Evangelical Church of Dens
The Evangelical Church Dens is a listed church building in Dens , a district of Nentershausen in the district of Hersfeld-Rotenburg ( Hesse ).
History and architecture
As excavations in the summer of 1978 have shown, the church stands on the foundations of a medieval chapel dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours and serving as a mother church. This smaller, stone-walled previous building with a long and narrow rectangular choir tapering to the east was 11.60 m long on the outside and 9.85 m on the inside, the inside length of the choir being 3.40 m and that of the hall 6.45 m. The hall was 5.30 m wide on the outside and 3.60 m wide on the inside. The choir, which is trapezoidal on the inside, at least in the area of the foundation, appears to have been roughly rectangular on the outside; it had an inner width of 2.60 m in the west and narrowed to only 2.20 m in the east. The original north wall of the hall is still contained in today's north wall of the church. The construction of this first church could not be archaeologically dated, and there are no documentary evidence of it. The Martins patronage , the ancient floor plan and the small dimensions are, however, indications for a dating before the first millennium.
Today's simple hall church with its solidly bricked rectangular substructure and a half-timbered superstructure was built in the second half of the 17th century or at least partially renewed and considerably expanded in 1786. The procedure was such that the course of today's north wall in the middle area corresponds to that of the north wall of the previous building; the middle section of the outer wall seems to have been part of the old church that was integrated into the new building. It was not until 1786 that an older tower at the west end was demolished and the nave was extended by around 4.5 m to the west. The west portal was built with the date 1786 engraved on it, but probably still without a tower top. Today's roof tower with a square floor plan and a broken hood was only built in 1806 over the main portal in the west; he's slipped . The church has a footprint of 17.50 mx 7.00 m. Inside it is 16.00 m long and 5.50 m wide. The massive masonry of the basement is only pulled up to the roof truss in the area under the tower , while the remaining walls of the upper floor consist of half-timbering, which at least in the area of the south wall is dated between 1640 and 1700 and was plastered until 1981.
The gallery on the north wall with a richly carved cornice dates from 1786. The organ gallery in the west, which is supported by two wooden pillars that extend into the roof structure, was probably not built until 1882, when an organ built by Carl Heyder from Mühlhausen was purchased. The pulpit was created around 1700. The hall and the altar area were and are at the same level. During the fundamental redesign of the interior in 1978/79, the floor was covered with ceramic tiles and the benches, sacristy and lamps were renewed. The decomposed stone altar , which had stood about 4 m west of the east wall and thus noticeably far inside the church, was replaced by a wooden altar. In 1981, the external plaster was renewed and the half-timbering of the south wall was exposed. Six grave slabs from the 17th and 18th centuries, which had been used for purposes other than flooring until 1978, were placed on the outer south wall, and a small canopy on wooden pillars was built in front of the main entrance.
Notes and individual references
- ↑ The first known documentary mention of the church and its patronage of St. Martin took place between 1302 and 1312, when the Cornberg monastery received two estates in Dens.
literature
- Klaus Sippel (Ed.): Contributions to the archeology of medieval churches in Hesse, Vol. 1 (Materials on the prehistory and early history of Hesse, Volume 9). State Office for Monument Preservation, Wiesbaden 1989.
- Georg Dehio (term): Hessen ( Handbook of German Art Monuments ). Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1966, p. 139.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 1 ′ 26 ″ N , 9 ° 54 ′ 14 ″ E