Frankfurt Cathedral

Geschichte

Frankfurt Cathedral, officially Imperial Cathedral of Saint Bartholomew is a Roman Catholic Gothic church located in the centre of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is dedicated to Saint Bartholomew.It is the largest religious building in the city and a former collegiate church. Despite its common English name, it has never been a true cathedral, but is called the Kaiserdom or simply the Dom due to its importance as former election and coronation church of the Holy Roman Empire. As one of the major buildings of the Empire's history, it was a symbol of national unity, especially in the 19th century.The present church building is the third church on the same site. Since the late 19th century, excavations have revealed buildings that can be traced back to the 7th century. The history is closely linked with the general history of Frankfurt and Frankfurt's old town because the cathedral had an associated role as the religious counterpart of the Royal Palace in Frankfurt.HistoryFrankfurt Cathedral was an imperial collegiate church, termed Dom in German - a synecdoche for all collegiate churches used totum pro parte also for cathedrals -, and thus traditionally translated as cathedral in English. St. Bartholomew's is the main church of Frankfurt and was constructed in the 14th and 15th centuries on the foundation of an earlier church from the Merovingian time.