Aachen Cathedral

Aachen Cathedral is in the city of Aachen, in the west of Germany.

Its oldest part was the chapel of an emperor's palace. It has eight sides and a round dome on top.

Aachen Cathedral stands in Aachen, in western Germany. At its heart is the Palatine Chapel, the chapel of Emperor Charlemagne's palace. UNESCO says Charlemagne made the royal estate of Aachen, used as a spa since the first century, his favorite home.

The chapel has eight sides, an octagon, under a dome. Later builders added a tall Gothic hall, side chapels and a west tower around it.

UNESCO's statement describes Charlemagne's own Palatine Chapel as the nucleus of the cathedral. Aachen was a Frankish royal estate that had served as a spa since the first century; the palace's main buildings were the Coronation Hall, now inside the Town Hall, and the Palace Chapel, now the cathedral.

The cathedral notes that the chapel was built over the remains of a Roman bath complex and that, in shape and size, it surpassed every church north of the Alps up to that time. UNESCO calls it the first vaulted structure north of the Alps since Antiquity. Today it receives around one million visitors a year, the cathedral says.

Later, builders added a tall hall that is almost all windows.

It has so much glass that people call it the Glass House!

As more visitors came, the church was enlarged from 1355 with a Gothic choir hall to the east of the octagon, finished in 1414. It is 32 meters high, and its outer walls are mostly windows, each 25.55 meters tall. With more than 1,000 square meters of glass, it is nicknamed the Glass House of Aachen.

In 1884 a new west tower in the neo-Gothic style was built over the old west part of the chapel.

Growing crowds of visitors led to the extension from 1355: the Gothic choir hall, completed in 1414, is 25 m long, 13 m wide and 32 m high, a single hall of two bays ending in a nine-sided apse. Its windows, at 25.55 m, are among the largest Gothic windows in Europe, the cathedral says, and with more than 1,000 m² of glass the hall is called the Glass House of Aachen.

A great fire in 1656 destroyed the roofs and the tower, and the 18th century added Baroque stucco. The 19th-century restoration renewed the Gothic parts and, in 1884, raised a neo-Gothic west tower over the Carolingian west building. Five chapels, most of them two-story Gothic buildings, adjoin the sixteen-sided ambulatory.

In the photo, the dome is in the middle. Beside it stand a tall pointed tower and a hall full of windows.

A few people walk across the big square in front.

The photo was taken on 3 August 2014. In the middle rises the dark, many-sided dome of the octagon. To the right stands the tall west tower with a pointed spire and a clock, and to the left the Gothic choir hall with its tall windows.

In front, a lower Gothic building with a large window faces a wide paved square, with trees and buildings on both sides.

The photograph (3 August 2014, by Uwe Aranas) shows the ensemble across a paved square: the octagon's many-sided dome with a lantern at the center, the neo-Gothic west tower with clock and spire to the right, the Gothic choir hall with its tall traceried windows to the left, and in front a lower Gothic building with a great window.

UNESCO notes that, despite the later additions, the Palatine Chapel remains a homogeneous nucleus that is easy to tell apart from them. The property is managed by the Cathedral Construction Administration, and the cathedral has been a protected monument under North Rhine-Westphalia's monument law of 1980.