Ittingen Charterhouse
The Kartause Ittingen is a former Carthusian monastery in Warth TG , municipality of Warth-Weiningen , in the Swiss canton of Thurgau . Today it is a culture and seminar center with two museums, a hotel, a restaurant, a farm as well as assisted working and living for people with a mental or cognitive impairment.
In contrast to other monastery complexes, Ittingen is not a building planned as a complete complex. The Ittingen Charterhouse, as it presents itself today, is the result of constant structural changes and adjustments to the respective needs over the course of more than 900 years.
history
prehistory
The first wooden castle of the Lords of Ittingen could have been built around 800 at the western end of the "Chrüzbucks", a wooded drumlin below the road to Uesslingen. An indication of this is the field name Burgzelg below the hill.
Monastery operation
From the 8th to the 12th century, Ittingen Castle was the seat of the Lords of Ittingen, a family of lower nobility and ministerials of the Guelphs . In 1079, Hittingin Castle was destroyed by the troops of the abbot of St. Gallen as part of the investiture dispute between King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII and was later rebuilt, probably due to an atonement. The core of the new castle is believed to be on the site of today's south wing of the monastery complex. For 70 years, the castle was the seat of the Stewards of Ittingen.
In 1150 the last three representatives of the family founded a canon monastery in their castle according to the rules of the Augustinians , which they themselves entered. The Bishop of Constance and the Guelphs were involved in the founding, the Count of Kyburg was the bailiff . In 1152 the monastery was acquired by the feudal lord, Duke Welf VI. equipped with additional privileges. The patron saint was Laurentius of Rome , whose symbol, the martyr's rust, still appears today in the coat of arms of the Charterhouse.
The small monastery owed its rise to the nearby town of Frauenfeld , which at that time became the Habsburg administrative center. The pen never achieved great importance; In 1289 the convent consisted only of the provost , the former provost, five canons and two brothers.
In 1420 Ittingen had neither a prior nor a priest. Emperor Friedrich III. , who was directly subordinate to Frauenfeld in 1458, ensured an improvement in the financial situation and prepared the handover of the monastery to the Carthusian monastery, whose order was experiencing its greatest expansion at the time. In 1461 the handover was completed. The Carthusian monks bought the impoverished Ittingen and rebuilt it at great expense. It was not until 1471 that the monastery was formally admitted to the Carthusian monastery. According to their rules, the population was excluded from church services; the church was closed to women especially. In the same year there was a “ women's strike”: the women from Warth broke into the church and forced their own chapel in Warth with a sit-in strike.
On July 18, 1524, the Charterhouse was attacked in the Ittingen storm , looted and burned for two days. The displaced monks returned slowly; It was not until 1553 that the facilities were rebuilt in the course of the Counter Reformation . As early as 1528, during the Reformation of Bern, 17 Carthusian fathers had fled from the Carthusian monastery at Thorberg Castle and brought at least 33 books with them.
Under Prior Bruno Müller and the Procurator Josephus Wech, the monastery reached a period of economic prosperity after an administrative reform, the basis of which was the wine-growing and trading. In a good year around 20,000 guilders were earned. For comparison: in 1762 a house with a yard, barn and garden cost 260 guilders. The prosperity was evident in extensive construction work and in the refurbishment of the church. At the same time, Prior Bruno Müller campaigned for the monastery chronicle and hagiography created in Ittingen , which was expressed, among other things, in his efforts to publish Helvetia Sancta by Heinrich Murer in 1648 .
In 1798, after the decline of the Old Confederation , the Helvetic authorities forbade the acceptance of novices . The monastery property was confiscated from the newly created Canton of Thurgau, the business operations were run by state administrators and high taxes had to be paid. In 1848 the monastery was finally closed; the monks had to leave Ittingen after around seven centuries. The medieval library was taken over by the Thurgau Cantonal Library .
Privately owned
First the canton ran the farm, in 1856 it sold it to two people from Appenzell. Not least because of the decline in income from viticulture, the new owners sold the business in autumn 1867 to the St. Gallen banker and businessman Edmund Fehr for CHF 308,000 . He acquired all the buildings of the former monastery together with around 100 hectares of forest, vineyards and arable fields for his 21-year-old son Victor Fehr . His family ran the Ittingen Charterhouse for several generations as a model agricultural business until 1977. The monastery complex was essentially preserved. The landlord's family lived in the rooms on the first floor of the south wing of the old monastery, which had previously served the prior .
On September 4, 1912, the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Victor Fehr visited the Ittingen Charterhouse from September 4 to 8, 1912 during the imperial maneuver. For the imperial convenience, the host built in the Charterhouse's first water toilet with flushing device, which was still a rarity in Switzerland at that time.
Victor Fehr's successor as landlord was his son Cavalry - Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Fehr (1883–1965), whose heirs initiated the sale of the property after his death. It was only in 1999 that it became known that he had hidden the German exile Käthe Vordtriede with him from July to October 1941.
present
In 1977 the Charterhouse was sold to the newly established Kartause Ittingen Foundation and extensively restored from 1978 to 1983 for 49 million francs; the amount was collected from the canton of Thurgau, companies and private individuals.
Four architectural offices were responsible: Scherrer and Hartung from Schaffhausen for the renovation of the monastery, Antoniol and Huber (Frauenfeld) for the art museum, Kräher and Jenny for the agricultural buildings and Rudolf and Esther Guyer (Zurich) for the buildings of the outer enclosure. In 2008 and 2009, parts of the facility (hotel wing, restaurant, etc.) were renovated and expanded again.
Today the foundation operates a culture and education center and a home for the disabled in Ittingen for around 30 men and women who are employed in the facilities of the facility. The buildings house the Protestant meeting and education center tecum , the Thurgau Art Museum and the Ittingen Monastery Museum . The operation includes two hotels with 68 rooms and seminar rooms, the multifunctional “Remise” hall and the Zur Mühle restaurant .
The farm is one of the largest farms in the canton of Thurgau. In addition to traditional agriculture, wine is grown. Two hop gardens provide the raw material for their own beer, which is brewed at Heineken in Chur. In the dairy, the milk from their own cows is processed into various types of cheese. The products can be purchased in the monastery shop.
Foyer in the lower guest house
Ceiling painting in a room in the monastery museum
Stairwell in the lower guest house
Ittinger barrel
building
The oldest part of the complex is the remainder of a rectangular building with thick walls in the south wing of the monastery; it is conceivable that it is part of a defensive tower from before 1150.
What the monastery looked like in the 12th and 13th centuries is not known. Much of the building material has been preserved from the time of the renovation in the 14th century, including the longitudinal walls of the church with its pointed arched windows. The small cloister already existed then.
After the monastery was taken over by the Carthusian Order, the large cloister was built around which the monks' houses and their own gardens are laid out. After the Ittingen storm , the church was completely renovated. The main portal, dated 1550, dates from this time. Stepped gables and crenellated walls shaped the appearance.
At the beginning of the 17th century, the south wing was extended to the west, accommodating the Protectorate's rooms on the ground floor and those of the prior on the upper floor. This was the first time that the rooms of these dignitaries emerged clearly from the building complex. After 1620 the large cloister and a few cell houses were rebuilt.
The baroque style of the church began around 1700 . The choir stalls by Thurgau resident Chrisostomus Fröhli (1652–1724) were completed in 1701 and the choir was rebuilt with large windows. Then the east wing was rebuilt on the small cloister with sacristies, hall and library.
In the 1720s, after a new building, the west side was given the appearance of a castle facade with two risalits . The large wine cellar was built under the floor, rooms for the lay brothers were on the ground floor and guest rooms were set up on the first floor. Thirty years later, the building had to be extensively renovated because static problems arose. At the same time, the axis of the church was made visible again by reusing a portal from the vestibule.
Under Prior Antonius von Seilern, the Gothic church was rebuilt in the Rococo style from 1763 to 1797 and received its appearance, which has largely been preserved to this day. The stucco and the stucco marble altars were created by Johann Georg Gigl , the carvings are by Matthias Faller and the frescos were created by Franz Ludwig Hermann .
The state administration refrained from structural interventions in the actual monastery buildings, their activities were limited to the demolition, reconstruction and new construction of farm buildings.
The private owner Victor Fehr, who lived in the Charterhouse from 1867 to 1938, had the seven monk cells with the north wing of the cloister and the surrounding wall of the garden torn down. The monastery kitchen became a Neo-Renaissance style room . The most striking change was the loggia with terrace and covered seating in front of the south wing in 1880 .
When the foundation took over the facility in 1977, numerous restoration work had become urgent. The broken monk cells on the north side were rebuilt and from then on served as rooms for the museum, which was set up in the historical rooms. At the beginning of the 1980s, the architects Rudolf and Esther Guyer built the Upper Guest House. The renewed facility was reopened in 1983.
Of the subsequent renovations, the most striking were the new building of the “Zur Mühle” restaurant with the integrated mill wheel from the old farm and the extensive redesign of the Upper Guest House in 2008/2009. The architects Regula Harder and Jürg Spreyermann, who had already renovated the lower guest house in 2004, were responsible. The dominant colors there, turquoise and pink, were taken from a ceiling on the first floor of the museum and from the church.
protection
The Ittingen Charterhouse is listed in the inventory of places worth protecting in Switzerland and as an A-Object in the list of cultural assets in Warth-Weiningen .
photos
Lower entrance
Restaurant "Mühle"
Small cloister
View from the loggia
Vine house and fish pond
literature
- Felix Ackermann, Markus Landert (Hrsg.): Ittinger Museum: The Kartause Ittingen - Insight into history and life. Ittinger Museum, Kartause Ittingen, Warth 2009 (information brochure of the museum on the occasion of the reopening in 2009).
- Margit Früh: The Kartausen in Switzerland. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings. 104th year 1986, pp. 43–65 ( bodenseebibliotheken.eu ).
- Albert Knoepfli : The art monuments of the canton Thurgau Volume I. Ed. Society for Swiss Art History GSK. Bern 1950, p. 223 ff., ( DNB 750089156 ).
- Hans Peter Mathis: Ittingen Charterhouse. (Swiss Art Guide, Series 34 No. 333/335). Bern 1983, ISBN 3-85782-333-X .
- Bruno Meyer: The Augustinian Canons of Ittingen 1151–1461. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings. 104th year 1986, pp. 1–41 ( bodenseebibliotheken.eu ).
- Peter Kamber: The Ittingen storm. A historical report. How and why the rebellious farmers occupied the Ittingen Charterhouse and set it on fire in the summer of 1524 (= Ittingen series of publications , volume 6), Ittingen Charterhouse Foundation, Warth 1997, DNB 955794676 ) (without ISBN).
- Jürg Ganz: Ittingen , in: Monasticon Cartusiense , ed. by Gerhard Schlegel, James Hogg, Volume 2, Salzburg 2004, 420–423.
Web links
- Homepage of the Ittingen Charterhouse
- Margrit Früh: Ittingen. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Ittingen Charterhouse . In: Bibliography of Swiss History in the Swiss National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ Urs Leu: European incunable printing and Thurgau reading culture ; in: Marianne Luginbühl, Heinz Bothien: Masterworks of early book printing: the incunable treasures of the Thurgau canton library from the monasteries of Ittingen, Fischingen and Kreuzlingen ; Verlag Huber, Frauenfeld 2011, LXII, 673 pages, ill., With 1 CD-ROM; ISBN 978-3-7193-1346-3 , pages XIII-XLVII, therein: books from the Bern Charterhouse Thorberg, with a list of Melchior Mörlin OCart p. XXXVII-XL and p. 645.
- ↑ Imperial . In: St. Galler Tagblatt , September 1, 2012.
- ↑ Julian Schütt: "Oh God, never again Switzerland !!!" Käthe Vordtriede: journalist, socialist, Jew, exile in Switzerland from 1939 to 1941. In: Die Weltwoche , issue 34 of August 20, 1998, p. 43.
- ↑ Ingenieurs Suisses ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 47 ° 35 ′ 2 " N , 8 ° 52 ′ 2" E ; CH1903: 707,466 / 271,333