Cathedral of Saints Peter and George

Besides the beer and the monastery, the cathedral was something I wanted to see. Not the cathedral per se, though it was very impressive, but the graves of Heinrich II and Kunigunde, emperor, empress, and both saints. If you remember, we saw Kunigunde's crown back in the Munich Residenz treasury. Heinrich's crown, well we talked about that, and why it's in Vienna...

The cathedral was begun in 1002. The first version of it, much smaller than those that followed burned down. It was rebuilt, burned again, and finally a larger, Romanesque structure was constructed. In the Seventeenth Century, the entire interior was remodeled in Baroque style, which included removing all the medieval stained glass, painting over the frescoes, and removing the tomb of Heinrich and Kunigunde to the basement crypt. King Ludwig I of Bavaria (not Ludwig who built Neuschwannstein), had it restored closer to what was believed the original Medieval form had been. This is the cathedral we have today.

A second significant tomb in the cathedral, that of Pope Clement II. Pope Clement's papacy lasted less than a year (1046-1047), but in that time, he established a penchant for reform, and strong support of the German Holy Roman Emperor's territorial claims in Italy. He was buried in Bamberg at his own request, as he had been the bishop there.

The other tourist drawing item in the cathedral is the Bamberger Reiter, a statue of a young knight on a horse. There's a great deal of debate over who the statue actually is, with no consensus reached. The Knight has been used as a symbol for different movements and ideologies since at least the days of the Romantics.

We took a lot of pictures here, and still missed significant things, unfortunately.Read more