St. Thomas

The 13th- and 15th-century St Thomas Church in Tribsees is a north-German brick Gothic building named after Thomas Becket. Its massive late-Romanesque tower and parts of the nave still stand from the first church begun when the town was founded in the 1230s. The present three-aisled hall was mostly raised in the early 1400s and shows Tribsees’ former importance with its uncommon five-eighths choir.

The church’s greatest treasure is the late-medieval Mühlenaltar, carved in Rostock around 1425. Its central panel shows God the Father above the four Evangelists pouring their Gospels into a mill whose flour becomes the incarnate Word caught in a chalice by the Church Fathers. The altar’s painted wings once told the Passion story, and its crowning figures are twelve Old Testament prophets. After a fire in 1702 the altarpiece was saved and later hung on the wall, its medieval paint lost when it was given a new gold finish in the 1860s.

Inside, white-and-red ribbed vaults span the nave while the sacristy keeps its late-Gothic vault. The 1860s neogothic fittings include the carved pulpit, pews and the Hennigs and Bülow family pew with their coats of arms. Six reliefs from a 1577 Lübeck pulpit, showing Evangelists and Paul, now flank the altar behind the wings. The 1831 Buchholz organ, restored in 1996, completes the scene with its rich neogothic case.