After twenty years, the municipality of the city of Cologne presented a new logo. The justification: according to the market research of the communications agency commissioned by the city, the old is "obsolete", "old-fashioned", "tidy", "huge", "emotionless". - can be read in Zoltán Veczán's article on Mandiner.
At the same time, the new logo design is very similar to the old one: both have the coat of arms of Cologne in front of a double-headed eagle and the inscription "Stadt Köln", with the latter slightly redesigned. There is an important difference: the towers symbolizing the city's world-famous cathedral were omitted again, reported Katolisch.de, the website of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany.
The Catholic Church had previously protested, and the Bishop of Cologne, Robert Kleine, said he did not know who advised this logo change, but it would be worthwhile to see if there is anything else characteristic of the city that makes people immediately think of Cologne as the two legendary towers - even though there are many churches with two towers, everyone immediately knew from the logo that it was Cologne.
Standing on the left bank of the Rhine, the Gothic cathedral adorned with towers of more than 150 meters is the third tallest church in the world, it is also on the UNESCO World Heritage List, one of the most important Christian monuments in the world, with one of the largest free-floating bells in the world, weighing 24 tons, and a choir for three hundred people. Moreover, it was built on Roman foundations, and although the church at that time was demolished in the early 500s (!), some elements remained from the 6th century, the immediate predecessor of the current church was consecrated in the middle of the 800s, as well as traces of the following eras it was kept clean by the building complex.
Its historical role is therefore clear, but if we only look at it from the point of view of tourist attraction, which is of prime importance in the case of a city logo, it is difficult to justify its disappearance.
Six million visitors visit it every year, about as many as the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Interesting fact: the much-criticized new logo of Paris, presented in 2019, does not include the Eiffel Tower either, instead focusing on the city's traditional coat of arms depicting a ship.
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