Qualla: Hildesheim Cathedral

Hildesheim Cathedral: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In the spring of 1945, twenty-five green shoots came up through the rubble at the east end of Hildesheim Cathedral. They belonged to a wild dog rose that had grown against the outer wall of the apse for as long as anyone could remember; the air raid of 22 March had killed everything above ground and left a charred stump buried under the debris. The first sparse flowers appeared in 1947. By 1948 there were 122. Hildesheim already had a name for the plant — der Tausendjährige Rosenstock, the thousand-year rose — and after that spring nobody in the city was inclined to argue with it.

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Image: Public domain

Hildesheim Cathedral: A Reliquary That Would Not Come Loose

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The story the city tells begins with a hunt. Emperor Louis the Pious, out in the forest, needed to hear Mass, and a reliquary of the Virgin he was carrying was hung on the branch of a wild rose for the service. Afterwards it could not be taken off the branch. He read that as an i...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Hildesheim Cathedral: Bernward's Bronze

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Torbenbrinker, CC BY-SA 3.0. A chapel of St Mary stood on the site of the present apse by 815. Bishop Altfrid replaced it in 872 with a cruciform three-aisled basilica and a two-storey westwork, and the church took the shape it still has between 1010 and 1020 — a symmetrical plan with an apse at each end, th...

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Image: Torbenbrinker | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hildesheim Cathedral: What the Diggers Found

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Torbenbrinker, CC BY-SA 3.0. The renovation of 2010 to 2014 turned into an excavation. Under the floor, archaeologists uncovered the ninth-century foundations of the original St Mary's chapel: a building six metres by six with an apse to the east, its sandstone footings extraordinarily thick for something so...

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Image: Torbenbrinker | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hildesheim Cathedral: The Twenty-Second of March

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Longbow4u, Public domain. RAF and RCAF bombers hit Hildesheim on 22 March 1945. The cathedral's main building was almost entirely destroyed; the westwork and the outer walls were what remained standing. The organ went the same day — an instrument of 54 stops built in 1909 into a case from 1617. Reconstru...

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Image: Longbow4u | Public domain

Hildesheim Cathedral: Closed for Four Years

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Longbow4u, Public domain. On 10 January 2010 the cathedral shut its doors for the largest church construction project in Germany. The basilica of St Godehard took over as the bishop's church, the same role it had played in the postwar years, and some of the treasures went travelling — the Metropolitan Mus...

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Image: Longbow4u | Public domain