Nikolaikirche (Görlitz)
The Nikolaikirche - a secular Gothic hall church in Görlitz in the district of Görlitz in the far east of Saxony - is surrounded by the Nikolaikirchhof , on the property at Große Wallstraße 21 . It is owned by the Evangelical Culture Foundation Görlitz and is used as an exhibition and memorial room.
history
The predecessor buildings of the church had been repeatedly destroyed by fire and the effects of war, the oldest foundation walls can be dated to around the year 1100. Until 1372 it was the only parish church in the city. The foundation stone for today's structure was laid in 1452, after which construction work was postponed in favor of St. Peter's Church . Since 1517, an extension to the west was made by Wendel Roskopf , the consecration took place on May 8, 1520. In 1543 the roof, which was in danger of collapsing, had to be removed; a new covering was carried out in 1582.
The building was destroyed by fire in 1642 and restored until 1649. After another fire in 1717, it was rebuilt with a wooden, illusionistically painted flat ceiling. A roof turret was built in 1786.
Even before the First World War, the Gothic building was in danger again. The plan to convert the church into a memorial for the fallen of World War I was implemented in 1925. The Cologne architect Martin Elsaesser redesigned the interior in the style of Expressionism . The Gothic pillars were torn down and replaced by slender struts with a star-shaped cross-section, the baroque wooden ceiling was removed and a rabitz vault was used instead . As a result, however, the room acoustics deteriorated , so that the church was "completely useless for speech and music". The painting was done according to a design by Paul Schröder, professor of decorative painting at the Cologne School of Applied Arts. Painted ribbons in shades of gray that become lighter towards the top bear the names of the fallen. The tapestries with names, rank, regiment and death dates of the fallen soldiers, designed by the Cologne type artist Andreas Nießen and executed with great effort, form a huge epitaph and correspond to the color of the pillars.
This redesign was initially criticized by the provincial curator of the art monuments of Silesia, Ludwig Burgemeister . In contrast, the architect defended his design in a letter to the Prussian state curator Robert Hiecke, pointing out that each art epoch had redesigned the rooms it found according to its ideas.
Around 1967 damage occurred due to the weak internal structure. In the years 1974–1976 an exterior and interior restoration was carried out in which the painting from 1925 was whitewashed. The restoration was funded in 2016 by the German Foundation for Monument Protection . The design of the west gallery was retained, the tapes on the walls are gradually being restored to the state of 1926.
Architecture and equipment
The hall church, which originally had five bays with an ambulatory choir made up of five sides of a dodecagon, is surrounded by buttresses and finished off with a hipped gable roof. The wide pointed arch windows were later reduced in size. The west portal with two ogival entrances and richly profiled walls opens up the building, from the south the slightly ogival south portal leads into it with likewise richly profiled walls. This is provided with a sandstone relief of the crucifixion, which is flanked by fully plastic sandstone figures of Saints Nicholas and Catherine . The blast-like finish is only partially preserved. On the north side is the modern converted sacristy.
The three-aisled interior is closed off by an expressionist vault on eight reinforced concrete columns, which were built in place of the twelve late Gothic octagonal pillars. The west gallery is also part of the expressionist redesign and is designed with two free plastic figures by the Cologne sculptor Hans Wissel , depicting a warrior with a lowered sword and a grieving woman. The wall design from 1925 is only preserved on the west gallery.
The altar has been preserved from the baroque furnishings from the period after 1717. The altarpiece with a Noli-me-tangere depiction is framed by columns and angel figures on the side and has a canopy-like finish.
literature
- Dehio-Handbuch der Deutschen Kunstdenkmäler. Saxony I. District of Dresden. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-422-03043-3 , pp. 380–381.
- Thomas Topfstedt: The conversion of the Görlitz Nikolaikirche into a war memorial church in 1925/26. In: Communications of the State Association of Saxon Homeland Security eV 1/2019. Dresden 2019, ISSN 0941-1151 , pp. 14-20.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Johannes Biehle: The church building. A room acoustic consideration. In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung 49 (1929), No. 39, p. 629.
- ^ Nikolaikirche: Expressionism inside - Gothic outside. German Foundation for Monument Protection , accessed on August 8, 2019 .
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Coordinates: 51 ° 9 ′ 34.7 ″ N , 14 ° 59 ′ 18.2 ″ E