Antoniterkirche

This guide to the Antoniterkirche on Cologne's busy Schildergasse asks how many days a year this quiet Gothic church swings its doors open specifically for crowds. It traces the answer through Karneval week, when the foyer becomes a ticket booth and the congregation holds a service sung in Kölsch, and back to the thirteen-fifties, when the Antonite monks who built it tended sufferers of Saint Anthony's fire, the disease now known as ergotism. You'll stand on the same worn doorstep where centuries of grim history and modern street life share an address. Look up at the church's plain Gothic facade before the parade rolls past.