St. Mary's Cathedral

Description

St. Mary's Cathedral is a United Protestant church in the town of Fürstenwalde, Brandenburg. It was formerly the cathedral of the Bishopric of Lebus.

In 1373 Fürstenwalde became the new seat of the cathedral of the see of Lebus, one of the three medieval dioceses of the March of Brandenburg. The cathedral, which is dedicated to Our Lady, was raised to cathedral of the diocese. In 1446, the cathedral was ransacked by Hussites. The attack was aimed at bishop John V of Lebus, a strong critic of Jan Hus. After the Hussites laid the cathedral to waste, work began on building it anew.

The cathedral weathered another attack during World War II, when it was almost completely destroyed. However, the church was not left completely at the mercy of the War's bombing. Foresight and precaution had prevailed, and the sacrament house and numerous grave-slabs had been walled in to protect them in 1942. This precautionary measure saved these structures from facing the same fate as the main church. The sacrament house and the grave-slabs thus protected survive to this day.

A full-scale reconstruction of the exterior of the cathedral had been completed by 1995, but the interior was redesigned in a postmodern style in order to commemorate the cathedral's destruction and to accommodate a new parish centre as well as other facilities. Steel-framed glass walls separate the newly created rooms underneath the organ gallery from the nave of the cathedral.

The original pulpit altar which had been destroyed in 1945 was replaced by an early eighteenth-century altar (on permanent loan from a church in Jüterbog). The cathedral's Gothic vaulting was only partially reconstructed and supplemented by a plain wooden ceiling.