“In the area where the find was made there was the church of St. Martin, which belonged to the monastery and was first recorded in 1393. It was located on the highest point of the island and was demolished in 1803 in the course of secularization. But the fact that there was an older predecessor building “It’s a big surprise for us too,” says Armin Krämmer, mayor of the municipality of Chiemsee.
In order to locate the exact location of the demolished hall church, measurements were taken on the village green north of the well-known Tassilo tree in the summer of 2023 as part of investigations for a municipal monument concept (KDK). At a depth of 50 to 70 centimeters, the monument conservators came across foundations whose floor plan corresponds to the view of the church in the engraving by Michael Wening published in 1701. However, the radar data also showed that there was an older building at this point: at a depth of 80 to 100 centimeters, completely unexpectedly but very clearly, additional foundation walls emerged, revealing an octagonal central building with an ambulatory formed by eight supports You can see four extensions arranged in a cross shape. Overall, the structure has an impressive diameter of 19 meters.
“Central buildings are rare in pre-Romanesque and Romanesque sacred architecture north of the Alps and are therefore a very individually designed building form, which is often interpreted as a successor to the Palatine Chapel in Aachen or as an imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. So far, octagonal central buildings with an inner colonnade have only been found in Bavaria with St. Andreas in Bamberg, around 1050, and St. Gallus in Würzburg, around 1130, archaeologically proven. So we are talking about an absolute rarity here,” says Mathias Pfeil, General Conservator, Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation.
But how can this find be classified historically? It is possible that a connection can be made with the veneration of Blessed Irmengard, daughter of King Louis the German and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne. She was abbess of the Frauenwörth convent, which had become an imperial monastery, and was buried in the abbey church in 866. Between 1001 and 1020, her grave was opened to remove relics to promote her veneration. At the same time, a fundamental new monastery building was built, of which the gate hall, the early Romanesque abbey church and the bell tower are still preserved today. Perhaps it was in this context that the additional memorial building was built, which was intended to serve as a destination for pilgrims based on the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is now up to scientists to evaluate and carefully analyze the latest data in order to provide answers to the many questions that remain unanswered. We are currently thinking about visualizing the floor plan in the form of plants next summer and making it tangible.
“Bavaria’s rich cultural heritage is always good for a surprise – the sensational find in Chiemgau proves this once again! The foundation walls on the Fraueninsel discovered during radar measurements show that nothing really escapes the expert eyes of our monument conservators. Such a floor plan of a Romanesque central building has north of the Alps Absolute rarity. It will therefore be exciting to see how science classifies this find historically,” emphasizes Art Minister Markus Blume.