Goslar Cathedral

The church known as Goslar Cathedral (German: Goslarer Dom) was the collegiate church of St. Simon and St. Jude in the town of Goslar in central Germany. It was built between 1040 and 1050 and stood in the district of the Imperial Palace of Goslar. It was demolished in 1819–1822. Today only the porch of the north portal remains. It was a church of Benedictine canons. The term Dom, a German synecdoche used for collegiate churches and cathedrals alike, is often uniformly translated as cathedral into English, even though this church here was a collegiate church, not a cathedral (seat of a bishop).

Design

The collegiate church was built to a standard design in the shape of a three-nave, initially flat-roofed basilica with an alternation of piers and columns. The walls were made of limestone blocks. It had a westwork with two low, octagonal towers and the main entrance and three eastern apses. The crypt was under the chancel. Above the crossing of nave and transept was another tower. The design of the collegiate church was the prototype for many subsequent church buildings of the Middle Ages.