Old St. Alban
Bombed Romanesque church left as a ruin, sheltering a grieving parents sculpture beyond its shattered windows.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Kolumba
Grey-brick museum wrapping a bombed medieval church's ruins and a postwar chapel under one roof.
Church of Saint Pantaleon
Cologne's oldest Romanesque church, with a hidden late-Gothic carved screen that survived wartime bombing.
Käthe Kollwitz Museum
Museum of drawings, prints, and sculptures confronting hunger, grief, and war by one German artist.
Great St. Martin Church
Riverside Romanesque abbey church whose ancient founding legend was exposed as an eighteenth-century fabrication.
National Socialism Documentation Center of the City of Cologne
Former Gestapo headquarters with a preserved basement prison bearing eighteen hundred wall inscriptions from wartime detainees.
St. Gereon
Ten-sided Gothic dome wrapped around the remains of a fourth-century Roman burial hall.