Aegidienkirche

About

Aegidien Church (German: Aegidienkirche), after Saint Giles to whom the church was dedicated, is a war memorial in Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony, Germany. The church dates from 1347, when it replaced an older Romanesque church dating to 1163. This in turn replaced an even earlier chapel. Aegidien Church was destroyed during the night beginning 8 October 1943 by aerial bombings of Hanover during World War II. In 1952, Aegidien Church became a war memorial dedicated to victims of war and of violence.

History: In 1952, the present Gothic building was inaugurated as a war memorial, in part reconstructed with sandstone from the Deister, a chain of hills about 25 kilometres (16 mi) southwest of Aegidien Church. It was originally completed in 1347 as a church dedicated to Saint Giles, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. It replaced a Romanesque church built in 1156–63 at the same site in the old town of Hanover, which replaced an early Romanesque chapel thought to have been constructed around the turn of the first millennium.

In 1703–11, Sudfeld Vick designed the Baroque facade with which the steeple was decorated, and in 1826 Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves used cast iron columns...