Wieskirche

From the outside the Wieskirche is almost modest: a pale church with a restrained exterior, standing alone in a meadow in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, with farms, pastures and wooded hills around it. Step through the door and the effect is overwhelming. The interior is a luminous oval of white and gold, filled with light from tall windows, where stucco curls around every edge and the painted ceiling seems to open straight into a heavenly sky. It is widely regarded as one of the supreme works of the Rococo.

The church exists because of a miracle story. In 1738 a wooden figure of the Scourged Saviour, kept in the Wies, a meadow belonging to Steingaden Abbey, was reported to have shed tears. Pilgrims began to come in such numbers that the small chapel built for the statue could not hold them, and the abbey decided to build a proper pilgrimage church. It went up between 1745 and 1754 to designs by the brothers Dominikus and Johann Baptist Zimmermann, masters of the Wessobrunn school of stucco and painting. Dominikus was so attached to the work that he spent the last eleven years of his life nearby.

The architecture is designed as a single experience. The oval nave, where pilgrims gathered, draws the eye toward the choir and the miraculous figure of the Saviour. The ceiling frescoes use perspective to dissolve the vault into sky, and the carved and gilded ornament is so light that walls seem to melt into decoration. In the early nineteenth century, when Bavaria secularised its monasteries, the church was preserved as a place of pilgrimage. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 and thoroughly restored between 1985 and 1991.

Come on a quiet weekday morning, when the building is calm and its white-and-gold interior can be taken in slowly.

Getting there

The Wieskirche stands in the countryside of the municipality of Steingaden, about 19 km from Füssen. The nearest airports are Innsbruck (INN), about 58 km away across the Austrian border, and, within Germany, Memmingen Allgäu (FMM), about 60 km away. Bus line 73 runs from Füssen railway station via Schwangau to the stop at the church.