Qualla: Paderborn Cathedral

Paderborn Cathedral: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AK fotostyle, CC BY-SA 4.0. Count the ears. Three hares run in a circle in the tracery of a small window, each plainly equipped with two ears, and the total number of ears cut in the stone is three. Every hare borrows from its neighbours, and no hare goes short. The Dreihasenfenster was carved from red Weser sandstone in the early sixteenth century and sits in the inner courtyard of the cloister at Paderborn Cathedral, and the city has never let it go: the hares turn up on buildings and shopfronts all over the centre, a medieval optical trick adopted as a municipal logo. What it signifies has never been settled. The Trinity, three in one, is the usual reading. Eternity is the other, since a circle of hares has no beginning and no end.

Read more: Paderborn Cathedral on Qualla

Image: AK fotostyle | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paderborn Cathedral: The Water Underneath

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dirk D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Everything here starts with the springs. More than two hundred karst springs rise within a few hundred metres of the cathedral and immediately form the Pader, at roughly four kilometres one of the shortest rivers in Germany - it barely gets going before it joins the Lippe. The to...

Read more: Paderborn Cathedral on Qualla

Image: Dirk D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paderborn Cathedral: The Year a Crown Was Decided

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christoph Wagener, CC BY 3.0. In 799 Pope Leo III fled his enemies in Rome and travelled north until he reached Paderborn, where Charlemagne was. He stayed three months. In the course of that visit the two men laid the groundwork for what would happen in Rome the following year - the imperial coronation that ...

Read more: Paderborn Cathedral on Qualla

Image: Christoph Wagener | CC BY 3.0

Paderborn Cathedral: Five Cathedrals on One Spot

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heinrich Stiegemann Warstein, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The building you see is the fifth attempt. Fire took the first in the year 1000. Bishop Ratherius began rebuilding; his successor Meinwerk looked at the work, demolished it and started again - a three-aisled church with a transept and an eastern crypt, consecrated in 1015 and bur...

Read more: Paderborn Cathedral on Qualla

Image: Heinrich Stiegemann Warstein | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Paderborn Cathedral: 22 March 1945

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:JWBE, CC BY 4.0. Paderborn lost around 85 per cent of itself to Allied bombing, and the cathedral was gutted. Every historic window was destroyed, along with works of art that cannot be replaced or even described, because nobody photographed most of them properly first. On 22 March 1945 a blockbu...

Read more: Paderborn Cathedral on Qualla

Image: User:JWBE | CC BY 4.0

Paderborn Cathedral: What Is Still In There

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. The west tower runs to 93 metres and the church to 104 metres in length, impossible to lose from the streets below. Go in through the Paradise Portal, cut in the first third of the thirteenth century, where late Romanesque and early Gothic statuary sit awkwardly and beautifully s...

Read more: Paderborn Cathedral on Qualla

Image: A.Savin | FAL