Katharinen Abbey Stendal

The monastery was founded in 1456 by Elector Frederick II of Brandenburg as a Benedictine nunnery. After 1469, the nuns adopted the Rule of St. Augustine and lived as Augustinian canonesses. After the introduction of the Reformation, the monastery was converted into a convent for noblewomen in 1540, which was dissolved in 1945. In the years 1985–1986, the church and the cloister were restored. St. Catherine's Monastery in Stendal was built in the second half of the 15th century on the site of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit. The church was consecrated between 1472 and 1490. The church is a well-proportioned single-nave brick building with a chancel closure of five sides of a decagon and a saddle roof with a roof turret. The building is structured by buttresses and illuminated by pointed arch windows, which are wider in the nave and narrower in the chancel. The church is comparable in type to St. Anne's Church in Stendal and the Elisabeth Chapel in Tangermünde. During construction, molded bricks and brick stamps were used, as on Stendal Cathedral and St. Mary's Church in Stendal. A change in plan can be seen from the third bay from the west. Possibly, the eastern part of the church was initially planned as a new hospital chapel and was completed as a nunnery church from 1461. Further unrealized plans can be seen in three wall connections laid out in the west wall but not used, furthermore in a portal with a stepped segmental arch and in the large six-part window of the former nuns' gallery, which was bricked up after the fire in 1687 and provided with two small openings. Inside, the plinth zone is structured by round-arched niches, which are extended on the south side to rectangular chapels between the buttresses. The nave is covered with cross-rib vaults, which rest on round services with capitals. Groin vaults are inserted in the chapels. The preserved former monastery buildings were restored in the years 1863–1865 by master builder Siepmann and later converted into a museum. A narrow cross-rib-vaulted cloister of the west wing and parts of the south wing date from the Middle Ages. They once enclosed an approximately square courtyard north of the church; to the south were the hospital buildings, demolished only in the 19th century, of which only a simple late Gothic entrance gate remains.

On the southeastern buttress of the chancel, the tombstone of Beteke Rolekin with a crucifixion depiction from 1441 from the previous hospital chapel is preserved. On the walls of the church are a scratched tombstone of the knight Benedikt Calve from the beginning of the 15th century and Baroque inscription epitaphs, mostly executed in sandstone, of the canonesses from the Altmark landed gentry. In the second bay on the north wall, the former bell of St. Catherine's Church is displayed. The cast bronze bell shows a four-line Latin inscription on its mantle, which in German translation reads: "This bell was cast at the expense of St. Catherine's Monastery and at the event of the Dominae von Vinzelberg and Convent also Monastery Comissariides Hof Fiscals Corings and Monastery Warden Andreas Warnicke in Salzwedel Master C B anno 1759 C. B. Behrens". The original of the Roland of Stendal, whose copy now stands next to the town hall, is also displayed in the church. The interior fittings with stalls and gallery are simple and modern. Former furnishings of the church, which included a carved winged altarpiece from the beginning of the 16th century, are now exhibited in the Altmärkisches Museum.