Germany's Ottonian jewel — Bernward's bronze column, a 1,000-year-old rose bush, and cathedral treasures equal to any in Europe
Hildesheim lies 30km southeast of Hannover in Lower Saxony, and its two Romanesque churches — the Cathedral of St Mary and St Michael's Church — represent the pinnacle of Ottonian art, the Christian artistic tradition of the Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonian dynasty (919–1024 CE). The Cathedral's cloister grows the legendary Hildesheim Rose (Tausendjähriger Rosenstock), a wild rose bush documented to be over 700 years old and claimed to be over 1,000 — the oldest living rose in the world, trained up the cathedral apse wall. Bishop Bernward's bronze column (c. 1020 CE, 3.79m tall, spiral na…
Hildesheim's cathedral was founded in 815 CE under Bishop Gunthar and became a centre of Ottonian art under Bishop Bernward (993–1022 CE) and his successor Godehard. The bronze doors commissioned by Bernward for St Michael's (1015 CE) — 16 panels narrating Old and New Testament scenes in sequential bronze relief, the earliest large-scale post-Roman figurative bronze casting in the West — set the visual language for German medieval art for two centuries. The city was devastated in the WWII bombing of March 1945; St Michael's and the Cathedral were both rebuilt, but much of the medieval Altstad…