Alt Pillau Church
The church Alt Pillau was a simple half-timbered nave without a tower from the 17th century. It was the Protestant parish church of a small parish in the southwestern tip of Samland with its seat in the rural community Alt Pillau , which in 1901 ("Pillau II") merged with the town of Pillau ("Pillau I"), now called "Baltijsk" in Russian, to form the new town of Pillau united. The house of God no longer exists today.
Geographical location
The former seaside town of Pillau in the East Prussian district of Fischhausen and today's Baltijsk in the Rajon of the same name (district of Baltijsk) in the Russian Oblast Kaliningrad ( Königsberg area (Prussia) ) can be reached via today's trunk road A 193 (former German Reichsstrasse 131 ). Baltijsk is also the terminus of the Kaliningrad – Baltijsk railway line of the former East Prussian Southern Railway . Alt Pillau as the actually old town of Pillau was below what was then known as the Swallow Mountain . The exact location of the church can no longer be made out.
Church building
The church Alt Pillau was founded in 1598 by the Margrave Georg Friedrich von Brandenburg . In 1657 the church was destroyed by fire. In 1674, on the orders of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm, the foundation stone was laid for a new building, which was inaugurated in 1676.
It was a wide, short, simple half-timbered nave without a tower, which was hardly recognizable as a church from the outside.
The interior of the church was aligned with the altar from 1599. It showed a representation of the divine trinity in its midfield . In the fields of the open wings the four evangelists were depicted, with the wings closed a scene from the story of Jesus' passion could be seen.
The pulpit was built in 1676. It came from the same workshop (probably Johannes Pfeffer ) as the wall grave of Johannes Soher from 1677.
The church received an organ in 1751 with a work by Königsberg's Adam Gottlob Casparini . There were two bells in the roof.
The Alt Pillauer Church was used as a place of worship until 1945. In the same year it was destroyed by acts of war. The building was later completely demolished, and parts of a telecommunications office are now in its place.
Parish
Alt Pillau was already a church in the pre-Reformation period. After the Reformation , Alt Pillau belonged to the parish in Lochstädt as a branch church until 1885 (Russian: Pawlowo, the place no longer exists), and since then the new parish has had its own pastor, even if its own parish office was only established ten years later. At the census in 1925, 4,000 parishioners belonged to the Alt Pillau parish , which also included the neighboring village of Kamstigall (no longer existing).
Old Pillau was a parish within the to 1945 church district Fischhausen (now Russian: Primorsk) in the ecclesiastical province of East Prussia the Prussian Union of churches .
Today there is only one Russian Orthodox parish in Baltijsk . Evangelical church members living here belong to the Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Swetly (Zimmerbude) , a subsidiary congregation of the Resurrection Church in Kaliningrad (Königsberg) within the Kaliningrad provost of the Evangelical Lutheran Church European Russia .
Pastor
After the formation of their own parish in 1885, the pastors officiated as Protestant clergy in Alt Pillau:
- Oskar Waldemar Droste, 1885–1890
- Adolf Paul Rogowski, 1891-1894
- Heinrich Ernst Conrad Giere, 1894–1923
- Gerhard Badt, 1923–1940
- Ernst Daudert, 1940–1943
- Gerhard Lenkeit, 1943–1945
Church records
From the church registers of the parish Alt Pillau (Pillau II) survived the war and are now stored in the Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin-Kreuzberg :
- Baptisms: 1885-1925
- Weddings: 1885 to 1933
- Burials: 1885 to 1944
- Confirmations: 1892 to 1942
Individual evidence
- ↑ Patrick Plew, The churches in Samland: Pillau / Alt Pillau
- ↑ Walther Hubatsch : History of the Evangelical Church of East Prussia I, Göttingen 1968, p. 121.
- ↑ Walther Hubatsch: History of the Protestant Church in East Prussia , Volume II: Pictures of East Prussian Churches , Göttingen 1968, p. 32, Figs. 31 and 32.
- ↑ Walther Hubatsch: History of the Protestant Church of East Prussia , Volume III: Documents , Göttingen 1968, p. 453.
- ↑ Friedwald Moeller: Old Prussian Protestant Pastor's Book from the Reformation to the Expulsion in 1945 , Hamburg 1968, p. 15.
- ↑ Evangelical Lutheran Provosty Kaliningrad ( Memento of the original dated August 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Russian German)
- ↑ Friedwald Moeller (as above)
- ↑ Christa Stache: Directory of the church records in the Evangelical Central Archives in Berlin , Part I: The Eastern Church Provinces of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union , Berlin ³1992, pp. 20f.
Coordinates: 54 ° 39 ′ 0 ″ N , 19 ° 55 ′ 59.9 ″ E