Sülte, Monastery and spring in Hildesheim, Germany

The Sülte was a monastery complex situated east of Hildesheim's city walls, containing a church, hospital, and hostel for pilgrims. The buildings stood near a natural salt spring that gave the place its name and attracted people seeking its waters.

Bishop Godehard founded a chapel to Saint Bartholomew and a pilgrim hospital at the Sulza spring in 1025, on a marsh where Wolfhere's vita reports frightening apparitions. The chapel's successor church was consecrated on 25 August 1034. Bishop Bruning turned the foundation into an Augustinian canons' house and was buried there in 1120. Johannes Busch reformed the convent in 1440 and led it as provost from 1459. The monastery was dissolved in the secularisation of 1803.

The name Sülte comes from the Latin sulza, a salt spring; legend holds that Bishop Godehard founded a chapel here in 1025 after ending the frightening apparitions reported in the marsh by the spring. The canons' community was later taken over by the Catholic Michaelis parish after the monastery was dissolved in 1803, and two of its altars were moved to the church at Groß Düngen.

The psychiatric clinic moved to the Galgenberg site in 1976, and the Sülte stood empty for decades; in 2000 investors converted it into a conference hotel, now a Novotel. The spring's masonry, roofed collecting basin from the 1840s survives, though the building above it dates from the 1970s. The water now feeds the Seniorengraben in the Liebesgrund.

The serial killer Fritz Haarmann was held for a time at the psychiatric hospital that occupied the former monastery in the second half of the 1890s, some twenty years before his murders. The institution, opened in 1849, was one of the first hospitals planned from the outset as a psychiatric clinic and was soon called the largest and most respected institution in Germany.