I went to Cologne to do two things: drink some kölsch and see the Cathedral. That's it. One day. In and out. The first one didn't work out so well. Despite sampling six different types of Cologne's endemic beer, I found the stuff mostly forgettable. The Cathedral, or Dom (in German), on the other hand was anything but. From the moment we stepped off the train from Düsseldorf to the second we stepped back inside the station on our way home, we barely lost sight of the Dom. And it was worth going to Cologne from the first sighting to our last goodbye early Sunday morning.
Cologne is an old city. The oldest in Germany actually. It was first settled along the west bank of the River Rhine by the Romans in the first century B.C. About 100 years later (around 40 A.D.) they got serious about building a real permanent type of town on the spot and about four decades after that, they brought water into the city by building an aqueduct. It grew from there, becoming a regional capital of the Gallic portion of the empire and eventually having a pretty good sized population of about 20,000 people.
As the Roman empire started to crumble around its edges, the city of Cologne was sieged and sacked and reclaimed by Rome and then sieged and sacked by an entirely different group of people. After about 100 years of that sort of stuff in the year 455, it was claimed by the Salian Franks and enjoyed a little bit of peace for a few hundred years. That is, until the vikings burned the whole place to the ground in the late ninth century.
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| The west face of the Dom at night. |
The first cathedral in Cologne was built in the fourth century on a spot pretty much right where the Dom stands today. It was eventually replaced by a second cathedral before gothic cathedral fever started to sweep over Europe and Cologne decided it had to have one too. I'm sure the previous sentence is way understating the gravity of the decision to build a new cathedral in the middle ages. Cologne had been an important city in the church hierarchy for centuries and just after the turn of the new millennium they found (or maybe stole is a better word) a really good reason to start building themselves a swankier church. I do think there was a little gothic cathedral envy driving their decision though. It's a personal theory, I know.
The first foundation stone of the current Dom was laid on August 15, 1248. Like most gothic cathedrals around Europe, construction was not rapid. The eastern side of the cathedral was built first; that took 84 years. Not bad, actually, for gothic cathedrals. What they got for four score and four years was a functional church, courtesy of a temporary wall to enclose what was already built.
They kept going, starting on the magnificent western front in the middle of the 14th century and getting as high as the belfry on the south tower before stopping in the year 1473. And boy can they stop work in Cologne. They left it that way, with the crane still atop the tower, for 400 years until the citizens of Cologne decided enough was enough and raised the funds to finish the building. Work recommenced in 1842 and in just 38 short years, construction was complete. 632 years for one cathedral!
The result is magnificent. Cologne Cathedral is by far the biggest building in the city. And if that statement is untrue (which it may very well be; I mean I didn't do any research here), it acts like it's the biggest and most important structure around. How does a building act that way, you might ask? It's just there. It's huge. It's as if it landed in the middle of the altstadt (or center city) like it was placed there from above. Everything around it is clearly less important. The Dom is the biggest, the widest, the most ornate thing in sight. It carries itself as if Cologne itself belongs to the Cathedral, not the other way around. It helps that it's black as night I guess. It's pretty freaking badass, if that's in any way appropriate to write about a house of worship.
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| Tallest building in the world 1880-1884. |
Let's talk some stats, shall we? The nave of the Dom is 142 feet high, which is good for 11th tallest in the world. Not impressed by that? The highest (Beauvais which we visited just a couple of years ago) is just 14 feet taller. Not a lot in it. The towers on the west facade of the Cathedral though place better than the nave does. At 516 feet, the two spires were the tallest structure in the world from the time it was completed until it was surpassed four years later by the Washington Monument. On the list of tallest churches in the world, it still places fourth and it's only 14 feet shorter than the tallest. This thing's pretty big and it shows. Particularly on the exterior.
The black, by the way, is not dirt. It's caused by the reaction between the sandstone that the Cathedral is made out of and the acid (sulphuric) rain that falls on the city. It makes it look really...well, gothic.
Before we head inside, it should be noted that the south tower of the Dom is open for visitors and who could pass up climbing to close to the top of one of the tallest gothic cathedrals in the world? Well, not me certainly. After making it to the top of Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres earlier in my cathedral climbing history and scaling both St. Paul's in London and the Duomo in Florence, there was no way I wasn't climbing Cologne Cathedral.
I'll say right now, it's a tough climb. The lower portion is all spiral staircase in a tight stone (and of course graffiti covered) circle. You might need to rest once or twice or maybe even three times. Make sure you climb on the inside of the stair, since it's about impossible to make folks coming down do that; let them have the outside. The initial climb takes you to the bells level. Two climbs further, including the second on a self supported stair in the center of the open tower, and you get to the top.
The view from St. Pauls is gorgeous. The view in Florence is magnificent. You can see the gargoyles up close at Notre-Dame and the French countryside from the top of Chartres. Cologne is not as good as any of these.
That's not to say that there's no value in climbing the Dom and that's not to say that Cologne is not a gorgeous city. You can still get some great views but the openings in the tower are really so small that your looks are really more like glimpses. That and the scaffolding on the north tower and the fencing preventing you from jumping off on the south tower either blocks the openings right in front of you or shrouds the sculptures on the adjacent tower.
You can look back over the entire Cathedral and see the rail bridge that connects the west side of the Rhine to the rest of Germany which for me was important because that's how we entered the city the night before. You can also get some very oblique looks at some of the angels carved in the other tower. Whoever made the angels obviously used a different kind of stone because they are not the same inky black as the rest of the tower. The bells of the Cathedral are pretty cool too, if you are into that sort of stuff.
But the real treasure of Cologne Cathedral is inside, and I mean treasure in every sense of the word. Apparently, and I'll address the plausibility of all this in a couple of paragraphs, the Cathedral has the remains of the three wise men (Gaspar, Balthasar and Melchior) who visited Jesus in Nazareth while he was swaddled and lying in a manger. That acquisition was, in fact, the entire reason why the folks in Cologne decided they needed a new house of worship. How did they get these precious relics, you might ask? Well the same way any self-respecting house of worship gets its relics: by stealing them.
Way back in 1164 the Archbishop of Cologne was handed a package by Frederick Barbarossa who at that time was the Holy Roman Emperor. The package was of course whatever was left of Gaspar and company. Where did the emperor get these remains? Apparently in northern Italy, from the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio in Milan. And I assume they weren't gifted to him out of generosity, if only based on the fact that Cologne has since seen to it that some (but not all) of the remains have been returned.
There are so many questions here for me. First, how did all the remains of the magi end up in one spot? After the first one died, was he buried or were his remains somehow stored somewhere? And if they were stored, who kept them? Was it the two remaining wise men (assuming they were even together) or someone else? And who would keep the remains of a dead person hanging around? Granted...the importance of the bones (or whatever constitutes remains here) would be understood at the time of death I guess.
More questions. Was one person responsible for collecting the bones of all three men? What a gruesome assignment that would be if it was true. And did he (assuming it was a he) have permission to do so? Was the collection contested by the family? Or did someone go around collecting (i.e. exhuming) these things years later? And if so, how do we know he got the right remains? I mean, that's a question overall, right? How does anyone know these things are legit? I'm assuming there's no chain of custody documentation on these.
I don't think my questions are going to be answered and I guess they don't really need to be if I can suspend belief and just appreciate the imagery related to these three men all over the Dom. They occupy central positions in the stained glass windows on the south side of the building (shown above) and in carvings in the back of the altar (shown way above in the first pic of this post). They are also represented in a gold (and I mean real gold not just gold colored) box in the apse at the west end of the Cathedral. Of course, that box and the contents of it is the reason why this place is so important as a church for Christianity today.
You can get relatively close to this box containing the relics, but rest assured, your views will be from the other side of a really high and really sturdy looking fence and what I am sure is a pretty heavy and thick plexiglass or maybe better box. There's no need to take chances with this kind of thing. I took the photograph below by sticking my hand through the railing and clicking the button with my finger. It's awesome that we have these devices to take these kinds of pictures that make it look like we are a glass case away from something this important.
The bones, or whatever they are, of the three wise men aren't why we went. I pledged to get to Cologne Cathedral a long time before I even realized the Dom had anything to do with the magi. For us, the predominance of the wise men in the building just ended up being a bonus. We found some other surprises along the way.
First, there are some incredible mosaic floors in this place. They run pretty much the entirety of the ambulatory at the west end of the Cathedral from the crossing on the north side to the same point on the south side. The tiles that make up the pictures on the floor are super-small in spots but also involve limited mortar. The result of that combination are some super crisp images made up in the floor, including a couple showing a model of the Cathedral and a plan (shown below). The whole image below is maybe six feet in diameter meaning the plan of the Cathedral which is super detailed is actually just about 18 inches to two feet high. It's not alone in its intricacy.
We also found some old friends in the stained glass, like at least two St. Georges (who we previously found most memorably at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice) and St. Sebastian, who we ran into a lot around Rome, particularly in the catacombs bearing his name on the Via Appia Antica. St. Sebastian is one of those figures who keeps cropping up again and again and again in many places we've been over the past few years, usually in random art galleries. He's a lot easier to spot with a bunch of arrows sticking out of him which is how he was almost martyred (he survived the arrows but not the clubs later on in life). We needed the English language self-guided tour brochure to help us in the Dom as Sebastian is mercifully arrow free in their windows. I love it when reminders of past trips crop up on subsequent trips.
Cologne for us lasted about 36 hours. We didn't leave the altstadt except to come in from the airport and get out to the (different) airport. We came to drink beer and love it. We didn't. We also came to see the Cathedral and we ended up on some level I think loving it. Our visit to the Dom took probably about three hours but in many ways our entire visit was about the Cathedral. I don't think there was a single spot where we couldn't see just a little of it, usually one or both of the very distinctively vertical towers on the west front. We could see it from just outside our hotel, we could see it from the furthest point we went from the Alter Markt and we could even see it from inside the train station. This building's presence is like few others I've seen in any place. It was truly impressive.
I'm glad we went. We will probably never go back to Cologne. The list of places to see is just too long and the beer and the food were just not worth it. But we took a little piece of Cologne with us by picking up a green and blue pop art-like image of the Dom which now sits on our mantel at home. We also have a set of three wise men Christmas ornaments that we found in the Cathedral gift store. We couldn't resist. Those stylized likenesses of Gaspar, Balthasar and Melchior will remind us of that city each holiday season. Cologne and those three figures are forever linked for me.
The view from St. Pauls is gorgeous. The view in Florence is magnificent. You can see the gargoyles up close at Notre-Dame and the French countryside from the top of Chartres. Cologne is not as good as any of these.
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| Looking up into the south tower of the Dom. |
You can look back over the entire Cathedral and see the rail bridge that connects the west side of the Rhine to the rest of Germany which for me was important because that's how we entered the city the night before. You can also get some very oblique looks at some of the angels carved in the other tower. Whoever made the angels obviously used a different kind of stone because they are not the same inky black as the rest of the tower. The bells of the Cathedral are pretty cool too, if you are into that sort of stuff.
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| From the south tower looking east. |
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| Looking down from the south tower to the angels on the north. |
Way back in 1164 the Archbishop of Cologne was handed a package by Frederick Barbarossa who at that time was the Holy Roman Emperor. The package was of course whatever was left of Gaspar and company. Where did the emperor get these remains? Apparently in northern Italy, from the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio in Milan. And I assume they weren't gifted to him out of generosity, if only based on the fact that Cologne has since seen to it that some (but not all) of the remains have been returned.
There are so many questions here for me. First, how did all the remains of the magi end up in one spot? After the first one died, was he buried or were his remains somehow stored somewhere? And if they were stored, who kept them? Was it the two remaining wise men (assuming they were even together) or someone else? And who would keep the remains of a dead person hanging around? Granted...the importance of the bones (or whatever constitutes remains here) would be understood at the time of death I guess.
More questions. Was one person responsible for collecting the bones of all three men? What a gruesome assignment that would be if it was true. And did he (assuming it was a he) have permission to do so? Was the collection contested by the family? Or did someone go around collecting (i.e. exhuming) these things years later? And if so, how do we know he got the right remains? I mean, that's a question overall, right? How does anyone know these things are legit? I'm assuming there's no chain of custody documentation on these.
I don't think my questions are going to be answered and I guess they don't really need to be if I can suspend belief and just appreciate the imagery related to these three men all over the Dom. They occupy central positions in the stained glass windows on the south side of the building (shown above) and in carvings in the back of the altar (shown way above in the first pic of this post). They are also represented in a gold (and I mean real gold not just gold colored) box in the apse at the west end of the Cathedral. Of course, that box and the contents of it is the reason why this place is so important as a church for Christianity today.
You can get relatively close to this box containing the relics, but rest assured, your views will be from the other side of a really high and really sturdy looking fence and what I am sure is a pretty heavy and thick plexiglass or maybe better box. There's no need to take chances with this kind of thing. I took the photograph below by sticking my hand through the railing and clicking the button with my finger. It's awesome that we have these devices to take these kinds of pictures that make it look like we are a glass case away from something this important.
The bones, or whatever they are, of the three wise men aren't why we went. I pledged to get to Cologne Cathedral a long time before I even realized the Dom had anything to do with the magi. For us, the predominance of the wise men in the building just ended up being a bonus. We found some other surprises along the way.
First, there are some incredible mosaic floors in this place. They run pretty much the entirety of the ambulatory at the west end of the Cathedral from the crossing on the north side to the same point on the south side. The tiles that make up the pictures on the floor are super-small in spots but also involve limited mortar. The result of that combination are some super crisp images made up in the floor, including a couple showing a model of the Cathedral and a plan (shown below). The whole image below is maybe six feet in diameter meaning the plan of the Cathedral which is super detailed is actually just about 18 inches to two feet high. It's not alone in its intricacy.
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| Mosaic floors in the Cologne Cathedral. |
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| St. Sebastian, on the right, in pre-martyred status. |
Cologne for us lasted about 36 hours. We didn't leave the altstadt except to come in from the airport and get out to the (different) airport. We came to drink beer and love it. We didn't. We also came to see the Cathedral and we ended up on some level I think loving it. Our visit to the Dom took probably about three hours but in many ways our entire visit was about the Cathedral. I don't think there was a single spot where we couldn't see just a little of it, usually one or both of the very distinctively vertical towers on the west front. We could see it from just outside our hotel, we could see it from the furthest point we went from the Alter Markt and we could even see it from inside the train station. This building's presence is like few others I've seen in any place. It was truly impressive.
I'm glad we went. We will probably never go back to Cologne. The list of places to see is just too long and the beer and the food were just not worth it. But we took a little piece of Cologne with us by picking up a green and blue pop art-like image of the Dom which now sits on our mantel at home. We also have a set of three wise men Christmas ornaments that we found in the Cathedral gift store. We couldn't resist. Those stylized likenesses of Gaspar, Balthasar and Melchior will remind us of that city each holiday season. Cologne and those three figures are forever linked for me.
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| The Dom at night from the west. |
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| From the east looking at the rear at just before sunset. |
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| One last look from Platform 10 at the Cologne Hauptbahnhof. |
How We Did It
The Dom is located slightly north of center of the altstadt or old city of Cologne on the west bank of the Rhine. However you make your way to the city, it's pretty much impossible to miss the Cathedral.
Opening hours are 6 am to 7:30 pm in winter (that's November to April) and 6 am to 9 pm in Summer (which is the rest of the year) Monday through Saturday. Sunday tourist hours are shorter (1 pm to 4:30 pm). The Cathedral is closed or partially closed during services and services are not only on Sundays. There was one just starting as we were on our way but we were told (in English) that we were welcome to stay. The best thing to do is probably to check their website.
Admission to the Cathedral is free. Guided tours are available, including in English, at 2:30 pm daily and additionally at 10:30 am Monday through Saturday at a cost of €8,00 per person. We skipped the guided tour in favor of the self-guided tour brochure that you can pick up near the front doors of the Cathedral for a mere €1,00 which we thought was awesome. I don't know what else the guided tour would have told us and it probably wouldn't have been at our own pace.
If you decide you want to climb the south tower on the west front of the Dom, the climb up the tower will set you back €4,00 per adult and it's probably worth it. Far be it from me to discourage anyone from climbing a building.
The Dom is located slightly north of center of the altstadt or old city of Cologne on the west bank of the Rhine. However you make your way to the city, it's pretty much impossible to miss the Cathedral.
Opening hours are 6 am to 7:30 pm in winter (that's November to April) and 6 am to 9 pm in Summer (which is the rest of the year) Monday through Saturday. Sunday tourist hours are shorter (1 pm to 4:30 pm). The Cathedral is closed or partially closed during services and services are not only on Sundays. There was one just starting as we were on our way but we were told (in English) that we were welcome to stay. The best thing to do is probably to check their website.
Admission to the Cathedral is free. Guided tours are available, including in English, at 2:30 pm daily and additionally at 10:30 am Monday through Saturday at a cost of €8,00 per person. We skipped the guided tour in favor of the self-guided tour brochure that you can pick up near the front doors of the Cathedral for a mere €1,00 which we thought was awesome. I don't know what else the guided tour would have told us and it probably wouldn't have been at our own pace.
If you decide you want to climb the south tower on the west front of the Dom, the climb up the tower will set you back €4,00 per adult and it's probably worth it. Far be it from me to discourage anyone from climbing a building.
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