St. John's Basilica (Ramla)

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View through the central nave to the east
Gothic west portal

The St. John's Basilica is a former parish church of the Crusaders in Ramla in today's Israel . It was dedicated to St. John the Baptist . The church is now a mosque .

history

The St. John's basilica in Ramla was always a parish church at the time of the Crusaders, although the sources sometimes refer to it as a cathedral. The cathedral church, however, was St. George in Lydda . The bishops of Lydda have occasionally referred to themselves as the bishops of Ramla; B. Robert of Rouen in 1099, the year Ramla was occupied by the Crusaders. Soon afterwards the construction of St. John's Basilica began. When Sultan Saladin had the crusader castle and cathedral in Lydda razed after the conquest of Lydda and Ramla in 1191, he left the parish church at Ramla untouched. It was used briefly as a mosque until the Crusaders were able to take Ramla back into their possession through the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192. In August 1266, Ramla fell into the hands of the Sultan Baibars I , and the St. John's basilica finally became a mosque.

St. John was built in the form of a three-aisled basilica with lower aisles. The nave has seven bays, the respective intercolumnium has long been spanned by pointed arches. The nave itself is spanned by a barrel vault. The side aisles are roofed by groin vaults. In the east, the church closes with three semicircular apses, which are embedded in an externally straight choir head. The sacred building measures 45 × 21.5 meters in plan. The building is therefore one of the oldest Christian sacred buildings in the world with pointed arches, which became the basic construction method of Gothic architecture.

literature

  • Paul Deschamps: Romanesque in the Holy Land. Castles and churches of the crusaders . Würzburg 1992, ISBN 3-429-01435-2 .
  • Denys Pringle: The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem , Volume 2 (L – Z), Cambridge 1998.

Web links

Commons : Great mosque of Ramla  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ ARD Tel Aviv: ( Memento from May 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Richard C. Schneider

Coordinates: 31 ° 55 ′ 30.1 ″  N , 34 ° 52 ′ 30.2 ″  E