Evangelical Church Crumbach
The Evangelical Church of Crumbach is a parish church in Crumbach , a district of the municipality of Lohfelden in the Kassel district in northern Hesse .
location
The church stands on a mountain spur that slopes steeply into the valley of the Wälzebach and protrudes from the ridge northeast of the Lohfelden old village of Crumbach. Immediately to the east runs the L 3203, here called Crumbacher Straße in the local area.
On the side of the churchyard facing away from the street there are two mulberry trees that were planted in 1790 and whose leaves were once used as food for silkworms. As probably the oldest mulberry trees in North Hesse, they are natural monuments today .
history
No documentary evidence is known about the origin of the church complex. The first written mention of the church comes from 1368.
It is assumed that at this point, probably in the area of a pre-Christian cult site , a small wooden church was built in the early days of Christianization in Northern Hesse in the 8th century. The first stone building was a small Romanesque chapel in the 10th or 11th century, the remains of which were found under the choir and which was roughly the same size as the St. George's Chapel in Kaufungen . The remaining foundations of the choir show the east-west orientation.
In the 12th century, the rectangular inner churchyard was surrounded by a wall almost as high as a man and a round defense tower was built. A residential tower was built in the southwest corner of the wall, probably to accommodate a small guard. the wall. The Agnus Dei - relief on the tower dates from the 14th century.
In 1402 troops of Archbishop Johann II of Mainz burned down a number of villages in the Kassel area. Crumbach was one of them, and the church was largely destroyed in the process. As a dendrochronological examination of the beams showed, the reconstruction did not take place until the second half of the 15th century, now with the alignment of the current nave on the defense tower, but still at a considerable distance from it. The small church with a Gothic sloping base at the end of the choir and small Gothic windows with tracery was the same size as the chapel in Ochshausen. The upper part of the residential tower in the southwest corner of the churchyard was taken down and replaced with a half-timbered structure .
The defense tower and the defensive wall with their Gothic portal survived the devastation of the Thirty Years War , but the church was in need of repair at the latest after the Seven Years War (1756–1763). In 1770/71 it was rebuilt into its present form. The nave was widened and raised and connected to the defense tower, which was converted into a church and bell tower. It received a baroque hood with four wich houses on the helmet attachment and was opened in the basement so that access to the nave was no longer from the side wall, but through the lower tower room.
The interior of the church was redesigned several times after the introduction of the Reformation in the Landgraviate of Hesse in 1526. Until 1957, the church stalls faced the pulpit, and the nave had a three-sided gallery . A tombstone from 1597 is set high above the side entrance.
Inside the church grounds, which were enclosed by a low wall, but outside the defensive wall, there were once the parish farm buildings (residential house, stables, barn) and vegetable gardens.
Since 2002 the old church complex has been supplemented by a new parish center and a rectory.
Coordinates: 51 ° 16'15 " N , 9 ° 32'15" E
Web links
literature
- H. Reese, W. Reuter: The parish church Crumbach, on the history of a fortified church; in Kaufunger Wald , issue 1998, Association for Hessian History and Regional Studies, Branch Association Kaufunger Wald – Söhre.
- Forays through 900 years of local history Crumbach and Ochshausen 1102 - 2002. Published by the Lohfelden parish council, 2001