Saint Stephen Church (Obermeisling)

The parish church of St Stephen stands on a hill above a loop of the Krems river in the village of Obermeisling, part of Gföhl in Lower Austria. Built as a fortified church, it rises above the surrounding countryside with its cemetery. The first parish here died out in the middle of the 11th century before being refounded in 1111.

The church shows layers of building from different centuries. A Romanesque hall with a west tower was later extended eastwards with a higher Gothic choir. To the north a narrower Gothic aisle and a five-sided chapel were added, their walls supported by buttresses bearing two coats of arms. Inside, Romanesque and Gothic forms meet under later Baroque plasterwork.

Visitors enter through a late-Gothic shouldered arch portal on the west side beneath the 14th-century tower. Inside, the two-aisled nave has Romanesque cores renewed in the 16th century. The northern aisle opens to the main space through pointed arcades on octagonal piers, its steeply rising vault dated 1518. The choir, raised slightly off the main axis, contains a 14th-century ribbed vault and a Baroque high altar. In the roof lives one of Lower Austria’s largest bat colonies, some 3 000 female mouse-eared bats that consume over 5 000 kilograms of insects each year.