St. Mary's Church (joke word)

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Church and bells from the southwest
Interior with a view of the triumphal cross, altar and pulpit

The St. Marien Church in Witzwort is one of eighteen historic churches on Eiderstedt . Together with the St. Nikolai Church in Uelvesbüll, it belongs to the parish Witzwort-Uelvesbüll in the parish of North Friesland in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North Germany . The small village church has an artistically and theologically significant interior .

Building history

Today's Witzworter Church is probably not the first church to be built in Witzwort. According to Anton Heimreich , the first church is said to have stood "on the Fuhrwege".

Today's single-nave Gothic brick building was erected around 1420 on a high terp . The side walls of the flat-roofed nave date from the time it was built. A renovation took place in the middle of the 19th century: the roof and turrets were renewed, the windows enlarged and today's south portal created and the post-medieval west wall secured with massive pillars. In 1898, the dilapidated medieval choir was replaced by a new neo-Gothic building in which stucco consoles and keystones from the previous building were inserted.

The stack of bells to the side dates from 1631.

Furnishing

The oldest pieces of equipment are two crucifixes, which are dated to the 13th century and are therefore older than today's church building. The triumphal cross attached to the left of the choir arch is dated to 1270. The board cross is stylized as a tree of life and symbolizes Christ's victory over death, while the crucified one is depicted in the Gothic style as a sufferer. The smaller Romanesque cross, which was placed above the altar in 1654 and shows the triumphant Christ with a crown, is even older . The ends of the cross bear the symbols of the evangelists .

The baptismal font, made of black marble imported from Namur , dates back to the 15th century . The eight-sided cup-shaped cup is decorated with small, now gold, heads of two women, including a lady with a burgundy bonnet , a man with a fur cap and a jester. A four-seat late Gothic choir stalls stand on the choir wall.

altar

The winged altar from 1520

The winged altar with two pairs of folding wings is one of the highest quality works on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein. The carving in the main shrine and the side wings of the festival side was created around 1520 based on the model of the somewhat older reredos of the Nikolaikirche in Kotzenbüll . The outer sides of the inner pair of wings and the inner sides of the outer pair of wings, which were seen as the so-called first transformation on normal Sundays, bear paintings, although the originals have not survived, nor have the paintings on the outside of the closed altar shown during Lent.

As with the very similar Kotzenbüller altar, the main shrine contains a figure and detailed depiction of the crucifixion in front of a hilly landscape with several secondary scenes from the Passion story , so that Jesus is depicted several times (encounter with Veronica , nailing to the cross and crucifixion). Interesting is a rider who is a Jewish priest and who witnessed the crucifixion because of the miter sitting across . In advance resorting to the resurrection of the women at the grave and which are right above Emmaus recognized. The numerous details include the soldiers' cow-mouth shoes as well as a large dog sitting in the middle directly under the cross and a little monkey sitting on horseback behind a rider who can be identified as Pilate by his headdress . The animals appear as symbols. Monkeys were often used as symbols of evil. Pilate is thus represented by the monkey as seduced by the devil. The dog, on the other hand, stands for loyalty and persistence. In addition, the centurion is depicted above the dog, who recognized the dead Jesus as God's Son ( Mk 15.39  EU ).

Details: Monkey on the horse of Pontius Pilatus, titulus scribe and the servants who fight over Jesus' robe

The upper compartment of the left side wing shows Jesus in front of Pilate, who is washing his hands while a small dog sleeps under his throne. In the window behind him his sleeping wife is shown, who at the same time stands next to him and tells him about her bad dream and warns him against sentencing Jesus to death. The mocking of Jesus is shown in the lower compartment on the left. In the right side wing, the burial with the secondary scenes Noli me tangere and Peter at the empty tomb can be seen at the top and Christ's descent into hell and resurrection below .

In the tendril veil above the crucifixion scene there are statuettes of six female saints, the two outer ones older than the altar. The figures of saints in the predella are also partly older than the carved altar. Presumably they come from one (or more) earlier reredos and were integrated into the new reredos in 1520.

The retable was renovated and reworked several times. During the renovation in 1654, the small medieval crucifix was placed on top of the shrine. The paintings of the first transformation were renewed in 1678 and each show four scenes from the childhood story of Jesus and the Passion. At the same time, the reliefs were given their current color. The names of the donors, including Pastor Augustinus Wilhelmus Sander, who died in 1678, are on panels between the compartments in the side wings. In the middle of the 19th century the reliefs were painted white, and the previous painting was restored in 1898. The sacrament pews next to the masonry altar table are a work of the acanthus baroque from around 1700.

pulpit

The renaissance pulpit from 1583 is like the pulpit of the St. Christians Church in Garding a major work of the so-called Eiderstedter type. The name of the artist is unknown. The bas-reliefs of the basket parapet depict the Lutheran doctrine of justification in five scenes . They show Adam and Eve in paradise, the erection of the brazen serpent by Moses , the man between law and grace (symbolized by the half-bare and half-leaf-bearing tree ), Crucifixion and resurrection. The same five scenes can be found in various programmatic paintings from the Reformation period, for example by Lucas Cranach the Elder and, among other things, on the title page of the Low German Bugenhagen Bible .

Caspar Hoyer, a stable man, was one of the founders of the pulpit . The pulpit is said to be particularly high because the then Pastor Laurens Adsen is said to have been 2 meters tall. Later a new floor was put in so that the pulpit could also be used by normal-sized preachers.

  • Baptismal font with the lady with the bonnet

  • Choir stalls

  • Detail on the altar (priest as witness of the nailing of Jesus to the cross)

  • Detail of the pulpit (man between law and grace)

A picture of Pastor Christian Hansen, who died in his second year in office in 1645 at the age of 29, and two epitaphs are hung in the back of the church. One from 1590 shows the donor couple in a crucifixion scene in the Mannerist style of Marten van eighth in a Renaissance frame, the second from 1617 a group of crosses.

Pastors

The scholar Laurens Adsen (also Laurentius Addi) became pastor of Witzwort in 1581, where he remained until his death. He wrote a story of Eiderstedt, the manuscript of which was used by several later chroniclers, but has not survived.

Like most of the small but affluent parishes on Eiderstedt, Witzwort also afforded two preachers, a pastor and a significantly lower paid deacon into the 19th century. Unlike in the rest of Schleswig-Holstein, the parishes in Eiderstedt had the right to choose the candidates for the election of preachers themselves. In 1652 the then pastor Levinius Ockenius ( Latinized by Leve Ockens) brought his younger brother Ivo to the diaconate in this way. Until 1673 the brothers shared pastoral care in the parish.

In 1790 the young enlightenment theologian Jasper Boysen received the diaconate. In 1797/98 he tried to introduce the Schleswig-Holstein Church Agende of General Superintendent Adler , but could not prevail against the Lutheran Orthodox opponents of the Agende in the parish. Based on witty words, resistance to the agendas spread in the Duchy of Schleswig . For Boysen, however, his commitment paid off, because in 1798 Adler promoted him to the far better-paid position as pastor at the Friedrichsberg Church in Schleswig- Friedrichsberg , with which the office of provost for the office of Hütten was connected.

literature

Web links

Commons : Marienkirche Witzwort  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Nicolai Andreas Jensen: Attempt of a church statistics of the Duchy of Schleswig. Volume 1, p. 783.
  2. ↑ Uwe Albrecht (Ed.): Corpus of medieval wood sculpture and panel painting in Schleswig-Holstein. VI.2 The churches in the Schleswig region. Odenbüll to Wyk auf Föhr . Kiel 2019, pp. 1043-1046.
  3. ↑ Liselotte Stauch: Monkey. In: Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, Vol. 1, pp. 202–206. RDK Labor, accessed on November 4, 2020 .
  4. ↑ On the joke of the crucifixion retable see: Uwe Albrecht (Hrsg.): Corpus of medieval wood sculpture and panel painting in Schleswig-Holstein. VI.2 The churches in the Schleswig region. Odenbüll to Wyk auf Föhr . Kiel 2019, pp. 1033-1043.
  5. ↑ Lucas Cranach the Elder: Law and Grace
  6. ↑ Hans Nicolai Andreas Jensen : Attempt of a church statistics of the Duchy of Schleswig. Volume 1 , p. 786, accessed October 6, 2020.
  7. ↑ Marcus Detlev Voss: Messages from the provosts a. Preachers in Eiderstedt since the Reformation . Revised u. gone by Friedrich Feddersen. 1853, p. 62.
  8. ↑ Hans Nicolai Andreas Jensen: Attempt of a church statistics of the Duchy of Schleswig. Volume 1, pp. 785f.
  9. ↑ Veronika Janssen: "Eh, Mr. Pastor, this is a completely new religion!" The Adler church agendas of 1797 between congregations, preachers and authorities. Solivagus-Verlag Kiel 2017, pp. 206-217.

Coordinates: 54 ° 23 '58.9 "  N , 8 ° 59' 6.2"  E