Cistercian convent of St. Jöris

overall view

Monastery church

View from the northwest

Rest of the monastery wing

The Cistercian convent of St. Jöris ( lat. Monasterium s. Georgii ad Rubum ) is a former monastery of the Cistercian women in the Eschweiler district of St. Jöris in the Aachen district . Only a few buildings remain from the original complex that dominated the village and are now used as event rooms and apartments.

The next junctions are Eschweiler-West on the A 4 and Broichweiden on the A 44 . The nearest train station is Eschweiler Hbf on the DB route Aachen - Eschweiler - Düren - Cologne .

History of the monastery

In 1274 Winrich and Jutta von Kinzweiler founded the Cistercian monastery, which was built on a clearing in the Propsteier forest and named after St. Georg , the patron saint of the Knights of Kinzweiler. In terms of architectural history, nothing has survived from the 13th century today. The head relic of Saint Regina in the Kinzweiler parish church, like the triumphal cross, is one of the numerous relics of the monastery from the 14th century. In terms of art history, the cross belongs to the Rhenish "Cruzifixi dolorosi".

After rivalries between the Cistercian abbeys of Heisterbach and Marienstatt, the ecclesiastical supervision of the monastery came to the Abbot of Clairvaux in the 18th century . In 1759 he commissioned the abbot of Altenberg with the supervision and renovation of the monastery, which had been neglected and run down and had in the meantime been about to be dissolved.

The town of St. Jöris developed around the monastery over the centuries. New buildings take place in the 15th and 17th / 18th Century; the current system comes from the last one. Today's monastery church is a single-nave quarry stone building from the 15th century, as are the two lower tower floors. Walled-up arch openings on the north wall of the nave suggest a lower aisle. The brick upper floor is more recent.

In April 1783 the von Hatzfeld family took possession of the Kinzweiler Burg , an important agricultural property at the time, whose tenant was the farmer Franz Wüsten after the von Hatzfeld family left Kinzweiler Burg shortly after 1800. He becomes an alderman of the city or Mairie Eschweiler and around 1797 builds the "Wüstenhof" at the Propsteier forest. At that time the region was part of the French department de la Roer . Kinzweiler, St. Jöris and the Propstier Wald, which at that time still stretched from the Aachener Reichswald to Aldenhoven , belong to Eschweiler, which in turn was the seat of the canton of Eschweiler until 1815, when the Rhineland came to Prussia .

After Napoleon I passed a resolution on the secularization of ecclesiastical property on June 9, 1802 , the Cistercian abbey is also abolished, and the probsteier forest, which was previously in the possession of the cathedral priest in Cologne and is now being sold piece by piece . Franz Wüsten bought the monastery in 1804 and built a large estate. In 1805 the monastery church was reopened and in 1815 it was closed again.

Edmund, the son of Franz Wüsten, was born on May 8, 1809 at Kinzweiler Castle. He later inherits the monastery courtyard and turns it into an exemplary large-scale operation. On March 8, 1846, the cloister courtyard - named "Landgut Georgenbusch" in a document - was elevated to a manor. Edmund is also the builder of the Steinbachshochwald estate on the southwestern edge of the Propsteier Forest around 1830. As the owner of a manor he even has the right to a seat in the state parliament , and during his military training he achieved the rank of royal cavalry master .

After the death of Edmund Wüsten in 1890, the Aachen entrepreneur Gerhard Rehm bought the monastery courtyard and bequeathed it to his related Ervens family after his death. The latter leased it to the Degen brothers from 1903 to 1924 and then sold it to the brothers Josef, Christian and Wilhelm Koch. In 1937 they divided it up and today's Georgshof was given to Josef Koch while Wilhelm and Christian Koch jointly managed the remaining half of the monastery courtyard. Both men died in the 1940s.

In 1944 the monastery complex was very badly destroyed in the Second World War , and in 1973 the south wing partially collapsed. In 1982 the "Friends of the Cistercian Monastery of St. Jöris" was founded, which in 1983 bought the old monastery church for 10  DM from the city of Eschweiler and was able to save the monument from deterioration. In March 1986, the rebuilt monastery church was inaugurated as the town's cultural center . Today it is used temporarily for Protestant church services and since 2003 for weddings.

Web links

• gukape.de: The Cistercian convent of St. Jöris

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans Mosler: The Cistercian Abbey Altenberg. (= Germania Sacra; New Series 2. ) Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1965, p. 87. Digitized

Coordinates: 50 ° 50 ′ 7 ″  N , 6 ° 12 ′ 39 ″  E