Peterskirchlein (Regensburg)
The so-called Peterskirchlein is located at D.-Martin-Luther-Straße 24 in the green area near to the north of Regensburg Central Station . The small church, built in 1806 as the cemetery church of St. Peter of the Catholic cemetery in the Lower Town, is now a Bulgarian Orthodox Church .
Church and cemetery
The first Protestant cemetery outside the city wall had existed in Regensburg since 1543 . It was near the priory of the Benedictine Consecration of St. Peter, which was destroyed in 1552, and was therefore called the Petersfriedhof. Adjacent to the south of the Protestant cemetery, during the reign of Karl Theodor von Dalberg in 1804, the first Catholic cemetery was laid outside the city walls that were still in existence at the time. The future bishop Georg Michael Wittmann had a chapel built there in 1806 according to plans by Emanuel Herigoyen . Today only the choir bears testimony to these plans, because the small church was only completed in its present form with nave and west tower in 1821, 11 years after Regensburg fell to the Kingdom of Bavaria . Most of the construction costs were borne by the last abbess of the Obermünster Abbey, Felicitas von Neuenstein. Her tombstone is in the Minorite Church belonging to the Regensburg Historical Museum .
The chapel is a classicist hall building with a three-axis nave, retracted choir, west tower and simple interior. There are two memorial plaques on the west facade. The upper one commemorates Bishop Georg Michael Wittmann , the cathedral priest, initiator of the construction of the St. Peter's Church and later auxiliary bishop in Regensburg, whose heart is buried here. Another commemorative plaque is dedicated to Johannes Kepler , who was buried in the former Protestant St. Peter's Cemetery. Like the entire Protestant St. Peter's Cemetery, his grave was destroyed in the Thirty Years' War in 1633 in the course of preparations for the fighting for Regensburg . After the war, the Protestant cemetery was restored, but the location of the Kepler grave was not recorded and can therefore no longer be located today. On the commemorative plaque, which was donated by the Johannes Kepler University Linz in 1994, Kepler is described as an "astronomer, world harmonist and founder of Christian ecumenism".
When in 1888-1892 the first station building of the main station was replaced by a more representative new building further north, the Catholic St. Peter's Cemetery had to be abandoned for this construction project. The Protestant part of St. Peter's Cemetery was initially retained, came into the possession of the city in 1933 and was then also dissolved in favor of road construction measures and a green area. Some tombs from the 19th century have been preserved, including monuments to the musicologist and cathedral music director Carl Proske († 1861), Joseph Schrems († 1872), Dominicus Mettenleiter († 1868) and for the cathedral provost Cölestin Weinzierl († 181847).
When the construction of a central bus station on Ernst-Reuter Platz in Albertstraße at the main train station became necessary in the mid-1980s, and a trimming of the green spaces at Peterskirchlein was considered, there were heated discussions among the population about what the facility was the bus station could not prevent. At the beginning of the 2010s, the discussion revived when Ernst-Reuter Platz was to serve as a location for a congress center, which made the entire Ernst-Reuter Platz and thus also the Peterskirchlein and that in the 1960s, according to plans by the architect Werner Wirsing, a high-rise dormitory. The plans for the construction of the congress center were rejected with a referendum, but in the years after 2010 it became clear that the entire north-eastern area of Ernst-Reuter Platz, including the Wirsing building and the existing bus station, would be a new local transport center for buses and for The new Regensburg Stadtbahn, which was decided in 2018, must give way. The demolition of the asbestos-contaminated Savoy skyscraper began in 2019 and ended in 2020 with a demolition. This marked the beginning of a new phase of changes in the immediate vicinity of the Perterskirchlein.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Monument profile D.-Martin-Luther-Straße 24, Peterskirchlein, City of Regensburg, Office for Archives and Monument Preservation, status 2009
- ^ Karl Bauer: Regensburg Art, Culture and Everyday History . 6th edition. MZ-Buchverlag in H. Gietl Verlag & Publication Service GmbH, Regenstauf 2014, ISBN 978-3-86646-300-4 , p. 34, 800 .
Web links
- Website of the Diocese of Regensburg (PDF; 3.1 MB) ( Memento from October 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 49 ° 0 '46.4 " N , 12 ° 6' 3.6" E