St Mary's Church, Bergen

St. Mary's Church, formerly German church in Bergen, Norway is a Romanesque basilica, which was built around 1130 on the model of the Speyer Cathedral of natural stone.

In most travel guides you can read, that the Church is the oldest surviving building in the city. However, archaeologists believe that a nondescript chapel in the city of Bergen was previously built near the bus station a few years.

St. Mary's Church is located in the northeastern part of Bryggen, the Hanseatic Kontor in the mountains. The church was as the main church of the Kontor 1408-1766, used exclusively by the resident Hanseatic merchants, who mostly came from Lübeck and other Hanseatic cities of the Wendish district of Hamburg, such as Hamburg, Stralsund, Rostock and Wismar, but also from Bremen. In this period the property was the patronage According to the church office and at the beginning in 1548 with the right to use the pastor ( jus patronatus et vocandi ) with the Lübeck corporation of climbers. The pastors were thus initially appointed to Lübeck, where Lutheran committed by entry in the Book of Concord of Lübeck on the Augsburg Confession. The sermons were not held until 1868 in German.

The triptych on the altar of the church is probably a late medieval Lübeck work of the late 15th century. When Norway through the Reformation came in 1536 to the Protestant faith, almost all Catholic images and icons have been removed. This was not the case in St. Mary's Church, since this church a church of German merchants was what is documented also by the grave inscriptions ( in German ) of the small cemetery in front of the church. Here, the Reformation had already been carried out before. That's why you can see on the altar of the Virgin Mary in the center of the altarpiece today.