Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche, Romanesque Revival church in Schöneberg, Germany.
The Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche is a brick hall church with a 57-metre tower topped by an octagonal spire. Its pale pink clinker facade has round-arched windows and a rounded projection at the lower left. Inside, a light green vaulted ceiling with white ribs covers a nave lined by dark wooden pews and a gallery on slender columns with gold capitals.
The parish was founded in 1863 and named after the twelve apostles by order of Wilhelm I on 6 April 1864. The cornerstone of the present church was laid on 23 October 1871 in the emperor's presence, following plans by Friedrich August Stüler, who had died in 1865; Hermann Blankenstein and Julius Emmerich carried out the construction, completed in 1874. In 1943 bombs damaged the roof and windows, and after the war the community replaced some windows with around 5,000 empty gin bottles donated by the nearby Gilka distillery.
The church is nicknamed the "Gin Church" because the windows of the side-aisle galleries were filled with some 5,000 empty gin bottles donated by the nearby Gilka distillery after wartime bomb damage; the bottles have been protected as a monument since the 1990s. Since 2008 the high-church Rogate initiative has held weekday devotions here, and its Rogate-Kloster Sankt Michael was founded in the church on 29 September 2010.
The church stands at the northern edge of Schöneberg, almost directly on Kurfürstenstraße near Nollendorfplatz, and is oriented toward the south rather than the east. The 57-metre tower with its octagonal spire makes it easy to spot from the street. The Rogate initiative has held weekday devotions and services here as a guest congregation since 2008, so weekday times vary.
The congregation owns two historic Berlin cemeteries, the Alte Zwölf-Apostel-Kirchhof and the Alte St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof, and founded the Neuer Zwölf-Apostel-Kirchhof in 1883. None of them lies on the church grounds by the Kurfürstenstraße; the St.-Matthäus cemetery was transferred to the Kulturstiftung St. Matthäus in 2000.
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