Cologne Cathedral

The story

In 1164 the archbishop of Cologne came home from Italy with a prize of war: bones said to be those of the three wise men who followed the star to Bethlehem. Pilgrims came in such numbers that the old cathedral could not hold them. In 1248 the city began a new one, the biggest it could imagine, in the new French style.

The east end was finished in 1322. Then the money and the will gave out. About 1520 work stopped altogether. In China 1248 is late in the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), and 1880 is the sixth year of Guangxu of the Qing (1644–1912).

Close by, with a page of its own: Notre-Dame de Paris, Seville Cathedral, Sagrada Família.

What is here

Since 1 July 2026 the church itself has a visitor's ticket. The tower and the treasury each have their own.

If you have one minute

On the square, facing the west front

Step back until you can see the tops. No church has a larger front. Every surface is cut into ribs, niches and little spires, so the whole thing seems to be rising while you look.

Almost all of what you are looking at is from the 1800s. But it was built from a drawing made about 1300, on a sheet of parchment four metres high. The sheet was lost. Half of it turned up in 1814 in the loft of an inn, where, the story goes, it was being used to dry beans.

Look at the colour. The stone is not black by nature. Rain and two centuries of soot have turned it, and it is too soft to scrub. Paler patches are new stone: about a hundred masons work on the building all year, every year.

At the foot of the south tower stands a stone finial, nine and a half metres tall. It is a full-size copy of the ones on top of the spires. Stand beside it and look up.

Things people often get wrong

"It is a medieval building." The choir is medieval. The nave, the towers and the whole front were built between 1842 and 1880, with steam cranes and an iron roof, and paid for largely by a Protestant king of Prussia.

"It is free." Until 30 June 2026 it was. Since 1 July 2026 visitors pay 12 euros. People who come to pray or to a service still go in free, by the north door.

"The bombers spared it on purpose." It was hit by fourteen heavy bombs and some seventy fire bombs. It stood because a Gothic frame of piers and arches lets a blast pass through. The story that pilots were told to save it as a landmark has no document behind it.

"It is finished." Ask in Cologne and you will be told that the day it is finished the world will end.

People who stood here

• Rainald of Dassel (archbishop of Cologne and chancellor of the emperor, about 1120–1167)When the emperor sacked Milan he gave his chancellor the relics of the Three Kings from a church there. Rainald brought them over the Alps in 1164 and made Cologne one of the great pilgrim cities of Europe.
• Petrarch (Italian poet, 1304–1374)He came in 1333 and wrote to a friend that he had seen, in the middle of the city, a very beautiful church, unfinished, which the people with good reason called the greatest.
• Sulpiz Boisserée (art collector, 1783–1854)A merchant's son of Cologne who gave thirty years to one idea: that the ruin should be finished. He measured it, hunted down the lost drawings, published them, and talked Goethe and the Prussian crown prince round.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German poet, 1749–1832)He saw the stump in 1774 and found it sad. Forty years later Boisserée showed him the plans, and he lent his name to the campaign.
• Heinrich Heine (German poet, 1797–1856)He joined the society for finishing the cathedral, then changed his mind. In his long poem of 1844 he calls the half-built church a Bastille of the spirit and is glad it was never finished. It was finished thirty-six years later.
• Frederick William IV of Prussia (king, 1795–1861)A Protestant who loved the Middle Ages. He laid the stone for the new work in 1842 and paid half the cost from the state, to bind his new Catholic provinces on the Rhine to Prussia.
• Robert Schumann (German composer, 1810–1856)He saw a cardinal installed here in 1850. The slow, solemn fourth movement of his Rhenish Symphony, written that winter, is his memory of it.
• Konrad Adenauer (mayor of Cologne, later first chancellor of West Germany, 1876–1967)He was mayor from 1917 until the Nazis removed him in 1933, and again for a few months in 1945 in a city nine-tenths destroyed. His funeral Mass was held here in 1967, with the leaders of the world in the pews.
• Gerhard Richter (German painter, born 1932)In 2007 he filled the great south window, blank since the war, with 11,263 squares of glass in seventy-two colours, placed by a computer at random. The cardinal said it would suit a mosque better and stayed away from the unveiling.

Go deeper: eight stops, from the square to the bell

Stops 2 to 6 are inside and need the visitor's ticket. The tower and the treasury are separate tickets.

1. The crane

From about 1400 to 1868 a wooden crane, twenty-five metres high, stood on the stump of the south tower. Nobody took it down, because taking it down would have meant admitting the cathedral would never be finished. It is in every old view of the city. When it creaked, people said, it was calling for the work to go on.

The finishing in 1880 was celebrated as a triumph of the new German empire. The archbishop was not there. He was in exile, in a quarrel between the Church and the state.

2. The nave

Inside, look straight up. The vault is forty-three metres above the floor, and the nave is narrow, so the height feels greater than it is. The piers run from floor to roof without a break.

The windows on the south side were given in 1848 by the king of Bavaria. Those on the north are from about 1508. Look for the difference: the old ones are darker and the faces are smaller.

3. The oldest cross

In a chapel on the north side hangs a crucifix carved in oak about 970. It is the oldest large one that survives north of the Alps. Christ is shown dead, his body sagging and his eyes shut. Before this, sculptors showed him alive and upright. Here, for the first time, he is a man who has died.

4. The golden box

Behind the high altar, in a glass case, is the reason for the whole building: a chest of gilded silver in the shape of a church, over two metres long, made between about 1190 and 1225. It is the largest reliquary in western Europe. On its sides sit prophets and apostles; on the front the three kings bring their gifts, and a fourth figure follows them, a German king who paid for the gold.

It was opened in 1864. Inside were the bones of three men: one young, one in middle life, one old.

5. The choir

The oak stalls were carved about 1310 and have 104 seats, more than any other set in Germany. Two were kept, by custom, for the pope and the emperor. Under the tip-up seats are small carvings of monsters, acrobats and couples dancing.

Near the choir stands a painted wooden Virgin of about 1290, slender and smiling. She replaced an older figure, brought from Milan with the relics, that was lost in a fire.

6. The painting with the city's saints

Stefan Lochner painted this altarpiece for the town hall chapel about 1445. In the middle the kings kneel to the child. On the wings are the city's own martyrs. The gold ground is real gold leaf, punched with a pattern.

Doch siehe! dort im Mondenschein Den kolossalen Gesellen! Er ragt verteufelt schwarz empor, Das ist der Dom von Köllen.

But look! there in the moonlight, that colossal fellow! He looms up devilish black: that is the cathedral of Cologne.

Heinrich Heine, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, Caput IV, 1844; our translation

7. The tower

The climb is 533 steps up a stone spiral in the south tower, to a platform ninety-seven metres up. The last part is inside the spire itself, which is not solid but a cage of stone tracery. You can see the sky through it.

On the way you pass the bells. The biggest, cast in 1923, weighs twenty-four tonnes. The people of Cologne call it Fat Peter. It is rung on a few feast days a year. In January 2011 its clapper, the weight of a small car, snapped and fell.

8. From across the river

The same shot: the classic view, with the iron railway bridge leading the eye to the spires, is taken from the steps on the east bank, just south of the bridge, as the lights come on. The fence of the bridge's footpath is hung with tens of thousands of padlocks left by couples.

In the photographs of March 1945 the same view shows the bridge in the river and the city flat. Only the cathedral stands.