Frauenkirche, Dresden

For two hundred years the great stone dome of the Frauenkirche defined the skyline of Dresden, the dome that Bernardo Bellotto painted and Johan Christian Dahl set against a moonlit sky. The Lutheran church was designed by the city architect George Bähr and built between 1726 and 1743, and Bähr did not live to see it finished. Its bell-shaped cupola, some 67 metres high and nicknamed the Stone Bell, weighed around 12,000 tonnes and rested on only eight slender piers. Inside, Bähr placed the altar, pulpit and font on a single axis in full view of a congregation seated in tiers of galleries, a design made for Protestant preaching. Bach played a recital on its new Silbermann organ in 1736.

The church survived the Prussian bombardment of 1760 but not the Allied raids of February 1945. It withstood two nights of firestorm, long enough for about 300 people sheltering in the crypt to be evacuated, before the heated sandstone piers failed and the dome collapsed on the morning of 15 February. For nearly half a century the blackened heap of stone was left in Neumarkt as a memorial against war, and from 1982 it became a gathering place for the silent candlelit protests of Dresden's peace movement.

Reconstruction began in 1994 after reunification, driven by a citizens' initiative and financed largely by donations from around the world. The rubble was taken apart stone by stone; the position of each salvaged block was worked out from where it lay, and about 3,800 original stones were built back into the walls. They are darker than the new sandstone, so the old church shows through the new one like a patchwork. Around 2,000 fragments of Johann Christian Feige's altar, which had partly survived, were cleaned and reassembled. The golden orb and cross on the lantern were made in London by Alan Smith, whose father had flown in one of the bomber crews over Dresden. The church was reconsecrated on 30 October 2005, and a new organ by Daniel Kern of Strasbourg now fills the space. Martin Luther's bronze statue of 1885, which survived the bombing, stands again in front.

Getting there

The Frauenkirche stands on Neumarkt in the heart of Dresden's old town, among the rebuilt baroque houses of the square. Dresden Airport (DRS) is about 9 km away.