Germany Guide
Schleswig-Holstein
The Dom
Address: Domkirchof
Cross Mühlenstrasse to reach Fegefeuer (purgatory), heed a warning plaque of sinners simmering in Hölle (hell) and, good pilgrim, you are rewarded with Paradies (paradise) – the vestibule of the Dom in whose tympanum Christ sits as supreme judge. Saxon duke Henry the Lion laid the foundation stone of his only surviving monument in town in 1173, only for mercantile Lübeck to cock a snook at the newly arrived bishopric from Oldenburg and found a civic centre around what became the Rathaus and Marienkirche. True, its Romanesque basilica with tacked-on Gothic choir can't match the latter for scale or flamboyance, but its bulk and twin towers impress. A whitewashed interior only boosts the impact of the fifteenth-century Triumphkreuz that sprouts from a plinth to fill an entire arch, the work of sculptor and painter Bernt Notke, a Michelangelo of the Baltic and a masterpiece of expressive figures that reveal more secrets the longer you study. Notke also designed the rood screen behind, another masterclass despite a seventeenth-century astronomical clock which throws it off kilter.