St. Peter und Paul

Pfarrkirche St. Peter und Paul stands in the centre of Lustenau, a market town in the Rhine valley of Vorarlberg. The church occupies the oldest part of the settlement, Kirchdorf, which took its name from the first stone church built here in the 17th century. A busy main road cuts the church off from its west front, so visitors enter through the north door beside the cemetery. The building is surrounded by four other listed monuments: the town hall, a small park, the cemetery with its priests’ graves, and the war memorial called the ‘Weeping Woman’. The church’s story begins with repeated losses to floods. The first known church was destroyed by the Rhine in 1206; a wooden replacement served for a hundred years before the river swept that away too. After further rebuilding and another flood in 1548, a permanent church was finally erected in 1672 on the site still used today. The tower, paid for by Karl Friedrich von Hohenems, was finished in 1696 and raised again in 1737, earning the builder Johannes Kremmel rare citizenship. By the 1820s the old church could no longer hold the congregation, so Alois Negrelli von Moldelbe designed a new three-aisled church that reused the tower and part of the walls. The present interior dates mostly from the 1950s, when Stuttgart architect Otto Linder lengthened the nave and raised the roof. The 1953 altar was removed in the 1980s, leaving plain white walls and a simple cross. Outside, the cemetery’s arcades and the war memorial stand close by. The church’s long history is visible in fragments of the 1672 foundations found during the last rebuilding and in the reused tower base.