Brandenburg Monastery (Sief)
The Brandenburg Monastery was a monastery of the Order of the Holy Cross (Kreuzherren), which existed from 1477 to 1784 and was located near the Sief settlement , which today belongs to the city of Aachen . It was the only monastery of the order in the Duchy of Limburg and belonged to the Diocese of Liège .
history
In 1441 Johannes von Eynatten acquired the Brandenburg estate, which was located in the far east of the Duchy of Limburg on the edge of the Raeren Forest. In 1444 he built a residential tower and surrounded the property with a moat fed by the Iterbach . The Brandenburg moated castle was a fief of the Aachen Marienstift to Aegidius or Gilles von Brandenburg, a knight from the House of Limburg . His marriage to Margarete von Sombreff had remained childless and so in 1477 he transferred the house, farm and land of the Brandenburch moated castle to the Order of the Knights of the Cross, who were to build a monastery for twelve monks there. The equipment also included forest, fields, meadows, a pond, cattle, tithe rights and a copper ore mine.
Aegidius himself began with the construction of a church, which he also had equipped, and a guest house was to follow. In 1484 the parish of Walhorn agreed to the founding of the monastery, which the Bishop of Liège approved the following year, along with the associated cemetery and church with bells and five altars , and whose church was consecrated in the same year. Aegidius von Brandenburg was buried together with his wife at the main altar of the monastery church. The monastery belonged to the parish Walhorn, the brothers baptized and preached there on Sundays and held mass in Raeren . In Brandenburg there were relics of St. Anthony (Abbas) and St. Odilia of Cologne , which were also venerated by the pilgrims who stayed here for Aachen and Düren.
Around the middle of the 16th century the Duke of Limburg gave the monastery the right to build a mill, which was first mentioned as a water mill in 1585 . In 1543 one of the monastery buildings and the church were badly damaged by fire and could only be rebuilt with financial support from the Kornelimünster imperial abbey . From 1630 the monastery belonged to the Meuse province of the order. The three-story mansion was used as a monastery and in the 17th century two wings were added to the south. Other farm buildings, including stables and the brewery, were located northeast of the main building, the watermill, powered by the Iterbach and renewed around 1700, on the east side.
The theologian Gerhard Masset, who died in 1680, was a member of the convent. The last prior, Johannes-Josef Simonis, died in 1778, the number of brothers had dropped to five and the monastery, which was already in a poor structural condition, was run by the subprior for the next few years. As part of the Josephine secularization , the monastery was abolished in 1784 and began to deteriorate. In 1789 the church, the monastery, the mill, the farm and the brewery were sold by a notary to a citizen of the city of Eupen , who had the moat backfilled and the drawbridge on the north side removed. The church tower was removed and the buildings themselves used for agriculture. The facility changed hands several times and was used both as a residential house and for agriculture, the church building temporarily as a cattle shed. In the 1990s, the residential tower and the former church house were rebuilt into a residential complex. The buildings are now a listed building.
A statue of Anthony from the mid-15th century and a pieta from the 17th century are now in the parish church of Raeren.
literature
- Guy Poswick: Les Délices du Limbourg . Self-published, Verviers 1951, pp. 391–396 ( digitized version ).
- Wolfgang Rosen: Aachen-Sief - Class Brandenburg. In: Manfred Groten (Hrsg.), Georg Mölich (Hrsg.), Gisela Muschiol (Hrsg.), Joachim Oepen (Hrsg.), Wolfgang Rosen (Red.): Nordrheinisches Klosterbuch. Lexicon of monasteries and monasteries until 1815. Part 1: Aachen to Düren. Franz Schmitt, Siegburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-87710-453-8 , p. 233 ff ( Word document ; 165 kB).
Web links
Coordinates: 50 ° 41 ′ 50.5 ″ N , 6 ° 8 ′ 43.2 ″ E