Apse church

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The apse church is an important type of floor plan in medieval village church building . Basically, the floor plan types of village churches differ according to the east end, either with a semicircular apse or with a straight altar wall, be it the retracted choir or be it the nave . The apse halls and the choir tower churches also have an apse. However, they have their own technical terms, so that only the three or four-fold staggered floor plans are referred to as apse churches (apse, retracted choir and nave, without a nave-wide west building in three parts , with west building in four parts).

The term is not common in cathedrals, collegiate, monastery and municipal parish churches, because in these large, mostly multi-aisled churches, the apse or the apses are only structural details compared to the overall building and are not a fundamental distinguishing feature.

The apse churches occur only in the Romanesque, especially in the late Romanesque .

Village churches

Erich Bachmann names four basic types of village church building in the Romanesque era: " Complete system " (better: four-part apse church) , choir tower church , square choir church and apse hall . With the exception of the square choir, they all have an apse. Since the square choir church alone among them lack the apse, it has often been interpreted as a reduction type of four-apse church So the "complete system" time followed, and in the early Gothic heard. This is not correct, however, because the square choir already appears in the Romanesque period parallel to the complete complex, but also more frequently later in the early Gothic period.

The apse churches can be found as field stone churches in northern Germany in the landscapes shaped by the Ice Age, but also in Denmark and Sweden. The village churches in the south of Germany are mostly made of sandstone and have been plastered in baroque style since the Middle Ages, so they are shaped to adapt to their surroundings and are therefore less noticeable than the (mostly unplastered) field stone churches.

The four-part apse church (“complete system”) in northern Germany is considered to be the classic archetype, the epitome of a perfect stone church as a village church. Urban parish churches with only one apse are very rare; the oldest among them close with a straight altar wall. The apse halls are relatively rare, and the choir tower churches are even rarer. Village churches with a ship-wide polygonal choir did not appear until the late Middle Ages. Therefore, the technical term "apse church" is limited to the four and three-part apse churches, which in the previous literature are misleadingly referred to as "complete structures", although the three-part apse church is not "complete" compared to the four-part apse church. The concept of the apse church also includes the simple apse hall in a broader sense, which Bachmann considers to be a separate floor plan type. Theoretically, the choir tower church was one of them, but it is extremely rare to find it east of the Elbe.

literature

  • Erich Bachmann: Artistic landscapes in the Romanesque small church building in Germany . In: Journal of the German Association for Art History . tape 8 , 1941, pp. 159-172 .
  • Siegfried Scharfe: German village churches , Königstein / Leipzig 1941.
  • Florian Monheim , Hans Müller: Dorfkirchen in Eastern Germany , Cologne 1991.
  • Ulrich Waack: Building types of medieval village churches in Berlin and the Mittelmark. In: Janowski, Bernd / Schumann, Dirk (Ed.): Dorfkirchen. Contributions to architecture, furnishings and preservation of monuments (= volume 3 of the series “Churches in rural areas”), Lukas-Verlag Berlin 2004, pp. 121-138.
  • Ulrich Waack: Church building and economy. On the relationship between structural features of medieval village churches on the Barnim and their economic and settlement history (= Volume 4 of the series "Churches in rural areas"), Lukas-Verlag Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-936872-73-6