Kloster Neuenkamp (Franzburg, Germany)

The former Cistercian monastery of Neuenkamp stands in what is now the town of Franzburg in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Founded in 1231 by Prince Wizlaw I of Rügen, it was built on land beside the Blinde Trebel river and soon became known as the Rosengarten der Heiligen Maria. The monks cleared forests and founded twenty new settlements with German names, while also acquiring mills and fishing rights across Pomerania, Rügen and Mecklenburg. By 1280 more than sixty monks and fifty lay brothers lived within the monastery, which ran a busy trading post in Stralsund and a local market at Richtenberg. The monastery’s great Gothic church, sixty metres long and twenty-five wide, was completed between 1280 and 1300. Emperor Charles V once called its abbots the highest prelates in Pomerania. After the Reformation the church was partly pulled down in 1580 and turned into a ducal residence. Only the southern transept survives today as the parish church of Franzburg. The rest of the medieval buildings were demolished or incorporated into a grand four-winged Renaissance palace built by Duke Bogislaw XIII in the late 16th century. Visitors enter a simple rectangular brick church with a two-storey sacristy at its east end. The north and south walls still show the original buttresses, while the west side carries a small round turret. Inside, massive two-tiered galleries line the north and south walls above rounded arches and barrel vaults. The east and west gables were rebuilt in the 19th century with stepped pointed arches and pinnacles. Outside, the surrounding streets of Franzburg preserve the quiet scale of a small northern town, where the monastery’s distant past is still faintly visible.