Diving church

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South view of the church, in the background the tower of the Bautzen University of Cooperative Education
Church interior
War graves at the diving cemetery

The diving church , in Upper Sorbian Tuchorska cyrkej , is one of the seven historic church buildings in Bautzen . The name is derived from the diving forest near Uhyst, about 15 km west of the city .

Originally located outside the city walls and east of the center , the divers' church is now located in the central and most populous district of Nordostring, directly on Löbauer Straße (State Road 111). Today it is used for concerts as well as church services.

history

Memorial for deceased prisoners of war of the First World War in the diving cemetery

In 1523, before the church itself was built, the first part of today's cemetery was laid out and consecrated to the Holy Trinity . Until then, the only municipal cemetery was on today's meat market between the town hall and Petridom and had long since not offered enough space for a town with 6,000 inhabitants. In order to create a meeting place, the Marienkapelle in the Taucherwald, which has been owned by the city of Bautzen since 1484, was removed in the same year and rebuilt east of the outer Reichentor on the road to Löbau . From then on, the cemetery was referred to as the “Divine Field for Diver”. However, this first chapel collapsed in 1550. In 1587 a hospital was built.

Construction of the new diving church began in 1598 and the building was inaugurated in 1599. However, the roof burned out completely during the Thirty Years' War . It was restored in 1628. Several major renovations took place in the 18th and 19th centuries; In 1899 the hospital was demolished after more than 200 years of existence. During the coalition wars, the church itself had served as a hospital. The funeral hall opened in the cemetery in 1885 took the function of a burial church from the divers' church .

The first complete renovation of the church took place from 1917 to 1926. The renovation of the divers 'church made possible by the fundraising campaigns, benefit concerts and subsidies organized by the divers' church foundation began in 2000. After numerous expansions over the centuries, the cemetery extends over an area of ​​7.9 hectares and offers space for 5000 graves.

literature

  • Constanze Knappe: Bautzen's monuments - diving church and diving cemetery , Lausitzer printing and publishing house Bautzen 2001
  • Kai Wenzel : The Bautzen diving church and the Görlitz holy grave. Spatial reorganization of two places of late medieval piety in the confessional age. In: Formations of the denominational area in East Central Europe , ed. von Evelin Wetter, Stuttgart 2008 (Research on the History and Culture of Eastern Central Europe 33), pp. 167–192
  • Cornelius Gurlitt : The divers church. In:  Descriptive representation of the older architectural and art monuments of the Kingdom of Saxony. 33. Booklet: Bautzen (city) . CC Meinhold, Dresden 1909, pp. 94-97.

Web links

Commons : Taucherkirche  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 10 ′ 52.7 "  N , 14 ° 26 ′ 11.8"  E