Walbeck Collegiate Church

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The ruins of the Walbeck Collegiate Church from the southeast, 2018

The Walbeck Collegiate Church is the ruin of an Ottonian collegiate church in Walbeck , a district of Oebisfelde-Weferlingen in the Börde district . The ruins , located on a limestone cliff 25 meters above the Allertal , which have been preserved in large parts of the rising stock, allow valuable knowledge about construction technology in the Ottonian period. Today the ruin is a station on the Romanesque Road .

Walbeck Abbey

View into the nave to the east, 2007

The Walbeck Abbey was founded in 942 by Count Lothar II on his castle as the home monastery of the Walbeck counts. The reason for the establishment was that Lothar had participated in a conspiracy of the Bavarian Duke Heinrich against his brother King Otto I in 941 , which however was uncovered. Like most of the lower-ranking conspirators, Lothar was initially sentenced to death, but obtained a pardon through the intercession of his friends. Apart from his allodial goods, he lost all property and was also obliged to build the church, which was placed in his castle in such a way that its military value was greatly reduced.

The most famous person in the history of the monastery was the chronicler and bishop Thietmar von Merseburg , who, as the grandson of the founder Lothar, was provost of the canons from 1002 . In this capacity, he rededicated the church in 1015, which had been damaged by fire four years earlier. The Walbeck bell , one of the oldest church bells still in existence today, which is currently in the collection of the Bode Museum in Berlin, was probably created in this context . Thietmar also passed on the founding history of Walbeck.

In 1219 the remains of the castle were razed after the Walbeck counts died out, and the church's west tower, which was built after the fire, was removed again. The canons of St. Maria were subordinated to the Halberstadt Cathedral Chapter in 1229 . In 1591 the monastery was reformed. In the period that followed, the church began to deteriorate. In 1731 there had been no services in the church for many years. In 1810 the monastery was finally abolished.

The church

The layout of the original building in Walbeck was comparable to that of the hall church in Ingelheim, Walbeck only had an additional rectangular choir bay between the transept and the apse.

The collegiate church was built from 942; The original building was completed before 964, as the founder Lothar was buried in a tumba in the crossing that year . The church was consecrated to Saints Maria , Pancras and Anna . The shape of the original building can be deduced from the masonry that has been preserved: it was a single-nave hall church with a continuous transept , a choir bay and an apse that closed off the building to the east . Overall, the church was about 31 meters long, the transept was 19 meters wider than the nave. Around 1000 the church was greatly expanded and extended by about seven meters or two yokes to the west. It received a westwork with a gallery as well as low side aisles, which transformed the hall church into a basilica , for this purpose the original side walls were broken through. Arches and pillars were drawn into the nave walls, and the construction seam can still be seen very well today. The original windows had to be abandoned and bricked up.

The second extension to the west took place around 1100: a mighty Saxon western bar was placed in front of the entrance , which presumably comprised two towers. The castle-like complex was partially destroyed in the 12th or 13th century, following a joint decision by King Friedrich Barbarossa and Wichmann , the Archbishop of Magdeburg.

The church was restored in the 13th century. The western triumphal arch was renewed, the eastern one is Ottonian to this day. New, larger lancet-shaped windows were installed.

In the 16th century the north wall of the transept was renewed when the complex became a Protestant monastery. After the abolition of the monastery, the church began to decline. After the roofs of the aisles had been demolished in 1829, the church was given to the Walbeck community as a poor house . In 1855 the apse was demolished, and in 1888 the roof of the main nave including the roof turrets. In 1908 the northern arcade wall collapsed. Today the northern arcade wall, the walls of the side aisles, the apse and large parts of the westwork are missing. From 1934 the ruins were systematically explored, and the grave tomb of Lothar II was found, which is now in the local church of Walbeck. A systematic excavation was carried out and the ruin was secured from further deterioration. After the end of the Second World War, the church was in the exclusion zone of the inner German border . Because of this location, the ruins were inaccessible and research on the property was impossible, but the location in the restricted area also protected the ruins from damaging changes. The ruin has been a listed building since 1980 . It was only after reunification in 1998 that construction documentation and re-evaluation of the findings by the researchers at the TU Berlin took place . The ruin was restored again.

research results

The original building

The right upper clad window is clearly visible not in the axis of the arcade below
The walled-up oculi and the upward-moving windows

In the older literature, the Walbeck collegiate church is referred to as a pillar basilica with a not very protruding transept; this information can also be found occasionally. The reason for this was that research was used to adopting basilical forms for large churches from the Ottonian period and hall churches with an apse for subordinate churches. The building type of a hall church with a Roman transept and apse mediates between these two types. The addition of a straight transept raised these churches above simple hall churches and set a clear accent. Similar buildings have been preserved, for example, with the church Im Saal in Ingelheim am Rhein .

However, as Cramer and Breitling demonstrated, a basilica could not originally have existed in Walbeck. On the one hand, the windows in the upper aisles are not in the axis of the arcades, and on the other hand, there is no change of pillars typical of Ottonian basilicas of this era , as the side aisles were only separated by pillars without a single column. The arcades were therefore subsequently broken into the original walls of the church hall when the aisles were added. Only parts of the wall remained in the pillars. The addition of the side aisles also required changes to the windows, as the side aisles were provided with pent roofs that partially overlapped both the window openings in the west wall of the south transept and the window openings in the hall. The builder of the renovation solved this problem by lengthening the windows upwards and shortening them downwards so that they fit into the upper aisle. Between the windows you can see oculi just below the eaves , which were walled up during the renovation, these oculi also belong to the wall design of the original building. The church hall received its light through these oculi and the large arched windows with an inclined reveal, which were set one wall zone lower . In the south arm of the transept there were two arched windows lying one above the other in the west wall, in the east wall there was an arched window above a passage to the enclosure . In the north arm of the transept there were extra long arched windows, the apse had at least three windows. Overall, windows took up a fifteenth of the wall area of ​​the nave, in the transept even an eleventh of the wall area. The church was thus very rich in light. Similar proportions of windows and wall area can be demonstrated for other Ottonian church buildings. Ottonian churches were thus brighter than later Romanesque churches.

window

The former collegiate church was characterized by a large variety of window shapes. What all window openings have in common, however, is that they are not surrounded by drapery stones, as is the rule in later buildings. The oculi as well as the arches of the windows are formed by small, irregularly cut stones. The vertical reveals are always formed by several stones.

The windows were framed by wooden block frames that were built into the masonry and built with it. The window frames were thus in the middle of the wall. The wood of the frames is mostly weathered, but a sample from the area of ​​an oculus could be dated to the year 943 by the Leibnitz laboratory of the University of Kiel with the help of radiocarbon dating. The construction of the window frames can be revealed by impressions in the mortar, after which the frames of the arched windows consisted of four planks five to eight centimeters thick, which overlapped at the window corners. The frames of the oculi were cut out of planks about 12 centimeters thick. The construction of the frame suggests a translucent closure of the window opening.

Masonry

This picture clearly shows the use of bricks of different sizes next to the walled-in entrance.

The Walbeck collegiate church was built with two shells in the manner of the ancient opus implectum . This construction technique was not uncommon in the 10th century. In Walbeck, however, it can be ascertained from the wall structure that the construction technicians aimed at building large stones, but had not yet mastered it in the slightest. Stones of completely different sizes are visible in the walls, the proportion of mortar on the wall surface is very high and there are no continuous horizontal joints. At the edges of the building, the builders tried to ensure that the edges were clear, but the arrangement of the blocks remained unsystematic and sometimes questionable from a structural point of view. The effort to build large stones is also evident in the particularly large stones in the wall surface, which are mostly rather thin slabs that were walled up on edge.

In the Michaeliskirche in Hildesheim, which began around 1010, i.e. two generations later, the unsystematic large-panel construction found in Walbeck has already been greatly refined. Although there are still upright slabs there, which give the impression of solid cuboids, the joints are already significantly narrower and more even than in Walbeck. As a further refinement, the building technology proven in Walbeck developed into the ashlar construction of the Salier period .

literature

  • Johannes Cramer , Stephan Breitling: The collegiate church in Walbeck. In: Klaus Gereon Beuckers , Johannes Cramer, Michael Imhof (eds.): Die Ottonen. Art - architecture - history. 2nd Edition. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2002, ISBN 3-932526-91-0 , pp. 273-278.
  • Hans Feldtkeller : The donor's grave in the Walbeck cathedral ruins . In: Yearbook of Monument Preservation in the Province of Saxony and Anhalt 1933, pp. 34, 48–58.
  • Hans Feldtkeller: The collegiate church of Walbeck. Castle 1937.
  • Hans Feldtkeller: The collegiate church of Walbeck, a building from the 10th century. In: Harz-Zeitschrift 1952.
  • Berthold Heinecke, Klaus Ingelmann (ed.): Thousand years of church in Walbeck. Michael Imhof, Petersberg 2007, ISBN 3-86568-311-8 .
  • Ulrich Knapp: Ottonian architecture. Reflections on a history of architecture during the rule of the Ottonians . In: Klaus Gereon Beuckers, Johannes Cramer, Michael Imhof (eds.): Die Ottonen. Art - architecture - history. 2nd Edition. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2002, ISBN 3-932526-91-0 , pp. 205-258.
  • Angelika Meyer: Ruin of the collegiate church in Walbeck. = Large monuments booklet 437. Munich / Berlin 1993.
  • Walbeck / Aller: ruins of the St. Marien collegiate church . In: Annett Laube-Rosenpflanzer, Lutz Rosenpflanzer: Churches, monasteries, royal courts: Pre-Romanesque architecture between the Weser and Elbe. Halle 2007, ISBN 3-89812-499-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Schrader: The Patch Calvörde - A 1200-year history. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2011, p. 71.
  2. ↑ RI II, 1 n. 94b in: Regesta Imperii Online (accessed January 3, 2018)
  3. ↑ Rosenpflanzer, p. 133 ff.
  4. ↑ http://romanik.setasign.de/details.php/c/1/e/155/Walbeck,+ehem.+Stiftskirche,+Walbeck,+Landkreis+Ohrekreis,+Sachsen-Anhalt (accessed June 2, 2007) .
  5. ↑ Cramer, Breitling, p. 275.
  6. ↑ Cramer, Breitling, p. 277.
  7. ↑ Cramer, Breitling, p. 274, fn. 9.

Web links

Commons : Stiftskirche Walbeck  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 52 ° 16 ′ 42.9 ″  N , 11 ° 4 ′ 10.9 ″  E

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on June 10, 2007 .