Pfarrkirche Unserer lieben Frau: Parish and Marian Pilgrimage Church in Eriskirch, Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page10 sections
History
Pfarrkirche Unserer lieben Frau, also known as Mariä Himmelfahrt, is a Catholic parish church in Eriskirch, Germany. Built in the late Gothic period, it became one of the region’s oldest Marian pilgrimage churches and continues to serve as the parish church of the municipality. Because it escaped substantial renewal during the Baroque period, much of its late-Gothic character remains visible.
Origins and Late-Gothic Construction
Eriskirch was first recorded in 1257, and a Marian chapel is documented there in 1278. The Codex Maior Weingarten mentions a church in Eriskirch during the second half of the thirteenth century, while the Liber Taxationis first identifies it as a parish church in 1353. These references mark the development of a local place of worship into an established parish and pilgrimage center.
Dendrochronology, the dating of timber through its annual growth rings, established that the present nave was built in 1387 and the choir followed in 1409. This order was unusual, since the nave normally followed the completion of the sanctuary. The arrangement was probably related to the number of pilgrims visiting the church. A larger nave could accommodate them while the Madonna of Grace, a sculpture dated to 1350, remained available for veneration in the earlier choir.
The bell tower was erected between 1409 and 1419. Its original steep spire had a saddle-roofed form, but lightning destroyed it in 1834. The present pointed spire dates from 1869.
War Damage and Baroque Alterations
In 1634, Swedish troops plundered and burned the church during the Thirty Years’ War, a European conflict that combined religious divisions with struggles among major political powers. The burned-out building was rebuilt in 1666. Parts of the interior were renewed in the Baroque style, whose richer ornament and altered forms followed the late-medieval fabric without replacing it entirely.
The nave was raised during these alterations. Painted strips on the gallery preserve evidence of this change. The Baroque work also introduced flat ceilings in both the nave and choir. The church’s extensive painted decoration nevertheless retained its Gothic character, and its complete interior painting scheme is one of the few of its kind to survive from the Gothic period in Germany.
Restoration and Musical Heritage
During the major restoration of 1932 and 1933, most of the surviving historical paintings were uncovered. Where earlier traces had disappeared, Josef Braun and August Braun added wall paintings and a nave ceiling painting based on the same subject as the choir ceiling, the Assumption of Mary. The interior and exterior underwent another renovation between 1981 and 1986. The work ended with the ceremonial consecration of the altar by Auxiliary Bishop Franz Kuhnle on 19 October 1986.
Wartime requisitions affected the church bells. The two oldest bells were removed during the Second World War and taken to Lünen in Westphalia to be melted down, but both returned undamaged in 1948. The church’s musical history also includes a new organ supplied in 1904 by the Späth brothers’ workshop in Mengen. Catalogued as Opus 113, it was modified several times before the Jürgen Lutz organ workshop in Feuchtwangen restored it in 1999. The restoration returned the instrument to its original Romantic disposition and expanded it to 15 stops.
Remains
The church is formed by a broad nave and a choir built at different times, with the choir standing two metres higher than the nave. Its smooth interior walls carry brightly coloured picture cycles, while the surviving flat ceilings reflect the later Baroque alterations. The 12-metre-wide nave is one of the few in southern Germany whose roof spans this distance without additional hanging or supporting trusses.
Painted Interior
Nave Paintings
The nave’s wall paintings present scenes from the New Testament. On the north side, the Capture of Christ begins the uppermost of three picture strips. On the south side, a Last Judgement extends across two picture fields. The lowest strip near the choir contains the Feast-Day Christ, a devotional image linked to the religious importance of Sundays and feast days, together with The Three Living and the Three Dead, a medieval moralizing scene in which living figures confront corpses and are reminded of the brevity of earthly life.
Further paintings beneath the gallery show the Entombment of Christ, the Resurrection of Christ, the martyrdom of Saint Catherine, and the martyrdom of Saint Agatha of Catania. The gallery itself includes images of King David and Saint Cecilia. Together, the cycles were intended to teach Christian conduct to worshippers who could not read. Their arrangement is distinctive because the New Testament appears in the nave and the Old Testament in the choir, reversing the pattern found in most churches.
Choir Paintings and Devotional Images
The choir contains scenes from the Old Testament and a ceiling painting of the Assumption of Mary dated to 1750. The work is probably by Anton Maulbertsch, an eighteenth-century Austrian painter known for religious and fresco painting. Two stained-glass windows in the choir were donated by the Counts of Montfort, a noble family associated with the Lake Constance and western Alpine region.
The Madonna of Grace, dating from 1350, stands on the left side altar. This image connects the surviving interior with the pilgrimage tradition that influenced the church’s unusual construction sequence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
Bell Tower and Bells
The approximately 60-metre-high tower contains six bells from different periods. The oldest is the Four Evangelists Bell, cast in the thirteenth century, which is 0.70 metres high, weighs 0.26 tonnes, and sounds the note C. Maria Hilf dates from the fourteenth century, measures 0.52 metres, weighs 0.175 tonnes, and sounds F.
Ave Maria was cast in 1595 by Leonhart Ernst Lindau. It is 1.10 metres high, weighs 1.6 tonnes, and sounds D-flat. O Maria caelum assumpta ora pro nobis was cast in 1950 by Benjamin Grüninger of Villingen. It measures 0.90 metres, weighs 0.85 tonnes, and sounds F. The Francis Bell and Pope Benedict XVI were both cast in 2007. The Francis Bell is 1.03 metres high, weighs 0.67 tonnes, and sounds A-flat; Pope Benedict XVI measures 0.95 metres, weighs 0.465 tonnes, and sounds B-flat.
Organ
The Späth organ of 1904 survives in restored form with 15 stops. Three stops are placed on an additional transmission chest, a mechanism that allows one set of pipes to be controlled from more than one manual. These additional stops can be coupled to the first and second manuals, preserving the instrument’s expanded arrangement while retaining its original Romantic character.
