Franziskanerkloster Bremen

The former Franciscan St John’s monastery in Bremen stood in the old town from 1258 until the Reformation. The friars arrived about 1225 and built a three-aisled Gothic church in the 14th century, later enlarged into a hall church. Street names such as Klosterkirchenstraße and Klosterortstraße still mark the site. Up to thirty Franciscans lived here as mendicant friars in the 14th to 16th centuries. The Bremen custody, a branch of the Saxonian Franciscan province, had its headquarters in this monastery around 1300. After the monastery closed in 1529, the buildings became a city hospital, then an asylum, and finally a church for French-speaking Protestants until 1801. Most of the monastery was demolished in 1834 and replaced by houses. In 1965 a row of two-storey red-brick buildings was erected for the St John’s rectory, now protected as monuments. The surviving church of St John, a rare example of a mendicant Gothic hall church, still stands nearby.