Groß St. Martin

Groß St. Martin rises in Cologne’s Old Town as a Romanesque Catholic church with a prominent crossing tower. Its eastern end forms a trefoil plan, with three rounded apses arranged around the crossing.

The foundations reach back to around 960 AD and rest on remains of a Roman chapel built when this area was an island in the Rhine. Archbishop Bruno the Great established a men’s choir house here in the mid-tenth century, and Benedictine monks later occupied the monastery. The present building grew between about 1150 and 1250, after fire destroyed the earlier abbey, with larger windows, new walls and a longer nave added over time.

Fire, storms and wartime bombing repeatedly damaged the church, while restoration in 1985 completed its postwar reconstruction. Inside, golden Baroque bands and surviving altar figures remain alongside the medieval Romanesque form, while the tower anchors Cologne’s Old Town skyline.

City: Cologne
Content updated: 2026-06-22

Image: Hpschaefer www.reserv-art.de CC BY-SA 3.0
Image: Arnold MercatorPublic domain
Image: wikimedia
Image: dronepicr CC BY 2.0
Image: Nicolas-Marie-Joseph ChapuyPublic domain

Take this page with you

The myTuur app is free, and once you are standing at a spot its story starts by itself.

Spots like this one are the stops myTuur strings into tours through Cologne. In the app, each story begins where you stand: walk up to a spot and it starts, read it on screen or listen as you go, then follow the route to the next one.

What is myTuur?

myTuur is a free city-guide app. Its tours are built from spots, and each spot carries a story that starts when you get there, to read or to listen to as you like.