Wichlinghauser Church
The Wichlinghausen Church in the Wuppertal district of Oberbarmen is the oldest church in the Wichlinghausen district .
After separating from the mother parish in Schwelm in 1744 , the Lutheran parish in Wichlinghausen built its first parish church directly on the market between 1743 and 1753 . In the 19th century this church with its 782 seats became too small due to the rapidly growing community. So the community decided to build a new church and commissioned the Barmer architect Christian Heyden with the planning. The new church was built under the supervision of Gerhard August Fischer in the years 1864–67. The old church was converted into a parish hall in 1869 and stood until it was destroyed by fire in 1927.
The building, located on a hill behind the old cemetery of the community above Wichlinghauser Markt , is a single - aisled neo-Gothic church, the sanctuary faces south and the proportions and construction of the Elberfeld Kreuzkirche , which is around fifteen years older . In the square tower in front of the north facade is the central portal, which leads to the gallery and the sacristy via two side staircases . Two further portals lead through the staircase extensions into the nave. The exterior is completely walled up with light-colored Ruhr sandstone blocks. The building has a pointed arch frieze that completely surrounds the tower and nave under the roofs, four small branch towers each at the corners of the nave and the tower building (which, like the church tower, were originally provided with a pointed spire) and pointed arched windows and portals of similar proportions very uniformly designed. The six-axis nave is lit on both sides by high pointed arch windows interrupted at the gallery level. The choir , attached to the south, rises on the ground plan of a half octagon.
A three-sided gallery on narrow, cast-iron supports provided the interior with a capacity of 1,225 people. The choir is separated from the parish area behind the altar up to the height of the gallery with a wooden pulpit wall; the organ originally installed above the north gallery was integrated into the pulpit area when the interior was converted. Instead of the original straight pews, the church interior is now loosely seated.
The last service in the church, which is being converted into a meeting center, took place on Easter Sunday 2014 in the presence of, among others, the parishioner Manfred Rekowski , President of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland .
Sources / web links
- Entry in the Wuppertal monument list
- ↑ http://www.wz-newsline.de/lokales/wuppertal/stadtteile/barmen-ost/letzt-gottesdienst-sehen-von-der-wichlinghauser-kirche-1.1617560
- Werner Franzen: Places of worship in change: Protestant church building in the Rhineland 1860-1914 , dissertation, Duisburg 2002 ( title page for the document duett-07082002-104417 ( Memento from December 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive ))
- Hans Helmich, Rainer Hendricks: The parish of Wichlinghausen 1744–1994 , Wuppertal 1994
- Sigrid Lekebusch, Florian Speer : Churches and places of worship in Barmen , churches and places of worship in Wuppertal Volume 2 (= contributions to the history and local history of the Wuppertal, volume 43), Wuppertal 2008, ISBN 978-3-87707-721-4 .
Coordinates: 51 ° 16 ′ 55.6 ″ N , 7 ° 12 ′ 48.9 ″ E