Eastern Apse of the Church @museum.de

M:Just three years after the collegiate foundation was established in 1144, the canons moved out of the village to this site. Their first choice, a site by the marketplace near the castle, proved to be simply too noisy. They were Premonstratensians – (sometimes known as the White Canons), members of an order that was only about 25 years old at the time. It was a reformed order, meaning that the members wanted to return to living a simple life, in accordance with the teachings of Jesus Christ.

They started out by commissioning the construction of the church. The eastern end of the building is semi-circular, a feature known as an apse. Traditionally, the apse is where the main altar is located – the most important feature during divine service. The church plinth is formed by a course of dressed stone, a type of sandstone called greywacke. The canons had it brought here from quarries in Magdeburg. But using it for the entire church would have been too costly and too much effort. So the canons set up a brickworks locally – using materials that are available here: clay, sand and water from the water-meadows along the Elbe.

The recipes came from distant lands, brought here by Italian craftsmen involved in building the church. Jerichow bricks are extremely durable, and fired to perfection. You may have noticed that some of the bricks are visibly darker. The explanation is simply that they spent longer in the kiln. The builders are thought to have produced and laid between four and five million bricks locally. Jerichow collegiate church is probably the oldest medieval brick building north of the Alps. With this building, the Premonstratensian canons incidentally laid the foundations for an entire branch of industry. From then on, brick-making was a major industry in the area. Even now, the area around Jerichow features an unusually large number of well-preserved brick-built medieval churches.