April 2, 2012
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The Berliner Dom
The Berliner Dom, or Berlin Cathedral, is the first non-Catholic church we visited on our trip. It’s not properly a cathedral, as a true cathedral is the seat of a bishop. And if you aren’t Catholic, then it’s pretty hard to get a bishop’s seat. Instead, it’s a “Supreme Parish and Cathedral Church” of the Evangelical Church.
Unlike many of the other churches we’ve seen, this one isn’t super-old. There were other churches, but they kept tearing them down and building new ones. The current building was built in 1905 in “high neo-renaissance style.” At the time, there was no separation of church and state, so the state paid the complete construction cost of 11.5 million Marks. It is 374 feet long, 240 feet wide and 381 feet tall. People thought it was the Protestant “counterbalance” to the Vatican in Rome.
Like most things in Berlin, the cathedral did not escape damage during WW2. In 1940, the windows got blown out. In 1944, a bomb was dropped through the dome and caused a big fire. Reconstruction began in 1975, but it wasn’t completed until 1993.
Of course, it was pretty inside.
The front had three stained glass panels. Here’s a close up of one.
I noticed that it differed from the Catholic churches we had visited. For one, the organ was on the left-side wall instead of opposite the main altar area.
For another, there were statutes of Calvin and Zwingli! They were posed pointing to the Bible to emphasize “Solo Scriptura”–that it was the Word of God, not the traditions of church or man, that would show the way to salvation.
Above the doors you walk into was the “royal box.” This didn’t look very exciting. (it’s the area above and behind the girls.)
But we were able to go into the choir loft, which pretty much looked like the royal box.
I don’t know what the name of this thing is. I’ve seen them in big churches before. But I wanted you to see the scale of things. That’s my six-foot tall son, Michael, standing next to it. (You can see the organ to the upper left in the picture.)
Even though “Dom” means “Cathedral,” it seems like it would have been mis-named if it didn’t have an actual dome. But it did!
The dome was decorated with mosaics depicting the Beatitudes. I couldn’t get a very good picture of the mosaics. But there were lots of other mosaics in the church. They had Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
And just a lot of pretties.
In the cathedral, you could go up or you could go down. Up took you to the roof! There are 272 steps to get to the top of the cathedral.
But the view from the roof was pretty cool.
Someone made this heart in the grass. We weren’t sure how. Driving bikes through the yard?
On the way up, we passed a room full of broken things. It reminded me that this cathedral has gone through a lot.
But, what happened if you went down those steps? You’d wind up in the crypt. There were a lot of royal graves here. Remember the Hohenzollern family who were sent by the Pope to help protect Berlin from pirates? Well, they are the folks buried here.
Now, my astute readers may be asking some questions about this crypt, such as, “If the place kept getting torn down, how old is this place?” Or, “What about that fire?” From the looks of things, this was a new crypt. And the audio guide said that a lot of the coffins (some marble, some tin, some wood) were damaged in the fire and were still being restored.
Can you imagine if this were the basement of YOUR church? (Someone would probably want to put an AWANA circle down there.)
I don’t know why I liked this seated figure so well. I’m not sure who he is supposed to be, but to me, he was an angel saying, “Stop. Consider this cross. Consider these graves. Where are you going after you die? And how will you spend eternity?”
