Cologne Cathedral

On 23 July 1164 Archbishop Rainald of Dassel brought relics said to be the bones of the Three Wise Men from Milan to Cologne, given to him by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa out of his spoils of war. They were housed in the city's Carolingian cathedral, consecrated in 870. Between 1190 and 1225 the goldsmith Nicholas of Verdun made the Shrine of the Three Kings for them, a gilded reliquary regarded as one of the finest of the Middle Ages, and Cologne became an internationally known pilgrimage site.

When work on a new Gothic cathedral began in 1248, the Carolingian building was to be demolished step by step. Careless demolition work and a fire destroyed nearly the whole structure; only the Shrine of the Three Kings was saved. Its western portion was patched up and used until 1322, when it was finally taken down as the Gothic choir was completed and the new nave begun.

Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the foundation stone on 15 August 1248. The eastern arm was built under Master Gerhard and consecrated in 1322. Work on the choir and south tower had stopped by 1473, leaving the tower complete only to belfry level, topped by a huge crane left standing as a skyline landmark for around four centuries. Nave work continued only intermittently after that and by around 1560 had halted entirely, leaving the cathedral a medieval torso for nearly three hundred years.

Nineteenth-century Romantic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, and the rediscovery of the original façade plan, revived the project. The Central-Dombauverein, founded in 1842, raised two-thirds of the cost by public subscription; the Prussian state supplied the rest; after 1871 the project came to be regarded as a symbol of German nationhood. Construction resumed to the surviving medieval plans with modern techniques including iron roof girders. Ernst Friedrich Zwirner directed the work until his death in 1861; the nave was finished and all three towers raised, with bells installed in the 1870s.

The completed cathedral was celebrated as a national event on 15 October 1880, 632 years after the foundation stone was laid, attended by Emperor Wilhelm I. At 157 metres, it was the tallest building in the world for four years, until the Washington Monument surpassed it.

The cathedral's twin spires served as a navigational landmark for Allied bomber crews, and the building took fourteen aerial bomb hits during the war. Badly damaged, it nevertheless remained standing in an otherwise flattened city. On 6 March 1945, an area just west of the cathedral saw fighting between American tanks of the 3rd Armored Division and a German Panther tank, which knocked out two Shermans, killing three men, before being destroyed itself.

Willy Weyres, appointed the cathedral's architect in 1944, oversaw the repairs; the building reopened in 1956. The central crossing tower, completed in 1860 to Zwirner's design, had been severely damaged but remained structurally sound; in 1965 Weyres reclad it in an Art Deco style, a redesign some critics called a "wart", and at the same time demolished Zwirner's war-damaged St Mary's Chapel.

Cologne Cathedral was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996. In 2004 it was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, the only Western site on it at the time, over concerns that planned high-rises nearby would damage its setting; it was removed in 2006 after authorities agreed to limit building heights around it.

From the 2000s the cathedral chapter examined antisemitic imagery among its artefacts, including a Judensau carving in the choir stalls publicly protested from 2002. A working group formed in 2017 with the Cologne Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation; by 2024 it had chosen to leave the carvings in place, with guided tours addressing their content, while commissioning new art. A 2023 competition named Andrea Büttner winner in April 2025 for a mural depicting the stone base of a Torah ark from a Cologne synagogue removed after a pogrom, later reused under an altarpiece.

The cathedral remains the seat of the Archbishop of Cologne and, with the Shrine of the Three Kings, one of the most important pilgrimage sites of northern Europe; visitors can climb 533 steps to a viewing platform roughly 100 metres up. Its stonework requires constant upkeep by the Dombauhütte, with half the maintenance costs still met by the Dombauverein. In March 2026 the cathedral's management announced it would begin charging tourists admission later that year to help fund the work.