St. Servatius (Cologne-Immendorf)
St. Servatius is a Catholic parish church dedicated to St. Servatius von Tongern in the Cologne district of Immendorf , which was built in 1873 and 1874 according to plans by the architect August Carl Lange . It stands on a 13 meter high hill which is popularly called "Heidenberg". The foundations of their much older predecessor building were used for the construction and are partly still visible in the current building.
Together with St. Blasius in Meschenich , St. Katharina in Godorf and the Holy Three Kings in Rondorf , St. Servatius forms the parish community of the Holy Three Kings in the Archdiocese of Cologne . The church building was included in the list of architectural monuments in Cologne's Immendorf district , together with the Catholic cemetery and individual tombs .
history
Today's St. Servatius Church was built on the Heidenberg in the center of the village Immendorf, on which several previous buildings had already stood, first a small chapel and then an early Romanesque church, which was mentioned as early as 948.
The catchment area of the Immendorfer church extended to Rodenkirchen , Raderthal and Raderberg . The parish Immendorf and thus the catchment area of the church included Rondorf as the seat of the local government (with Höningen , Giesdorf, Hochkirchen), Mannsfeld , Godorf , Weiß , Sürth and at times also Meschenich . In 1827 Sürth broke away from the Immendorfer mother church. Meschenich was part of the municipality from 1807 to 1834. In 1867 Raderthal, Arnoldshöhe and Zollstock were assigned to the church in Bayenthal , but still belonged to Immendorf until 1888 and later became partially independent parishes. Thus Raderthal achieved parish status in 1901, Arnoldshöhe and Zollstock were assigned to the Rectorate Zollstock and in 1908 St. Pius became its own Rectorate and in 1912 an independent parish. Godorf remained part of the Immendorfer community until 1906 and Rondorf until 1919.
Romanesque predecessor building
The construction time of the previous building is not certain, but it is likely that it came from the Ottonian period. A deed of donation from the Archbishop of Cologne, Wichfrid , allegedly from the year 948 shows that he bequeathed the parish church in Iminethorp to the Cologne monastery brothers of St. Severin with their benefices , so that they could serve the monastery without material worries. The deed of donation later turned out to be a forgery from the 11th century, but the information is plausible based on other evidence. This applies in particular to the fact that at that time it was already a parish church, because only this could be endowed with property and income, unlike a simple chapel, for example.
The original dedication of the church was to Saint Severin , which over the centuries for unknown reasons became a patronage of Servatius of Tongeren .
Local tradition also says that there was probably a chapel on the "Heidenberg" before this early Romanesque building, which can still be seen in the foundations. This was probably destroyed by the Normans in 881 , before the pre-Romanesque building of today's church was built on the same site.
Cultivation in the 19th century
This was expanded from 1841 to 1842 with an extension in the east. Due to the growing community and its importance as a pilgrimage and indulgence church, the church council unanimously decided on July 18, 1838 to enlarge the church and approached the local government with this request. In July 1840 he also approached the district administrator to promote the expansion and on May 10, 1841 Pastor Nellessen and Vicars Schröder and Hund laid the foundation stone for the new extension.
To enlarge the church , the choir was broken open and extended to the east by a hall-like extension and equipped with three windows and a wooden ceiling without vaults . A small choir was added to the nave and a corridor was laid out behind the altar through which the pastor could access the square sacristy behind and a door to the adjacent cemetery. On October 10, 1841, the extension was inaugurated by the Brühl dean Steinbüchel. In 1842 a few smaller additions and acquisitions were made, including some cupboards, a communion bench and several pews, which are also in today's church. In 1852 a second door was built into the tower, using a coat of arms of the von Geyr family from Gut Neuenhof, which was demolished in 1841, as a lintel.
The proportions of the now expanded church turned out to be not very harmonious, and the old part was still in need of repair, so that in 1864 the community began collecting donations for a new and larger church. Previously, an increase in staff had been asked in order to be able to spiritually care for the growing congregation.
The younger extension was to be incorporated into the new church - a design by Heinrich Nagelschmidt from 1871 provided for a duplication of the window parts and three new window parts with a tower facing west, whereby the new part was to be significantly higher and the tower was to be asymmetrical to the south . This and another design with a long, hose-like nave and eight windows were rejected by the Vicariate General and were rejected.
New construction of the Church of St. Servatius in 1874
On January 5, 1873, the architect August Carl Lange presented his plans for a new building for the Immendorfer Church, planning a church with a transept, vault, two sacristies and only one additional window section. In his plan, the architect drew on models from Staufer church buildings in the Rhineland. The tower was planned accordingly on the model of the towers of St. Aposteln , for the transept he used the transept of St. Andrew as a model. The windows of the old extension were taken over into the new building of the church, the first three window parts from the tower.
This draft was complied with, it was financed by 15,000 marks from the community, including 9,000 marks in donations and 6,000 marks in interest from the Bernhard Claren Foundation as well as a loan of 27,000 marks. In the years 1873 and 1874 the extension was redesigned by an extension into a three-aisled neo-Romanesque step hall. At the beginning the old church with choir and newly built sacristy was largely demolished; A further window element was added to the east of the three existing window parts (of the extension).
Then the two aisles with the choir and next to them the two sacristies on the north and south sides were built. The nave was laid out in three parts and received eight Corinthian columns on which a vaulted roof rests. At the point where the tower and the first part of the nave used to stand, the new tower of the church with a Rhenish diamond roof was built .
The shell of the building was completed by the end of 1873. The remaining parts and the slate roof followed in 1874 with the original four dormers . The laying of the foundation stone under the central window of the apse took place on May 18, 1874, when a foundation stone certificate was attached. Construction was completed at the end of 1874. At the time of completion, Archbishop Paulus Melchers was imprisoned and the consecration was not carried out until April 29, 1894 by Auxiliary Bishop Hermann Joseph Schmitz . On June 18, 1879, a large piece of a beam was torn from the new belfry by a lightning strike in the church tower. In 1883 the church council decided to paint the inside of the church, which was done in 1887. The painting was done in the Romanesque style, with a "God the Father" framed in a medallion and flanked by two angels in the choir .
Further structural measures
In 1928 electric lights were installed in the church and in 1933 the church council applied for a government grant to repair the roof. On April 10, 1936 the building was opened by the archbishop's curator Dr. Schumacher appraised and in the same year the roof was renovated together with the sacristies. A storm in October 1938 caused some damage to the church tower and in March 1939 severe weathering and moisture damage was found on and in the building, which were probably partially removed as a result. Due to war damage in World War II , the windows and large parts of the roof as well as one of the pillars were destroyed by a heavy bombardment of the town of Immendorf and the surrounding area. On March 7, 1945, the day before the village was taken over by American troops, an artillery shell hit the tower, which was occupied by German artillery observers, and the bell of the church, causing the bell body to crash into the entablature. Shortly afterwards, a shell from the German Wehrmacht , which was shot down from positions on the other side of the Rhine , struck the crossing and caused major damage. Although one of the northern columns in front of the transept collapsed, the vault of the church remained. On June 22, 1950, the church council wrote to the archbishopric of the damage to the church, naming above all the damage to the tower and roof as well as the cornice and the northern entrance area.
In the 1950s, as part of the first renovation work after the war, the original interior painting was painted over with white paint and decorated by the Brühl restorer Gangolf Minn . The major renovations of the war damage were carried out from 1966 onwards by the architect Ludger Kösters , who first had to secure the endangered vault in order to start work. During the work, the board set up an emergency church in what was then the Knop room (now the Amigo room), in which the service could take place from August 20, 1966 to Christmas 1967. In 1971 the church was painted completely white, by 1972 the repair work was completed and parts of the furnishings, including the altar, the tabernacle and the crucifixion group as well as the Way of the Cross were replaced. In 1989 the church got better insulation and was repainted. The church received a last renovation from 2005 to 2006, during which the church was re-grouted and the foundation and the roof structure in the tower and nave were renovated and the roof covered with new slate.
Architecture and equipment
The St. Servatius Church is a brick building with a slate roof.
Inside, the individual ships are separated from one another by high partition walls . These are placed on slender columns with leaf capitals are decorated. Due to the massive war damage in 1966 and 1967, the church was extensively renovated and the interior redesigned in color in 1989. The walls and ceilings were painted white, the pillars light gray with white joints and the columns pink.
The oldest piece of equipment in the church is the corpus of the hanging cross from the 15th or 16th century, which came from the no longer existing cross altar (1855) of the old church. The early Baroque pulpit with reliefs of the bishops Cornelius , Cyprian and Severin was created around 1620 and was probably part of the furnishings of St. Severin in Cologne's old town until the secularization of 1803 . In the south transept there is a figure of St. Servatius by Christoph Stephan (1797–1864), which was also part of the furnishings of the older church. The two wooden figures of Saints Boniface and Antonius were made by Josef Fink and were made shortly before 1900 and the Pietà was made in 1909. The origin of two confessionals from the late 18th century is unclear.
Three bells in pitches F, G and A were cast by Peter Rodenkirchen in Deutz and are consecrated to Saints Servatius and Katharina as well as the Three Kings .
The furnishings from the 19th century with sculptures and altars by Cologne sculptors, which St. Servatius received in 1887, have largely disappeared, except for the benches in the nave and a frame with the image of "Perpetual Help" in the southern entrance area.
The most recent pieces of equipment include the windows of the aisles and the transept, which were designed by Hermann Gottfried in the 1950s and 1960s as abstract, chessboard-like depictions . The apse windows refer to the essential equality of Christ in the Trinity , represented by Servatius , the windows in the vestibule yoke to the gifts of the Eucharist .
In 1968 the foundations of the previous buildings in the floor of the church from the tower in the central nave were marked with lighter stones, whereby the outline of the presumed smaller previous chapel should be clearly visible in the foundation of the church, which was laid down in 1873.
supporting documents
- ^ City of Cologne: Cologne list of monuments. 12.3 Districts 2 and 3 Rodenkirchen and Lindenthal. J. Bachem, Cologne 1984; P. 34. ISBN 3-7616-0734-2 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l The story of an old church 948 - 2007 on the website of the Archdiocese of Cologne ; accessed on July 10, 2018.
- ↑ Gertrud Scholz: Introduction: The old churches and the parish system of the 10th to 19th centuries . In: Hiltrud Kier (Hrsg.): Cologne: Villages in the south of the Rhine on the left bank of the Rhine (= city traces. Monuments in Cologne . No. 12 ). JP Bachem Verlag, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7616-1004-1 , p. 17 .
- ^ A b c d e Walter Geis: St. Servatius Catholic parish church . In: Hiltrud Kier (Hrsg.): Cologne: Villages in the south of the Rhine on the left bank of the Rhine (= city traces. Monuments in Cologne . No. 12 ). JP Bachem Verlag, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7616-1004-1 , p. 132-136 .
- ↑ a b c d e f Manfred Becker-Huberti , Günter A. Menne: Cologne churches, the churches of the Catholic and Protestant communities in Cologne . JP Bachem Verlag, Cologne 2004, p. 142, ISBN 3-7616-1731-3 .
- ^ Walter Geis, Gertrud Scholz: Immendorf: location, history, characteristics . In: Hiltrud Kier (Hrsg.): Cologne: Villages in the south of the Rhine on the left bank of the Rhine (= city traces. Monuments in Cologne . No. 12 ). JP Bachem Verlag, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7616-1004-1 , p. 115-120 .
literature
- Manfred Becker-Huberti , Günter A. Menne: Cologne churches, the churches of the Catholic and Protestant communities in Cologne . JP Bachem Verlag, Cologne 2004, p. 142, ISBN 3-7616-1731-3 .
- City of Cologne: Cologne list of monuments. 12.3 Districts 2 and 3 Rodenkirchen and Lindenthal. J. Bachem, Cologne 1984; P. 34. ISBN 3-7616-0734-2 .
- Robert Wilhelm Rosellen: Immendorf. Church conditions . In: Karl Theodor Dumont (ed.): History of the parishes of the deanery Brühl (= history of the parishes of the Archdiocese of Cologne, arranged according to the individual deaneries . No. 6 ). JP Bachem, Cologne 1887, p. 362–374 ( digital copies at archive.org ).
Web links
- The history of an old church 948 - 2007 on the website of the Archdiocese of Cologne
Coordinates: 50 ° 51 ′ 37.2 " N , 6 ° 57 ′ 24.3" E