Qualla: Jerichow Monastery

Jerichow Monastery: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franzfoto, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is no stone here. Walk the Elbe lowland around Jerichow and you find sand, clay, meadow and more sand — nothing a mason could quarry, dress and stack. Everywhere else in twelfth-century Europe, a great church began at a quarry face. Here the builders had to invent their way around the absence, and what they did was fire the ground itself. The canons who arrived in 1149 raised a three-aisled basilica out of baked clay, and in doing so helped establish a technique that would define north German architecture for the next four hundred years. The building is still standing. More surprisingly, it is still recognisably the building they finished.

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Image: Franzfoto | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jerichow Monastery: Baked Ground

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Varus111, CC BY-SA 3.0. Brick was not new — the Romans had used it, and it had never quite vanished from Italy — but on the north German plain it was close to unknown. The evidence suggests Italian builders worked at Jerichow in the early years, which would explain how the method arrived. Whatever the r...

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Image: Varus111 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jerichow Monastery: Not Monks, and Not a Monastery

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franzfoto, CC BY-SA 3.0. It is called a monastery and it never was one. The founders and first occupants were Premonstratensian canons — priests who took vows but went out into the parishes, preached, and did pastoral work rather than withdrawing behind walls. What stands at Jerichow is a collegiate chur...

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Image: Franzfoto | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jerichow Monastery: A Century of Building, Then Silence

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hartwig von Stade founded the house in 1144, when he was a canon of Magdeburg Cathedral; four years later he became Archbishop of Bremen, and the Emperor Conrad III confirmed the foundation. The first canons came from the Liebfrauenstift in Magdeburg. The original site sat in the...

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Image: OTFW, Berlin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jerichow Monastery: Brewery, Barracks, Artillery

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit - Ingo2802 15:22, 5. Jun 2006 (CEST), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Reformation emptied it. The house was secularised in the sixteenth century and the remaining canons left. In 1631 Imperial and Swedish armies wrecked the village and its churches during the Thirty Years' War. In 1680 the whole district passed from the Archbishopric of Magdebu...

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Image: - Ingo2802 15:22, 5. Jun 2006 (CEST) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jerichow Monastery: Condemned, Then Rescued

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Concord, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 1955 and 1960 the East German state paid for repairs that stripped the interior back towards its original Romanesque state, and in 1977 a museum opened in the west wing. It was not enough. The summer refectory was restored in 1985 and 1986, but the rest had deteriorated s...

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Image: Concord | CC BY-SA 4.0