St Lorenz Church

About this place

The great church of the old town south of the river, its twin towers standing eighty and eighty-one metres high. Building began in the middle of the thirteenth century with a smaller Gothic church, and between fourteen thirty-nine and fourteen seventy-seven the wide eastern hall was added that gave the building its final form: one tall unbroken space rather than a nave separated from a chancel. In fifteen twenty-five Nuremberg went over to the Reformation, and the city's decision was to leave its Catholic art in place rather than smash it. That decision alone is why two unmatched works are still here. The first is the Angelic Salutation, carved by Veit Stoss from limewood in fifteen seventeen and fifteen eighteen, hanging on ropes above the choir at about three and a half metres tall inside a rosary of fifty-five beads. The second is Adam Kraft's stone sacrament house of fourteen ninety-three to fourteen ninety-six: a slender tower of nearly twenty metres whose tip curls over under the vault because the roof left it nowhere else to go, carried on three kneeling men, one of whom is traditionally taken to be Kraft himself. In the bombing of nineteen forty-five the roofs and vaults came down, but the sculptures had been moved into the rock cellars beneath the city and survived; rebuilding was finished by nineteen fifty-two. Entry today is free with a donation asked. Visiting runs Monday to Saturday, morning and afternoon, and on Sunday afternoons only, the mornings being given over to services. The organ is among the largest in the world, with some twelve thousand pipes.