Kloster St Apern

St Apern was a Cistercian nunnery in Cologne, founded beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Aper of Toul. The site on today’s St-Apern-Straße first housed a small hospital and a Franciscan hermitage before the nuns arrived. In 1477 the community moved from St Mechtern outside the city walls and built a new church under the patronage of Saint Bartholomew. Between 1621 and 1625 the church was rebuilt in its present form. The monastery answered to Altenberg Abbey, whose monks supplied confessors and chaplains for the nuns. The complex stood in the southern part of the old city near the Rhine. After the nuns left in 1802 the church was demolished, yet traces of the cloister survive beneath later buildings. Scholars such as Paul Clemen and Julia Bruch have studied the site’s history and liturgical books. Harald Horst’s recent work reconstructs the daily life of the community through their surviving manuscripts. Visitors today see a quiet street lined with modern façades where the church once stood. A low wall marks the outline of the former cloister, and a plaque recalls the nuns’ presence. The area around St-Apern-Straße remains a peaceful corner of central Cologne, close to the river and the old town.