Church name

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Under a church name (or Onomastik specialist terminology Ekklesionym ) is understood the name under which a religious building, church building is perceived by the public. Churches are named differently depending on the denomination .

Catholic and Orthodox

On the Catholic and Orthodox side, the church name is usually identical to the patronage of the church, i.e. the name of the saint or the salvation-historical event to which the building was dedicated . The saint's name is often in the genitive: St. Marien , St. Nicolai .

Evangelical

Protestant churches that date back to the time before the Reformation usually still bear the old name of saints today. Often, however, they are also named after the place in which they are located. Churches that have already been built as Protestant houses of worship are often called Christ Church . There are also names after biblical persons (prophets, apostles etc.) or biblical places (Bethlehem, Jerusalem etc.), or the names of the reformers (Martin Luther, Zwingli etc.) or important theologians (Paul Gerhardt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer etc.) are eponymous.

Other names and contexts

Mostly regardless of the denomination, church names are named based on their function or location, for example cemetery church , town church or forest church . In the Middle Ages, the name for the entire village was often derived from the church name, either in the form of the patronage or the ending -kirchen .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolodymyr Kamianetz: On the division of German proper names. In: Graz Linguistic Studies. Vol. 54, Autumn 2000, ISSN  1015-0498 , pp. 41–58, here p. 48, ( online  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link accordingly Instructions and then remove this notice .; PDF; 127 kB).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.uni-graz.at  
  2. ↑ Sebastian Nagel: Local grammars for describing locative sentences and their application in information retrieval. Munich 2008, (Munich, University, dissertation, 2008; digitized version (PDF; 8 MB) ).
  3. ^ Karl Puchner: The place names on -kirchen in Bavaria. In: Leaves for Upper German Name Research. Vol. 3/4, 1960/1961, ISSN  0172-0872 , pp. 16-27; Vol. 6, 1965, pp. 15-25; Vol. 12, 1971, pp. 1-11.