Nikolauskloster, Franciscan monastery in Jüchen, Germany
Nikolauskloster is a monastery complex near Schloss Dyck in Jüchen, built between 1715 and 1746. It consists of a church, convent buildings, and a walled cemetery for soldiers. The church, restored in the 19th century, has a neo-Gothic altar and a crypt beneath the nave.
Founded in 1403, the monastery contains a family crypt of the Princes of Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck with burials spanning into the 20th century. This burial site demonstrates the site's long connection with a regional noble family.
St. Nikolaus was the house monastery and burial place of the lords of Dyck and the counts of Salm-Reifferscheidt. In the church's south wall stands a large black-and-white marble epitaph with the Salm-Reifferscheidt coat of arms between two volutes held by putties; it is the tomb monument of Count Erich-Adolph (died 1673), moved here in 1895 from St. Lambertus in Bedburg. Since 1976 the wind band "Die fidelen Trachtenmusikanten von St. Nikolaus", founded by students of the study house, has existed independently of the monastery.
The monastery lies next to Schloss Dyck in the town of Jüchen, in the Rhein-Kreis Neuss. The former study home closed at the end of the 2000s; the Oblate fathers now run a centre for children's and family pastoral work there, and in 2016 a "Kinder- und Familienkirche" was set up in an old gymnasium on the grounds. The church interior was lost after 1802, so the present furnishings date from the 19th-century restoration.
During World War II the monastery served as a military hospital from October 1944, and in 1945 a soldiers' cemetery was laid out on the grounds. The church beneath which the Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck family crypt lies was long used as a storeroom after secularisation in 1802.
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