Evangelische Kirche Blankenheim

A small Augustinian convent once stood in Aua, a village in the Geisbach valley in eastern Hesse. Founded in 1190 by Abbot Siegfried of Hersfeld, it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St John. The site included a church and chapel holdings in villages such as Sipperhausen and Mühlbach, confirmed by Archbishop Konrad I of Mainz in 1195. A few years later the nuns bought land at Giesenrod from Volkwin of Naumburg. Yet the narrow valley proved unsuitable, so in 1229 the community moved to Blankenheim on the Fulda. The move did not bring great wealth. Records show modest gifts, like lands at Meckbach from the canonesses of Heerse in 1233 and property at Hergershausen from the widow of Landgrave Heinrich Raspe IV in 1247. The convent survived until the Reformation reached Hesse in 1527, when it was dissolved and its buildings turned into a ducal estate office. In Aua the old church survives as the village’s Protestant church, its 12th-century font still in place. At Blankenheim only the eastern part of the 13th-century church remains, now the village church. The choir and transepts stand on rising ground above the Fulda meadows, the rest of the complex long gone. The simple stonework shows traces of both Romanesque and later Gothic changes. The two sites together recall a quiet Augustinian presence that shaped the region for more than three centuries.