Dominican Church of St. Andrew
Romanesque church with a Roman-era stone sarcophagus in its crypt, holding the remains of a medieval scholar-saint.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Dominican Church of St. Andrew in Cologne opens with a question: why did it take the Catholic Church six centuries to canonize Albertus Magnus, the scholar who taught Thomas Aquinas and died inside these walls in 1280. It follows his remains after Napoleon's armies dissolved the Rhineland's monasteries in 1802, and the long wait before workers finally built him a resting place beneath the crossing in 1954, inside a Roman sarcophagus carved seventeen hundred years before he was born. The guide also traces the Romanesque nave itself, standing since Archbishop Gero consecrated it in 974.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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