St. Peter und Paul, Gothic church in Weimar, Germany.
St. Peter and Paul is a late Gothic hall church built between 1498 and 1500, with pale plastered walls, a steep dark slate roof and a tall square west tower topped by a slender dark spire with a cross and weathervane. A second, shorter spire sits at the east end, and tall buttresses divide the side wall between pointed windows. The central entry porch has green doors and a dark statue on a pedestal.
A first church stood here from 1245 to 1249 and burned down in 1299; its foundations alone survived. The second building was badly damaged in the town fire of 1424. The present late-Gothic hall church was built between 1498 and 1500, and its choir served as burial place of the Ernestine Wettins. Lutheran services have been held since 1525. Bombing on 9 February 1945 destroyed the 19-metre roof and the vaults; reconstruction followed from 1948 and the church reopened on 14 June 1953.
Locals call it Herderkirche after Johann Gottfried Herder, general superintendent from 1776 until his death in 1803, who is buried in the church; Duchess Anna Amalia was interred beside him in 1807. The square took his name when the Herder Memorial was erected in 1850, and a plaque on the house north of the church marks his former residence. In autumn 1989 the church and square were meeting points of the peaceful revolution.
The church stands on Herderplatz in Weimar's old town, with the Herder monument in the square in front of it. The Cranach altarpiece and the ducal tombs are inside the nave and choir, and the church is a concert venue of the Thüringer Bachwochen festival. Visitors should check current opening times before setting out.
Recent research attributes the three-panel altarpiece to Lucas Cranach the Younger, made 1552 to 1555, not to his father as long assumed. It is held to be the main work of 16th-century Saxon-Thuringian art. The altar was removed for safekeeping in 1940 and so survived the bombing of 9 February 1945.
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