Maria am Leech

The Leechkirche stands on a quiet hill in Graz’s Geidorf district. It is the city’s oldest Roman Catholic church, reached by two steep streets, Zinzendorfgasse and the stepped Rittergasse from Glacisstraße. The hill itself once held a Bronze-Age urn field and a Hallstatt burial mound twenty metres wide. A stone retaining wall still traces the circular boundary of the old grave site. The church’s name comes from the Old High German word for a burial mound, showing the hill’s meaning survived long after the Romans. The first stone church was built around the year 1000, using roof tiles from a nearby Roman building. Duke Leopold VI replaced it in 1202 with a round chapel dedicated to Saint Kunigunde. In 1233 the same duke gave the site to the Teutonic Knights, who gained asylum rights there. The present early-Gothic church was completed between 1275 and 1293 and consecrated by Bishop Hartnid of Gurk. Beneath the nave archaeologists found dozens of graves, though only members of the order were normally buried there. Inside, the west portal shows a carved Madonna from about 1290, while the vault’s keystones depict a rood cross and three female saints. The high altar of about 1780 holds a fifteenth-century wooden statue of the Virgin flanked by figures of Kunigunde and Elisabeth. A Gothic sacrament niche from 1499 and a painted Pietà sit beside the altar. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century stained glass fills the windows, and two towers were added around 1500. The outline of the old Kunigunde chapel is marked in the modern floor, linking past and present.