Augustinian Monastery

The Augustinerkloster in Speyer stands on Wormser Straße where a 13th-century Augustinian friary once rose. Founded in the 1200s as a mendicant house, the complex burned in 1334 and was rebuilt before being enlarged in the 15th century. By 1430 the friars had joined the city’s citizenry, and by 1488 the town council taxed the monastery to pay for mercenary troops. In the early 1500s Lutheran services were held inside the precinct, and prior Michael Diller publicly embraced Luther’s teachings. The monastery survived until the great Speyer fire of 1689, when only the 13th-century choir remained standing.

What remains is the late-medieval cloister, built between 1733 and 1737 as part of a symmetrical four-wing convent. After French occupation in 1793 the buildings were secularised and sold off, later serving as almshouses. In 1866 most of the convent was demolished except the cloister, which was preserved and later integrated into a school designed by Max von Siebert. The school’s third floor housed the Historical Museum of the Palatinate until 1910. Today the rebuilt cloister with its late-Gothic pointed arches and tracery windows still lines Wormser Straße at number 39.

Visitors find the reconstructed cloister behind the modern Sparkasse building. The arcades, dismantled in 1982 and re-erected nearby, enclose a quiet rectangular garden. Inside the Augustinersaal, named in memory of the friary, exhibitions and concerts take place. The adjacent Augustinergasse recalls the monastery’s long presence, while the surviving fabric offers a quiet corner of Speyer’s history amid the town’s streets.