Medieval Siegburg

Siegburg grew up at the foot of the Michaelsberg, the hill on which Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne, founded a Benedictine abbey in 1064. Anno was buried there in 1075 and canonised in 1183; the gilded Anno shrine made for his relics around that time is one of the great Rhenish reliquaries and is kept, with the town’s other medieval shrines, in the treasury of the parish church of St Servatius below the hill. A market has been held at the foot of the hill since 1069, and the market square below the abbey is where the medieval Christmas market stands today.

From the late Middle Ages Siegburg was a potters’ town. The workshops of the Aulgasse produced salt-glazed stoneware — grey drinking jugs, the tall slender Schnellen and the bulbous Bartmann-type jugs — that was shipped down the Rhine and turns up in excavations from London to the Baltic. Production peaked in the 15th and 16th centuries and collapsed with the Thirty Years’ War; the Stadtmuseum on the market square shows the best local collection of Siegburg stoneware and the Michaelsberg abbey’s history.

The abbey itself was dissolved in 1803, re-founded by Benedictines in 1914 and given up by the monks in 2011; the buildings on the hill are now a Catholic conference centre, and the abbey church can still be visited. Siegburg is on the Cologne–Frankfurt high-speed line (station Siegburg/Bonn), about 20 minutes from Cologne and half an hour from Bonn by tram line 66.