Prunerstift & altkatholische Kirche Hl. Drei Könige, Linz

The Prunerstift stands at the corner of Fabrikstraße and Prunerstraße in Linz, a former charitable foundation building raised in 1737 on the site of the Egereck castle. Its long façades enclose two inner courtyards once graced by fountains, and the side wings once housed small rooms for the twenty-seven male and twenty-seven female pensioners as well as quarters for the chaplain and the steward. The boys slept in two dormitories and attended classes supervised by a German and a Latin tutor, whose own flats were also in the building. The foundation was the work of Johann Adam Pruner, Linz’s mayor until his death in 1734, who left most of his fortune to support poor adults and orphans in the city. His will specified a church with three altars, including one dedicated to the Three Holy Kings, and funds for twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls, together with twenty-seven poor men and twenty-seven poor women. After Joseph II’s reforms closed many monasteries, the building briefly housed a hospital and a maternity ward before becoming a crowded tenement with sixty-five flats in the 1920s. Today the Prunerstift shelters the Altkatholische Kirche since 1919 and the municipal music school since 1979. The former church interior has been adapted for concerts and lessons, while the dormitory rooms and classrooms recall the building’s original purpose. The quiet courtyards and high ceilings still show the scale and solidity of Pruner’s design, linking the 18th-century charity with present-day music and worship in the heart of Linz.