Cloister church with remains of the cloister wall

Historical Monuments

Description

The monastery church with its slender bell tower is one of the most dominant points in the panorama of the city of Guben. It is a Neo-Gothic brick building erected on the site of a former Benedictine monastery.

In terms of shape and material used, the temple is a typical sacred building of the time: its three-nave hall corpus is accentuated from the south of the entrance with a gallery and a low extension connecting the church with the sacristy. Double-winged wooden doors are closed from the top with skylights and a uniform arched portal. On both sides of the entrance, there are two engaged columns that are also one of the elements of the five-story brick bell tower base, closed with a long, octagonal roof topped with a cross. On the eastern and western sides, in the middle of the tower, a mechanical clock was placed. The northern side of the church ended with a stepped gable that starts just above the altar. The interior of the church is composed from s an altar from the second half of the 20th century, an organ built by Aleksander Schurke in the 1950s, a sandstone plaque for those killed in World War I, and multi-colored stained-glass windows by Helge Warme. Next to the church the remains of the medieval walls belonging to the former Benedictine monastery can be seen.

Historical background

The history of the church dates back to the 12th century, when on the order of Emperor Barbarossa, a Benedictine monastery was on this site. The monastery complex with the church and the surrounding monastery suburb (Ger.: Klostervorstadt) burned down completely after the Hussite attack in 1429. It was rebuilt shortly after. From 1562, a salt works operated in the monastery, and the temple operated here served as a parish church. Until the 19th century, services were held in the Sorbian language. At the beginning of the 19th century, the old and quite neglected church was not able to accommodate the ever-increasing number of local evangelic community. It was then that a decision was made to demolish the temple and replace it with a larger monastic church. This was done according to the design of the student Schunkel Emil Karl Alexander Flaminius, integrating the remains of the foundation wall of the new building with the walls of the choir of the previous building.

Contrary to the parish church, the temple was not significantly damaged during the Second World War and was put back into use a year after its end. The renovation in 1965 made it possible to create a space for concerts in the area of the presbytery. The monastery church was restored for the last time in the 1990s.