The Hildesheim Cathedral was closed to the public for over four and a half years. With the impending 1200-year diocesan jubilee in 2015, the Romanesque episcopal church has been extensively renovated and remodelled. On 15th August 2014, the wings of Bernward’s Door and the other entrances opened wide for the first time to welcome the people of Hildesheim and their guests.
Up until summer 2014, Hildesheim played host to Germany's largest church construction side. Since it's closure in January 2010, the Cathedral has been completely gutted, and then renovated and remodelled from scratch from the inside out. The Cathedral's exterior, too, has been redesigned. In addition, new spaces have been created in the immediate vicinity of the Cathedral for the Hildesheim music and the new museum.
Renovating the Cathedral had become an urgent and necessary task: during the air strike on Hildesheim on 22 March 1945, the episcopal church had been almost entirely destroyed. No further alterations had been made to the Cathedral since its reconstruction during the 1950s. There was damage to remove; temporary building fixtures that had become permanent ones to be replaced; and the UNESCO World Heritage Cathedral needed to be redesigned for the modern era without detracting from its character.
The most striking alteration was made within the interior of the Cathedral: the sacred space feels much brighter and more spacious following the redesign as developed and executed by the Cologne-based Schilling Architekten architectural firm, together with the Hildesheim Cathedral chapter as building project organiser. The outstanding art treasures, too, that form part of the permanent display at the Cathedral, and that are some of the most significant mediaeval artworks in the world today, now have a much greater impact. For the first time, the legendary thousand-year-old rosebush can be seen from inside the Cathedral, via a window in the apse of the crypt. The rosebush plays a key role in the founding legend of the Diocese of Hildesheim by Louis the Pious (778-840).
The reopening ceremony of the Hildesheim episcopal church took place on 15 August 2014, the Feast of the Assumption and the Cathedral’s Patron Saint’s Day. It involved church and politics, business and society.