Hauptkirche St. Petri
Hauptkirche St. Petri stands in the heart of Hamburg, near the area associated with the original Hammaburg. The church occupies ground that has held several cathedrals across the centuries. Its first recorded role was as a market church in 1195, and today it belongs to Northern Germany’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.
A Gothic reconstruction began around 1310 and reached completion in 1418. The bronze lion-head door handles date from the tower’s foundation in 1342 and rank among Hamburg’s oldest artworks. A copper-covered spire crowned the tower in 1516, before St. Nicholas Church overtook it in height two years later. Napoleonic soldiers used the building as a horse stable in 1813, and the Great Fire damaged it in 1842.
Alexis de Chateauneuf and Hermann Peter Fersenfeldt led the rebuilding, completed with a 132-metre tower in 1878. Inside, a Gothic mural from around 1460 stands alongside Bernt Notke’s late-fifteenth-century statue and Gottfried Libalt’s seventeenth-century oil paintings.
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- Hamburg
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