St. Johannes der Täufer: Parish Church in Amöneburg
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.8
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- German, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page12 sections
History
St. Johannes der Täufer is a Neo-Gothic parish church in Amöneburg, Germany, built between 1865 and 1871 on the site of earlier monastic and collegiate churches. The monastery was founded there in 721 by Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon missionary and bishop who helped organize Christianity in central Germany. In 732, it was enlarged with a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael.
From monastery to collegiate church
The monastery was probably dissolved at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Around the middle or later part of that century, a new three-aisled Gothic hall church was erected on the site. A hall church has a nave and side aisles of broadly similar height. In 1360, the church became a collegiate church, an institution served by a community of clergy. Its tower is the only surviving remnant of that former collegiate building.
War damage and reconstruction
The collegiate church was almost completely destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, the European conflict fought from 1618 to 1648. Reconstruction followed, and the interior was redesigned in the Baroque style. The work was not completed until 1720.
Further severe damage occurred during the Seven Years’ War, which lasted from 1756 to 1763. The damaged church was eventually demolished in 1862. The collegiate foundation itself was dissolved during secularization in 1803, when German states dissolved many ecclesiastical institutions and transferred their properties to secular authorities.
The present parish church
The present church was built from 1865 to 1871 to designs by the architect Georg Gottlob Ungewitter. Because Ungewitter died before construction was finished, the work continued under the direction of the architect Peter Zindel. Christoph Florentius Kött, Bishop of Fulda, consecrated the completed church on 23 December 1871. St. Johannes der Täufer is protected as an architectural monument.
Remains
Church structure
Neo-Gothic basilica
The present church is a Neo-Gothic cross basilica, a basilica-shaped building whose plan forms a cross through the meeting of the nave and transepts. Its choir closes on three sides. The choir, central crossing, and side aisles have quadripartite vaults divided into four sections, while the nave and transepts have sexpartite vaults divided into six.
The church stands directly on the summit of the 365-metre-high Amöneburg. Its elevated position makes it visible across much of the Amöneburg Basin.
Medieval tower
The fourteenth-century tower stands on the north side of the choir and is crowned by a hooded roof added after 1762. Its ground floor contains the sacristy. Beneath the ground floor is an ossuary, a chamber for storing human bones, dating from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
The bell chamber holds five bells. Three are cast-steel bells made by the Bochumer Verein, and two are bronze church bells made by the Heidelberg bell founder Friedrich Wilhelm Schilling.
Interior furnishings and memorials
Surviving furnishings
Two choir stalls and four benches survive from the former Baroque furnishings. The church also contains gravestones dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
Windows and organ case
The nineteenth-century stained-glass windows and the organ case were produced from designs by the architect Carl Schäfer.
Organ
The organ was built around 1975 by Otto Hoffmann. It has 28 stops distributed across two manuals, the keyboards played by the hands, and a pedal keyboard operated by the feet. The instrument has mechanical key actions and electric stop actions. Its couplers are II/I, I/P, and II/P. Playing aids include two free combinations, hand registers, pleno, tutti, and a cancel device. Stops control the instrument’s groups of pipes.
