Cologne Cologne Cologne (; , , ) is the largest city of Germany's most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and its 1,075,935 (2016) inhabitants make it the fourth most populous city in Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. The largest city on the Rhine, it is also the most populous city both of the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region, which is Germany's largest and one of Europe's major metropolitan areas, and of the Rhineland. Centred on the left bank of the Rhine, Cologne is about southeast of North Rhine-Westphalia's capital of Düsseldorf and northwest of Bonn. It is the largest city in
Historical Archive of the City of Cologne Rhine-Westphalia is based on the "Archivgesetz des Landes NRW" bill of 1989. The municipal archive of Cologne is also governed by the municipal archive ordinance "Archivsatzung" (last revised in 2007). The federal "Bundesarchivgesetz" bill does not apply. An early programme of holding archival records in Cologne was the so-called "Schreinswesen" (shrine system), used for documenting citizens' rights. A "Schrein" (shrine, from Latin "scrinium") was a wooden chest or cabinet where parish administrations stored records and charters. Such shrines were used for records storage throughout the Middle Ages and into early modern times, most notably in the parish of St. Lawrence