Christian feast days: Hamburg Matthiae-mahl, feast of Hanseatic League cities on the mediaeval first day of spring

Hamburg, officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, is the second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and 7th-largest in the European Union with a population of over 1.9 million. The Hamburg Metropolitan Region has a population of over 5.1 million and is the eighth-largest metropolitan region by GDP in the European Union.

The Hanseatic League, commonly called The Hansa, was a medieval commercial and defensive network of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from Lübeck and a few other North German towns in the late 12th century, the League expanded between the 13th and 15th centuries and ultimately encompassed nearly 200 settlements across eight modern-day countries, ranging from what is now Estonia in the northeast to the Netherlands in the west, and extended inland as far south as Cologne, and Kraków, Poland.

February 25 is the 56th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 309 days remain until the end of the year.