Strasbourg
The Saint-Thomas church
The Saint-Thomas church © Jean-Marie Stocker
Description
The site on which the current church stands was used as a place of worship under the patronage of Thomas the Apostle as early as the sixth century. In the ninth century, Bishop Adelochus established a magnificent church with adjoining school. However both burned down in 1007, and again in 1144. In 1196, construction began on the façade of a new, fortress-like building with an imposing steeple, built in the Roman style. Interrupted several times, the building work was completed in 1521, in the late Gothic style.
In 1524, the church became Protestant (Martin Bucer served there as a pastor from 1531 to 1540), a status which it maintained despite the annexation of Alsace to Catholic France.
The Saint Thomas church is a five-naved hall church, the oldest on the territory of former south-west Germany. Inside it is approximately 65 metres long and 30 metres wide, with a height of 22m (30m under the late-Gothic cupola). There is a gallery on the left outer aisle, and chapels to the right and left of the apse
The church is internationally renowned for its historic and musically-significant organs: the 1741 Silbermann organ, played by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1778 and faithfully restored in 1979 by Alfred Kern; the French organist Louis Thiry recorded the Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach on this organ. Another organ is the 1905 organ (installed in 1906) built by Fritz Haerpfer, following a design by Albert Schweitzer.
The funerary monuments at Saint Thomas church date from between 1130 and 1850. The most famous are the richly decorated sarcophagus of Bishop Adelochus (1130) and the huge, late-Baroque mausoleum of Marshall Maurice de Saxe (1777), created by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Among the many other remarkable funerary monuments, the Renaissance tombstone of Nikolaus Roeder von Tiersberg (1510) is notable for its realistic depiction of his decaying corpse. Roeder had been the donor of the life-size Mount of Olives group of sculptures (1498) now to be seen inside Strasbourg Cathedral. The Neoclassical sculptor, Landolin Ohmacht, is represented by two works, one of them dedicated to Jean-Frédéric Oberlin.
