Great St. Martin Church
Riverside Romanesque abbey church whose ancient founding legend was exposed as an eighteenth-century fabrication.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Great St. Martin Church starts by dismantling the church's own biography: guidebooks repeated a legend of a Scottish monk founding a chapel here in 690 and Danish princes rebuilding it, until a scholar traced the whole chronicle to a Benedictine monk who invented it in 1730 to flatter his own monastery. It follows what archaeologists actually found beneath the crypt in the 1960s, a Roman sports ground with a swimming basin, and the real founder, Archbishop Bruno the Great, who planted a community here around 960. You'll also hear how bombing raids gutted the church in the Second World War and how long it took Cologne to rebuild the tower overhead.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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