St. John’s Church (Johanniskirche)

Now leave the Old Town Hall, walk around the building and cross Zindel Street (pay attention to bicycle riders and particularly busses coming from the right) in order to arrive at St. John’s Church (St. Johannis Church) which is hard to miss due to its direct proximity to the Old Town Hall and its characteristic church towers.
Circulate the church once. St. John’s Church was built in the first half of the 14th century. Sections of the church, in fact, originate from a Roman basilica which stood on this site before the church was built. One such section is, for example, the old round-arched portal which is visible when the church is approached from the north.
Should you take your tour on a Saturday, and it happens to be just about 11:00 in the morning, you will hear trumpet playing. A former church musician has taken it upon himself to play various hymns for the citizens of Goettingen from the church tower of St. John’s at this hour.
The St. John’s church towers are, however, worth mentioning for more than this. The North Tower housed the so-called tower apartment until the year 2001. It was here that the city’s guards lived and worked for over 600 years in what was for a long time the highest apartment in the city. From this refuge, 238 steps high, it was not only possible to look out over the entire old city and thus prematurely warn against fires, but it was also possible to maintain visual contact with the watchtowers placed around the city. This presented an immense advantage in case of an enemy attack. Students resided in the tower apartment after the death of the last watchman in 1921. The students were required to receive visitors for two hours once a week and, therefore, did not need to pay rent.
Unfortunately, there is no tower apartment today because, after the renovation work in 2001, a new building ordinance became effective for the first time which faulted the absence of refugees and forbade the use of the rooms as a residence. This was indeed fortunate as the entire North Tower was, in fact, destroyed in a fire in 2005 when two youths climbed over the scaffolding provided for the renovation work and set a fire within the tower. The collapse of the tower could hardly be avoided at the time, and now a chapel is located on the site of the tower apartment in the North Tower of St. John’s Church.
If you wish, you can view the interior of the church and then continue on to the Bismarck Cottage on the Goettingen city ramparts

Photo Goettingen-Johanniskirche.01 by Longbow4u is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0