Old Parish Church Matzleinsdorf (Vienna)

Former Florianikirche (before 1939)

Old and New Florian Church (1965)

The Florianikirche was a Roman Catholic parish church in the 5th Viennese district Margareten . The parish church belonged to City Deanery 4/5 in the Vicariate Vienna City of the Archdiocese of Vienna . The old Matzleinsdorfer parish church dedicated to St. Florian , which was located in the middle of Wiedner Hauptstrasse until 1965 and was considered a Viennese landmark , was also called Florianikirche or Rauchfangkehrerkirche .

history

The church was built on the site of an earlier Marian chapel from earlier times and was completed in the simple baroque style in 1725. The parish garden was created in place of the cemetery that was abandoned in 1784 and relocated to Nikolsdorf . Joseph II's order to demolish the church failed in 1787 due to popular resistance. In 1820 a sacristy building was added.

On May 10, 1953, three new bells were consecrated and raised. The middle Floriani bell was donated by the fire brigades of the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , and metal was also donated, for example old brass fire brigade couplings . 400 comrades from Lower Austria and the outlying communities, which until 1954 still belonged to Greater Vienna , took part in the consecration and 40 firefighters then raised the bells.

From August 30, 1965, the demolition took place for traffic reasons, despite a wave of protests with 13,000 signatures. The fact that the church stood in the middle of the Wiedner Hauptstrasse - which, however, was extended at this point - formed the special urban charm of the building, but even before the Second World War it had led to considerations to sacrifice it to accommodate the increasing traffic. In 1935 the parsonage, which protruded far into the street, was demolished. From 1955 these tendencies intensified, whereby both the municipality of Vienna and the Catholic Church were apparently interested in the removal of the "traffic obstacle" and the construction of a new church. The demolition of the old parish church was justified with the construction of an underground tram . The USTRABA route in the Wiedner Hauptstrasse was built afterwards and is used at this point by several tram lines and the Badnerbahn . An ideas competition announced by the city administration for the redesign of the street space between Kliebergasse and Laurenzgasse resulted in a 24 m high bell tower designed by Johann Staber (1928–2005) for the middle of Wiedner Hauptstraße, which was supposed to replace the resting place made possible by the demolition of the church - but remained unrealized.

New Florian Church

In 1965 the new parish church Matzleinsdorf took over the tasks of the old church.

literature

• Alfred Prokesch: Requiem for a Church. How Vienna was demolished into a cosmopolitan city - and an analysis of the background. In: Die Zeit , year 1965, issue 40, October 1, 1965. ( Full text in Zeit online. )
• Rauchfangkehrerkirche in: Stones Speaking. Austrian Society for the Preservation of Monuments and Sites (Ed.), Special issue, Vienna October 1965, ZDB -ID 521516-x .
• Felix Czeike : Historisches Lexikon Wien , Volume 4. Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-218-00546-9 , p. 204.
• Dieter Klein , Martin Kupf , Robert Schediwy : Stadtbildverluste Wien. A look back over five decades . Lit, Vienna 2004, ISBN 978-3-8258-7754-5 .

Web links

Commons : Florianikirche  - Collection of pictures

• Georg Siegel: On the architecture of the parish church of St. Florian on the website of the parish of St. Florian

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Floriani Bell Fund. :  Announcements of the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , born in 1953, No. 1, p. 2 (online at ANNO ).
2. ↑ 1. Proof of donations for the Floriani Bell Fund. :  Announcements of the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , born in 1953, No. 1, pp. 19-21 (online at ANNO ). "In addition, material donations (metal) have been received from the following weirs: [...]"
3. ↑ 2. Proof of donations for the Floriani Bell Fund. :  Announcements of the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , born in 1953, No. 2, pp. 17-19 (online at ANNO ).
4. ↑ 3. Proof of donations for the Floriani Bell Fund. :  Announcements of the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , born in 1953, No. 3, pp. 19-20 (online at ANNO ).
5. ↑ 4. Proof of donations for the Floriani Bell Fund. :  Announcements from the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , born in 1953, No. 4, pp. 16-17 (online at ANNO ).
6. ↑ 5. Proof of donations for the Floriani Bell Fund. :  Announcements from the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , born in 1953, No. 5, pp. 19-20 (online at ANNO ).
7. ^ History of the Bad Vöslau fire brigade from 1946 to 1964. In: ffbv.at. Fire brigade of the city of Bad Vöslau, accessed on February 16, 2015 : "The state fire brigade command issued a call to all Lower Austrian fire brigades to donate old brass couplings for casting a bell for the Florianikirche in Vienna." 
8. ↑ Our Floriani bell !. :  Announcements of the Lower Austrian Fire Brigade Association , born in 1953, No. 6, p. 3 (online at ANNO ).
9. ↑ Wiedner Hauptstrasse: bell tower. City administration ideas competition: Viennese architect won first prize . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna July 12, 1966, p. 7 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).

Coordinates: 48 ° 11 ′ 8 ″  N , 16 ° 21 ′ 46 ″  E