Two Tours of the Cologne Cathedral

This post has a LOT of photos, so I'll try to keep the text to a minimum.  One of the events at the English bloggers' meet-up last year was a tour of the Cologne cathedral.  What was special about this was that the guide took us on service elevator to the upper level, and we walked around both inside and outside (to a unique lookout).  The next day, during free time, Frau A and I took the more public route of walking up the stairs to the root of the spires.

Check out Wikipedia for info on this famous cathedral - started in year 1248, is the largest gothic church in Northern Europe, is Germany's most visited landmark, with the largest free-swigning bell in the world: 

The day before the tour (when we went to Aachen), we grabbed a photo from the front in sunlight...
(note:  you can see the lookout we will visit on the first tour in this photo, with a small spire above it)

...and then at night:

This is the cathedral from the "back", near the bank of the Rhein river (the entrance is on the city side):

From this side, you can see the two huge spires that are it's calling card on the Cologne skyline:
(these are the destination for the second visit the following day)

As a gothic structure, there is a lot of detail of course: 

For the first tour, we met a guide at the side of the cathedral, and entered basically through a locked construction/restoration entrance.  We immediately took the maintenance elevator up to the next level.

As we exited, we started walking through the passage that outlines this upper level inside the cathedral.
You can see the passage to the left of Frau A, and the cathedral opens up below on the right:

This is the view of the cathedral inside, from this second level (basically looking right and down from Frau A, through the pillars and over the stone edge): 

I stuck my arm out and took a few blind photos to try and get a better view.  You can see organ pipes on the left and the main altar at the far front of the cathedral:

This is the same shot processed in HDR to try and show more detail:

There were neat twists and turns through the passage:

Coming around the end, we got a glimpse of the main organ pipes...

...and now we are looking at the other end of the cathedral inside, at the front entrance:

We passed some places where light coming through the huge stained-glass windows hit the wall.  Great views.

At one point, the passage took us a bit higher...

...and we had a tremendous view of one of the windows:

Then in another narrow section of the passage, there was a stained-glass window on the left, and the light hitting the wall on the right.  Just awesome.  Got one shot with Frau A, both in regular processing...

...and in HDR:

Here is a view just with the stone and light (regular)...

...(and HDR):

When we reached the far side of the upper level, we took a door to the path wandering along the outside of the cathedral.  We were literally walking under the flying buttresses, and over the roof of the trancept (I think):

This is looking back down the first part of the path.  In the background is a bridge over the Rhein river:

The path takes a turn to continue along the outside of the cathedral.  You can see members of our bloggers' group ahead of me:

Up ahead is the guide (a student, I think, with expertise in the cathedral's architecture and history).  He is standing before the door that will bring us to the next part of the tour, with maintenance ladders on the rooftop...

On the last few meters before reaching the door, we had a great view of the Rhein:

This is zoomed-out to the bridge seen in the prior photos - obviously for trains, and not cars:

Just at the door, the view straight ahead was to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station)...

...and a bit of the city as well:

This was the view when we got back inside the cathedral:

You can see the tops of the domes in the cathedral ceiling through the scaffolding, beneath our feet!

A set of metal stairs will lead us to the looking mentioned earlier:

Looking down, you can see more of the domes in the roof that tourists are staring up at in the cathedral right now!

At the top of the stairs was a "trap door" that opened into the lookout.  This is NOT one of the two huge spires (that comes in the next tour) but is the smaller one.  (See the first photo on this page to see the difference.)

From up here we had an unimpeded view of the Rhein river...

...and the Hauptbahnhof:

Looking up in the city direction, the twin spires loom.  Next day's visit will take us up into the bottom of these:

As usual, there is always restoration going on, with scaffolding obscuring parts of the building:

With a little zoom, we could see the ladder going to the very top of a spire!

Looking down, we could see the buttresses again and the path that we walked along outside the building:

It was cool and breezy up there, but Frau A agreed to post for a second:

On the next day, we took a different "tour".  This time, it was the unguided access to the stairs climbing up to the base of the spires.

Before getting in line, we spent some time at ground level inside the cathedral:

We could spend hours here taking photos.

We had to wait about 20-30 minutes in line, pay, and then start the slow (and tightly winding) stairs up almost 400 steps (the girls ahead of us counted).  We finally reach inside of the base of one of the spires.  Looking up:

Then up further to a walkway just outside the spires that was heavily covered with metal chain link fence:

This is not just to keep things from going down - the fence was above our heads as well.

The fence got in the way for photos, but despite the blurriness it's a nice view.

Looking down from here, you can see the place/platform/lookout we were on the day before: 

And of course the views of the Rhein here were great as well:

It was really a stunning trip with the bloggers' group, and a must-do for any tourist to Cologne.

Expat Bloggers meetup - Aachen Cathedral

When our group of English-speaking bloggers in Germany met last year (in Cologne), some of us took an afternoon side trip to the city of Aachen.   In the prior post we shared photos of a unique children's fountain, a fantastic torte-like treat from one of the best cafes in town, and a glimpse of the Rathaus (town hall). 

The walk through town was nice, but the headline attraction that day was the Aachen Cathedral.

In the photo above, there is a store on the right side called Nobis Printen - I remember them from my semester studying at the university here... in 1992!  Printen are Aachen's version of lebkuchen (like gingerbread but denser).

Of course we took a minute (or 10) for some photos outside...

...and bracketed & tonemapped as well (HDR) to see how it looks with exaggerated details:

Wikipedia says that it is the oldest cathedral in Northern Europe.

Charlemagne apparently liked the mineral baths in Aachen, and spent a lot of time here.  He began construction of the Palatine Chapel on this site in 792 AD - it was expanded in the 10th century.  He was laid to rest here in 814. (Two later kings had his vault re-opened.  In 1000, Otto III took one of Charlie's teeth!)

Then, for about 600 years between 936 to 1531, 30 German Kings and 12 Queens were coronated here.

In 1978, it was one of the first 12 items to be named a UNESCO world heritage site.

Here is the entrance, on the other side of the cathedral.

There is an interesting feature on the cathedral entrance -- a decoration on the door of a lion's head, whose "nose" is open from one side to the other.  This is the earliest known bronze casting north of the Alps, and also has a traditional tale about it, relating to the construction of the cathedral.

As the legend goes, at some point in the construction, the people ran out of money.  The devil himself offered to fund the rest, but his price was this:  he would get the soul of the first mortal to enter after its consecration.  So the Aacheners caught a wolf, and chased it into the cathedral first.  The devil blindly grabbed the living soul of the first thing that crossed the threshold.  As soon as he realized he was tricked, he became enraged and slammed the door... but with such force that his thumb was ripped off in this decoration.

If you reach a finger into the lion's nose, you feel something shaped like a thumb.  Here is Frau A checking it out:

Stepping inside (souls intact, I think), you are hit by a wave of lovely detail and lots of GOLD:

Coming completely inside, it feels smaller than many newer, larger churches... but that makes the decorations more visible, more 'accessible'.  The dome, for example, is something we stared at for minutes at a time.

Here's a wider view, without the chandelier but showing more of the upper levels, columns, and arches:

Moving all the way forward to the apse, you now see the large stained glass windows that we glimpsed from the outside.  And if you didn't notice in the foreground in GOLD, the altar (which dates from the 11th century).

Here's the same view, but again bracketed, merged, and tonemapped for HDR output in Photomatix...

...and another HDR composition of the apse:

The cathedral was also known as the Royal Church of St. Mary at Aachen, so she has a strong presence as well:

It was really a traveler's and photographer's delight.  We spent a relaxed while soaking it in (and me, remembering bits and pieces of my time here 20 years ago) before finally returning to the train station.

Interestingly, this was the perfect "warm up" because the next day (and next blog post) is at the Cologne Dom!