This felt mildly unsettling when walking by it, namely a skull tucked away in the stonework. According to the museum display, this may originally have formed part of a cell like hermitage. This would have been the home of an anchoress, a female enclosed beside a church in order to renounce the world in a very literal and rather committed way. She would have lived for years in what was usually a single stone room attached to the side of the church, with the shuttered slit allowing her to receive communion and be able to be involved with services. I don’t think I’d like this, it would play havoc with my travel plans.
The information panel notes that these recluses were normally higher ranking people (as someone who have to be paid to bring them food), and that as many as fourteen such cells are documented in Cologne between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.
It was only discovered in 1976 and the skull is likely not linked to the hermitage, this dates to the seventeenth century when the area was reworked to be a burial vault for the Augustinian canonesses who were operating the church.