Riehen village church

Riehen village church

The Riehen village church is an Evangelical Reformed church in the Swiss municipality of Riehen in the canton of Basel-Stadt . It is located on Baselstrasse and marks the historic village center of Riehen.

Building history

According to the results of previous building research, the earliest foundations date back to the 10th century ( pre-Romanesque ). In the 12th century ( early Gothic ) a fortified church was built on this site . In 1942, the remains of a fortification and a medieval manor were found in the area . The church, originally consecrated to Saint Martin and first mentioned in 1157, was destroyed in the Basel earthquake on October 18, 1356 and replaced by a building with a relatively narrow nave in the late Gothic period . The new church tower was built in 1395 and raised to its current 41 meters in 1544 and 1612. To this day, it is the tallest structure in Riehen. On the gable roof of the tower sits a later, pointed roof turret with a hexagonal floor plan , which hides its own small bell cage and is crowned by a weathercock . The late Gothic church with an enlarged nave emerged from a renovation in 1693/94. The building has essentially been preserved in this form to this day.

The main entrance is atypically in the middle of the street-side longitudinal facade and leads into the single-nave nave , which ends in a five-sided choir polygon . The simple interior of the room is characterized, among other things, by a Gothic strip ceiling with star painting. There are also epitaphs for the pastors Johannes Müller (1561–1631), Samuel von Brunn (1606–1684), Bonifacius Burckhardt (1656–1708; a direct predecessor of Paulus Euler and ancestor of Jacob Burckhardt ), Jakob Heinrich Schönauer (1695 –1767), Johann Rudolf Rapp-Hosch (1727–1794) and for the Basel silk ribbon manufacturer Jacob Christoph Frey (1741–1806) and Eleonora Elisabeth Bischoff, née Burckhardt (1742–1801; wife of the Basel cloth merchant and Grand Councilor Benedict Bischoff).

Behind the church, seen from Baselstrasse, lies the late Romanesque “ Meierhof ”, which is now used as a church community center. The apartment part of the fortified church, also built in the 12th century as a fortress tower, is one of the oldest of its kind in Europe. The village church and the Meierhof are under monument protection.

Parish

The church is the place of worship of the Riehen Dorf parish - with its own pastor and working group - in the Riehen-Bettingen parish , which comprises a total of three parishes and which covers the area of ​​the two rural parishes of Riehen and Bettingen in the canton of Basel-Stadt.

Varia

The tram line that had been coming from Basel since 1908 ended directly at the Riehen village church until 1914 . A small tram station consisting of three parallel tracks was laid out on a plot of land between the church and the street. When the line was built from 1914 to the nearby border crossing to Germany and after the First World War all the way to Lörrach , the space was also used to park attached cars while the motor vehicle continued on its own. The three-lane parking facility in front of the village church was demolished in 1959. Since September 1967 the route has ended with a loop directly at the state border, but the Riehen Dorf tram stop is still at the level of the village church . Today there is a small green area at the location of the tram station.

literature

• Guido Helmig: Traces of Romanesque and more recent annex buildings . In: Jahrbuch z'Rieche 1993, pp. 16-21 ( online ).
• Guido Helmig, Udo Schön: On the renovation of the village church of St. Martin in Riehen . In: Annual report of the Archaeological Soil Research of the Canton of Basel-Stadt. Basel 1993 (1996), pp. 83-93.
• Bernard Jaggi: On the building history of the village church St. Martin . In: Jahrbuch z'Rieche 1993, pp. 5–15 ( online ).
• Rudolf Laur-Belart : The Church of Riehen: Building history and investigation 1942 . In: Journal for Swiss Archeology and Art History , Vol. 5, Issue 3, Zurich 1943, pp. 129–141.
• François Maurer-Kuhn: The fortified church in Riehen: for the development of a «village center» in the early and high medieval times . In: Pro Augusta Raurica Foundation (ed.): Provincialia: Festschrift for Rudolf Laur-Belart . Schwabe Verlag, Basel 1968, pp. 603–614.
• Christoph Matt, Bernhard Jaggi, Martina Holder: 'The village church of St. Martin in Riehen', Society for Swiss Art History GSK, Bern 2017
• Walter Pannike: The weathercock of the village church in Riehen . In: Yearbook z'Rieche . Riehen 1993, pp. 33-37 ( online ).

• Michael Raith : The epitaphs of the village church St. Martin zu Riehen . In: Yearbook z'Rieche . Riehen 2003, pp. 33-51 ( online ).
• Michael Raith: Small lexicon of the village church . In: Yearbook z'Rieche . Riehen 1993, pp. 22-31 ( online ).
• Hans Reinhardt: The church of Riehen: the Carolingian building . In: Journal for Swiss Archeology and Art History , Vol. 5, Issue 3, Zurich 1943, pp. 142–148.
• Peter Thommen (with contributions by Kurt Wechsler and Marcel Mundschin), Archaeological Soil Research Basel-Stadt, Seminar for Pre- and Protohistory of the University of Basel (ed.): The fortified church of Riehen . Materialhefte zur Aräologie in Basel, H. 5, Basel 1993. ISBN 3-905098-08-3 .

Web links

• Photographs in the image database of the Canton of Basel-Stadt

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ordinance of December 13, 1994 on the Church Law , Canton Basel-Stadt
2. ↑ Page about the Riehen-Bettingen parish on the website of the Reformed Church in Basel-Stadt ( memento of the original from January 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Evangelical Reformed Parish Riehen-Bettingen , inforel.ch
4. ↑ Route: Schwarzwaldallee - Riehen Dorf (1908) , www.tram-basel.ch

Coordinates: 47 ° 35 '4.7 "  N , 7 ° 38' 57.5"  E ; CH1903:  615849  /  two hundred seventy thousand four hundred fifty-eight