Basilika St. Ursula
Romanesque basilica whose choir holds a fifth-century inscription, oldest record of Christianity in the city.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Basilika St. Ursula in Cologne opens with a Roman senator named Clematius, who kept dreaming of silent women until he rebuilt a ruined chapel on the land where they had been martyred and carved his story into stone, sometime in the late fourth hundreds. It follows how medieval readers misread an old inscription's abbreviation as a number, turning a handful of nameless women into eleven thousand, and how a construction crew digging near the church in the early eleven hundreds broke into an ancient Roman cemetery and found bones by the hundreds. You'll hear how the city decided at once whose remains it had found. Clematius's own inscription is still there in the choir wall, plain and legible, if you look for it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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