Roman city gate St. Mauritius in Cologne

The Agrippa Road, over 700 kilometers long, begins, like the Via Belgica, in the west of the CCAA (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium). Here, the city walls had three monumentally constructed gates. The southernmost of these was the starting point of the long-distance road towards Trier.

Agrippastraße ran straight west for only a short distance from there and then turned sharply southwest: today Mauritiussteinweg, Josef-Schwartz-Anlage, Huhnsgasse, Weyerstraße, Barbarossaplatz. From here, today’s Luxemburger Straße still largely follows the route of the Roman road, which ran straight through the countryside, all the way to Zülpich.

The parish church of St. Mauritius has stood in the immediate vicinity of the Roman city gate since the 12th century. According to legend, Mauritius was the leader of the Theban Legion, which also included the Christian martyrs Gereon, Victor, Cassius, and Florentius.

The Romanesque church, remodeled in the Baroque style in the 18th century, with its Benedictine convent, was largely destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt in a modern style. A Baroque annex to the convent, the Wolkenburg on Mauritiussteinweg, serves as the clubhouse for the Cologne men’s choir “Cäcilia Wolkenburg”.