Cologne Cathedral

This guide to Cologne Cathedral follows a four-hundred-year superstition Cologne told itself, that the world would end the day the cathedral was finished. Work began in 1248 to house relics of the three wise men, then stalled for two centuries, leaving a wooden crane stranded on the unfinished south tower until it became a fixture of the skyline. Money and momentum only returned in the 1840s, from a Prussian king eager to bind Catholic Cologne to his kingdom, and the site's own stone workshop still employs about a hundred masons patching the soft sandstone today.