We made the trip to Cologne to visit the Cathedral.
Our train followed the Moselle from Traben-Trarbach to Bullay to Koblenz where we then followed the Rhine down stream to the city of Cologne. The Cathedral is next to the station. We looked inside and Aby took the climb up the tower.
We walked around the cathedral and at one point could look over a wall and see all the restoration work going on.
The cathedral was the tallest building in the world in 1884, and is still a formidable structures, but once can not visually appreciate the size as there is no view point
Aby climbed the tower of the cathedral, 509 spiral steps to a height of 98 metres. The steps were the same narrow spiral the whole way up, and two-way stairs which means that someone has to take the narrow inside step to pass. Quite dizzying, around and around and around
Her comments were – it was too crowded and the graffiti was terrible. But fun to have done.
Inside the cathedral there is very little light, all the light comes through the magnificent stained glass windows, and taking photographs with a flash seems all wrong ! Here are a few pictures of details viewed while we walked around the interior. There are many artworks, tombs, enclaves and memorials. We would have liked to have learnt more about what we were looking at.
I gather that in the past the interior of these medieval cathedrals were brightly painted, in one area of the building the original style of bright painting has been maintained
While Aby was climbing the tower I went back into the cathedral and tried to take some long exposures. These pictures where taken by leaning the camera against a massive pillar to keep it steady (the camera, not the pillar) while taking a picture with a half minute shutter speed or longer. Hope fully they will give you some idea of the size and height of the interior. For the engineers and architects – look at the size of the pillar on the right ! There are people in the pictures, but worked ok as most people spend time standing still !
We bypassed the tours groups rushing in and out of the cathedral and walked around the building, here we encountered local business people and workers rushing to and from the station ! Every side of the building is highly decorated and the entrance ways are enormous. We reversed our train travel and went back up the Rhine and Moselle to Traben-Trarbach.
The good, bad and ugly – and there is definately ugly here
- Good
- Walking up all the steps to the tower was fun
- Magnificent structure
- Beautiful stained glass window
- Awesome pillars and structure
- Bad
- Terribly terrible grimy, inside and out
- Too many visitors who do not appreciate it is still a place of worship
- No entrance fee charged – thus under appreciated
- The building is difficult to view from outside, it is on a mound and you can not really see the whole grand structure
- The graffiti covered every scrap of wall and disgusting
- There appears to be little administration or crowd control
- No information – look and leave, no tours, no signs
- They have built modern building against the walls.
- From outside there is no sense of scale, you can not appreciate how big and tall the building is
- Ugly
- It is just not clean, overall feeling of too much grime – and I am talking about inside
- Graffiti – modern
- No crowd management
- Lack of respect by so many of the visitors
We would not go again, it is a magnificent building, but fails as a cathedral
Next – Berg Eltz Castle