing before you understand what you're looking at. Out the far side, the Ringbahn and the U7 take you home.
