About Ribe Cathedral

The first church at Ribe was founded in 860 by Ansgar, the missionary monk who would later become Archbishop of Hamburg, a wooden structure built with the express permission of the pagan Danish king Horik I — making it the earliest documented Christian church anywhere in Denmark. The first stone cathedral on the site was begun by Bishop Thur in 1110, using tufa stone imported from Germany owing to a local scarcity of suitable building material, and stood completed by 1134. A devastating fire ravaged both the town and the new cathedral in 1176, but because the building was not completely destroyed, Ribe Cathedral survives today as Denmark’s best-preserved Romanesque building. Late in the 12th century, around 1175-1190, an elaborate main doorway was carved for the cathedral, popularly known ever since as “the cat’s head portal” because of the doorknocker and the two carved figures flanking its base — though the name is somewhat misleading, since the figures actually depict lions rather than cats, surrounded by dragons symbolising the strength of the Church amid an unfriendly world; the bronze doorknob is considered among the oldest surviving in Denmark. Just before morning Mass on Christmas Day 1283, the cathedral’s northwest tower collapsed into the church and the surrounding streets, a consequence of the shifting sandy ground beneath the building. Its replacement, the Borgertårnet (Commoners’ Tower), was completed in 1333, rising 62 metres with a copper spire; unusually, the tower’s lower levels served the church while its upper levels were used by the town itself, partly for defensive purposes, giving the structure a genuinely dual civic and ecclesiastical function. Across the following centuries, successive restoration campaigns layered Gothic and later architectural elements onto the original Romanesque core, giving today’s cathedral its varied stylistic character.