he building of Aarhus Cathedral was started in the last decades of the 12th Century. The exact year is not known for certain. Peter Vognsen of a famous aristocratic family, Hviderne, from Zeeland, was the one, who really got the building going. He was ordained as a Bishop in 1191. The Cathedral – a magnificent Romanesque basilica – was a gigantic project, not finished until about 1350. Red bricks were used, a kind of material not otherwise used in Denmark before approx. 1160. The outer walls of this Cathedral and the beautiful chapels along the eastern wall of the transept are the only surviving Romanesque elements today.The Cathedral, as it otherwise stands today, is the result of radical rebuilding in the Gothic style, undertaken from 1449 till about 1500, transforming the heavy and sombre building into a Gothic cathedral, inspired by the great contemporary churches in the Hanseatic towns around the Baltic Sea. Considerable height completed with cross- and star vaulting was added to the nave as well as to the aisles and the transept. The culmination however was the altogether reconstructed and enlarged chancel, now with three naves of the same height, an ambulatory and 13 high, pointed windows throwing cascades of light into this bright space.