The steeple of St. Lambertus Basilica leans, and Düsseldorf has a legend to explain it.

The church had turned Protestant, then Catholic again, and the Devil was furious. He kicked and pulled at the tower and tilted it, but could not knock it down. Lightning then hit barrels of gunpowder and set off an explosion. The church survived that too, and the Devil gave up.

The plain explanation is that the timber was not yet dry when the tower was built, so it warped over the years. The church is reportedly Düsseldorf’s oldest, inaugurated in 1384 on the site of an earlier one from the early 1100s. Inside is a shrine from 1655 for the city’s patron saint, St. Apollinaris.

VoiceMap’s Düsseldorf tour tells both versions of the steeple story, then passes a monument showing the four popes who raised the church to a basilica.