The three apses
Three half-domes seen at once.
St Aposteln stands on the western edge of Neumarkt, Cologne's busiest shopping square, and you need only turn your back on the shops to be standing in front of one of the city's twelve great Romanesque churches. It began as a collegiate foundation in the early eleventh century, and between about twelve hundred and twelve hundred and twenty the east end that made its name was added. That east end is not the usual straight choir but three semicircular apses meeting around a single crossing in a clover-leaf plan. This trefoil arrangement is the most ambitious of its kind anywhere in the Rhineland, and other Cologne churches copied it. The city lost most of its Romanesque fabric in the bombing of nineteen forty-three and nineteen forty-five; here the roofs and vaults came down, and rebuilding dragged on for decades. The most recent addition divides opinion. The painting inside the apses was carried out by the artist Hermann Gottfried in the nineteen-nineties in frank modern colour beneath vaults eight hundred years old — bold to some visitors, an intrusion to others. The church is also known for its concert programme, and entry is free throughout the day outside service times.
Three half-domes seen at once.
Modern colour under thirteenth-century vaults.
Neumarkt 30, 50667 Cologne
If architecture is what draws you, make it St Gereon for its decagonal dome. If you want the familiar riverside silhouette, make it Great St Martin. St Aposteln is the one for people who are already at Neumarkt: seeing it costs you nothing more than a short detour off the shopping route.
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