Qualla: St. Maria im Kapitol

St. Maria im Kapitol: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johan Bakker, CC BY-SA 4.0. The wooden doors weigh several hundred kilograms each, and they are nearly nine hundred and sixty years old. They have hung at the north entrance of St. Maria im Kapitol since around 1065. Twenty-six carved panels show the childhood of Jesus on one wing and the passion and resurrection on the other, the figures still standing in the framed compositions of late antiquity, traces of original paint still in the wood. Across all of Romanesque Europe, no other complete wooden church doors of this age survive in place. They open into a church standing where a Roman temple once stood, where a Frankish queen lay buried, where Cologne's largest Romanesque basilica spread its three apses in the shape of a clover.

Read more: St. Maria im Kapitol on Qualla

Image: Johan Bakker | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Maria im Kapitol: Temple of the Capitoline Three

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Own work, CC BY 3.0 de. In the first century, when Cologne was promoted from a Rhine garrison to a Roman colonia, the Roman colonists built a temple on a small hill in the southernmost corner of the new city to thank the three gods who watched over Rome itself: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the Capitoline...

Read more: St. Maria im Kapitol on Qualla

Image: Own work | CC BY 3.0 de

St. Maria im Kapitol: Plectrude's Church

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit unknown, Public domain. After the Franks took Cologne in the fifth century, the most powerful men in the kingdom kept houses on the Capitoline hill. Pepin of Herstal, the Frankish ruler who effectively ran the kingdom from 687, lived for a time in the city. His wife Plectrude came from an Austrasian nob...

Read more: St. Maria im Kapitol on Qualla

Image: unknown | Public domain

St. Maria im Kapitol: The Clover Plan

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In the middle of the eleventh century Archbishop Hermann II and his sister Ida, the abbess of what was now a women's monastery, began an extraordinary church. Pope Leo IX himself came to Cologne and consecrated the altar and the nave. The plan was modeled, deliberately, on the Ch...

Read more: St. Maria im Kapitol on Qualla

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

St. Maria im Kapitol: The Doors That Lasted

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Provinzialverband der Rheinprovinz, Public domain. Of everything the church holds, the wooden doors from around 1065 are the strangest survival. Made for the north conche, they hung there for almost nine centuries, opened and closed by countless hands. They were modelled on the early Christian doors of Santa Sabina in Rome and Sa...

Read more: St. Maria im Kapitol on Qualla

Image: Provinzialverband der Rheinprovinz | Public domain

St. Maria im Kapitol: Closed, Reopened

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 3.0. World War II was brutal to St. Maria im Kapitol. The six-part Gothic ribbed vault that had crowned the nave since 1240 collapsed. Until 1956 only the western part of the church could be used. The eastern half, with the great three-conch sanctuary, stayed closed for almost forty y...

Read more: St. Maria im Kapitol on Qualla

Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY-SA 3.0