The Golden Chamber
Walls of ornamentally arranged bones and gilded busts โ nothing like it anywhere.
Raimond Spekking โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Jorge Franganillo โ CC BY 4.0 ยท Armin Kleiner โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Frank Vincentz โ CC BY-SA 3.0
Solemn more than frightening: the arrangement is sacred ornament meant as honour, not horror, and the room is small, lit and calm. The sensitive and young children may keep to the church itself โ lovely on its own.
Most likely an old Latin copying slip turned 'eleven virgins' โ or 'little Ursula' โ into thousands, and the later find of a Roman burial ground fed the legend's number. Either way, the legend built the city's identity regardless of arithmetic.
Seven minutes' walk north of the cathedral: do the giant first, then this as its quiet opposite โ enormity and crowds, then silence and strangeness. Continue to the Belgian quarter's restaurants if hunger strikes.
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St. Ursula is one of Cologne's twelve great Romanesque churches and home to the city's most famous legend: the tale of Ursula, the princess martyred here with her virgin companions โ "eleven thousand virgins" in the legend's telling โ who became Cologne's patroness, her eleven flames on the city's coat of arms to this day. The church's jewel is the seventeenth-century Golden Chamber: a small room without equal anywhere, its walls a mosaic of bones arranged in ornamental patterns and Latin words, above rows of gilded reliquary busts โ a baroque confrontation with mortality that astonishes and chills at once, and is never forgotten. The church stands in permanent quiet near the station, and the visit is short โ but whoever enters the Golden Chamber leaves with one of Europe's strangest memories.
Walls of ornamentally arranged bones and gilded busts โ nothing like it anywhere.
The tale of Cologne's patroness, whose eleven flames mark the city's arms.
The venerable style without the cathedral's queues.
Ursulaplatz 24, 50668 Cologne