Evangelical Church Frankenau
Coordinates: 51 ° 5 ′ 29.8 ″ N , 8 ° 56 ′ 8.3 ″ E
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Frankenau is a listed church building in the small town of Frankenau in the Hessian district of Waldeck-Frankenberg .
The church with its small churchyard and a war memorial is located in the city center. It stands on a slight hill, is visible from afar and offers a panoramic view of the nearby Kellerwald-Edersee National Park .
Building history
When the city was founded in 1242 by Landgrave Heinrich Raspe , Frankenau certainly received its own church, but under parish law it belonged to the Quernstkirche on the nearby Talgang mountain and its northern foothills, Quernst. In 1319 a pastor is mentioned for the first time in Frankenau. Possibly around this time the city had received its own pastor's office, which also supplied the communities in Altenlotheim and Löhlbach until the 17th century. The church has been Lutheran since 1528, and since the 17th century it has also been used by the Reformed congregation overseen from Frankenberg.
A presumably still medieval church was so dilapidated towards the end of the 18th century that the congregation celebrated services in the town hall. It was torn down in 1833 and replaced between 1834 and 1859 by a classicist hall built with the simplest means, but which had serious structural defects. A round tower made of stone blocks, which supposedly was built before the city was founded, belonged to the church, which in the Middle Ages also served for defense and was connected to the church, which was demolished in 1833. This "Franconian borderland tower" was preserved as a free-standing bell tower after the old church was torn down and was demolished in 1869 due to disrepair after the great city fire in 1865, in which the new church burned down and the tower burned out.
In 1876, today's neo-Gothic church was rebuilt according to plans by Waldeck's state master builder Wilhelm Müller as his first major work; The executed and several alternative designs have been preserved. A crack in the tower during construction and unsuccessful attempts to remove it caused it to be demolished and rebuilt again. The church was consecrated in 1878. A major renovation of the church was carried out in 1992.
Churchyard
The old churchyard was walled in an oval shape according to the city plan from around 1776. Located in the middle of the town, which was rebuilt after the fire in 1865 with a completely different layout, rising from the southwest to the northeast.
Since the previous church with the choir was apparently oriented differently towards the northeast, Müller designed the new building with a line of sight to the tower and nave from Rieschstrasse, so that it lies back in the rising terrain of the churchyard and appears higher than it actually is.
Building description and equipment
A flat-roofed gallery hall with a recessed five-eighth polygon and a west tower made of quarry stone with ashlar structures . The side walls of the building are little vortretende buttresses in three axes jointed and with high-fitting, two-track windows over a narrow ledge in Sohlbankhöhe provided, the simple circles in Couronnement decorate. Small portals in the east walls next to the choir . The polygonal choir has stronger buttresses and pentaheads in the windows.
The tower consists of a high shaft, the walls of which are framed by buttress-like lining walls. With Wimperg suspected, protruding double portal with profile walls on the west side, in the tympanum a cross and the symbols of alpha and omega ; above a window with a larger aperture. The bell storey is provided with double windows, which are coupled via columns with capitals and shaft whorls . Octagonal, slate pointed helmet , four wichhouses at the base of the helmet .
The interior was inspired by the Friedrichswerder Church in Berlin (1824–1831 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel ) and transformed into a broad variant with a flat ceiling, stylistically rooted in the English early Gothic. In its basic idea it is a pillared hall. On pillars, which are square in plan and connected with flat segmental arches , stone galleries with slightly recessed, closed stone parapets are built into the side walls and in the west. The parapets are interrupted above the pillars by sturdy round pillars with protruding leaf capitals on which short, wide, pointed transverse barrels rest.
The passages in the galleries at the level of the pillars are formed from architraves on wall templates. In the spandrels between the barrels, there are wooden wall posts on which the flat ceiling rests. The wide chancel arch is edged by a on consoles intercepted joist accompanied posing as a form vault beginners repeatedly shortened in unison.
The steep sloping ceilings for the choir windows are unusual. A restrained color scheme and painting underline the architecture. Few profile valleys and the rib edges in the choir are laid out in dark red, the ribs are accompanied by small, stylized leaves, the painted choir keystone is adorned with gilded and colored ribs. Late classical ornament band at the ceiling attachment.
The choir walls are equipped with a painted textile wall hanging below the window sills. The original furnishings were based on Müller's designs (received from the pulpit and organ brochure , 1877). Four-part altarpiece by Christian Braun in brittle, peculiarly stylized neo-Gothic forms. In each axis there is a painted figure of a saint, the two central axes are held together by a lunette with a Lamb of God and crowned by a wheel cross between pinnacles on pillars.
The five-sided sandstone pulpit has no sound cover . The pulpit cage rests with closed parapets , each with a quatrefoil , between corner pillars on a short pillar foot, the leaf capital of which corresponds to the upper capitals in the nave . A sandstone staircase connects with a quarter-circle arc from the choir room. Five-part, flat organ front by Furtwängler with a raised central section closed off by a Wimperg, the high substructure jumps back a little; the organ work was rebuilt in 1975.
Only a few stones from the old church in Frankenau were used as the floor foundation when the newly built church was built . The remaining stones were used to build the road to Frankenberg .
Memorial stone and war memorial
On the north east wall of the nave there is the memorial stone “In memory of the glorious campaign of 1870-71”, a black inscription plate with names between columns on a high plinth and a keel arch attachment with a six-pass and crabs.
The monument scope also includes the war memorial in front of the church.
Footnotes
- ↑ As a state master builder, Wilhelm Müller (1851–1928) has retained a memory to this day through the buildings that were built according to his plans in the Principality of Waldeck . His buildings were based on the taste of the time in the neo-Gothic style . Müller's realized form, the Müller Gothic , unmistakably bears his own signature.
Web links
- Evangelical Church Kurhessen-Waldeck
- Website of the city of Frankenau
- Edersee adventure region: Frankenau
- Edersee adventure region: sights
- Eder church district
literature
- Roland Pieper, Antje Press, Reinhold Schneider: Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany, cultural monuments in Hesse, district Waldeck Frankenberg II. Ed .: State Office for Monument Preservation Hesse. Theiss, Darmstadt 2015, ISBN 978-3-8062-3054-3 .