Church of the Holy Family (Kaliningrad)

The Catholic Church building in Haberberg is the most famous and significant creation of Friedrich Heitmann . According to the initial design, the building of the church should have been located parallel to the road with its longitudinal axis, while the choirs should have been oriented east. But the construction site was expanded and the church was built symmetrical, which is uncharacteristic of Heitmann's work. Many elements of the building, its layout are borrowed from order churches, long studied by the architect. Red brick was used as the main material. Construction took place in 1904 - 1907 . Heitmann believed that the Church of the Holy Family should be a family home in which the spirit of Christ and his earthly parents reigned. The church never held memorial services , only the rites of baptism and weddings . Sometimes the church was called Katerinen Kirche , according to the name of the nearby St. Katerina hospital .

Architectural description from the book of Baldur Koester ^[1] :

Outside, it is very easy to see all parts of the building: a high church nave , choirs , a bulky tower with its two pediments and four extensions at the falling corners (for sacristy and other rooms). Heitmann used a Gothic stepped pediment to shape these cubic forms. They were made as lateral completions of the gable roofs of the longitudinal nave and in a reduced form in front of the gable roofs of the tower. In addition, the same decorative pediments arose at the four corners of single-pitched roofs. Numerous staircases decorated with small phials add movement to the rigor of cubic forms; at the top of the tower, traffic intensifies, there the phials meet in pairs. The cornices under the roofs and at the tower are made rather discreetly; vertical elements predominate in the pilasters of the pediment and decorative arcades of the tower.

It is useless to search for typical Gothic forms of decoration, such as, for example, openwork ornament. In general, this is a joint combination of basic simple volumes and also simple and sequentially upward-looking forms of decoration and create a building in the style of a new Gothic style, which just could not have arisen in the Middle Ages, but corresponded to the sense of shape of the ending 19th century.

A simple, made from a simple molding stone, a little protruding deep into the portal leads through a small room in front of the entrance to the lobby itself. Hence the entrance to the high hall church with its five spans. Slender, octagonal columns divide the space into a middle nave and two side naves of equal height. Above them, beautiful stellar arches with ribs begin. The ribs are made of molding red bricks. Arched stones of the arch begin above the heels of columns , against the walls above small consoles. The surface of the walls is covered with plaster, the corners of the walls and the triumphal arch are decorated with red brick. In slightly elevated choirs, these forms are repeated. To the right and to the left of the choirs there were earlier sacristy rooms.

On the eve of the war, in 1939 , they wanted to recruit a class of young organists at the church, like a Sunday school. None of the eight recorded boys became a musician, all died in the service of the Third Reich .

In 1945, the church was damaged and for a long time was abandoned, gradually collapsing. In 1980, after a long reconstruction, under the direction of architect Pavel Gorbach , the Kaliningrad Regional Philharmonic was opened in it. In 1982, a Czech-made organ was installed in the concert hall with 5 manuals, 3,600 pipes (44 registers).

Catholic Church of the Holy Family until 1945:

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  Northwest view

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  View from the southwest

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  Organ Hall

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  Altar of the Church

Kaliningrad, Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street, 61a (until 1945 - German Oberhaberberg )

• V. I. Kulakov, A. P. Bakhtin, A. P. Ovsyanov, N. I. Cheburkin, “Monuments of history and culture. Kaliningrad ”, Moscow, 2005, p. 141 ISBN 5-902425-01-8
• Baldur Köster “Buildings of Königsberg”
• Kirchen und Sozialeinrichtungen in Konigsberg (Kirches and welfare institutions of Königsberg (German)
• Photo of the Philharmonic
• Guide to Kaliningrad