Aachen

Lore & Background

The once Celtic settlement was equipped with several in the course of colonization by Roman pioneers settling at the warm Aachen thermal springs around the 1st century. After the withdrawal of the Roman troops, the vicus Aquae Granni was Frankized around the 5th century, by which it came under Merovingian and later Carolingian rule. With the completion of the Carolingian Palace of Aachen at the transition to the 9th century, Aachen was constituted as the main royal residence of the Frankish Empire ruled by Charlemagne. Because of that, the city is sometimes called the 'cradle of Europe'. After the Treaty of Verdun, the city was within the borders of Middle Francia, until it became part of East Francia after the Treaty of Meerssen (870). It subsequently was part of the Holy Roman Empire and was granted city rights in 1166 by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, becoming an imperial city. It served as the coronation site where 31 Holy Roman Emperors were crowned Kings of the Germans from 936 to 1531, until Frankfurt became the preferred place of coronation.

In Their Own Story

The street smelled of wet plaster and old fire. He crouched behind what had been a shopfront, the sign still hanging by one bolt, the letters half-melted. Somewhere ahead, past the pile of overturned tram cars, a machine gun ticked in short, impatient bursts. He counted the seconds between bursts—two, three, maybe four—and then he was moving, boots crunching on broken tile, the muzzle flash of his rifle punching a hole in the grey morning. The cathedral spire was gone. He'd known that before he came over the ridge, but seeing the gap where it had been, the raw sky above the ruined nave, made his stomach clench in a way the gunfire didn't. Aachen. They'd been calling it 'the first one' in the briefings. The first German city. He hadn't thought about what 'first' meant until he was standing in the middle of it, in the dust, with the sound of the city settling around him like a building that had finally decided to stop standing.

Reader's Guide

One of Germany's leading institutes of higher education in technology, the RWTH Aachen University, is located in the city. Its university hospital Uniklinikum Aachen is Europe's largest single-building hospital. Aachen's industries include science, engineering and information technology. In 2009, Aachen was ranked eighth among cities in Germany for innovation. Aachen is located at the northern foothills of the High Fens and the Eifel Mountains. It sits on the Wurm River, a tributary of the Rur, and together with Mönchengladbach, it is the only larger German city in the drainage basin of the Meuse. The regional dialect spoken in the city is a Central Franconian, Ripuarian variant with strong Limburgish influences from the dialects in the neighbouring Netherlands. As a Rhenish city, Aachen is one of the main centres of carnival celebrations in Germany, along with Cologne and Mainz. The culinary specialty for which the city is best known is Aachener Printen, a type of gingerbread.

Did You Know?

• The name Aachen is a modern descendant from Old High German meaning 'water' or 'stream', which directly translates to Latin referring to the springs.
• The location has been inhabited by humans since the Neolithic era, about 5,000 years ago, attracted to its warm mineral springs.
• Aachen's Roman name Aquae Granni meant 'waters of Grannus', referring to the Celtic god of healing who was worshipped at the springs.
• The city is known by a variety of different names in other languages, including Aix-la-Chapelle in French and Akisgran in Basque.