Domkerk (Dom Church), Utrecht (must see)

Domkerk, as it presently stands, was begun in 1254. It was initially a cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Utrecht and dedicated to Saint Martin, but it has been Protestant since the Reformation in 1580.

This wasn't the first church built here, though. Dom Church has been built on centuries of history. Dom Square was the site of a Roman castellum that guarded a crossing of the river Rhine. The castellum likely included a small stone temple.

During the Middle Ages, the Utrecht area was the cradle of Christianity in the Northern Netherlands. Frankish missionaries built a wood church here in 630, long after the Romans had left.

In 695, Willibrord, an Anglo-Saxon monk, was charged with building a stone church dedicated to Saint Martin. At this time, there was also a second church dedicated to Saint Salvator. Unfortunately, Normans destroyed the churches here in 857 and the local bishops fled.

Bishop Adalbold built a Romanesque-style church on this site, consecrated in 1023. Sadly, Adalbold's church was mostly destroyed in a nine-day fire in 1253 that affected much of Utrecht.

The Gothic Saint Martins Cathedral was started in 1254. However, progress on the cathedral was slow as money for the project was scarce. It wasn't until Jan van Nassau put together a series of measures to secure financing that construction started. That was in 1288.

The 14th and 15th centuries saw several additions and expansions to the church. This included the bell tower, transept, and nave. Still, even after all these years, the money dried up for the projects, and work was done in starts and stops. At this time, the nave connected the church to the tower in one grand cathedral.

A severe storm on August 1, 1674, destroyed the church's nave. The result was the separation of the church and the tower, which has remained to this day. The remains of that original nave stood until 1826.

Over the years, there have been several attempts to rebuild the nave, or at least mark its existence. In 2004 a temporary structure was created using scaffolding.