If you love medieval mysteries, the Basilika St Ursula is for you. This Cologne church is filled with riddles.

A bizarre chamber of bones, arranged in patterns and some spelling out Latin words, presented with golden-looking objects and statues.

A story of a saint and her 11,000 handmaidens, martyred in Cologne under the Romans. A mysterious Latin inscription about the rebuilding of a Cologne church in their honour.

A gravestone naming a young girl called Ursula.

A large graveyard discovered near the church in medieval times – and 11 unusual chambers dug up under it.

Plus, there are messages, lots of messages. What does it all mean?

The Goldene Kammer

Basilika St Ursula houses one of the strangest sights in Germany. To some, it might seem a chamber of horrors.

Its Goldene Kammer is a chapel with a macabre display of human bones in the roof vaulting that forms patterns or symbols and spells out Latin messages, connected by legend with the saint and her 11,000 followers. “S. Ursula pro nobis ora,” (St Ursula, pray for us) pleads one, “S. Ethri ora pro nobis” another.

In at least two places, the Christogram “IHS” (referring to the salvation of Jesus, or his Greek name) has been connected with a symbol of the Crucifixion. Arrow symbols are repeated, along with hearts and crosses.

Reliquary busts and ornaments are sculpted and arranged on shelves on the walls beneath the bones. Some busts of saints are labelled, others can be identified by their attributes. One, wearing a crown and carrying an arrow and palm leaf, is St Ursula.

What appear to be sculpted images of the virgins clasp their hands in prayer and wear the smiles of martyrs.

An altar of gilded figures and ornament is at the centre.

But the Goldene Kammer is also a riddle, because it is from the 17th century, much later than the rest of the church. A councillor of the city, Johann von Crane, and his wife Maria were the donors behind the work.

It was created towards the end of the deadly and ruinous Thirty Years War. Cologne, unlike many German cities, was well defended from this conflict, but perhaps the suffering and carnage of the age found an echo in what seems to have been built as a shrine.

Or did Counter-Reformation zeal, after the greatest schism of the Christian church, call for a renewal of the Ursula story?

Inscription shrouded in controversy

Another mystery is an inscription in a stone embedded in the south inner wall of the church, dated by some to about the year 400, by others to the 9th or 10th century.

Purporting to be a foundation stone, it says the church had been restored or rebuilt by a Roman of senatorial rank called Clematius on the site where holy virgins “from the East” had been martyred.

The inscription warns all against burying anyone else on the site, lest they face punishment “in the fires of hell”. Interpreting its meaning is difficult.

Is the stone a medieval forgery? No one is certain.

The tantalising story of Ursula and the virgins

References to the worship of martyred virgins on the Cologne site multiply in the 9th century. The earliest written source to mention the name Ursula comes from the 10th century. Two centuries after this, St Ursula is the leader of 11,000 virgins.

There are two medieval versions of the passion of St Ursula. Then, in the 13th century, the story was included in the collection of lives of saints known as Legenda aurea (‘Golden Legend’). Their details vary.

Ursula is usually described as a Romano-British or Breton princess or noblewoman and in some versions dies by an arrow. The rest of the martyrs are beheaded.

The king of Dumnonia in Britain, Dionotus, sends his Christian daughter Ursula and 11,000 young women (plus 60,000 others) to become brides of pagan soldiers in Armorica (Brittany). A storm drives the fleet quickly forward and Ursula prays for deliverance from an unwanted marriage, promising a pilgrimage to Rome in return. She and her followers carry out the vow, meet the pope and then travel to Cologne, where they are massacred by the Huns. Medieval versions attribute the murders to the emperor Maximian.

Not all versions of the story mention Ursula. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 12th century, says 11,000 daughters, including the unnamed daughter of Dionotus, were sent as wives to Armorica, but many were drowned in a fierce storm, or were shipwrecked and afterwards slaughtered.

If there is a basis to the tale, the number 11,000 is hard to credit, and perhaps the thousands were added through a textual misunderstanding. Medieval exaggerations of numbers was common.

An order of nuns was founded in Ursula’s name in the 16th century.

The bronze door or the main portal, showing elements from the story, was made in 1959 and scenes are displayed below the choir windows.

The 11 shapes on Cologne’s coat of arms are sometimes called drops or flames, but are ermine tails taken from the Breton arms in reference to St Ursula.

The facts about the church

A chapter of canons living and worshipping on the St Ursula church site is known from documents in the mid-9th century and later there was a convent church. A gilded, house-shaped reliquary shrine to St Ursula is on the high altar. Opposite is a shrine to St Etherius, named in some sources as her intended groom.

In 1106 builders of a Cologne city wall hit a nearby grave site and skeletons were removed. Whether all were human (and female) has been questioned.

Excavations during and since World War II found a small structure from the 4th or 5th century under the present church. These were followed by a 6th century church. The church expanded early in the 10th century and a reliquary monument was later built. A unique construction of 11 unusually shaped chambers was found underneath.

The Goldene Kammer is dated to 1643, and a gravestone mentioning an eight-year-old girl named Ursula was found in a church pillar at the end of the 19th century. It is now in the collection of Cologne’s Römisch-Germanisches Museum.

The large number of bones in the Goldene Kammer have been carefully sorted into types before being artistically arranged. The reliquary busts come from periods between the 13th and 18th centuries.

The church is not the only one in the city to be linked with a martyr associated with the Roman period. The Basilika St Gereon nearby, another of Cologne’s 12 medieval Romanesque churches, is consecrated to “the golden saint”, usually considered a Theban Legion soldier, who with comrades was beheaded by Maximian for his faith. St Ursula’s story parallels some of these details. Ursula and Gereon are among the city’s patron saints. A precious late medieval altarpiece showing both and the Adoration of the Magi is found in Cologne’s cathedral.

The church alone would be interesting, with its mixture of styles. Leaving aside the earlier buildings on the site, it is considered one of the oldest triple-aisled basilicas in the region of the lower Rhine, with rare interior galleries.

Romanesque features remain in the shape of arches and pillars of the galleries. There is also a Gothic choir. But parts of the church were restyled in the Baroque period with a distinctive tower and some interior alterations, as well as the Goldene Kammer.

Extensive changes were made in the 19th century because of much-needed stabilisation work on the structure. The cloister, no longer needed after the dissolution of the convent, disappeared. After World War II damage, some Neoromanesque features in the western exterior were removed.

A sculpture in the south transept showing St Ursula, crowned and bearing an arrow while attempting to shield her companions beneath her cloak, is from the late 1300s. In the north transept is her Baroque tomb.

Reliquary busts of martyred virgins, similar to some in the Goldene Kammer but individually sculpted, stare inwards from the galleries.

Visiting Basilika St Ursula

There are as many questions as answers at Basilika St Ursula. But, like the fascinating Great St Martin and Cologne’s other Romanesque churches, it demands a visit. It takes a request and a €2 coin to church staff, however, to open the iron door on this spectacle as the chamber is otherwise kept under lock and key.

The Ursulaplatz church, now a parish church, is closed Monday and open restricted hours. For transport details, check Raven Guides’ Cologne travel guide. Restoration work could restrict access to the Goldene Kammer.

To inquire about tours, contact the tourist office or check www.katholisch-in-koeln.de.