Kloster Mehringen

The former Cistercian convent of Mehringen stands in the village of Mehringen, now part of Aschersleben in the Salzlandkreis. Founded in 1222 by Oda von Mehringen, it passed in 1232 under Pope Gregory IX to the nearby Sittichenbach monastery. The church was built in the Romanesque style, with later Gothic additions, while the enclosed precinct contained the nuns’ house, workshops, a school and other service buildings. Outside the enclosure stood the provost’s residence, a hospital, library, guest house and farm buildings. The monastery’s work improved local crafts and farming, making Mehringen a comparatively prosperous place until it was destroyed in the Peasants’ War of 1525. After the Reformation the site became a manor farm and, in the 20th century, part of an LPG estate. Today only a few structures survive: the former convent church, two residential buildings, a barn and two further ruins in poor condition. The church still shows its Romanesque nave and Gothic choir, while the adjacent houses recall the scale of the original settlement. The fields around the ruins were once tilled by the nuns and later by the estate workers. Visitors walk among low brick walls and overgrown foundations that mark the vanished cloister. The surviving church stands at the centre, its simple mass flanked by the two houses and the barn. Beyond the enclosure lie the remains of the provost’s house and the old farmyard. The quiet fields and scattered farm buildings give little hint of the busy religious and economic life once centred here.