St. Kunibert's Church, Romanesque church in Altstadt-Nord, Cologne, Germany
St. Kunibert is Cologne's youngest of the twelve Romanesque churches, consecrated in 1247. Its exterior has a two-storey apse wall under a dwarf gallery, and the nave gable between the east towers holds three niches. Inside, the apse has two levels of column-supported galleries set within a double-shell wall, and the nave rests on rectangular piers of alternating size.
Construction began in the early 13th century under Archbishop Theoderich von Wied and was completed by the mid-13th century. The church ranks among Cologne's later Romanesque buildings from that period.
The church keeps the shrines of Cunibert and the Two Ewalds, whose relics were buried here; the medieval shrines were destroyed in the secularization and the present ones date from the second half of the 19th century. The eight apse windows, made between 1220 and 1230, were stored away during the war and survived.
The church is open daily to visitors without entrance fees. It sits in a quiet residential area north of the old town center, easily reached by a walk through the historic neighborhood.
The crypt's central column supports the vault above the Kunibert spring, a well the sources describe as probably pre-Christian; its water was said to promise fertility to couples. The crypt itself was built as a substructure to level the slope down toward the Rhine.
The community of curious travelers
AroundUs brings together thousands of curated places, local tips, and hidden gems, enriched daily by 92,897 contributors worldwide.
