Augsburg Cathedral

The western towers of the original church collapsed into a heap of rubble in 994. Empress Adelheid claimed to have foreseen this exact disaster in a vision, which prompted Bishop Liutold to immediately draw up plans for a massive new Ottonian structure. Wood from the scaffolding used during this initial push still sits inside the high walls of the nave today. Workers chopped down the trees for those planks in the winter of 999, locking the cathedral’s core construction to the turn of the first millennium. Ambition overtook the builders again in 1331. The clergy decided their Romanesque church needed a soaring French style Gothic choir. Master builder Heinrich Parler the Elder designed an elaborate ring of chapels and open flying buttresses modelled on the cathedral in Cologne. Money and enthusiasm eventually ran dry. They capped the choir with blank exterior walls instead of elegant stone arches, leaving the building with an unpolished, mismatched silhouette where the low Ottonian nave simply rams into the towering Gothic extension. Political chaos brought royalty to these mismatched walls in 1690. The Nine Years War made the usual coronation city of Frankfurt too dangerous for the Holy Roman Empire to use. Officials scrambled to relocate the ceremony to Augsburg. Archbishop Anselm Franz of Mainz crowned Joseph I as the Roman German King right inside the cathedral, followed days later by the coronation of Empress Eleonore Magdalene, turning the provincial church briefly into the absolute centre of European power. Fire threatened to erase all of this during an Allied bombing raid on the night of 25 February 1944. Local authorities explicitly banned the fire brigade from wasting water on burning churches. As phosphorus bombs punched through the cathedral roof, Chaplain Johann Aichele realised nobody was coming to help. He gathered a small group of teenage altar boys and climbed into the wooden rafters. The boys kicked and threw dozens of sparking incendiaries out of the roof down into the snow before the ancient timber could catch fire. Generations later, the building still hides physical secrets from its earliest days. During routine roof repairs in the south transept in 2009, workers scraped back layers of modern paint and found a face looking back at them. Conservators eventually revealed a massive Ottonian fresco of John the Baptist painted shortly after the year 1000. He stares straight ahead from the plaster, his wide eyes and ochre robes completely unbothered by the millennium of renovations, coronations, and falling bombs that passed beneath his feet.