St. Jürgen

The St.-Jürgen-Kapelle stands in Lübeck’s St. Jürgen quarter beside the Ratzeburger Allee, close to the Wakenitz river and next to the Wasserkunst grounds. It replaced a small chapel built in 1290 for the leper hospital just outside the Mühlentor. The first church was a single rectangular nave with a ridge turret and stepped gable, shown in a 1597 drawing by Johannes Willinges. A carved figure of St George by Henning von der Heyde was added in 1505, paid for by Lübeck citizens’ legacies. In 1534 the chapel was wrecked during unrest under Jürgen Wullenwever; the statue was saved but the wooden dragon destroyed. Repairs followed, and a new dragon, though smaller than the original, was made by Hinrich Wittekop. The present building dates from 1645–46, built when the city’s defences were enlarged. Andreas Jeger, the city master-builder, designed a brick church in late Renaissance and early Baroque style with Gothic touches. It takes the form of a Greek cross and has a separate wooden bell tower containing a bell cast in 1548 by Karsten Middeldorp. The inaugural service on 31 August 1646 was led by Adam Helms, with Franz Tunder at the organ. For two centuries the chapel served the leper hospital, then stood empty until regular services resumed in the 1880s after heating and lighting were installed. Inside, the late-Renaissance pulpit by Johannes Warneke carries statues of the four Evangelists between Corinthian columns. A medieval altar slab from 1391 supports a Gothic triptych from the southern Netherlands, donated in 1647 by the domküster Friedrich Leopold and his wife Elsabe. A small carved Crucifixion group of about 1520, once common in charitable houses, also hangs in the chapel. The present organ was built in 1976 by Hinrich Otto Paschen of Kiel and has eighteen stops on two manuals and pedal. Behind the church, the simple 1645 mortuary chapel and the later cemetery with its listed gravestones recall Lübeck’s burial reform movement of the late 18th century.