Benediktiner-Doppelkloster, später Zisterzienserinnen Meerhusen

A former Benedictine double monastery stands in the flat East Frisian landscape east of Aurich, founded between 1183 and 1198. It was the second-oldest monastic house in the region, built on land between the vanished lakes Ostermeer and Westermeer. The community followed the Rule of Saint Benedict and belonged to a network linked to the Frisian abbot Hatebrand. After 1216 the monks and nuns asked to join the Cistercians, who refused to accept a double monastery. The Cistercians admitted only the nuns in 1219 and moved the monks ten kilometres away to Ihlow. The women’s house became a daughter of Ihlow, dependent on its abbot for spiritual and economic matters. In 1514 Graf Edzard I set fire to the buildings during wartime, destroying much of the archive. Later the counts kept the site alive as an almshouse, then built a small hunting lodge on part of the foundations in 1556. Today a forestry house occupies the spot where the cloister once stood. Archaeologists found brick-lined graves, fragments of tiled floors and the curved edge of an apse in 1958. More recent digs turned up 15th-century Rhine valley pottery and roof tiles bearing animal paw prints. The Meerhusener Forst now covers about 700 hectares of sandy soil around the old precinct.