Kloster Kirschgarten

The former monastery of Kirschgarten once stood just beyond Worms’s outer wall, southwest of the Speyer Gate, beside the road to Speyer. Built in a garden watered by the Eisbach stream, it began in 1226 as a community of Cistercian nuns under Bishop Heinrich II of Saarbrücken. By 1237 the sisters followed the Cistercian rule, though formal incorporation never happened. After a century of decline marked by debt and the Black Death, the Zistercians declined to revive it, and in 1443 the Augustinian Canons of the Windesheim Congregation took over. The Augustinians restored the ruined site and made Kirschgarten their regional centre. Six canons arrived from Böddeken in 1443 and set up a priory that became independent within two years. They revived the nearby Frankenthal convent, ran a scriptorium to copy books, and gradually rebuilt the monastery’s finances. Under Prior Johann von Lambsheim the house led reforms at Höningen, Truttenhausen and Reb. Today nothing of the buildings remains above ground. A German-Latin psalter copied for the nun Anna von Bolanden around 1300 survives in Karlsruhe, showing how the sisters used their own language in private prayer. The site lies along the old garden path by the Speyer Gate, where the Eisbach once flowed beside the orchards that gave the place its later name.