Germany Guide
North Rhine-Westphalia
St Paulus Dom
Address: Domplatz
Opening time: Mon– Sat 6.30am–6pm, Sun 6.30am–7.30pm
Situated at the heart of the Altstadt, the immense St Paulus Dom is the largely thirteenth-century successor to the church built by the Frisian monk Liudger in the eighth century. Take a gentle circuit of the building before entering the west transept via the Paradise porch, which features late Romanesque sculptures of Christ and the Apostles, with Jesus sitting as supreme judge above the gate to heaven – rather appropriately, since this space once had a judicial function. On the right, black-and-white photographs show the extent of wartime damage, with the west front almost obliterated, the roof gaping and one of the towers in a state of collapse. Inside, the Dom impresses more through its unusual width than its modest height, and it is pleasingly austere save for some splendid memorials and a sixteenth-century astronomical clock in the ambulatory, constructed between 1540 and 1542 by the printer Theodor Tzwyvel, the Franciscan friar Johannes Aquensis and the wrought-iron craftsman Nikolaus Windemaker. Decorated with paintings by Ludger tom Ring, the clock is divided into 24 hours, charts the position of the planets and is accurate until 2071. A chapel in the ambulatory contains the tomb of Bishop von Galen, the "Lion of Münster", who died in 1946 and was beatified in 2005. The Dom's artistic treasures can be seen on the north side of the cloisters in the Domkammer (Tues– Sun 11am–4pm; €3); they include an eleventh-century head reliquary of St Paul and a jewel-encrusted thirteenth-century cross reliquary.