St. Georg (Neustadt near Coburg)
The Evangelical Lutheran town church of St. Georg in Neustadt near Coburg was first mentioned in a document in 1358. Today's neo-Gothic church dates from the middle of the 19th century.
Building history
A small mountain church, the Ottilienkapelle, was built on the Muppberg around 1160 and was a place of pilgrimage in the 15th and 16th centuries. A church consecrated to St. George in the city center is documented for the first time in a document from 1358. The parish was separated from the original parish of Fechheim around 1463 . In the 15th century there was a late Gothic fortified church , which from 1507 was expanded to include a nave . In 1518, the extended church was consecrated, above the sanctuary the tower stood and which was equipped with three altars, among other things. The Reformation was probably introduced between 1525 and 1528. The first Protestant Catholic Church visitation took place in 1529. On Good Friday 1530, Martin Luther , who was passing through from Graefenthal to Coburg and who came through Neustadt several times on his travels, preached in St. Georg.
After it was destroyed by the great fire on May 17, 1636, it was rebuilt. In 1787 the church tower was rebuilt and rebuilt. Stones from the church wall were also used for this. The second big city fire on June 24, 1839 destroyed the church to the ground. In 1846 the parish commissioned a new building, which was opened on October 29, 1848. From the old church, parts of the outer walls and the tower stump on the east side, which houses the sanctuary, were included. A church with 650 seats was built on the area of 1518. The plans in neo-Gothic style were created by the Nuremberg architect Carl Alexander Heideloff .
A redesign of the windows, the pulpit, the altar and the choir stalls experienced the interior 1946-48 in the course of repairs during which war damage was also removed. An extensive renovation for 400,000 DM took place in 1985–1990. The original version of the church from 1848 was largely restored. In 2009 a partial renovation was carried out for 90 thousand euros.
description
The neo-Gothic church, made of sandstone, is designed as a three-aisled church house with five window axes in the nave. Two rows of wooden, marbled octagonal columns with foliage capitals carry the galleries and the flat wooden ceilings above the side aisles, as well as the self-supporting wooden construction, designed as a high cross vault , above the central nave. The wooden, two-storey galleries have balustrades that are decorated with tracery from the late Gothic period . The chancel with the historic wall remains of roughly hewn stone blocks from the 16th century is spanned by a cross vaulting on consoles and decorated with 600 lilies.
The exterior of the church is characterized on the west side of the market square by the 51 meter high, accessible church tower with the main portal. In the tower there are three bronze bells that were cast in Apolda in 1847 . The big bell, the Christ bell, bears the inscription Faith, Love, Hope, the middle bell, the Our Father bell, the coat of arms of the city of Neustadt and the small bell, the baptismal bell, the medallion image of Duke Ernst II. The big and middle bells were made in 1942 removed. However, it did not melt down, so that they could be returned to the belfry in 1947. In the tower there is a hand-forged, functional clockwork from 1848 that ran for 120 years.
The church is equipped with a baroque brass chandelier above the baptismal font from 1681, a stone relief "Christ Carrying the Cross" by Edmund Moeller from 1908 in the chancel above the passage from the choir to the sacristy, opposite the oil painting "Resurrection of Christ" by Karl Arnold from 1909, communion cups from 1557 and 1653 and a round host box from the 16th century.
A stained glass window from 1946 decorates the chancel. The original stained glass of the three-part pointed arch window from 1848 was destroyed during the Second World War in April 1945. In the front right of the nave there is a new Luther window, which was created in 1998 based on a design by the Augsburg artist Anne Hitzker-Lubin. The old Luther window existed from 1894 to 1945. The font is probably from the construction period. The pulpit and the altar are made of shell limestone and date from 1948. The pulpit made of Upper Franconian marble shows next to the scroll “YOUR WORD IS THE TRUTH” the symbols of the four evangelists Matthew, Markus, Lukas, Johannes. The neo-Gothic structure on the sound cover dates from 1989.
In the foyer there is a memorial plaque with 405 names of parishioners who died or went missing in World War I , designed by Gustav Köhler . The tower museum in the staircase shows historical objects from the history of the church, a Luther Bible from 1563 and a Luther letter from 1530 to the Coburg Magister Johannes Fesel.
organ
The Neustadt organ builder Johann Andreas Hofmann completed a large organ in 1808 after four years of construction, but it was destroyed in the town fire in 1839. His son Georg Christoph Hofmann built a new organ in 1847/48 for 2950 guilders. It is the largest of around 60 instruments from the workshop of the Hofmann organ building family, which worked in Upper Franconia and southern Thuringia for three generations. The original 23 registers are almost completely preserved. During a repair and restoration in 1977, the organ was converted into a concert organ. The master organ builder Werner Bosch added a third manual (swell mechanism) and expanded the number of registers to 42. It has around 3000 pipes. In 2013 a repair was carried out for 56,000 euros. Externally, the organ is designed in a style between historicism and classicism . In terms of timbre it is close to the baroque.
Parish
The parish today includes the Ebersdorf district and the core town. It still had 12,000 members at the end of the 1950s. The subsidiary parishes of Wildenheid - Meilschnitz and Haarbrücken - Ketschenbach - Thann became independent as well as a decline in the population that resulted in a decrease in the number of members to 9,000 in 1984. With 5,350 parish members (as of October 2014), it is still the largest parish in the Coburg deanery.
literature
- Klaus Engelhardt, Horst Gundel: The town church St. Georg in Neustadt near Coburg . Neustadt near Coburg, September 2009.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Church Guide, May 2014.
- ^ Klaus Engelhardt, Horst Gundel: The town church of St. Georg in Neustadt near Coburg . Neustadt near Coburg, September 2009.
- ^ Ulrich Greiner, Michael Thein: The Hofmann organ building family from Neustadt b.Coburg and their organs. 3. Edition. Neustadt b. Coburg 1992.
- ↑ Congregational Letter August – September 2013 ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2015 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.
- ↑ Helmut shy Erich: history of the city Neustadt bei Coburg in the twentieth century. Second volume, 1993, p. 160.
- ^ Manfred Berthold: Neustadt bei Coburg - St. Georg. In: Evangelical parishes in the Coburg region. published with a working group of the deanery by Eckart Kollmer, Verlag der Ev.-Luth. Mission, Erlangen 1984, ISBN 3-87214-202-X , p. 153.
- ↑ Evangelical Lutheran parish of St. Georg Neustadt near Coburg
Coordinates: 50 ° 19 ′ 36 ″ N , 11 ° 7 ′ 29 ″ E