Saint John's Church

The church with the slender spire on the riverbank, tucked against the abbey buildings, is Saint John's — "Saint John on the rock", as the Germans called it, Saint-Jean-du-Grund in French. A church stood here by 1309, when Count Henry VII, the man who was about to become Holy Roman Emperor, named it in a founding charter. The one you see was rebuilt in 1606, at the same time as the abbey of Neumünster next door rose from the ruins of the old abbey on the plateau, and got its present form between 1688 and 1705, in the years when the French were remaking the whole city.

Inside, the baroque furnishings are borrowed: after the French Revolution closed the monasteries, altars and fittings from other churches found a home here. The organ dates from 1710. But the reason people came to the Grund for centuries is a small dark statue — the Black Madonna, a fourteenth-century image from the Parler workshop in Cologne, venerated as miraculous and, for a long time, the goal of pilgrims who walked down into the valley to see her. She is still here.

Step back to the river to look at the church properly. From the towpath, with the abbey along the water and the old town on the cliff above, it is one of the views that made this city; the church is the oldest thing in it.