Saint Cyriakus

This was another must visit for me. It's a gorgeous church, built in the Ottonian Romanesque style by the Margrave Gero around 959. At the same time, he established a female monastery adjacent to this land. Again, it went through many renovations, enlargements, with Gothic elements added, but keeping it's Romanesque shape.

Because Gero was such an ardent supporter of King Otto I aka Otto the Great (son of Henry the Fowler), the church and convent were granted Imperial protection. Control of it was transferred from the bishop of Halberstadt, Gero is buried in front of the altar. And if you're keeping score-- this is the same Gero whose main job was to pacify the Slavs (including the Wends/Sorbs whose lands we'll revisit shortly). The same Gero, who after seeing a Saxon army get slaughtered invited thirty Slav chieftans to dinner and slaughtered twenty-nine of them. One, obviously, got away.

The church was visited by Frederick Barbarossa, and he gifted them a bell. It was the site of one of the earliest copies of the Tomb of Christ, which apparently looks nothing like the one in Jerusalem. It became Protestant with the rest of the area, was secularized when that happened. The convent was taken over by a private individual as his farming estate.

The church itself was restored at the request of the the Duke of Anhalt Bernburg , the work being done between 1859- 1873. More work was done in the early 1900s, and I'm wondering if this was when much of the interior painting was done. What's there now looks vaguely Jugendstil/ Art Nouveau mixed with Byzantine and reminded me very much of the Shrine of Hildegard von Bingen, which is also a mix of Romanesque and Art Nouveau.

This was my favorite church so far on our trip, up there with the Asam Chapel in Munich and the beautiful churches of Nuremberg.Read more