Michaeliskirche, Evangelical Lutheran church in Kaltenkirchen, Segeberg district, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
The Michaeliskirche is a church in Kaltenkirchen, Schleswig-Holstein, featuring a round tower from the 12th century and a nave constructed from granite and brick. The main building was completely rebuilt in 1879 in neogothic style with a cross-shaped floor plan and rounded apse.
The first documented mention of the place, as Koldenkerken, dates from 1301, implying an earlier church. The medieval church was replaced in 1624 by a hall church of granite blocks and brick; the tower was clad in brick in 1656. After the east wall partly collapsed in 1873, the church was demolished and a neo-Gothic building consecrated to Archangel Michael was completed in 1879.
The parish was split into three congregations in 1996, and the Michaeliskirche remains one of its two churches alongside the Christuskirche in Alveslohe. A memorial plaque installed in April 2015 commemorates the victims of pastor Ernst Szymanowski, who left Kaltenkirchen in 1933; his name is not shown on it. The congregation had already helped fund a critical biography of Ernst Biberstein in 2009.
The church stands in the centre of Kaltenkirchen, in the Segeberg district of Schleswig-Holstein. The medieval round tower of fieldstones is the oldest surviving part and is best seen from outside; the 1879 neo-Gothic nave with its cross-shaped plan and apse lies behind it. The interior is entered from the west, where the organ stands on the gallery.
The 1608 chandelier is a brass crown chandelier, not a lamp, and it survived the 1874 demolition because the furnishings had been stored away; a fire in 1878 destroyed most of them, leaving only this chandelier, a second of 1708 and the 1634 font basin. The 1880 organ by Marcussen & Sohn was rebuilt in the 1940s and 1970s and brought closer to its Romantic original in 1996 by G. Christian Lobback.
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