One day I was driving through Remagen along the Rhine, and while I was leaving town, I saw this castle on a hill to my left. Well, the building that looked like a castle was actually a Franciscan Monastery until 2006, and is now used by another religious group.

St. Apollinaris received its current name at the beginning of the 15th century from the relics of St. Apollinaris. It is not known exactly how long they have been there, but most likely since the last decades of the 14th century.

There were pilgrimages to St. Apollinaris and to the 14th-century sarcophagus in the crypt, where the main relic is kept to this day.

Only assumptions can be made about the origin of the relic. They probably come from the Benedictine Abbey of Siegburg, which bequeathed one of its precious relics to its provost founded in 1117 on today’s Apollinarisberg. The Siegburg Benedictines looked after the old Apollinaris Church until 1793.

At the end of 2006, the Franciscan monks left Mount Apollinaris and the “Gemeinschaft der gekreuzigten und auferstandenen Liebe” (Community of the crucified and risen love”) and took over the pilgrimage. On the first pilgrimage day of the great Apollinaris pilgrimage in 2007, Bishop Dr. Reinhard Marx commissioned the new community on the mountain to restore the old traditions.

Tumba with the head relic of Apollinaris in the crypt of the Apollinaris Church in Remagen