À propos de ce lieu
The Franciscan Church and its monastery sit at the heart of the UNESCO Old Town, first recorded in 1239 as a house of the Minorite friars and taken over by the Franciscans in 1515. The building joins a high, narrow fourteenth-century chancel to a comparatively low and wide nave, while its tall fortified west tower, built between 1636 and 1643 by order of the city authorities and crowned by an onion dome around 1740, remains one of the most recognisable silhouettes of Graz. During the Allied bombing of the city in 1944 and 1945, when Graz endured more air raids than any other town in Austria, the chancel was gutted by a bomb and burned out. It was rebuilt after the war with a stark contemporary interior in which a grey cast-iron crucifix appears to hover above the altar, and a new Schuke organ from Potsdam was installed in 2004. The Gothic cloister beside the church, with its medieval lancet windows and fragments of sixteenth-century frescoes, survived and is open to the public, a reminder of how much of old Graz had to be pieced back together stone by stone.
À retenir
- 56 air raids — The number of Allied bombing raids on Graz, more than any other Austrian city
- 1239 first mentioned — The Franciscan monastery is first recorded in this year, among the oldest in Graz
- 2004 year installed — The post-war chancel received a new organ built by the Schuke workshop of Potsdam
📍 Franziskanerplatz 14, 8010, Graz