Hildesheim Cathedral

Hildesheim's cathedral is one of the great treasure houses of early medieval Europe, a church whose bronzes and chandeliers show what the craftsmen of Ottonian Germany could achieve around the year 1000. Its story begins with the founding of the diocese in 815 by the emperor Louis the Pious, and it has been the seat of the bishops of Hildesheim ever since. Together with the nearby abbey church of St Michael, the cathedral was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, chiefly for its Romanesque architecture and its extraordinary works of art.

The building grew from a small chapel of St Mary into a cruciform basilica in the ninth century. After a fire in 1046, Bishop Hezilo rebuilt it on the old foundations, and later centuries added Gothic side chapels, a Baroque crossing tower and, in the nineteenth century, a Neo-Romanesque twin-towered west front. The greatest treasures, however, come from the time of Bishop Bernward, who led the diocese at the turn of the first millennium. The Bernward Doors, cast in bronze and dated by their inscription to 1015, are each leaf cast as a single piece and more than four and a half metres tall; their reliefs set scenes from Genesis on one leaf against scenes from the life of Christ on the other, an ingenious piece of medieval storytelling. Bernward also commissioned a bronze column whose spiralling band of reliefs, modelled on the triumphal columns of ancient Rome, follows the life of Christ. Two great Romanesque wheel chandeliers, given by bishops Azelin and Hezilo in the eleventh century, symbolise the heavenly Jerusalem with their circles of towers and candles.

On 22 March 1945 an air raid left the cathedral almost completely destroyed. It was rebuilt in the 1950s in a simplified form closer to its early Romanesque appearance and consecrated anew in 1960. Against the outer wall of the apse grows the Thousand-year Rose, the city's emblem. Local legend holds that Louis the Pious hung a reliquary of the Virgin on a wild rose while hunting here, could not take it down again, and took this as a sign to found the diocese on the spot. The bush has been documented for several centuries; burned down to its roots in 1945, it sent up new shoots among the rubble that same spring. Hildesheim, a historic bishop's town in Lower Saxony south of Hanover, grew up around this cathedral hill.

Getting there

The cathedral stands in the centre of Hildesheim, within walking distance of Hildesheim Hauptbahnhof, which has frequent trains to Hanover and long-distance connections across Germany. Hannover Airport (HAJ) is about 39 km to the north.