Luther's Diet of Worms, the Nibelungenlied, and Europe's oldest Jewish community
Worms is a small Rhine city with an outsized historical footprint — it was the site of the Diet of Worms in 1521 where Martin Luther famously refused to recant his teachings ('Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise'), and before that the setting of the Nibelungenlied, the medieval German epic of Siegfried and the dragon. The city also has Europe's oldest surviving Jewish cemetery (over 1,000 years old) and a Romanesque cathedral that is one of the finest in Germany. Despite being badly damaged in WWII, Worms retains remarkable historic monuments.
Worms was a Roman colonia (Civitas Vangionum), the seat of a Burgundian kingdom destroyed by the Huns in 436 CE (an event that fed into the Nibelungenlied mythology), and one of the most important imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire — over 100 Diets of the Empire were held here. The Jewish community, established by the 10th century, was massacred during the First Crusade (1096) and the Black Death (1349) but re-established and remained until the Nazi period. Luther's stand at the Diet of Worms in 1521 marked the effective beginning of the Protestant Reformation.