Episode 18: Cologne

A gold sarcophagus houses the bones. The bell rings. The work continues above Roman roads and love locked bridges. No doubt till the world ends.

A transcript of this Haiku Life podcast together with photos will be available on the mygreatergood.com website.

You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram - Haiku Life Podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Haiku Live Podcast, where we take a little exploration into some abbreviated moments. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry. It is traditionally focused on nature and captures a fleeting moment within the space of three lines and a 5-7-5 syllable count. In a world so overwhelmingly immersive, a haiku is a moment of respite. These haiku are mine, moments of life, thoughts in the ether. Welcome to episode eighteen titled Cologne. And by the way, that's Cologne, Germany. This is not a discourse into scent. Five three three stairs up. One o'clock cologne. Maybe it was GeoGesso, maybe geography class. Maybe a Celtic stirring in his DNA. But Connor said I would like to go to Cologne. I'd like to see the cathedral there. In Gordon's and my travels we had not been to Cologne, although we have explored nearby cities Dusseldorf and Bonn and spent many happy days discovering the Middle Age castles and castle ruins on the Rhine River to the south. The Marksburg castle was our favourite, and of the forty or so hill castles along that area of the Rhine River, it is only one of two that was never destroyed. Sitting on the top of a cliff is helpful defensively. The castle dates back to the eleven hundreds and was built to protect the town of Braubach below. Incidentally, the hotel Zumweissen Schwanen in Braubach has the most comfortable bed that we have ever slept in. A thousand years before, in the first century AD, the Romans expanded their empire up into the Germanic territories and founded Cologne, which then went on to become one of the largest European cities in medieval and renaissance times. Roman remains are very evident in Cologne, including thirty three meters of a paved Roman road excavated in nineteen sixty, an original first century autobn. Very cool, very bumpy. Back in the day, lovers carved their initials on a tree. These days, couples flock to Cologne, walk across the Hohenzollern Bridge and fasten a love lock besides half a million others on the bridge, then throw the key into the Rhine River. That is over two tons of love hanging on that bridge right there. The Cologne Cathedral dominates the old city. It is one hundred and fifty seven meters tall, that's five hundred and fifteen feet, and the world's third largest Gothic cathedral. It was constructed with three hundred thousand tons of stone. It has ten thousand square meters, about one hundred and eight thousand square feet of windows and welcomes twenty thousand visitors every day. Daily maintenance costs exceed that amount, averaging a staggering thirty thousand dollars a day. Those are some impressive numbers, though the most remarkable statistic for me is that it took six hundred and thirty two years to complete the cathedral, beginning in twelve forty eight with the three wise men and ending in eighteen eighty at that point the world's tallest building. The three wise men, you ask? Yes, the Cologne Cathedral began as a shrine housing the supposed bones of the biblical three wise men brought to Cologne in eleven sixty four. eight hundred and sixty two years later and the work never ends, about a hundred workers, including stonemasons and sculptors, work daily to maintain and repair the cathedral. The scaffolding is always up. It's a precarious job up there cleaning and repairing spires and windows and parapets. A local saying goes that if work on the cathedral ever ends, the world will end. A less hazardous option than the scaffolding to see the world from the top of the world's tallest twin spired church is to climb the tower. It's five hundred and thirty three steps skyward, that's ninety seven meters or three hundred eighteen feet. But the reward is a spectacular panoramic view over Cologne and the Rhine River. The Cathedral Bell is an impressive stop on the way up to the top. It is affectionately named Fat Peter and is quite the history. It was cast in just ten minutes, but the metal took weeks to cool and further weeks to transport up the tower. During World War II, the Cologne Cathedral was bombed fourteen times, but remained relatively unscathed. Although the powers that be wanted to melt Fat Peter down in the war effort. The City of Cologne leaders cunningly convinced them to leave the bell alone as it would be needed to celebrate the final victory. In the nineteen fifties, Fat Peter cracked, and in twenty eleven the clapper, several hundred pounds of it, broke off, fortunately not crashing all the way down into the cathedral. A gold sarcophagus still houses the bones. The bell rings, the work continues above Roman roads and love locked bridges, no doubt till the world ends. Thank you for listening to today's Haiku Life Podcast. You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram. A transcript of this podcast can also be found on the mygreatergood.com website. Matane! See you later!