A Day Out of Frankfurt: Cologne Cathedral

Posted on by Juliet Frost

One thing I knew I wanted to do while I was in Germany was take the train up the road to Cologne and visit the cathedral. It’s only a little over an hour from Frankfurt and I’d heard rumours it’s a pretty good cathedral.

I did balk at the price. I went to the ticket machine to get an estimate the evening before and when it came out at €99, I was taken aback. Isn’t Germany the land of affordable train travel, the forward-looking nation we’re all aspiring to be these days? That’s making UK ticket prices look like peanuts! And… that’s not even what I ended up paying. I’m not going to tell you what I ended up paying! No wonder everyone went mad for the €9 tickets in the summer. You can make it cheaper by choosing a non-ICE train but that would have taken three and a half hours each way, with multiple changes and that would have eaten into my day so much it wouldn’t be worth doing. So I winced and apologised to my bank account and went for a direct high-speed train. Nice little free bonus, though – if you buy your ticket from the machine, you can print your timetable so you know exactly where you need to be and at what time. Look at this! Platform numbers hours in advance! Maybe that’s not a novelty to you but I’ve spent enough evenings at Waterloo going “the train is leaving in eight minutes and I still don’t know where from!” to appreciate this.

Train tickets from Frankfurt to Cologne, including printed timetables showing times and platforms for transfers.

I had a slight hiccup in that the train wasn’t actually quite direct. It delivered me not to Cologne Hauptbahnhof but to Cologne Messe and I struggled with that last half-mile. I didn’t have a valid ticket to find a mainline train. There was a transfer included but it had to be within three minutes and no way was I figuring out how and where in that time limit. There was no ticket machine in evidence for the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn was back at the other end of the station with no maps to tell me which line I should be choosing and in which direction. All complicated by wearing a mask – that’s still compulsory on public transport in Germany but in cold weather, there’s absolutely no way to wear glasses without them fogging up to a degree I’ve never previously experienced. So I was half-blind, freezing cold and extremely frustrated.

Anyway, I got a day ticket for Cologne public transport and found the right train in the end. I intended to take the U1 or U9 from Messe/Deutz to Heumarkt and then change to the U18 or U16 which would take me to Dom/Hbf. But, unusually, this U-Bahn not only runs above ground, it ran through the street like it was a tram and I discovered that at Heumarkt, it was very obvious where the cathedral was and the route appeared to run through a Christmas market. Well, ok then. I shall walk the rest of the way!

The entrance arch to Heinzels Wintermarkt. It's a blue arch with lots of gold accents, shaped like two fairytale towers connected by a covered bridge with a nutcracker figure in an opening over the top. The sky is blue and there are lots of people crowded underneath.

It was a good market! Cologne has four or five of them and this one was Heinzels Winter Fairytale old-fashioned market. Everything had wooden frontages and there were plenty of people dressed up in oldey-timey costumes. There was an ice rink and the mugs were round-bottomed things in dark red and either lined in pale yellow or everyone was drinking eggnog. What I’ve only just discovered is that this is where brownies live – Heinzelmännchen – the ones from the Brownie Story, the one where the children’s mum wants a brownie to help with the housework and the children discover that they can be the brownies. I’m not sure how many units still tell their girls that story but I told mine last year. Anyway, they live in Cologne!

Inside the market. The streets are cobbled and lined on both sides by dark wooden stalls, with gold decorations at top and bottom and a long green wreath along the top dotted with lights. Dominating the scene is a woman in a straw hat and an ankle-length fur (or fur-like) coat.

Beyond the Heinzels market came the Cathedral market, where the stalls have red tops and shooting star labels and entirely different mugs and behind that was the cathedral. What’s more, it’s free to go into the cathedral so that went some of the way towards making up the price of the train fare.

Cologne Cathedral, a Gothic masterpiece, looming over the Christmas market, although all you can see of this market is a green fake-grass arch with a shooting star on it and behind, some red canvas roofs.

I like Gothic architecture. I like Norman more and I particularly like it when the two styles are mixed, as at Winchester Cathedral. Cologne is pure Gothic. What I hadn’t realised is that this cathedral sat half-finished for about 400 years and although they used the original plans and methods, anything above about the height of a two-storey house only dates back to the Victorian era. It was only just finished when the Allies knocked it down again. Well, we flattened Cologne but the cathedral was apparently sturdy enough that while it took some serious damage, the effect was of something unharmed standing in the ashes of its city. Part of it was hastily patched and only properly repaired in about 2004 but there’s now no evidence of bombing at all. Well, I guess they probably still had the plans sitting around and they’ve had 80 years to fix it.

Inside Cologne Cathedral, looking east down the nave. It's relatively narrow and lined with grubby sandstone pillars with soar up to high vaulting.

A large gold box shaped like a church without towers. This contains relics of the Three Kings, allegedly.

A view into the quire from the south ambulatory, seen through the pillars. Above the arches in the quire, there are frescoes of angels on very gold backgrounds and above, there's a row of huge windows with the subtle coloured patterns similar to the one I showed earlier.

One of the chapels in the ambulatory. It's lined with red brick and has niches painted on the wall, containing saints. There's a lot of gold, especially in the altarpiece. The delicate columns are painted in red, gold and green patterns. The effect is like a red version of the blue splendour of the lower chapel at Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

I wish my camera hadn’t broken the weekend before I went to Germany. I had to resort to taking my mum’s, which is better than nothing but it can’t touch the magnificence of this cathedral. It doesn’t handle anything other than broad daylight very well at all.

It’s spectacular. It’s absolutely breathtaking. It’s so high and the columns just soar. It’s a bit odd colour-rise – some of the columns are quite pinkish and some are quite yellowish, whereas most cathedrals are a bit more consistent with their stone colour but it kind of added to the image. As for the stained glass – well, anywhere a bit of stained glass could be put, it has been. Plenty of it is original, removed to a safe place during the war, some of it is Victorian and the huge piece in the south transept was only made in 2007, I think. It’s hundreds of squares creating a pixellated effect and when the sun shines through it, as it did that day, it casts pinkish rainbows on the north transept wall. Down the south aisle are three huge golden-yellow windows which also glow incredibly when the sun comes through them. I wish I could have captured that on camera because it was amazing. But if you look right up, above the clerestory, right up into the ceiling, where panels of windows are effectively just skylights, and if you have any kind of zoom on your camera, you can see that even those aren’t plain glass. I’m daydreaming of all the prints and all the things you could have made with the glass patterns from this cathedral.

Stained glass high up in the clerestory where you'd only notice the intricate patterns with a good zoom. It's abstract, in shades of yellowy green and blue, with wiggly blue lines separating the patterns into something resembling columns.

Light shining through the stained glass window in the south transept casts colours on the wall of the north transept opposite. It's an arch-shaped thing full of bright colours against a stone wall with carved saints in niches.

The window that cast the colours in the previous picture. It's a proper Gothic window with a rose at the top but the glass is a random pattern of colour squares, a pixellated window.

Three windows in the south aisle. They're relatively traditional but there's a lot of yellow glass in there. It's late morning by now and the midday sun is streaming through, making everything gold.

You can go up the South Tower. You have to go back outside and into a side door downstairs and then you pay the princely sum of €6 to climb the tower, heeding the warning signs “No lift – no joke”.

My ticket for going up the tower, lying on top of a pile of postcards of the cathedral and a little coin/medallion with the cathedral and rail bridge on it.

Cologne Cathedral is 516 feet high. It’s the highest double-towered church in the world and then third highest of all churches of any number of towers. Ulm Minster, just down the road, halfway between Frankfurt and Munich, has the highest tower in the world at 530 feet (yes, it’s just 14 feet higher, which is nothing) and then the second-tallest church in the world is the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, which is so big that it doesn’t look tall – it’s the biggest church in the world and tops Cologne by just two feet. The way up is 533 stairs, mostly the stone spiral variety but there are open metal stairs right at the top. Mercifully, they’re inside but they do go high enough for me to start to panic. I’m not as keen on heights as I once was. The 533 steps are a killer. There are two or three doorways where you can pause but mostly you have to stop on the steps and hope no one is coming in the other direction. I was reminded violently than I’m a tiny bit terrified of spiral stairs – these aren’t quite as steep and narrow and deathly as the ones in St Olaf’s in Tallinn but I was always scared of letting go of the handrail to literally crawl up the thin end of the steps to pass people coming down.

Stone spiral stairs, going clockwise. These date to the 1870s, so they're still nice and square and they have edging on each step to help prevent wear. They're lit by electric light and there's clearly some natural light coming from a window out of shot at the top.

Your main respite is the bell chamber. I don’t think the bells here actually dong – for one thing, all the functioning church bells I’ve ever seen are held upside down so when they swing, the clappers fly and these are held the way up you’d expect. For another, bells that size would cause hearing damage if they donged while visitors were up there. There are very narrow passages within the walls that allow you to move around the chamber and see the bells from all four sides but on two sides, there’s a very long drop and the windows seem inadequate protection. Oh, the windows! There are windows in the spiral stairs but as you get higher up, more and more of them are open. I know they’re barely six inches wide – you couldn’t fall out if you tried (cavers might be able to; I could squeeze through a 15cm gap once upon a time) – but it’s still a bit scary when you’re that high up to have open air blowing at you.

The belfry in the south tower. Natural light comes from large plain windows in three of the sides, illuminating some pretty large bells hanging from a system of very Victorian iron girders.

The view from the belfry. It's very high. In the foreground, something very Gothic is silhouetted against the sky. Below is the city. There's a much smaller church a couple of streets away, a long glass tower in the distance and something that looks a but like the Space Needle in the distance. There's a faint haze hanging over the city.

It’s a bit too high to enjoy. I’m sure the cage that runs around the top is perfectly adequate but I can’t quite help feeling like the platform can’t possibly be well-enough secured. You’re not going to fall through the wire but what if the whole structure falls? I took some photos. I didn’t have the self-possession to take selfies up there. I wanted a drink and a piece of chocolate and to get back down again.

A view over Cologne from the cathedral tower. To the right is a three-lane arched railway bridge crossing a wide blue river. In the foreground is another church with a lower Gothic tower and you can make out Hanseatic-style buildings just below that. There's definitely a thick haze coming in from the west.

The walkway at the top is contained in a cage with wire mesh. Above the cage, you can see the ornate spire perched on top of the tower. There's a metal ladder running up it. Just looking at it makes my blood run cold.

Through the wire mesh, and behind something spiky and ornate, you can see the red roofs of the market below, some 97 metres down.

Once I was back on blessed solid ground, I wanted a badge to commemorate the occasion. Cologne does not have such a thing. I had to settle for a tiny pin in the end and I searched every shop and stall in the city. The cathedral itself has three shops but they each sell the same thing, just in different places to save you the effort of walking round to the south side or to the basement.

I spent the afternoon taking in the markets. I bought a little white ceramic tree that I suspect was made with a biscuit cutter, which had the words Köln 2022 written on it in curly letters. In the souvenir shop, I bought a little wafer-thing wooden star for the tree with the cathedral in the middle of it. I bought a load of postcards for my scrapbook. I was very tempted by some little glass earrings in the shape of the cathedral’s towers but they had no price. I’ve looked them up online and although they do have a shop, the tower earrings don’t feature. I invested in a miniature 3ml souvenir bottle of original eau de Cologne because when you’re in the city it’s named after, it’s rude not to. I don’t have much of a nose for perfume. Usually I describe it as either smelling of perfume or alcohol but there are hints of citrus in this under the smell of alcohol.

The small Christmas tree in my office. Its branches are "snow-covered" and it's lit by warm white star lights and cold white snowflake lights. Among its branches, you can see on the bottom left, a white ceramic tree with Koln 2022 written on it and at the top, a wooden star with a cut-out of the cathedral in the middle of it. I couldn't get the tiny bottle of eau de cologne to balance in the branches.

I had a mug of hot chocolate in the Heinzels market and got “cup three”. It’s good hot chocolate and the cup is now serving as the holder of my various tools on my desk – scissors, pliers, craft knife etc moved from my Frankfurt 2014 mug which was getting a bit overloaded. My hands were cold but the mug was too hot to hold without gloves. It’s nice to warm up.

A round-bottomed dark red mug with a pale yellow inner and a brownie on the front wearing a red pointed hat. The mug is full of steaming hot chocolate and you can just make out a couple of nails which have the scrappy remains of two-week-old blue nail varnish on.

By the time I was done with the shopping, it was getting cold. An icy mist had come down, which would ruin any view from the high top of that tower and I was freezing. I took shelter inside the cathedral where it was not warm. Massive stone medieval buildings rarely are, which is why I enjoyed the coolness of Wells Cathedral so much during the heatwave back in July or August. Here I was out of the cold mist and I could sit down but it wasn’t a place to warm up. The character of the cathedral was hugely changed – it had been full of golden light and patches of bright colour earlier and now it was positively dark, which really brought out the pink tones in the stone. I tried standing by the candles but they don’t really give off heat – or not enough to penetrate five layers of warm clothes.

The south side of Cologne Cathedral with a mist blotting out the top of the towers.

A selfie inside the cathedral, with the east end and the pillars visible behind me. I'm wearing a green brioche woolly hat and have my circular scarf pulled up over my mouth.

I was wearing my heated coat. I had it switched on and in red, full-heat, mode. Couldn’t even feel it. Heated coats work much better when you’re only wearing a t-shirt underneath. Maybe that’s what I should have done, taken off three of my layers. But I didn’t. I went into the main station, as my return ticket was from there rather than the Messe stop, and I sat in Burger King and had some chips. I had a non-flexible ticket which meant I had to get the 18:18 train, even though I was shivering in the station by 4pm. You want a mortgage one day, you have to use that ticket, even if you freeze to death for it.

On platform 5 of Cologne Hauptbahnhof in the winter evening. A huge arched roof encloses the long station. There's a white ICE train at the next track but this one is empty.

Yes, it would have been a very satisfying day if I could have left as soon as I was cold, tired and cathedral-ed out but as it was, I had to kill two hours in the station waiting for a train that was delayed and that was not satisfactory. But the cathedral was absolutely worth it and even though I saw and admired just about every inch of it, if I ever find myself in Cologne again, I’ll do it all over again.