Elisabethkirche (St. Elizabeth's Church), Marburg

The Elisabethkirche in Marburg was built between 1235 and 1283 over the grave of Elizabeth of Thuringia (also known as Elizabeth of Hungary), a princess who devoted her later life to caring for the sick and poor in Marburg and died there in 1231 at the age of 24. She was canonized by Pope Gregory IX in 1235, only four years after her death, and construction of the church began that same year specifically to house her relics, making it one of the earliest buildings in Germany designed in a purely Gothic style rather than the transitional Romanesque-Gothic idiom common elsewhere. The church quickly became one of medieval Germany's most important pilgrimage sites, drawing visitors to the saint's shrine until the Protestant Reformation, when Landgrave Philip I of Hesse, having converted to Lutheranism, ordered Elizabeth's remains removed from the church in 1539 to suppress the cult of relics. The elaborate Elisabeth shrine, a gilded reliquary casket from around 1249 depicting scenes from her life, survives empty in the sacristy's treasury chamber and remains one of the finest examples of medieval Rhenish goldsmith work. The nave and twin west towers preserve their 13th-century structure largely intact, having escaped major wartime damage, and the church also contains the tomb monuments of members of the Teutonic Order, which administered the church for centuries, along with a carved and painted high altar. Restoration campaigns in the 20th century focused on stabilizing the sandstone facade and conserving the medieval stained glass in the choir, some of the oldest surviving glass of its kind in Hesse.