Old St. Alban

This guide to Old St. Alban in Cologne starts at an iron inscription by the gate about prisoners of war still waiting to come home, then opens into a Romanesque church first recorded in 1172 and left roofless after a 1943 bombing, dedicated in 1959 as a war memorial with federal president Theodor Heuss present. You'll hear how its medieval bell escaped Nazi confiscation and still rings across town at Saint Gereon, and about a kneeling mother and father in stone visible through the empty windows, copies of a grieving sculptor's own work made by two young art students under Ewald Matare. Look closely at the father's bowed face through the bars.