Frauenkirche Dresden - Baroque Architecture on Waymarking.com

Our Lady's Church in Dresden was built as a Lutheran cathedral between 1726 and 1743. It was designed by Dresden's city architect George Bähr. The church's most distinctive feature is its "Stone Bell" - a 315 ft-high dome, soaring skyward with no internal supports. It was inspired by Michelangelo's dome for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and is certainly comparable. Europe's most famous organ maker Gottfried Silbermann built a three-manual, 43-stop instrument for the church. It was dedicated on November 25, 1736 and Johann Sebastian Bach gave a recital on the instrument on December 1 in the same year.
The church and its dome proved to be extremely stable. During the Seven Years' War in 1760, it had been hit by more than 100 cannonballs which simply bounced off the walls.
The church even survived Dresden's night of hell, the Allied bombing on February 13, 1945 for long enough to have 300 people who had sought shelter in the church crypt, evacuated to safety. Shortly after that, it succumbed to the heat generated by thousands of incendiary bombs that had been dropped on the city. When the temperature in the church reached 1,800 F, the pillars started glowing bright red. Then, they literally exploded and the structure collapsed. For the next 60 years, the blackened stones would lie in a pile in the center of the city as a monument to the absurdity of war.
Reconstruction finally started in 1993 and in 2005, the church was reopened - again dominating Dresden's skyline in all its glory.
We will create another waymark in the "Pictures then and now" category focusing on the rebuilding of the church.

Style: Baroque Type of building (structure): Large religious building (church, monastery, synagogue...) Date of origin:: 1743 Architect(s): George Bähr Web site of the object (if exists): [Web Link] Address: Frauenkirche Neumarkt 01067 Dresden

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Date Logged Log   12/31/2023 Enial visited it 12/03/2023 Mochito on Tour visited it 12/12/2022 okrutnyb visited it 11/04/2022 icemac visited it 05/24/2022 Team.Schubi visited it 05/24/2022 Phineas und Ferb visited it 05/23/2022 wienja visited it 04/07/2022 Cachewürmer visited it 11/06/2020 Lagune80 visited it 08/28/2020 asusik666 visited it 07/12/2019 Cpt. Feldi visited it 02/21/2019 eilers1 visited it 05/23/2018 Weinnase3000 visited it 02/20/2018 michwada visited it 11/04/2017 castorka visited it 10/09/2017 qpdbcz visited it 03/18/2017 CADS11 visited it 02/09/2017 matefreund visited it 06/04/2016 4spring visited it 04/10/2016 keksíček visited it 02/08/2016 Lichtenberger visited it 12/12/2015 jezevcik visited it 09/24/2015 Bush-Rescue visited it 08/17/2015 Tumbrel visited it 07/12/2015 pathfinder65 visited it

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