Wartenburg Monastery

The monastery Wartenburg was a convent of the Franciscan and Bernardine in Wartenburg , today Barczewo in Warmia from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

history

In 1364, Bishop Johann II Stryprock of Warmia founded a Franciscan monastery in Wartenburg in the secular territory of his bishopric . This belonged to the Saxon Order Province ( Saxonia ). Around 1380 a new monastery church, the Church of St. Andrew, was built in the style of a mendicant order church, which has been preserved to this day; it had a ridge turret instead of a tower . The choir was only built after the fire of 1414.

The Wartenburg Franciscans adopted the Martinian statutes in the 15th century and thus followed a moderate direction of the Franciscan Order on the issue of poverty . As a result of the Reformation , the monastery, like most of the Saxonia settlements, went under in the mid-16th century. In 1597, Cardinal Andreas Báthory gave the remains of the monastery to the Order of St. Bernard, as the Franciscans are called in Polish. The Bernardines continued to run the monastery, the buildings were rebuilt and the facility expanded.

In 1810 the monastery was secularized by the Prussian state .

Further use

The area was used as a prison. In 1846 the former enclosure burned down and was demolished in 1855. New buildings were erected. In the prison was Erich Koch , jailed former Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia from 1965 to 1986. In the 1980s, members of the opposition such as Solidarność members Adam Michnik , Leszek Moczulski and Władysław Frasyniuk were interned there . In 1983 the Church of St. Andrew was given back to Franciscan monks. The prison is still in use today.

Web links

• Wartenburg Franciscan Monastery
• History of the Monastery Site of the Church (Polish)

Coordinates: 53 ° 49 ′ 36.6 ″  N , 20 ° 41 ′ 40 ″  E