Basilica of St Mary in the Capitol

This guide to the Basilica of St Mary in the Capitol in Cologne follows Ida, granddaughter of Emperor Otto the Second, who arrived around 1039 as abbess and decided the existing church wasn't worthy of her family's name. It traces how she and her brother, Archbishop Hermann the Second, tore down the old building atop a thousand-year-old Roman temple platform and modeled her new choir on the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Stand beneath the three rounded apses she designed, and the nearly five-meter wooden doors carved with twenty-six panels of Christ's life.