
Church of Saint Pantaleon
Cologne's oldest Romanesque church, with a hidden late-Gothic carved screen that survived wartime bombing.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Church of Saint Pantaleon in Cologne opens during World War Two, when someone hid the church's finest possession, a delicate carved screen, behind a hastily built brick wall as bombs fell on the city. That screen was raised in 1502 for Abbot Johannes Lünninck by the Cologne workshop known as Master Tilman's, and for four centuries it separated the chanting monks from the congregation. The guide follows the building itself through the war years, when its roof was torn away and it stood open to the sky for over a decade while Cologne rebuilt around it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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