Naumburg, Germany: a UNESCO cathedral and the gaze of Uta on the Saale

Inside the cathedral of Naumburg stands a statue so lifelike that visitors have called its subject the most beautiful woman of the Middle Ages: Uta von Ballenstedt, one of twelve life-sized founder figures carved around 1250 by the anonymous genius known only as the Naumburg Master. His west choir, where sculpture, architecture and stained glass fuse into a single work, ranks among the supreme achievements of European medieval art, and in 2018 it brought the cathedral onto the UNESCO World Heritage List. A town of around 33,000 people in southern Saxony-Anhalt, Naumburg lies where the Saale meets the Unstrut, about 50 kilometres south-west of Halle and some 60 kilometres south-west of Leipzig.

The Dom of St. Peter and St. Paul, mostly built in the thirteenth century, captures the transition from Romanesque to Gothic: round arches at one end, pointed ones at the other, with rare twin choir screens found together nowhere else.

A town between cathedral and vineyards

Naumburg grew at a crossroads of medieval trade routes and became a bishop's seat in 1028, when the see was moved here from nearby Zeitz. Beyond the cathedral, its market square gathers a Renaissance-fronted town hall and gabled half-timbered houses, and a nostalgic narrow-gauge tram still rattles through the centre. The town also sits at the heart of the Saale-Unstrut, the most northerly of Germany's traditional wine regions.

Art old and new

The cathedral keeps adding to its story: a chapel holds the oldest known stone sculpture of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, lit by vivid modern windows by the painter Neo Rauch, and in 2022 a new centrepiece by Michael Triegel completed a Cranach altar left unfinished for five centuries. Quiet and still little known abroad, Naumburg rewards those who seek out its medieval masterpieces.