Martinskirche (Engelbostel)

The church from the southwest

The church from the south

The Martinskirche is an Evangelical Lutheran church in the Langenhagen district of Engelbostel . It is a monument and belongs to the Burgwedel-Langenhagen church district .

History and structure

The Martinskirche in Engelbostel is considered the original parish of northern Hanover . Already in 1196 a church in Engelbostel was mentioned in a document provided by I. Konrad , an Earl of Roden , the Monastery Marienwerder was paid. In fact, there were the first church buildings a few meters further south as early as the 9th century, when the area still belonged to the diocese of Minden . In the 12th and 13th centuries, first the parishes of the market church and then the Langenhagens were separated from the then large parish of Engelbostel .

In 1385 the building, which at that time belonged to the Archdeaconate Pattensen , was completely destroyed by Duke Albrecht of Saxony-Wittenberg and Lüneburg in a feud against the Counts of Mandelsloh . Today's church building, which is probably named after Martin von Tours like the church of St. Martini in Minden , was probably built in the 15th century, first the 33 m high church tower , before the nave was rebuilt from 1788 to 1789 and two buttresses were added . This makes the Engelbosteler Martinskirche the oldest surviving structure in Langenhagen. The church was reformed around 1540 . Between the 18th century and 1976, all places in the Engelbosten parish were finally re-parished or made independent.

The church tower is made of broken stone and lawn iron , the nave is made of broken stone with corner blocks . The church building, built in baroque style, has three aisles , a circumferential gallery , five segmented arched windows along each side and a barrel vault made of plastered wood. Weathered reliefs consisting of tombstone fragments can be seen in the masonry.

The church was badly damaged in World War II and then repainted light gray in 1952. In 1959, 1965 and 1989, as well as in 1993, the building was restored or refurbished and the latter was reverted to the neo-Gothic style of 1894.

The pulpit altar is designed in Baroque style with Ionic column architecture and was created in 1788 by a sculptor named Matern. The organ has been in the Martinskirche since 1880, but it is one of the oldest organs in Hanover. The piece was built by Adolf Funke and Adolph Compenius between 1648 and 1660, converted into neo-Gothic by Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves from 1826 to 1827 and only sold from the Aegidienkirche to Engelbostel at the end of the 19th century . The church has three bronze bells and a clock chime , which was cast around 1300. While the largest bronze bell dates from 1651, the two smaller ones from 1726 and 1782 have only been in the tower since 1959, as their predecessors were supposed to be melted down in the First World War and were lost in the process.

Outside the church, in front of the main entrance, there is a stone cauldron, which had probably been used as a baptism since Roman times , but later served as a cattle trough and rainwater container. Since the end of the 19th century the name E. Brecht has been engraved in it, who belonged to a pastor's son who thought he should be immortalized. This son of pastor Ernst Wilhelm Brecht was Ernst Friedrich Johann Brecht (1855–1910) who later emigrated to California .