Mathena suburb
The Mathena suburb was created in the late Middle Ages to the east of the old city walls of Wesel on the Lower Rhine . After the separating walls were removed, it grew completely together with the old town and is now part of the urban center.
location
The medieval old town was located in the western part of today's town center and included, among other things, the Willibrordi Cathedral and the Kornmarkt . The northern part of Kreuzstrasse and Korbmacherstrasse roughly trace the dividing line between the old town and Mathena-Vorstadt. An important entrance between both parts of the city was the Viehor , which gave its name to a section of today's pedestrian zone. Coming from the old town, the Mathenakirche, the most important building in the suburb, was already just behind the gate. There is now a large department store at the site of the church, but the intersection in front of it is still referred to as the “Maths Cross”. The main axis of the Mathena suburb was today's Hohe Straße , which has also become a section of the pedestrian zone. Overall, it enclosed a walled area about as large as the old town.
The local public transport stop Mathenakreuz, which is located in front of the former Mathenakirche, is noted in the local transport plan as the central stop in the city center due to its location in the middle of the business center.
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Origin of name
The name Mathena has been documented at least since 1348. Originally it referred to the meadow land in front of the Viehor and probably means “meadow meadow”. This landscape designation was later transferred to the suburb that was created there.
history
In 1352 two small chapels were built in front of the cattle gate, which were consecrated to Saint Nicholas and Saint Anthony. The development of the suburb began on the previous meadow area. After the elevation to the Hanseatic city in 1407, the city grew in the following decades, which led to increased settlement of the Mathena. In 1420 the suburb got its own cemetery. In 1429 the Nikolauskapelle was elevated to a branch church of St. Willibrord by the Premonstratensian nuns of the Oberndorf monastery near Wesel and from 1440 it was expanded into a late Gothic Mathenakirche . Around the same time, the Mariengarten sister house was built in the suburbs . The Mathena became the largest suburb outside the old town walls and the only suburb that received its own walling. The fortification of the Mathena began in 1434 and encompassed an area about as large as in the old town. As around the old town, the fortification consisted of a wall, trenches, ramparts and a palisade. The old town wall continued to separate the old town and suburb. Despite the separation from the original city center, there were popular residential areas in Mathena. Around 1496, the well-known and respected painter Derick Baegert settled there for the last phase of his life.
The Mathenakirche, which led the patronage of St. Nikolaus and Antonius , became a Protestant church from 1540, just like St. Willibrord. From 1612 to 1912, the former building of the Mariengarten sister house was the location of the municipal high school for boys, today's Konrad-Duden-Gymnasium Wesel . In the 1680s, the expansion of the city to the fortress Wesel began , which meant that the city was limited in its expansion to the old town and the Mathena suburb. Wesel was surrounded by narrow fortress walls and the area in front of it was not allowed to be built on. One consequence of this was that the city had a very high density of buildings at the time of the fortress. A preserved part of the fortifications is the Berliner Tor , built between 1718 and 1722 in the east of the Mathena . The wall between the old town and the suburb, on the other hand, was torn down around the start of the expansion into a fortress, and around 1740 the cattle gate was also removed as a former passage between the two districts. As a result, the old town and suburb grew together structurally.
Around 1890 the process of de-fortification was initiated, through which the city was able to expand spatially. Within a few years, the previously vacant area east of the Mathena between the Berliner Tor and the existing Wesel train station was built on. Further quarters were also built in the north and south, so that today's inner city partly extends beyond the historical extent of the old town and Mathena-Vorstadt. Mathenakirche was destroyed in the Second World War in 1945 and the first post-war town hall was built in its place in the early 1950s. In 1973 it was replaced by a large department store and the city administration moved into a building near the Kornmarkt . The Hohe Straße, which was once the main axis of the Mathena-Vorstadt, established itself as a shopping street in the 19th century and still has this function today as part of the inner-city pedestrian zone.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b 15th century AD (zeitreise-wesel.de)
- ↑ Local transport plan 2012 (kreis-wesel.de)
- ^ Heinrich Gloël : The family names Wesels, 1901, p. 31
- ↑ Kühler: Festschrift for the celebration of the inauguration of the new high school building on October 18, 1882, 1882, p. 3
- ↑ Werner Arand, Walter Stempel: Unnder both gestalt--: the Reformation in the city of Wesel, 1990
- ↑ Derik Baegert (wesel-tourismus.de)
- ↑ March 28, 1540 - Introduction of the Reformation (wesel.de)
- ↑ Communication No. 112 (historical-vereinigung-wesel.de)
- ↑ a b History of the City of Wesel (wesel.de)
- ↑ a b c Wesel's downfall in pictures ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 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. (kdg-wesel.de)
- ↑ a b c Wesel through the centuries (zeitreise-wesel.de)
- ↑ History up close (derwesten.de)
- ↑ Communication No. 152 (historical-vereinigung-wesel.de)
- ↑ Martin Wilhelm Roelen, Doris Rudolfs-Terfurth (ed.): The reconstruction of the city of Wesel, p. 189
- ↑ Wesel - the constricted city ( memento of the original from June 10, 2016 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. (kdg-wesel.de)
