Abbatiale Saints-Pierre-et-Paul de Wissembourg

Wissembourg

On the northern edge of Alsace, on an island in the Lauter, the abbey church of Saints Peter and Paul stands on the site of a monastery founded around 660 by Austrasian nobles, which medieval tradition later linked, not without a touch of golden legend, to the Merovingian king Dagobert. The Benedictine community enjoyed an exceptional intellectual flowering in the 9th century thanks to the monk Otfrid of Wissembourg, author around 865–870 of the Krist, the first great verse paraphrase of the Gospel in the Germanic tongue and a founding landmark of German literature. Under the abbacy of Edelin, between 1262 and 1293, the abbey was entirely rebuilt in the Gothic style: the present building, with its soaring nave and basilical plan, is held to be one of the very first great Gothic achievements in Alsace. Secularised in 1524 with the coming of the Reformation, the abbey became a collegiate church, then a simple parish church at the Revolution. The medieval pilgrimage to the relics of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and the unusual scale of the vessel for a town of this size, have made it a great spiritual site of northern Alsace, where the memory of the learned Carolingian monks still echoes, between religious fervour and the remembrance of the great hours of Rhineland monastic humanism.

Getting there : Church freely open, in the town centre of Wissembourg

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound