Lutheran City Church

In the years 1582 to 1583, the Lutheran City Church was established as the Catholic monastery church of the Queen’s Monastery.This Clarissa convent, dedicated to Mary as Queen of Angels, was founded by Elisabeth of Austria, the daughter of Emperor Maximilian II and the widow of King Charles IX of France.The dowager queen most likely constructed the abbey as penance for St. Bartholomew’s Night, the Huguenot massacre in France, and spent the remaining years of her life there.The Queen’s Monastery was designed by the Italian architect and painter Pietro Ferrabosco, but the structure was completed by the subsequent court master builder Jakob Vivian.On August 2, 1583, the monastery church was dedicated.

The monastery was closed in 1782 as part of the Josephine reforms.In the same year, the Tolerance Patent of 1781 authorized the formation of both a Lutheran and a Reformed congregation in Vienna.The Vienna Inner City parish, which is centered on the Lutheran City Church, is the oldest in the Evangelical Superintendency AB Vienna.The Lutheran and Reformed churches each purchased a portion of the old Queen’s Convent in 1783.The Reformed community had the Reformed City Church erected on their property, making it the first Protestant church in Vienna.The Lutheran congregation received the monastery church and the center section of the abandoned monastery.Another section of the land was purchased by banker Johann von Fries, who erected today’s Palais Pallavicini nearby.The old monastery church has been renovated and enlarged into the Lutheran town church.Because the Tolerance Patent required that the church be unrecognizable from the outside, the three church towers, among other things, had to be dismantled.The Lutheran City Church was dedicated on November 30, 1783.

Following modest structural adjustments, architect Otto Thienemann completed a significant renovation in 1876.The façade was renovated in such a way that the church could be identified from the outside, as authorized by the Protestant patent of 1861.The composers Franz Lachner and Hermann Graedener were hired as organists at the Lutheran town church in the nineteenth century, and the notable piano manufacturer Andreas Streicher prepared a new hymnal for the service.Because of tougher fire restrictions following the Ringtheater fire, the Lutheran town church had to be rebuilt in 1907.Because a direct exit from the church interior to Dorotheergasse was required, architect Ludwig Schöne had the church interior rotated by 180 degrees, reversing the position of the organ and altar – a procedure that architect Ignaz Sowinski had tested in the neighboring Reformed City Church as early as 1887.During WWII, the Lutheran town church was severely damaged, and the facade was bombed in 1945.The simple, bricked-up windows and a prominent stone cross on the smooth front were reconstructed in 1948.In 1989, this modification was reversed, and the neoclassical façade was restored to its 1907 appearance