Pilgrimage Sites in Germany

Germany's oldest pilgrimages are relic pilgrimages, and several of them keep imperial time. Aachen shows its four great relics once every seven years, a cycle first observed in 1349; the treasures were gathered by Charlemagne. Cologne raised the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe around the Shrine of the Three Kings. Trier, the oldest bishop's church in the country, keeps the Holy Robe of Christ. Fulda holds the tomb of St. Boniface, the Apostle of the Germans, and at Bingen am Rhein pilgrims follow St. Hildegard, visionary and Doctor of the Church, along the Rhine.

Bavaria and the Lower Rhine hold the Marian heart. Devotion to the Black Madonna of Altötting began in 1489; the town is known as the Heart of Bavaria, and three popes have prayed there. Kevelaer is the largest pilgrimage destination in Germany, where reported apparitions and healings drew the first pilgrims to Our Lady of Consolation in 1641. Two of the country's Baroque churches are pilgrimages in themselves: Balthasar Neumann's basilica at Vierzehnheiligen, raised where a shepherd saw the Fourteen Holy Helpers in 1445, and the Wieskirche at Steingaden, built for a weeping statue of the Scourged Saviour found in 1738. Walldürn hosts the largest Eucharistic pilgrimage in Germany, centred on a blood miracle of 1330. Benedictines keep two older houses — Andechs, the oldest pilgrimage site in Bavaria, on a ridge between two Alpine lakes, and Maria Laach, the country's finest Romanesque abbey, on the shore of a volcanic crater lake.