‘Imperia’

At the mouth of Lake Constance (Bodensee), where the Rhine slips toward Switzerland, a nine-meter courtesan spins in slow defiance. Her name is Imperia, and she’s been turning — quite literally — since 1993.

Sculpted by Peter Lenk, she rotates once every four minutes, balancing two tiny naked men in her hands: one crowned like an emperor, the other wearing a papal tiara. Both look foolish. Both are helpless. And both, in her grasp, symbolize a truth Konstanz has never quite lived down — that power and piety often share the same bed.

The story behind her grin reaches back to the Council of Constance (1414–1418), when Europe’s most powerful clerics and rulers gathered here to end the Great Schism. For four years, the small lakeside city overflowed with popes, princes — and prostitutes. Chroniclers whispered that the “holy” council was shadowed by carnal excess.

Lenk drew inspiration from Balzac’s 1830s story La belle Imperia, in which a courtesan seduces the church’s elite during that very council. When the sculptor unveiled his version, local politicians and priests tried to have it removed. He sidestepped them by placing it on private harbor land, untouchable by city order. Overnight, Imperia began to turn — a concrete act of rebellion.

Today, she is Konstanz’s icon, declared a cultural monument in 2024. Tourists pose beneath her; locals still argue about her. But Imperia endures, her slow rotation a reminder that the sacred and the profane are never far apart — and that sometimes, history itself needs a woman to keep it spinning.