Qualla: Cologne Cathedral

Cologne Cathedral: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arminia, CC BY-SA 3.0. For four hundred years, a wooden crane sat on top of the unfinished south tower, a fixture of the Cologne skyline so familiar that travelers used it for navigation. Construction had begun in August 1248. The money ran out around 1560, the work stopped, and the half-built cathedral became a strange monument to abandoned ambition - a Gothic ruin built only to belfry height, frozen mid-rise. Then in the 1840s, fueled by Romantic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages and the discovery of the original medieval drawings, the project resumed. The crane came down. The towers went up. In October 1880, six hundred and thirty-two years after that first foundation stone, the cathedral was finally complete.

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Image: Arminia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cologne Cathedral: The Patient Construction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the foundation stone on 15 August 1248, in a Cologne already pulsing with pilgrim traffic. Eighty-four years earlier, the bones believed to be those of the Three Wise Men had been carried up from Milan, gifted to the archbishop from Frederick...

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Image: Public domain

Cologne Cathedral: Bones of the Magi

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arminia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The reason the cathedral exists on this scale is, fundamentally, three boxes of bones. The Shrine of the Three Kings, commissioned around 1190 from Nicholas of Verdun, is a gilded bronze and silver reliquary in the shape of a small basilica, encrusted with enamels and gemstones -...

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Image: Arminia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cologne Cathedral: Fourteen Hits, One Standing Building

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D-Kuru, CC BY-SA 3.0 at. By the end of the Second World War, central Cologne had been pounded into rubble. The cathedral took fourteen direct bomb hits - the Allied aircrews used its twin spires as a navigation landmark, and the cathedral sat in the middle of the target area. Photographs from March 1945 ...

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Image: D-Kuru | CC BY-SA 3.0 at

Cologne Cathedral: A Building Never Finished

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit File:Cathedral main entrance.jpg: Yavor Doychinov derivative work: Georgfotoart, CC BY-SA 3.0. The cathedral has stood for over a century officially complete, and yet it has almost never stood without scaffolding. The Schlaitdorf sandstone of the 19th-century work weathers badly, and the filigree of buttresses and pinnacles is constantly attacked by rain, sulphur, and bird...

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Image: File:Cathedral main entrance.jpg: Yavor Doychinov derivative work: Georgfotoart | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cologne Cathedral: Light Through Pixels

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johann Franz Michiels, Public domain. In 2007, the cathedral got a new window. The original 19th-century glass in the south transept had been blown out in the war, replaced for decades by plain panes. The painter Gerhard Richter was commissioned to design a replacement, and what he produced was 11,263 identically siz...

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Image: Johann Franz Michiels | Public domain