Trier Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The oldest cathedral in Germany began as part of the palace quarter of Constantine the Great: in the early fourth century, Roman brick walls went up here that still stand twenty-six meters high inside the church, and a fragment of a colossal granite column lies by the door like a signature. Sacked in the fifth century and again in the ninth, the core was rebuilt each time, then wrapped in a Romanesque westwork of four towers whose severe, fortress-like face was copied across the empire; Gothic vaults, baroque altars and a cloister were added over the centuries, so that the building reads as a compendium of European architecture with the Roman heart still beating at its center. Behind the sanctuary, in the Holy Robe Chapel, is kept the tunic said to be the seamless garment of Christ, which tradition holds Saint Helena, Constantine's mother, brought from Jerusalem and gave to this church. Found in the high altar in 1512 and shown that year to more than a hundred thousand pilgrims, it is displayed only rarely; the cathedral treasury holds its reliquaries, and the old stones hold seventeen centuries of prayer.