The mists of time

The Cologne Cathedral is seen from across the Rhine River near the Hohenzollern Bridge.

I had seen the cathedral at Cologne (Köln) before, but never like this -- at night, bathed in a ghostly green light, its towering spires disappearing mysteriously into the dense fog that covered the city.

My friend Walter and I had arrived in Cologne too late in the day to do much more than seek out a place for dinner and a beer. While we were indoors, night had fallen, and fog had crept quietly up from the Rhine and shrouded the city.

As we left the crowded bierstube and emerged into the thick mist, I was thinking about our planned visit to the cathedral the next day, and then we looked up and saw it: the magnificent Cathedral of Saint Peter and the Blessed Virgin disappearing into the fog above, a timeless apparition that transported us -- just for a moment -- back to the Middle Ages. We were stopped in our tracks, stunned by what we beheld. Speechless. Awestruck. Never before nor since have I seen something both so moving and so beautiful.

I first saw the Cologne Cathedral in 1967 when I was in the Air Force, on the day of the funeral of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. We had come not so much in reverence as because we wanted to see the city and be a part of the throng that gathered outside the church. The next year, I saw it for the first time at night when a group of us from Bitburg Air Base spent New Year's Eve bar-hopping in Cologne. We celebrated the birth of a new year by making our way to the middle of the Hohenzollern Bridge and relieving ourselves into the Rhine. (We were not alone as we enacted what seemed to be an odd Kölnischer New Year's Eve ritual.)

But on this visit, in 1995, for the first time I toured the interior of the church, which was built on a site where Christians worshiped in Roman times. It is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe, and for four years (1880-84), it was the tallest structure in the world (until the completion of the Washington Monument).

Construction of the present cathedral was begun in 1248 and not completely finished until 1880. Its most celebrated work of art is the Shrine of the Three Kings, a massive, gilded, 13th-century sarcophagus -- the largest reliquary in the Western world -- believed to contain the remains of the Three Wise Men. (Bones and 2,000-year-old clothing were discovered when it was opened in 1864.) Brought to Cologne in 1164, the relics made the cathedral one of the most important pilgrimage churches in Europe. Thirty thousand people still visit each day.

But it was the view of the cathedral's twin spires disappearing into the thick mist that left me with a lasting impression. It made me think of what it must have been like to live in the Middle Ages when the cathedral's first stones were set. For Cologne's people, life then must have been harder than we can imagine. The filth, disease, cold, poverty, starvation, brutality, stench, and ignorance that molded their lives were inescapable.

Yet, amidst all of this, the people of that long-ago Cologne labored to build a monument for the ages and to the glory of their religion.

They surpassed even their loftiest expectations.