Evangelical Church (Rittersbach)
The Protestant church in Rittersbach , a district of the Elztal community in the Neckar-Odenwald district in northern Baden-Württemberg , was built in 1854.
history
Rittersbach was Calvinist reformed as an Electoral Palatinate town in the late 16th century , but was predominantly Catholic after the Thirty Years War . The old church of the village, mentioned in the 14th century (the predecessor of today's Georgskirche ), has belonged to the Reformed community since the Reformation - with the exception of a few years during the Thirty Years War, when the village was temporarily part of Catholic Bavaria. In 1698 the Simultaneum was finally introduced, which enabled the numerically larger Catholic community to use the old church. In 1705 the Catholic community was finally awarded the church. The small number of Reformed congregations received a room in the town hall for their services and in 1742 set up a prayer room in a building originally planned as a school building on Mittelstrasse. By 1850 the Reformed community had grown to 70 people. The old prayer room became too small, at the same time the building had become very dilapidated, was, according to experts, the worst building in town and threatened to collapse.
In 1853, the Evangelical High Church Council gave 600 guilders from a building collection to build a new church on a plot of land southeast of the town center, on the new state road (today's B 27 ), which was completed in 1849 and towards which the town began to orient itself from that time. Construction began on May 15, 1854. The plans for the church came from building inspector Lutz from Mosbach . The original plan was for a footprint of 30 feet long and 24 feet wide. As soon as the excavation was made, the Reformed congregation was shocked by the small size of the building, so that an extension of the church space by 10 feet in length and 6 feet in width was quickly applied for and approved, whereupon the church was built in its current form.
description
The Protestant church is a single-nave, towerless building with a turret and a small choir apse facing south-east . Today's roof turret replaced the smaller original roof turret in 1909. In the tympanum above the main portal there is an inscription stating the year of construction 1854.
In the roof turret is a chime made of two bronze bells, which was cast in 1952 at the Bachert bell foundry in Heilbronn. Previously, two sets of two bells each were melted down in the First and Second World Wars.
literature
- Karl Wilhelm Beichert, Werner Blesch: Rittersbach. A walk through the village and its history. Neckarburken 1993.
Coordinates: 49 ° 25 '24.8 " N , 9 ° 14' 9.6" E