Evangelical Church Hoheneiche

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The choir tower of St. Martin's Church

The Protestant church , called St. Martin's Church , is a building that characterizes the townscape in Hoheneiche , a district of the municipality of Wehretal in the Werra-Meißner district of North Hesse . Because of its artistic, historical and urban significance, the church is a protected cultural monument. The parish of Hoheneiche is connected to the parishes of Mitterode and Wichmannshausen .

The construction

Romanesque architectural fragments on the north wall.

The towering choir tower , with its around 23 meters, is the recognizable symbol of the place. It was built in the first half of the 14th century. The attached half-timbered structure with the not completely hipped roof and the roof turret is assigned to the middle of the 17th century. The loopholes emphasize the defensive character of the tower and suggest that the building once served as a fortified church , where the population could find refuge in times of need.

The original Romanesque core of the nave is dated to the 11th or 12th century. In its current form, it was created in the 17th and 18th centuries. The former entrance to the high medieval church on the north wall was exposed in 1981 when the exterior facade was renovated.

The inside of the church

The choir of St. Martin's Church.

The interior surprises with an illusionistic ceiling painting that is supposed to open the room into the sky. The choir is covered by a ribbed vault, the keystone of which shows a four-part rose window . Originally there were late-Gothic windows in the choir room , the tracery of which has been removed. A gallery with a coffered parapet surrounds the interior of the ship on the north and west sides.

An altar plate from the pre-Reformation period, the baptismal font from 1571 and a pulpit from the middle of the 17th century have been preserved as special pieces of equipment .

The altar window, designed and executed by the glass painter E. Jakobus Klonk from Wetter near Marburg, was installed at Whitsun 1991. “Justice” and “Diakonia” were the given themes. Based on the words from the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew: “What you did to one of these least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me”, the artist incorporated various motifs in the design he created.

Dauphin organ

The Dauphin Organ

Johann Eberhardt Dauphin (* around 1670; † 1731 in Hoheneiche) was the scion of a Huguenot family from Dörna near Mühlhausen in Thuringia . He learned the organ building trade from the renowned Mühlhausen master Johann Friedrich Wender , who worked closely with Johann Sebastian Bach . Between 1713 and 1715 Dauphin moved to the Landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel and built several organs in the North Hessian region. In the parish of Wichmannshausen , he completed his organs in the St. Nicholas Church in Mitterode in 1728 and in the St. Martinskirche in Wichmannshausen in 1730. Dauphin built the last organ in St. Martin's Church in Hoheneiche. He died immediately after it was completed. He was buried with his wife Anna Regina in April 1731 in the cemetery next to the church. Sixteen days after the double burial, the Hoheneich church book records the death of the organ builder's sister, who was nine years older than him. It is not known today which event cost the lives of three people in such a short time.

Elisabeth path

The Elisabethpfad from Eisenach to Marburg leads through the village and to the church. It is marked with the sign of the Elizabeth path and also with the shell of the Camino de Santiago . The path was inaugurated in 2007 for the 800th birthday of St. Elisabeth .

Hoheneiche owes its first documentary mention to St. Elisabeth. A documented witness report from 1233 describes the miraculous healing of the eight-year-old girl Adelheid from Hoheneiche, who made a pilgrimage with her mother to the grave of Elisabeth, who died two years earlier. After the pilgrimage, Adelheid, who had become immobile after illness, was able to move in a hunched position and with the help of crutches. Later she recovered enough that she could walk again without crutches. The healing was understood by those around her as so incomprehensible that her father, the village pastor and the mayor made the arduous and multi-day trip to Marburg, more than 100 kilometers away, in the winter of 1235, to testify to the church commission.

Others

  • The former pastor of Wichmannshausen, Hoheneiche and Mitterode, Kurt Reuber , was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 after studying medicine and was in Stalingrad as a troop doctor from 1942 . At Christmas 1942 Kurt Reuber drew a mother and child, the so-called " Stalingrad Madonna ", for his comrades with charcoal on the back of a Russian map . To the right of it he has noted the words “light, life, love”. The choir room of St. Martinskirche houses a replica in the original size of the Madonna, the original is exhibited in the Memorial Church Berlin. Pastor Reuber died in 1944 as a Soviet prisoner of war.
  • On the return journey from a Pyrmont spa treatment, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stopped together with his partner Christiane Vulpius and son August on August 21, 1801 in the Eschstruth inn opposite the church and drew the "Church in Hoheneiche near Eschwege" there. The pencil drawing belongs to the holdings of the Goethe National Museum in Weimar. A copy of the Goethe drawing can be seen in the Hoheneiche village community center .
  • In 2010 an extensive exterior and interior renovation of the church took place.
  • As part of the village renewal, the area in front of the churchyard was renovated in 2018. In addition to the reconstruction of the old sandstone wall, the paths were rebuilt with sandstone paving. In the edge area of ​​the square, a seat is to be created where citizens and pilgrims can linger.

literature

  • Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany. - Cultural monuments in Hessen. Werra-Meißner district I, old district Eschwege . Peer Zietz in collaboration with Thomas Wiegand, Braunschweig; Wiesbaden: Vieweg. 1991. ISBN 3-528-06240-1 . P. 592 f.
  • Bernhard Hermann Roth: 750 years of the Hoheneiche. 1233-1983. Published by Bernhard Hermann Roth on behalf of the festival committee. Hoheneiche, self-published, 1983.

Web links

Commons : St. Martin Hoheneiche (Wehretal)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Monument topography Werra-Meißner-Kreis IS 592 f.
  2. ↑ "The Altar Window of the Church of Hoheneiche" on the website of the parish Hoheneiche; accessed on September 22, 2018.
  3. ↑ Based on the text by Bernhard Hermann Roth on the occasion of the “Open Churches” campaign on June 11, 2006. (Source: Hans Gräfe: A Dörnaer on the trail of his ancestors , Dörna 2000); accessed on September 22, 2018.
  4. ↑ see also The canonization process of Elisabeth of Thuringia
  5. ^ Texts on Kurt Reuber and the Stalingrad Madonna on the Eschwege church district website; accessed on September 21, 2018.
  6. ^ "Goethe drew the church in Hoheneiche" on the website of the parish Hoheneiche; accessed on September 21, 2018.
  7. ↑ Ev. Parish Hoheneiche on the website of the parish of Eschwege; accessed on September 21, 2018.
  8. ↑ Anger in Hoheneiche. Courts in Hesse. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).

Coordinates: 51 ° 7 ′ 42.8 "  N , 9 ° 58 ′ 18.2"  E