Kölnisches Stadtmuseum

This guide to the Kolnisches Stadtmuseum in Cologne follows how the city's four-hundred-year-old Renaissance arsenal, the Zeughaus, survived wartime bombing only to lose everything to a leak nobody caught in time during the summer of two thousand seventeen. It traces the arsenal's construction between fifteen ninety-four and sixteen oh six, its postwar rebuilding into a museum in nineteen fifty-eight, and the collection, from a medieval seal to carnival floats, that had to be evacuated within days. Picture the old Zeughaus itself, standing empty a tram ride from where you are now.