Uttobrunn

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Uttobrunn is a small pilgrimage church on the edge of the Bavarian Forest in the hamlet of the same name belonging to the municipality of Metten . The place with the church is located near the Benedictine abbey Metten in the Deggendorf district .

History and legend

At the remote place where the little church of Uttobrunn stands today, Blessed Utto , the first abbot of the Metten Monastery, is said to have lived as a hermit at the end of the 8th century . Here the later emperor Charlemagne after the submission of the Bavarian Duke Tassilo III. encountered the hermit while hunting. Charlemagne is said to have entrusted the man of God with gathering other pious men around him and building a monastery, today's Benedictine abbey in Metten. In the oldest surviving version of the Utto legend, the reason for the order to found the monastery is a miracle of the hermit: Karl sees the hermit, who is still busy building his cell, hanging his ax on a ray of sunshine.

The tradition about the meeting Uttos with Charlemagne displaced an older version of the founding history of the monastery Metten, after the Noble Gamelbert of Michaelsbuch , proprietary church Lord and Priest of Michael book on the other side of the Danube, the monastery founded and ordered his godson Utto to its first abbot have. The older and the younger tradition were connected by the fact that when Gamelbert died, Utto received his own church in Michaelsbuch as an inheritance and initially worked there as a pastor. The war between Charlemagne and Tassilo III. but had forced him to leave Michaelsbuch and to take refuge in the solitude of the woods on the other side of the Danube, where he finally met Karl.

The tradition is not clear about the place of this meeting. At first the place of encounter seems to have been equated with the place of the foundation of the monastery, i. H. Karl and Utto would have met where the Metten Monastery is today. It was not until the 16th century that the meeting was located at a spring that lay lonely in a forest valley northeast of the monastery. From this source (“Brunn”) and its connection with the Utto legend, the place bears the name “Uttobrunn”.

The pilgrimage to this place began at the beginning of the 16th century, as healing powers were ascribed to the spring (it is unclear whether the spring was ascribed healing powers before it was considered the place of the hermitage of Blessed Utto). In particular, Uttobrunn was looking for a cure for the "Gallic disease" ( syphilis ) and the "Spanish rash" (also means either syphilis, which was also known as the "Spanish disease", or one of those diseases that were summarized under the name plague ). But even with gout and paralysis, people hoped to heal themselves by bathing in the Utto fountain. The Regensburg bishop Wolfgang II von Hausen also found healing in 1607 by taking a bath in Uttobrunn; a memorial stone erected by him in gratitude in the cloister of Metten Monastery reminds of this. The growing number of pilgrims in the 17th century led to the establishment of a bathing establishment and hostel for the sick. Nothing of that is left today.

Church to Our Lady

Under Abbot Benedikt Ferg von Metten, a chapel was built at the Uttobrunnen from 1699 to 1701. The plan for this was drawn up by the Deggendorf master builder Ulrich Stöckl. The chapel without a retired choir consists of two bays and a triangle. The west gable of the simple building is characterized by a turret with an onion dome and an open vestibule over two columns.

The interior of the chapel, which is vaulted with a barrel cap, is brightly and evenly illuminated, and looks noticeably ancient for the time it was built. Still in the style of the early baroque, the white walls and vaults are evenly covered by yellow-tinted frame stucco. The stucco frames consist alternately of laurel, palmette and egg stick strips . The yoke border or the transition to the triangle is marked by pilasters, which are crowned by aedicules with shell niches for the colored wooden figures of Peter and Paul, as well as Wolfgang von Regensburg and Pope Clemens .

The black and gold altar of the chapel is also in the tradition of the late 17th century. In the central niche, instead of the original altarpiece, there is a large late Gothic figure of Mary (around 1480). The middle section of the altar is flanked by the large carved figures of Charlemagne and Blessed Utto. The altar figures, which are very confused in their execution, the large angels in the excerpt and the other carvings on the altar come from Thomas Streber from Pfarrkirchen. The painting on the antependium shows the encounter between Utto and Charlemagne.

literature

  • Georg Dehio - Handbook of German Art Monuments. Bavaria II: Lower Bavaria , edited by Michael Brix , with contributions by Franz Bischoff, Gerhard Hackl and Volker Liedke, Munich / Berlin 1988, 735.
  • Wilhelm Fink, History of the Development of the Benedictine Abbey of Metten. Vol. 3: The land-based monastery (1275–1803) (studies and communications on the history of the Benedictine order and its branches. Supplementary booklet 1,3), Munich 1930, 248f.
  • The art monuments of Bavaria . Vol. 4,17: The art monuments of Lower Bavaria. City and District Office Deggendorf , edited by Karl Gröber, Munich 1982 (unchanged. Reprint of the Munich edition 1927), p. 303ff.
  • Alfons Link, Uttobrunn , in: Alt und Jung Metten 58.1 (1991/92) pp. 10-20.
  • Bernhard Ponschab, The blessed Utto and Gamelbert. The story of their admiration and their life , Regensburg 1910, 21–25.

Web links

Uttobrunn in the location database of the Bavarian State Library Online . Bavarian State Library

Coordinates: 48 ° 51 ′ 21 ″  N , 12 ° 56 ′ 20.4 ″  E